Slashdot Mirror
The Other Side of Diversity In Tech
An anonymous reader writes: We frequently discuss diversity in the tech industry, and all the initiatives getting underway to encourage women and minorities to enter (and stay in) the field. The prevailing theme is that this will be good for companies, good for innovation, and good for the future of technology. While that's true, greater representation will also be good for the individuals themselves. Erica Joy has been in IT for a long time, and she's worked in many of the industry hotspots. She's written an insightful article on how the lack of diversity has affected her throughout her career. An excerpt: "Unfortunately, my workplace is homogenous and so are my surroundings. I feel different everywhere. I go to work and I stick out like a sore thumb. ... I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in."
The summary says that increasing diversity will be good for innovation and technology, with no stated reason as to why. So I'll ask: why will increasing diversity be good for technology and innovation?
We frequently discuss diversity in the tech industry, and all the initiatives getting underway to encourage women and minorities to enter (and stay in) the field. The prevailing theme is that this will be good for companies, good for innovation, and good for the future of technology.
There was a time when we said that race and sex don't matter. That you should be inclusive, at least in the sense of not being prejudiced, because its right and moral to not judge based on these attributes, which are uncontrolled and doled out at birth. Now we say otherwise, that they do matter? Which is it? Is it irrelevant that you were born with a certain set of physiological characteristics, or are people truly intrinsically different? Because here I thought I was being progressive by thinking the latter notion, in whatever form you wish to give it, was what we were fighting against. I miss the old progressives. The new ones have stared into the abyss so long they're becoming part of the problem.
The author of this blog article (and that's what Medium is, it's livejournal 2.0) is flat out complaining that it's wrong for people to like things she doesn't like. It's not good enough that people accept her doing her own thing, they have to NOT do theirs. It's unacceptable that everyone else enjoyed playing rock band and a sign of horrible discrimination and exclusion that she should ever become part of another culture or group instead of everyone else changing to suit her exact tastes and preferences.
And she wonders why she feels like people walk on eggshells around her and why she feels like she makes people uncomfortable. As usual these days Susan Sons' article on girls and software should be mandatory reading.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in.
Translation: I want to impose my culture on my team mates.
Frankly, I'm tired of hearing people bitch about diversity in the tech field and then blaming employers. Out of the 200 people in my freshman CS class, two were black. By my senior year, one of them was left in the program -- and his major semester project failed all tests (the test being automated were completely color blind).
Let's ignore race for a moment. What's the percentage of people in tech who came from a single parent home? Ditto for the population at large? How many people in tech had welfare crack whores for mothers? The population at large? What's the percentage of people in tech where education was a priority for the family? The population at large?
If you want to bring race into it, turn around and ask the same questions and throw racial demographics into it. Perhaps the problem isn't with the tech companies, nor institutions of higher learning,nor primary or secondary education. Perhaps the problem lies with the family dynamics.
So different teams, different bosses, different roles, different companies, different locations, different time periods and they all sucked, she was always the outsider... the only commonality was the author. Her attitude is the problem, not the rest of the world.
The continual assumption on the part of the "progressive" crowd that, as a white male, I am obviously a racist hate-filled bastard, is actually starting to turn me into a racist, hate-filled bastard.
The assumption is that there is no diversity because of discrimination. An analysis of the women in college demonstrates that fewer are hired in tech because fewer train for that field.
Therefore the burden is on the college not the tech company.
The College will respond that the burden is not on them because the student chooses what they want to study.
Which either means women have to take responsibility for this or we regress back into their history blaming their high school, their grade school, their parents, or society...
And I wish you all a hilarious time with that little journey. I'll be over here in the real world just getting on with it.
*rolls up window and drives on*
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I've lived and worked in the South my entire life and worked on teams that were overwhelmingly white. I've never heard coworkers make "terribly racist and sexist jokes" at work. What this leads me to believe is that either her West Coast or New England coworkers were much more inclined toward racism and sexism (a possibility, since New England is actually more racist than much of the South today) or she was indirectly proving why they felt the need to walk on egg shells around her (the habit of certain people to find racism and sexism where it doesn't exist).
Much of her argument comes down to the fact that she wants to work with people who look and act like her, not like me. That's fine, but let's call it what it is. She prefers her own and in white people that's called "racism" by the left. But as we know from the left's vanguard, minorities cannot be racist since you have to have power to be racist and minorities allegedly have no power.
According to current social justice theory being a white male, especially a heterosexual white male, is a privilege you need to be ashamed of.
Because people who know different stuff know different stuff. That's why it was taken as read and not stated.
I'm not a member of a minority, or at least not one that would be recognized as such. Indeed I am a middle-aged white male, however: a good number of the issues that Erica Joy brings up in the article are ones to which I can relate.
