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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.
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?
Native Americans saw an increase in diversity in their country from the 1500s on. A lot of good it did them.
You still didn't answer the question.
"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.
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.
Someone really knows how to troll slashdot.
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.
Your example is very intriguing, and perfectly valid, but unless American engineering resembles Lebanese politics, also quite irrelevant to the original topic.
Ezekiel 23:20
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 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
I've worked for several companies that diversified their development teams simply because they were told that the staff was not diversified enough. The result has always been a general decrease in the productivity because the new hire was not the best qualified candidate (many times the jobs were filled internally).
Workplace diversity for the sake of diversity is a stupid idea
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Because people who know different stuff know different stuff.
"Hello Team! This is our new team member, Ug. Ug is actually an unfrozen stone-age caveman who we brought in to add some diversity and new ideas to the development of our game. Now, keep in mind that Ug doesn't know anything about programming, or games, or how to use a toilet, or anything like that. But we're hoping that his fresh new perspective can really help us rethink some of our cultural assumptions about game development. So we need you to treat him as an equal and really listen to what he has to say. Are there any questions?"
"Yeah, what does Ug think of the game so far?"
"Well, when we showed it to him, he screamed, attacked the monitor, and yelled something about a vision from the thunder gods."
"So we should strive to make the game more sensitive to those who may not understand how electricity works?"
"EXACTLY! And we should probably also avoid any sudden movements in the game. Sudden movements REALLY seem to make him uncomfortable. Do you have anything to add, Ug?"
"Ug happy to be part of team tribe, Ug honor team chief, no kill his son or take his woman."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
(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.
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?
Yes, little bit of blackface comedy there redirected to a safer demographic, but consider the following:
In the US the population is mobile and diverse plus typically jobs are awarded based on merit.
In North Korea most of that does not apply.
Personally I'm backing the diverse US option instead of the North Korean "everyone must fit in" approach.
How do you like it presented that way? Does it bypass enough baggage to avoid silly blackface comedy?
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.