Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com)

itwbennett writes: This year, women made up 26.8 percent of Microsoft's total workforce, down from 29 percent in 2014, the company reported Monday. In a blog post discussing the numbers, Gwen Houston, Microsoft's general manager of diversity and inclusion, pointed the finger at the thousands of layoffs the company made to restructure its phone hardware business: 'The workforce reductions resulting from the restructure of our phone hardware business ... impacted factory and production facilities outside the U.S. that produce handsets and hardware, and a higher percentage of those jobs were held by women,' she said.

Comments

SJWdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

This place is getting worst than Tumblr.

Re:SJWdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man SJW has always been a thing, just nobody thought of a glib term for it before. You know... Civil rights, suffragettes, peace prize, conservation and recycling, some idiots wrote books like 1984. Oh noes... We would have been much better off building a society of Trump clones and slavers

Re:SJWdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those aren't SJW activities. Just saying, SJW's are much like Freedom Fighters. They fight real social equality, while advocating racism to fight perceived and often phantom racism.

Re:SJWdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those aren't SJW activities. Just saying, SJW's are much like Freedom Fighters. They fight real social equality, while advocating racism to fight perceived and often phantom racism.

This; One of the main things that SJWs struggle against is "microagression". Here's the thing. Where discrimination against black people (in the USA) is a scientifically observed fact, measured, e.g. by many different experiments like sending the same CV with different photos, microagression has no science behind it at all. All the examples you look at will break down to two things - real discrimination ("oh - I'll put your son into sports class - black kids are always better at sport")- or a lost chance to explain something about your culture (cases like someone asking "oh - where are you from"; you could also include here "cultural appropriation" which is a terrible way of naming a bunch of different ways in which cultures cross pollinate and also misunderstand each other). It's actually mostly a way to attack different cultures where words have different meanings whilst often avoiding explaining to people what is wrong with what they are saying or, e.g. in the case of Germain Greer, trying to understand the rather advanced point she is trying to make (women are not simply men without penises).

SJW could be characterised by extreme attempts to discriminate against other social cultures within the same grouping. It can be characterised by attempts to stop the speech of people who have different viewpoints and to block an interrupt debate and interaction between groups with different views about equality, society and relations between people. SJW is a right wing (or extreme left; approximately where the political circle meets at the point of totalitarianism) reactionary grouping which should be seen as closer to the neo-con / neo-liberal / stalinist thinking than to anything which looks for social equality.

OMG!! Female STEM workers again!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who fucking cares al-fucking-ready?

If women want a STEM career they will get one. Clearly they don't want them. Stop trying to artificially equalize something that has no natural desire to be equal!

Where is all of the outcry about males being less than 10% of the nursing field in the US? https://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupations.pdf

Equality of opportunity matters

[sjbe]

Excuse me, but what I expect from corporations (where I am not myself a shareholder) is quality products. I don't give a damn, who they hire and why — as long as they don't enslave workers — and neither should anybody else. Mind your own business, people.

Maybe you don't give a damn about your fellow human beings but those of us who aren't sociopaths do. I want to see people get good opportunities and not be held down because they happened to be born with a different set of genitals or a different skin color. Glass ceilings are a real thing. Clearly you've never seen anyone bump into one but I have. These are real issues that affect real people and in a civilized society we care about what happens to them. People don't have to be enslaved for a workplace to be a very bad place.

We have certain protected classes of people (gender, race, age, etc) precisely because there is clear and unambiguous evidence that if we allow discrimination based on those criteria that the results are bad both for society and for the individuals. The market demonstrably cannot fairly deal with this problem.

Re:One more layoff required...

[Pseudonymous Powers]

"top talent" is a code word for rich white people

"$TERM is a code word for rich white people" is a code phrase for "I'm too lazy to actually debate the case on its merits, so I'll just create an intentionally flawed argument and pretend like you said it."

Not that there's not a bunch of racist sexist elitist assholes in the world, but you don't get to just glibly dismiss their points and pretend like you've won the argument. Well, I mean, you absolutely can do that, but it doesn't really count.

Re:what are they saying

[Bengie]

Nokia was a company that was much more enlightened than Microsoft, and actually had some female employees

They also had a factory. They didn't have more female programmers, just more female factory workers. Microsoft purchased them then fired most of the factory workers.

Re:I want quality, not politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Breitbart is not a reliable source of information on this matter.

Why? Either way, the Breitbart article is full for references. If you think you're getting a slanted version of the story, just check the references. The facts are there to be had for those who care to look.