I recently have been in a job where I was the outsider. Mine was a more techie role in an environment populated by those who'se main focus lay elsewhere. Considering that these colleagues were almost uniformly ahead of me in their field, and I would have to be doing domain specific work, this threw up some serious impostor syndrome issues for me. Sure I was good at tech, but this stuff they were doing... well I could grasp it, but always felt a little left behind. Objectively, it's not surprising. We each had our own specialty after all, but at work this divide left me some what isolated. Now, add to that an exclusion from social events as well (I am not one for the drinking, by preference and necessity), and being quite a distance from my non-work social group. So yeah, isolated and stressful, in the long term sense.
In hind sight from a personal perspective, I would have had a much easier time surviving if I had been stricter with myself on work/life balance and made sure to find more things outside of work from which to draw a sense of value and self-worth. Always have a backup plan and all that.
Of course there are a number of issues Erica discusses, which I have not experienced; I have not been mistaken for admin or security, nor have I been passed over without reason (at least not to my knowledge).
tl;dr version: While these issues are particularly apparent with minority groups, not all of them are exclusive. This is something which a number of our geeky cohort can find common experience with at least in part, and as such we ought all be interested in making things better. Not just in terms of encouraging/enforcing diversity, but in terms of allowing for outsiders - be it due to race, gender, culture, or field - (so long as they get the job done).
I know this: I am not my job. I am not my industry or its stereotypes. I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted.
Excuse fucking you? No wonder people felt like they had to walk on eggshells around you.
Let me rephrase that for you to for exactly what was said here, as I don't feel the need to walk on eggshells. "White people do not have the same background as I do as a black person, I feel more comfortable and included by black people. White people have to change what they're doing to be more like black people so I can feel included without changing who I am"
People do not need to be your friend, they don't need to like you. I did read some disgusting behaviors in there by coworkers and managers, that was exceptionally inappropriate, however, you do not need to be included in social aspects of work.
That goes with people having similar interests and background. I don't get to come to work as a white guy to talk to other white people and demand I feel included because we're all white with white backgrounds. If I have different interests in my co-workers, which I often do, I'm not part of any secret communications, or making fun of other people. In fact, I don't care to gossip at work at all so I'm likely the target of some of the gossip, and I don't get invited to these 'things'
I am a white male. My responsibilities in the work place to my co-workers; I must respect them, they are human beings. Their gender does not matter. If I can reconfigure our cisco routers, any women of any race with the same knowledge and expertise can do the same thing. I will provide them equal respect for this as I would a caucasian male. I will treat them professionally without discrimination. I will include them in any work related activities on a business level of productivity and participation within the company.
I do not have to like you. I do not have to be your friend. I do not have to embrace your values, or way of life, or anything about you in a non professional manner. I am in my full rights to keep a strictly professional relationship with you, regardless of your race and gender.
As with any co-worker, that is likely the case, I do not engage socially beyond work related social interaction with most people. On occasion, I run into person of who happens to share similar interests and behave the way I do. These people I may end up calling friends.
You cannot hide behind the mask of racism and gender discrimination to force people to like you and want to be your friend. The opposite will happen.
My final comment on this - I'm sorry you experienced some assholes who were disrespectful to you. They were assholes, and it's not a reflection of the entire industry, progress is being made on that front, and here is the biggest shocker of all. White men have to deal with these assholes too, sometimes they just don't "us" either, and we get treated with shitty condenscending comments where we're shocked we didn't punch them in the face for it and what they said is HR worthy.
I found it a very interesting and quite moving post.
I'm a white male from a relatively privilaged background, yet I have felt like an outsider many times over the last thirty years of my career. Yet if I choose to I can put on a cheap suit and smile and most people's first impression of me will be 'he's one of us'.
When people start to get to know you they pick up, of course, on the things you do and say that are not quite what they expect, and some will dislike that, and some of those people will turn to harrassment and bullying.
Now, I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to begin at the point where one or two people have taken to bullying, and the rest are reticent about chatting and socialising. It certainly can't be easy (well it could be, I suppose, if you're a sociopath and simply don't care what others think of you).
If you spend long enough somewhere, and you are basically a good person, then of course you will end up with friends who like you for who you are. But getting to that point takes time, causes stress for many, even when you feel welcome and people are supportive. Getting to that point when you already feel you don't belong must take tremendous strenght of character, and I know there's no way I could have gotten through what she has.
She doesn't like that she conformed to the group she was in and feels that is a bad thing. But yet recognises that she feels much comfortable amongst people who "share her cultural upbringing" and doesn't think that's a bad thing. There's inconsistency there.
But then when she talks about joining a group at work who enjoy going out to have a beer or two and then complains that they she doesn't like beer and that they should do something else. Not very appreciative of views diverse from her own there!
At one point she mentions that she was the only black women in her team of two. As opposed to what, being two black women alone in the same team? That's not very diverse now, is it?
I can totally get behind what she was saying and she has my sympathy.
I mean, it's not like she was blaming anyone, she was just pointing out that it kinda sucks to work in an industry where everyone else comes from a similar background and shares similar interests and you are kinda the odd one out.
Which I think is a perfectly valid point to make. She wasn't saying that they are all assholes for being who the are, just that she didn't really feel like part of the group.
