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Amazon Embodies the Gender Gap in Tech
New submitter chpoot writes: "The Guardian reveals the gender breakdown among Amazon's management 'S Team.' At one end of the team of 132 are 12 secretaries. All are female. At the other end are 12 who report directly to Jeff Bezos. All are male. Of the 119 remaining when Bezos and the secretaries are put to one side, 18 are female. Amazon, of course, grew out of book selling. Book selling, publishing, and writing have all a fairly admirable tradition of employing women. In its attempts to overthrow traditional book selling, Amazon seems to have been particularly successful in subverting that part of the tradition."
And here I'd always heard that Amazon women were particularly cutthroat..
There's also a surprisingly low percentage of female garbage collectors.
Since that particular job requires very little education, it would be far easier to start there when trying to close the gender gap.
Why aren't we?
about how few females are truck drivers?? or garbage collectors? or oil field workers? or (insert other industry here)
Why does it seem that tech is being unfairly beat up because of a apparent lack of women? the lack of women does not automatically mean that there is some sexist agenda, It could simply mean that there are A - not enough women wanting to be in the field or B - better qualified candidates who happen to be male.
Females wanted equality, I define equality by giving the job to the best candidate, not an artificial quota of genders in each position
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Amazon is not in the same business as traditional bookselling. Amazon is a tech company which sells books (among other things). As a result, the characteristics needed in its employees are those of a tech company, not those of a book company. I used to work as a bookstore manager. If you look at the types of jobs that are typically dominated by women and the types of jobs which are typically dominated by men, you discover that those jobs require different characteristics. Bookstores and publishers require a mix of those characteristics, as a result, you have a fairly even distribution between the sexes.
I tried to explain why Amazon does not need to have more women executives, unlike bookstores and publishers, but I cannot quite put it into words. I do not think Amazon would be hurt by having more women executives. It is just that the nature of the company is such that men are more likely to have the characteristics which cause them to rise to executive positions.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
At one end of the team of 132 are 12 secretaries. All are female. At the other end are 12 who report directly to Jeff Bezos. All are male. Of the 119 remaining when Bezos and the secretaries are put to one side, 18 are female.
I don't know what i'm supposed to be picturing here? what is the significance of the ends? are employees implicitly linear? is it particularly damning that the secretaries are all put on one end instead of being allowed to freely mingle with the other 120 team members? Do the 12 team members who report to Bezos somehow balance out the 12 secretaries? why are there 12 of both? Why are they at the other end? do they never get to see the secretaries being so far away? Is this just a super complicated way of saying that out of 132 team members 30 of them are female and the most important 12 members are all male?
Are any of them hot?
I'll just say it out loud for everyone. Most women are not that aggressive. Most men are. Often it's a detriment in the modern world. Where it's not is in leading business. Why are most HR departments filled with women? Because women and men are in fact different and our gender does affect how well we perform and enjoy certain tasks. We have equal opportunity laws because most is not all. There are women that make great executives and they should have the chance to show it. But to expect very specific roles in a single company to be gender equal numerically is just stupid. Are we going to accuse Etsy of sexism because the majority of their customers/stores are run by females?
My office tries to maintain a gender balance in management... the performance bar is set lower for the women, it's quite obvious.
Congratulations. The ignorance factor among your management will all but guarantee a lawsuit.
From the men.
I know I'd be rather pissed if my job was somehow harder only because I was a male in management. Why does she get a break?
(Yeah, it's practically funny to see how quickly that shit can turn, isn't it..)
Hmm... sounds like the wealthy's attitude towards workers more than anything. Perhaps the internecine struggle between women and men in the workplace would be better focused on class differences - it could result in better economic outcomes for the majority of both sexes if workers' energies were focused in this direction.
Workers of all sexes can either argue over how big their portion of a minuscule share is or grow the share for all workers by negotiating a larger cut with those who receive the majority of the gains - it is always such in an economic system. When the greater inequality is settled, providing larger gains to all workers, the smaller one can be addressed. Before then, it's just an economic smokescreen created by the wealthy to exploit a natural division in the ranks of the working class.
That is all.
Childbirth is exactly one of the reasons why women are at a disadvantage. Because getting kids is actually considered a health risk, much like a bad back or failing heart would be. The mere fact that woman may get pregnant, have a child and would take time off to at least raise it for a few months is a risk that simply cannot happen to a man.
Or rather, if it ever happens to a man, I sure as HELL want that guy in my team, the PR alone is worth everything...