I don't really see how you could disagree with her about that.
"social justice" is based on the extremely faulty assertion that everybody is the same and that absolutely every trait or preference you may have is culturally constructed. Once you take on board the basic concept that men and women are different and that on average their college major and career preferences reflect this difference, it's not hard to understand why there's less "diversity" in technology businesses.
Straw Man indeed.
I cry myself to sleep every night. Its horrible. I actually just realized when i read this blog. Manager is indian. I actual had a white guy as a lead before and I couldnt stand him. Control freak. So i told my female indian manager that I didnt want to work wirh him. Just realized that I am the only white guy n the team. I didnt notice.
Guy who sits next to me prays 5 times a day. We get along good. Neither of us like the white guy i used to work with.
Damn i am oppressed. How will i deal with it? No wonder there are crackers in the office. I see the slights now. I need to talk to my therapist.
It's called solipsism. You can't really negotiate with a solipsistic person since even abstractions that obviously are intended to show them things about others invariably, in their minds, come back to them.
Word of advice, though, from experience in dealing with these types of people. The best defense is to make it clear you are a hard target. By hard I mean, you will defend yourself and make it costly even if they nominally win the fight. No one wants to suffer at best a pyrrhic victory.
but diversity is weakness for the workers... diversity divides, dis-unites... a workforce divided by gender, race, culture and nationality cannot stand united against the corporation... why do you think the corporation, the media, the major institutions of america all push diversity and multiculturalism like it is the best thing since sliced bread? Because they want more money. And diversity gets them more money and us less money. Unity is what we want. We get unity by decreasing diversity. Drive the foreign invaders from our soil and hang the elite collaborators.
Why is diversity so limited? Why does it only refer to ancestors location (skin color is not used, there are some dark "white people"), gender, and sexual orientation?Why are height, weight, eye color, hair color, travel history, etc. ignored? Height is interesting since I have seen studies that claim that tall people are more likely to earn more and be in a position of power. Rather than physical attributes, life experience and personalty are the most important aspects of diversity. Did you grow up on a farm, suburb, or city? Did your parents stay together? Did you travel? Can you empathize with others? Do you have a vivid imagination?
Someone really knows how to troll slashdot.
Most jobs are done in India and China by Indians and Chinese.
It used to be about equality of opportunity. But now we have equality of opportunity it has morphed into equality of outcome. This is a very different thing indeed.
" I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in."
But why do you feel the need to inject YOUR culture into the workplace? You are there to work, not to discuss culture...
They aren't straw men.
I totally destroyed your reply didn't I.
My word you dealt with the straw man of "social justice" very quickly. I say that he was terrified to his straw heart and quaking all the way to his straw boots.
And that's the beautiful thing about social justice: the first rule of social justice is we don't define social justice. That way, when anyone tries to pin you down you just claim that "this isn't what it's about," claim the opposition is making a strawman.............and then continuing doing exactly what you've been accused of.
You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
They aren't straw men.
Yes they are.
I totally destroyed your reply didn't I.
If by destroy, you mean yiu set up a straw man and then TOTALLY hacked it to death then sure. Basically all this is you making shit up about mythical "social justice" warriors, and the attacking it with vigour.
But, don't let me stop you from making a whole pile of straw corpese. It's very entertaining to watch you thrash around and get covered in straw.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I reluctantly gave the article a read. It's written from the first person and describes her own experiences.
I don't see a huge amount of speculation on the problem in the article. She's just saying what happened and how she felt. She even said that she felt comfortable at one company, but left becuase of pay.
I think her reaction to this is overwhelmingly positive.
What I don't know... is if she's aware of how other people in tech feel. Some of us like boozy events, but some of us like non-boozy events too. I'm not a gamer, not into sports, I don't like dirty jokes at the office. I like tech stuff, I talk tech stuff and I find it really cool and interesting. I like doing creative stuff with tech. I come off a bit weird, so it usually takes me 6 months to "fit in" to a group.
I think most people in tech feel like outsiders. She's part of that crowd whether she likes it or not.
I was working at a software firm that tried to implement diversity, by hiring the wives of "star" male employees. These women had neither the background, the skillset, nor the ability to learn. Nominally a Marketing Writing Manager, my boss was a HS English teacher. There is some irony in her on-line profile where she has downgraded her job to make it look like she was a worker bee. She could not write commercially, talk with either vendors of customer (the product was engineering analysis software), or even create an outline. Her best efforts were freely plagiarized. She lifted paragraphs -- entirely unedited for context or tense or any trace of grammatical comparability and strung these random bits into an "article." Granted the opportunity to write the press release that defined the company's future (all revenue would shift from "big iron" to workstations and smaller boxen) she, "Was too busy selecting literature for the upcoming trade-show." Yet, she was immune from criticism. Any doubts on her abilities were cast as sexism. A parallel boss (of equal "wife" status) stiffed Sun Microsystems in the 1980's when she refused to pay shipping charges -- part of her attempts cover up her incompetence. Sun (one of the top revenue producers for the firm -- this was millions in revenue) stopped paying attention the software firm, because the boss stiffed them of $1,800 that the spouse had agreed to pay. It is with great joy that neither "boss" has ever had a follow-on job with ANY staff. The writing boss did some work, but only onsey-twosey and little repeat business (too many small jobs in way too many big companies). If you are any good you become "captive" and write a lot for one department.I have recovered and left writing and now am the second in command at a small manufacturing firm. My boss in the family run firm is a competent woman. She does her job well and we get along great.
I did a contract gig at Ericsson for about a year. As a white male citizen of the USA, I was in the minority in that company fir the first time in a 30 year career and it was awesome! That year I had several folks from the office over for Thanksgiving -- we had several people working contracts from overseas so they didn't have anywhere particularly else to go and a couple of them had never attended a Thanksgiving feast before. That felt very much like how people should get along -- just hanging out and having a good time without regard for nationality or sex. The office environment was much the same. It never felt like anyone was going out of the way to make anyone else feel like they fit in, but everyone just fit in. If your only experience is with US companies and their environment makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you should try a European one!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Did you reply to the wrong post or something?
I read the woman's article and I guess it hit closer to home for me than some people, because while I'm a white male, I'm married to a black woman who works in I.T.
There are certainly some workplace lessons to be learned from the author's insights, but I'm not sure they're all necessarily the ones she would conclude herself?
For starters? Whether you like it or don't... want to admit it's true or don't ... Geographic location has a lot to do with the workplace environment you can expect and its racial makeup. As she admitted herself, the job she took with Home Depot's corporate offices in the South (Atlanta) was one of the places she felt most "comfortable" among her co-workers. If this was as high of a priority for her as it sounds like it was (to the point of her describing health problems due to stress), I would have advised her never to go to Silicon Valley for work - regardless of the promised pay and benefits.
It sounds like, to an extent, she's upset that she can't "have it all" -- meaning working amongst a large population of blacks (with a nice chunk of them being female as well) who share her values and interests, while still earning "top tier" salaries in her field with the biggest industry "movers and shakers".
I'd counter that we simply don't live in a perfect world, and like everyone else, she has to make some tough choices. As a white male who has always had an interest in technology and computing, I knew it was my career field of choice. At the same time? I grew up in the midwest, and found some of my own values made it difficult for me to do such things as running out to the west coast in the dot-com boom era (even when some of my friends did and a couple wound up millionaires). I chose to stick with doing I.T. for manufacturing firms who couldn't afford to pay me that well, but offered some measure of stability and a concept of "life / work balance" that the big tech places lacked. I had family in the midwest that I didn't want to leave, and good friends that I grew up with as a kid and still hung out with. Considering all of that plus the fact that cost of living and housing was reasonable where I lived, it seemed prudent to stay put.
My wife grew up in Memphis, but I think she always knew that she wanted to get out of that area, in order to find more career success. She wound up in New York for a while, Texas for a while, and now out on the east coast with me. She's definitely not anything close to your stereotypical black woman. (Yes, she listens to alternative and classic rock by choice, and doesn't care for much rap music. She also converted to Judaism, among other things people might find outside the norm.) She never had much interest in playing competitive video games though (well, outside of a bit of Guitar Hero until she got bored with it after playing through several songs). (I, on the other hand, still like playing first person shooters, even though I'm in my early 40's.)
If you're working someplace where it's clear the vast majority enjoys and values things you don't -- guess what? That can happen to ANY of us. I worked in I.T. for union steel shops where everyone's interests included hunting, wrestling, monster trucks and country music. I was the only one who listened to alt. rock instead, and cared about a computer as more than just "a pain in the ass tool management forces us to use". I guess I *could* have tried to go hunting or fishing with the guys or start listening to country to try to make new friends. But I didn't.... I just accepted that we liked different things, and went to work to get work done, period. It's a lot easier to enjoy your free time if you have a paycheck and the bills are all paid.
If you're not willing to do that? That's ok... but you have to do your job search based on what's important, then .... which would be finding like-minded co-workers. I know it exists, but she's right that at least for what she was looking for -- it probably won't be found in the "tech giants" of plac
. "The prevailing theme is that this will be good for companies, good for innovation, and good for the future of technology. While that's true,..." On what basis is it true?
(Yeah, I know this was focusing on gender diversity, but I see a larger issue)
Back when I was in college, oh too long ago, we had actually a decent amount of diversity in classes, at least relative to what I see today.
I got my job from a reference from a Mexican engineer. My group of close friends were a white guy like me, a few Indians, Mexicans, a Greek girl, some Greek guys, a Korean girl, etc. It seemed pretty mixed at the time. Also, not coincidentally I think, I got a free ride to college. My tuition was low (state school) and I got a lot of grants and scholarships.
Now, college is getting more expensive. They're spending money not on faculty or programs, but on buildings, and incurring debt. Tuition is rising. Scholarships are gone, too much belt tightening. So, if you're close to the cutoff of "can I make it in, can I not", you're more likely to be on the bad side of that cutoff now. Oh, and who's more likely to be on the bad side of the cutoff? Minorities.