Children are a health risk from an employer's view. Depending on the local laws you may not be allowed to use the woman fully while she is pregnant, especially during the last trimester, she will be absent (obviously) for a while during birth and depending on your local laws again she will be out of commission for a while afterwards, in my country this can be up to 3 years.
That alone makes woman very unattractive as employees.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Too-long-will-not-read version: There are things we should change now to bring pay into a gender balance, there are vestiges of past practices that will "take care of themselves" over time which will bring gender pay into balance, and there may be things which should not be "fixed" just for the sake of achieving gender balance because the "fix" will be worse than the "disease."
Long version:
The gender gap will only close so far, here's why:
* As long as we live in a society where more women prefer to halt or "downsize" their career in favor of their family than men, women's average career opportunities will be lower.
* As long as we live in a society where child-rearing after divorces falls more on women than on men, the women who have to reduce their work hours or drop out of college so they can raise their kids will drag down the average career opportunities for women.
* It will take generations to "bleed out" the vestiges of past discrimination. If today's boys and girls see that their grandmothers or great-grandmothers were nurses and teachers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were doctors and headmasters, they will notice and may choose a career path accordingly.
* If today's boys see elementary-school-teaching as female-dominated, they are more likely to grow up thinking that the job is "beneath them" and not worthy of being paid well.
* Some jobs, such as being an administrative assistant or schoolteacher, are much more tolerant of long career breaks than others, such as science and engineering. They are also much easier to get into as a second career. This means the talent pool of those who could become trained for the job in less than 2 years if they wanted to resume that career or switch to that career is larger, which in turn means wages may be lower.
Here are some other factors that are likely to give one gender an advantage over another but the advantage could just as easily be a women's advantage as a man's.
* As long as we live in a society where girls are "steered" towards certain career fields and men towards others, then unless by chance the average salaries and other career opportunities in "women-dominated careers" is the same as in "men-dominated careers," one gender or the other will have a statistical "advantage" at any given time.
* If - and I'm not saying there is, but if - there is a gender-specific biological preference for certain types of work and that preference isn't countered by some other force such as encouraging people to have careers outside of their gender's statistical preference, there will likely be one gender with a more average pay and career opportunities than the other at any given time.
* There are certain jobs that women, on average, are simply more qualified to do than men, and vice-versa. Fortunately, many of these, such as being a professional football player or professional soprano vocalist, are so low in numbers that they don't sway the averages. Others, such as certain jobs in the military and law enforcement that require strength and endurance standards that men on average are better able to meet, are common enough that the lack of a 50/50 balance in these careers will affect the "average" ratio of pay for men and women. If jobs that are male- or for that matter female-dominated are stepping-stones to other careers, such as becoming a General in the Army, then the effects will be felt for a much longer period of time.
These lists are by no means complete.
Some of these things will take care of themselves over time. Others will require deliberate effort to overcome. Others, such as the (hypothetical?) gender-specific biological preferences for certain types of work, should probably be accepted as not worth "fixing" as the "fix" - encouraging people to take on career paths that would not naturally be their first choice, merely to achieve some statistical balance - is probably worse than the "disease" - having a small, permanent imbalance in male- to female- average earnings.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's the situation we have at work. I work at an IT department, and we are all men. Why? Because that's basically all that apply. In the last round of hiring there weren't any women. Ok well I could be clear that I can't say that for sure: The three candidates we picked to interview were all men, and the names on the resumes of the other 20-ish that made it past HR sounded male. We don't ask for pictures or anything so there could have been women in that mix, I don't know. Also I don't know who HR filtered, as they don't pass those on (hence the filtering).
We have had a woman work for us before. Our previous web dev was a woman. She was the only woman to apply, and she was hired (not because she was a woman, because she was the best). However, after about a year her fiance took a job in New York and she moved off with him. In the next round of hiring for that, it was all men.
We can't hire people who don't apply. We really don't have the opportunity to discriminate based on gender because there are just almost no female applicants. I suppose, in theory, HR could be discriminating on our behalf but I find that unlikely because:
1) We are a large state agency and thus have very strong anti-discrimination/EEO rules.
2) HR has quite a few women on staff, perhaps the majority.
3) Most importantly: All HR really does is check qualifications and pass on resumes that seem to meet the minimums for the job. They tend to know fuck-all about the position, it is just match our minimums list vs the resume.
So ya, 100% of the IT people in our college are male, and about 90% of the secretaries are female. Well, in the case of IT, that's because of who applies. We can't go and make women apply.