This isn't racism in the classic "Im going to stop you from reading a book" sense. But it is a consequence of previous racism. You get cycles. Parents who were banned from colleges in the 60's, who were forced to live in neighborhoods with bad schools in the 80's and 90's are having kids saddled with a few headwinds today. It took years to create this situation, and it will take years to unwind it.
This isn't just a "well, poor them", "yeah the bleeding heart liberals will cry them a river" problem. Aside from the emotional cost, for the spreadsheet lovers, this is a huge subset of our nation not being as economically useful as they can be. This specifically in a time where our economy is depressed because people don't have good paying jobs and can't buy anything. To have cycles and generations of people who are nowhere near their economic potential should be a problem for both Dems and Republicans.
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be anybody who wants to do a long term improvement project in today's politics. Neither politicians, nor the electorate have enough patience to try to unwind this.
This is one of those things where you can choose how to react. You can either be a victim or not. It's not middle school. You don't have to mindlessly strive to "fit in". Consider it an aspect of work life balance. If you find your job taking over your life to that degree I would tend to attribute this to the prevailing attitudes regarding work in whatever location you happen to have landed in.
Once again, this is probably problems with Silicon Valley being applied to the industry at large.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm not as hostile towards Erica as some here, but I'm not as sympathetic either as you might think. I graduated college when Reagan was president and I've worked in IT all my professional career. I've had some jobs I liked a lot. I've had others that really sucked. My current job is pretty good and I like my employer a lot, but a few years ago things were different in the job and I was pretty unhappy. Things change in life. Some jobs start off good and get bad. Some start off bad and get good. Some are always good. Some are always bad. Erica started her career at a university in Alaska. Alaska is hardly a place with a lot of black people and university IT jobs are kind of infamous. Typically they don't pay well and they tend to attract certain types of people who aren't exactly go getters. Well, this has been my experience on the East Coast of the USA, but perhaps things are different elsewhere. Maybe in California, for example, university IT jobs are fantastic. But I've got a pretty good feeling that Erica didn't start off with a great job. That probably plays some role in her perceptions. She also worked in Windows which attracts different types of people than Unix/Linux type jobs do. That may also play a role in how things were for her.
Another thing I want to mention is that I work sometimes with other companies' IT departments to solve problems and there's a lot of variability there. Big companies usually have pretty competent IT groups. Small companies? Not always. I know that some small companies have badly overworked IT people who are doing the work of 2 or 3 people by themselves. Sometimes people in bad IT jobs won't leave for various reasons. They may fear change. They may work in an area with limited opportunities. One of my co-workers is a few years older than me and before joining our company he apparently didn't have any IT jobs that weren't horrible beyond belief. Maybe she just found a lot of bad jobs. It sounded like she was pretty happy in the job at Home Depot but got pissy over the pay and not being able to get promoted and left. If you want to work in IT and chase dollars, you can job hop and do that, but I can't promise you that the next job will be better or make you happy. You may get more money and have worse working conditions. And if you want to get promoted, you probably shouldn't go into IT at all. It's not exactly a career path to being CEO. Sounded like she was willing to trade a job that made her happy to try to get more money and she was never able to find a job she liked as much. It happens.
You think social justice warriors who want equality of outcome are mythical? Do you even read the news?
For the last few weeks we've been hearing about how Google, Apple, Amazon, and other tech firms don't have enough women and non-Asian minorities working for them. Companies are being described by the media as "overwhelmingly white and male."
Calling things straw men that aren't actually straw men is a fallacy of its own. It's a pathetic attempt to deflect the argument that is no better than "No because I said so and you're wrong anyway!"
So what's wrong about "feeling different"? She must be an insecure person. Get over it. You are the diversity if you think different (that was Apple's motto wasn't it?). What I want to know is: Do Nursing, Cosmetologist, or Secretarial blogs (or whatever traditionally female predominate occupations you want) fret about the lack of diversity in their industries? Or are only perceived male-dominate industries (like tech) subject to criticism?
Maybe Google, Apple, Amozon, etc are concerned that something they're doing is putting off potential applicants. Wanting to not put people off is not equality of outcome no matter how much you would like it to be.
"No because I said so and you're wrong anyway!"
No shit Sherlock! That's why it's the perfect rebuttal to someone saying "It's like this because I say so".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Maybe Google, Apple, Amozon, etc are concerned that something they're doing is putting off potential applicants.
Here's a news release: http://www.rainbowpush.org/new...
"At the urging of Rainbow PUSH Coalition and others, AMAZON finally released its workforce diversity and inclusion data."
Explain how this is not related to SJW activism and is actually a straw man.
No shit Sherlock! That's why it's the perfect rebuttal to someone saying "It's like this because I say so".
Begging the question. You're justifying your own childish "straw man" retort by saying the other person's argument was invalid... but you can't actually explain why it was invalid.
I got into technology to get away from idiotic psycho-drama like this. Technology is mathematics, and beyond such nonsense.
Hi, I'm a white male from a rather underprivileged background, and also have felt like outsider. Our experiences in our formative years were very very different. BUT to people like the author of this article by virtue of gender and color, we're exactly the same! Huzzah for diversity, which only occurs when people *look* different.
The question that always come to my mind when reading articles like this .. is why is tech singled out as "needing" to change?
Granted it's a tech-centric site, so it will be biased -- but where are the SJ crusaders trying to get more men involved in teaching primary education, or nursing? I'd wager that the gender gap is even greater than in technology.
This is somewhat tongue in cheek, but having traveled to several large cities, white men were somewhat underrepresented as cabbies. Is there implicit racism in cab companies hiring practices? Is this something we need a hash tag for?
From my experience most people feel some-of-the-time that they don't fit in and do try and conform to the percieved majority group-think. I would have thought that the IT sector was the one group where people were accepted regardless of their ethnic background.
If you somehow think that white men are smarter, or more capable, than everybody else, then I'm willing to bet that you haven't spent much time as 'the token white guy'. If all your experience with other races is service oriented (restaurants, banks, etc) or with 'token non-(white guy)s', then you experientially have no reason to expect as much of them as you do of yourself. This is natural. Racism is natural, just like rape, theft, and murder.
Humans: more than just a lizard brain. Act like it!
In fact, people who are raised in different cultures think differently*. From a completely utilitarian viewpoint, diversity of ideas is the most critical ingredient to problem solving. Moreover, in terms of numbers, there are vastly more non-(white male)s than white males. By maintaining the status quo, we restrict the talent pool to a tiny margin, and homogeneous dev teams get stuck in groupthink. You're trapping yourself in a stuck mindset, and the competition will pass you by.
Without diversity of eye, hair, and skin color, think of the example you're setting. When white folk inevitably lose supremacy, who the fuck is going to hire your white ass? If we get diversity up & running nice and smooth, it'll seriously work out in our favor in the long run. Make people feel welcome, regardless of their coloring. They might return the favor... but slight them, and that'll surely come back to bite you.
* If it needs to be said, culture and pigment levels are strongly correlated. Also, sending white babies to be raised in different cultures so you can maintain a lily-white workforce with a diverse cultural footprint probably won't end well.
"While that's true"
*** citation needed
Diversity of things that matter, may be important, but diversity of eye, hair, and skin color may be unimportant.
They are not. We have recent history to prove otherwise.
Explain how this is not related to SJW activism and is actually a straw man.
So basically, you've jumped on in the middle of an argument, posted something marginally related and then demand I explain how that fits my attack on the original poster.
oookay.
Anyway, the whole concept of "SJW" is a straw man. I've only ever heard it used by angry internet types who make up all sorts of things and then decry the evils of "SJW".
So far I don't see anything wrong with the link you posted. Some companies have noticed their workforce does not remotely reflect the balance of people in the broader population. They figure this is almost certainly a bad thing and are aiming to fix it.
The result seems to be massive amounts of whining on the internet, because nothing at all is worse than fixing something that's bad.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"social justice" is based on the extremely faulty assertion that everybody is the same and that absolutely every trait or preference you may have is culturally constructed.
No, social justice is based on the premise that significant institutionalized injustice was committed until very recently whose consequences still linger. How effective (or just) remediation is, that is a related but different subject.
The technology industry is also made up of a lot of Asian and Indian men and women who don't seem to have a problem. In this particular case, I think it's less of a race issue and more of an personal entitlement issue.
Increasing diversity in THE TEACHING OF OUR CHILDREN would be pretty damn good also.
Unfortunately, no one seems to care about this.
After many decades of chasing just about any man out of the teaching profession, we are left with a huge bias presented to children at their very most sensitive age.
And we are worried about diversity in Tech? why not ponder the elephant in the corner, instead of the mouse hole.
How do we expect to develop a well balanced and unbiased society when our children are taught, almost without exception, by women?
I am NOT claiming, of course, that women cannot teach well - that is far from the truth.
I AM claiming that having only women teachers IS A BAD THING.
Of course the knee jerk reactions will not flood in - but face it, it is an inexcusable situation.
Where are the big well funded pushed to get more men in teaching? ha! they are being actively excluded.. Many schools now actively
avoid employing men 'as it makes the parents uncomfortable'.
What a sad state of affairs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't care what others think about me -- not because I'm a sociopath, but because I'm an adult. I do try to make others feel comfortable (I abstain from talking too much about religion, politics, drugs, etc. in the workplace) I put my best foot forward, work hard, make sure that people get a clear understanding of what I've done for them or the company, and let them walk away with whatever stupid opinion they want. The worst they can do is try some office politicking, in which case I still have my work and product to show when anyone comes knocking that will shine the light of truth on any bullshit that someone might be pushing against me. It's never failed to make accusers look like the idiots they are. It makes me look impartial when I approach it this way, which always gives me the upper hand.
The result? 95% of my coworkers really enjoy my feedback and my company. I don't bother telling them that I think their music sucks, that they should work on their lisps, that they are boring people, that their language offends me, or anything like that, because they probably think the same things about me. We're all in the same foxhole and we're all trying to take home more this year than we did last year. At 5:00pm, we part ways where I go home to my beautiful wife and children and they go get crunk'd at some idiot-magnet where we no-longer affect one-another.
The press release says "At the urging of Rainbow PUSH Coalition and others, AMAZON finally released its workforce diversity and inclusion data."
That suggests Amazon's release of data was under pressure from interest groups like Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
Why do you keep saying things that imply the companies did this spontaneously?
From http://rainbowpush.org/pages/b... we see that: "The Rainbow PUSH Coalition is the product of a social justice movement that grew out of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) Operation Breadbasket. Founded by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Operation Breadbasket sought to combine theology and social justice, and to effect progressive economic, educational, and social policy in America."
How is that not descriptive of an organization fighting for social justice, i.e. a "social justice warrior?"
How can you call the concept a straw man when we have examples of them and their influence? (At the very least, their own claims of their influence.)
Most teams I've worked on, I've been the only white male or one of only two or three white males. The rest are all other combinations. We've never had any of the issues that the author complains about. Methinks the problem is the common denominator: her.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I work with women, blacks, arabs, etc... And everything is fine for everyone.
Of course, a few of them were unhappy with their situation but it happens with white males too. These people tend to blame everything but themselves.
The women I work with are usually a lot more tech inclined than the average women, which is to be expected when working in tech. So yeah, they may readily talk about computers, video games and cars, but it doesn't prevent them from being feminine. They just have the culture that matches their jobs. Likewise, you should expect people working in libraries to read books and people making dog food to own pets.
Whether or not our minority coworkers get along is not about about accepting offensive jokes but rather a simple matter of social skills. If you show that you bring more fun to a group than racist or sexist jokes, people will want you in, even if you don't accept these jokes.
"I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture"
Probably most of the members of that "culture" feel exactly the same way.
>I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in.
to be honest, most white male nerds lost most of their identity with traditional white and male culture years ago.
IT and technology up until very recently was a soul crushing job that almost perminatnly marked you as an outcast, with no life outside your own. The reason is you have an undeniable value to society, any society, and any society that has the technology you create will be better than the ones without it.
That gives you leverage, and the rest of the intellegista fears you, because most of them are worthless hacks who have class and status, that is very relivant to the people who gave it to them.
These are social values in capitalism.
So females have exclusive skills and knowledge that males don't?
Every woman I know mentions men's inability to change the toilet paper.
Even our fantasies are different, as I summarize in this submission
The issue the researchers wanted to solve was this: Though there are numerous theories about deviant sexual fantasies, science had never described what was a typical fantasy versus what was "unusual."
Not surprisingly, the study confirms that men have more fantasies and describe them more vividly than women. The study also tells us that a significant proportion of women (30% to 60%) evoke themes associated with submission (e.g., being tied up, spanked, forced to have sex).
Importantly, unlike men, women in general clearly distinguish between fantasy and desire. Thus, many women who express more extreme fantasies of submission (e.g. domination by a stranger) specify that they never want these fantasies to come true. The majority of men, however, would love their fantasies to come true (e.g. threesomes).
As expected, the presence of one's significant other is considerably stronger in female fantasies than in male fantasies. In general, men in couples fantasize much more about extramarital relationships compared to women.
One of the most intriguing findings has to do with the significant number of unique male fantasies, for example, regarding shemales, anal sex among heterosexuals, and the idea of watching their partner have sex with another man. Evolutionary biological theories cannot explain these fantasies, which, among males, are typically desires.
There are differences, and there's no denying it. And the dynamics are a lot more complex than first appearances would have us believe. Example - Shoshana Roberts - the woman walking around New York getting the catcalls, then death threats when she posted the video.
Some of the men, the politest interpretation is that they're mentally disturbed. Others are peacocking to show their street buddies that they're "da man" by being so openly rude and sexually suggestive. They're building up their dysfunctional egos at women's expense. The rest? Shoshana is making no eye contact, not looking at them, not acting in any way like she wants to interact with them ... do these guys even realize how counter-productive, how much they look like losers, doing this?
They probably do. So why DO they do it?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"...How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Which changes how it flies.
An example I used to present to students was the "Liberty" ships, where the only two changes were joining method and in many cases a relaxation of quality standards for the steel used. Those two changes without proper redesign to take them into account resulted in more than a couple of thousand recorded catastropic cracking incidents, multiple ones per ship in some cases, and the number of ships reported lost due to the cracking was in triple digits but I can't recall more detail than that. In that case changing the joining method from riveting to welding meant that a redesign of a deck hatch was required. That was resisted until many months had passed and more than one thousand ships with that design had been built.
So that's another way to illustrate the point I was trying to convey - design is a process that involves feedback and is not as trivial as changing a line of source code without having to worry about the libraries it calls.
So yes, even "a Zenit with a bit of a length cut out" is undoubtedly not trivial and not without risk.
It would be nice to have something entirely new pushing the envelope but the approach of running spaceflight as separate cottage industries instead on contractors under the expert guidance of NASA is unlikely to deliver anything of consequence.
Translation: I want to impose my culture on my team mates.
This. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a culture that one adapts to. The other option, thou people will disagree, is having no culture. If I lived in Japan I would adapt to their culture and manurisums. I wouldn't walk around complaining that I couldn't be more American.
How is that not descriptive of an organization fighting for social justice, i.e. a "social justice warrior?"
Because the phrase SJW has a pretty well known pejorative meaning and you well know that. Secondly not everyone who fights for a cause is a "warrior". Finally, you're a social justice warrior too by your own apparent definition. You think this is all unjust (unfairly biased against men) and are fighting against it (by arguing loudly on the internet). Makes you a social justics warrior too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
SJW being a pejorative meaning does not make the phenomenon any less real. As an example, "racist" is a pejorative term, but racists are real.
You're twisting the definition of SJW to make it apply to me, though. You chose too high a level of abstraction ("unfairly biased"). I'm against things that are unfairly biased for women as well. Where people think SJWs err is in HOW they determine things are unfairly biased. Disparate impact is one example, unequal outcome is another. SJWs are happy to stop at that level. Unequal outcome is evidence of unfair bias, and that's good enough.
You can't lump such people in with others (like me) who believe in equal opportunity, but not equal outcome. The views are far too different.
But the lowercase form "social justice warrior" -- sure, I'm that. I believe in social justice very strongly.
If I hadn't already posted I'd mod the above up. A lack of diversity is a sign that you are not looking very far for talent.
OK, you're not the ggggggp. You seem more sensible.
You're twisting the definition of SJW to make it apply to me, though.
That's because (unlike racist), SJW is merely a perjorative with no real meaning. Firstly it's amazing that anyone who fights for justice in social matters is considered bad merely because of the fight for justice. Second it's hilarious that you've decided it doesn't apply to you because reasons.
SJWs are happy to stop at that level.
Find a definition (no, not on internet forums, somewhere a bit more solid) of SJW which includes all the things you do like but not any of the things you don't.
You can't lump such people in with others (like me) who believe in equal opportunity, but not equal outcome. The views are far too different.
And we're back to the straw man. The definition of SJW is not "someone who believes in equal outcome".
Look: SJW is basically a pejorative term made up by the red pill crowd to shut down any argument about anything they don't like. At least that's my impression. If you can find a real definition that isn't actually that then I've got an opinion which can be changed.
And I stand by my claim about the OP attacking straw men. Shouting SJW as soon as any article comes up is simply an attempt to construct an easy to defeat enemy (there is apparently no enormity to which SJWs won't sink aparently), and so shut down the argument quickly. The thing is SJW doesn't mean anything except an amporphous collection of things the straw-man constructor hates.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think your expectations are too high. SJW is not a well-defined term, it's an evolving term, just like civil rights, achievement gaps, and employment figures are evolving. If many different people are calling a person or organization an SJW then that's probably valid. If a few people or one person is calling a person or organization an SJW then you'd compare it to other cases and make a judgment call.
The thing I've noticed is that SJW's, like I said, take up the mantle of the most extreme positions on social justice, where not just equal opportunity but equal outcome are the goal. They rely on things like disparate impact to "prove" that something is discriminatory or racist, because they have lost touch with or outright rejected the dictionary definition of the words. They often in one breath readily admit that overt racism and discrimination are extremely rare, but in another claim that society is racist, institutional racism is rampant, and white male supremacy is woven throughout society and is causing all the problems for minorities and women.
There are many attributes and subtleties, which is why there isn't a clear definition of SJW. It's something you recognize when you see it, but can't define, like love or beauty (only bad).
If many different people are calling a person or organization an SJW then that's probably valid. If a few people or one person is calling a person or organization an SJW then you'd compare it to other cases and make a judgment call. The thing I've noticed is that SJW's, like I said, take up the mantle of the most extreme positions on social justice, where not just equal opportunity but equal outcome are the goal.
Well then, it seems that that is how you define SJW, but there's plenty more from the GamerGate crowd who seem to define SJW as anyone who disapproves of rape threats.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Diversity is kind of like zen; if you strive for it you will never obtain it. Instead if you don't seek it, but simply ignore all those things that don't matter you end up with, surprise, diversity. Of course, we sometimes don't know what matters. Nobody with a two functioning neurons says, however, to himself, "what I need is a team of young white males." Ok someone might think of a reason why that might be useful, but that's beside the point. You have a mission; you build a team to the best of you abilities to accomplish that mission. A lot of times we sacrifice the mission for other things: friendships, comfort, familiarity, and so on. Sometimes the population you have to select from is not all that diverse. That's someone else's problem. If you seek diversity, you will never find it.