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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.

24 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. SJWdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This place is getting worst than Tumblr.

    1. Re:SJWdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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

    2. Re:SJWdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:SJWdot. by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Microsoft's general manager of diversity and inclusion

      I can think of another job that will be on the cutting block when times start to get lean for MS.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    4. Re:SJWdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:SJWdot. by epyT-R · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nice false dilemma. The SJW moniker is apt. It indicates how 'social justice' has become oppressive in its own right. However I give you props for at least implicitly admitting its marxist underpinnings.

  2. OMG!! Female STEM workers again!?!?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:OMG!! Female STEM workers again!?!?!? by vel-ex-tech · · Score: 2

      Fair point for nursing. That is becoming less of a problem. See homecare providers also. I somehow got on a mailing list for a local nursing/homecare association, and they even have a spotlight for men in those professions.

      If women want a STEM career they will get one. Clearly they don't want them.

      This is so mind numbingly stupid, yet brought up in every debate on the subject, that I can't even be bothered to refute it any more.

      Would you please help me to understand why this is mind-numbingly stupid? Up above I talked about my various experiences mentoring women programmers. One was quite brilliant. However, the only woman I know personally who does programming outside of work is trans. There is something going on here, and it seems that the assertion should be more specific: "cisgendered women don't want STEM careers."

      That tells me, unlike other people unconsciously blabbering this whole "women are different" axiom, that the problem is social. The problem could be fixed. I'll be blunt: would a world where women may be circumcised at birth, are generally viewed as expendable, are required to sign up for selective service/be drafted, have to worry about being stuck making alimony payments if married or considered being in a common law marriage, have lives that can be completely ruined at the mere accusation of rape or sexual harassment, etc, a world with absolute gender equality, have this problem?

      Additionally, I'm having troubles seeing barriers outside of a lack of jobs and asshole gaslighting managers for programming in particular. A couple weeks ago I got a sort of "I wanna be a programmer!" from of one of the line workers, so I told her about code.org, recommended Ruby or Python, and let her know another good learning experience is installing a Linux, even recommended Linux from Scratch when she was comfortable with a command line. I haven't received any follow-up questions. Either that means she's a genius hacker and has grokked things that took me a good 6 months to even figure out when I first started messing around with Linux, or by "I wanna be a programmer!" she meant that she wanted a job like mine. Job being the key word.

      If could magically create 3 programming jobs out of thin air, I could, right now, at this very moment, fill them with that trans hacker I know who, you guessed it, was fired by a gaslighting asshole executive, and two black women who have given me "I wanna be a programmer!" in the past 6 months. No, make that 4, since there needs to be room for my current apprentice. Give me 300 programming jobs out of thin air, and I'll bet I could fill them with a veritable army of black, brown, cisfemale, transfemale, probably otherkin!, you name it people. And in flyover country, to boot! These wouldn't just be "diversity hires" either. I have standards, and I'm willing to personally mentor others to meet those standards when somebody in an appropriate job goes "I wanna be a programmer" and it actually means, "Hey, this stuff could really make me a more valuable employee. Help me out, Vel!"

      Hell, make that 5. I just remembered I got "I wanna be a programmer!" from, get this, not only black, not only a woman, but trans! Although I hope we won't forget she's a person before all that.

      The only thing getting in my way would be that pesky law that says I'd have to consider white male applicants fairly.... Well, and the fact that there are no good jobs to motivate my army of diversity to become programmers. All we're left with is us misogynerds :(

    2. Re:OMG!! Female STEM workers again!?!?!? by Coren22 · · Score: 2

      AmiMoJo is the local SJW. He is fighting the good fight against everything anti woman. He doesn't care if it is women making the choice, they must be being forced out of the profession at a young age, we must force them to go into STEM as they are too simple and don't know better.

      He is fighting for equality, but only for women, who cares if there is sexism against men, men are tough, they can take it.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  3. Re:what are they saying by sunderland56 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The useless employees were disproportionately female.

    It's a little more subtle.

      - Microsoft bought Nokia
      - Nokia was a company that was much more enlightened than Microsoft, and actually had some female employees
      - Now Microsoft is canning a bunch of those people

      And so - the layoffs are disproportionally female compared to *Microsoft* standards, not compared to Nokia standards, and not compared to other sane companies.

  4. Re:OMFG! by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 4, Informative

    OMFG! There was a fluctuation of 2.2 percent in the female employees of a major corporation that has bizzilions of employees that come and go!

    The larger the corporation, and the less turnover it has in general, the more significant a small number is. If there are 49 employees, a 2.2% fluctuation is someone quitting. If there were 2 million employees, with say, 20% layoffs, that a 2.2% reduction between gender groups is extremely significant (p

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  5. Equality of opportunity matters by sjbe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:"Microsoft's GM of diversity and inclusion" by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

    Maybe that title exists because qualified women were being overlooked thanks to the old boys network?

    This could easily be seen as trying to get better quality workers without prematurely culling half the herd because of their gender. Nothing SJW there - just sound business sense - if you want to hire the best, you use the largest pool of candidates to draw from. Or do you think that no woman can't be better at a job than a man?

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  7. Re:I want quality, not politics by JackieBrown · · Score: 3, Informative

    FreeBSD has FreeBSD girl aka Randi Harper https://twitter.com/freebsdgir...

    She is not only a woman but an awful SJW attacker. FreeBSD's support of her cause in many discussion list entries is what caused my business to stop our annual donations and migrate >5k hosts over to Linux. Won't disclose the donation amount because that would likely make me identifiable

    I don't blame you. I just googled her and she is pretty terrifying, cold, and heartless.
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...

    I skipped on the article and started on the list of her victims. Most of those people are people that I'd consider left leaning, but I would not wish what she did on them or anyone. She really has no problem destroying anyone even those that mainly agree with her.

  8. Re:Gwen Houston should be next by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2

    While correlation is not causation, it's a statsitically significant difference. Therefore, there is something separating those groups. It could be a confound (for instance, maybe the layoffs were limited to those with PhDs, and more women at MS had PhDs), but the test for "is the size of the delta worth talking about" passed.

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  9. Re:One more layoff required... by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.

  10. Re:what are they saying by Bengie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:Gwen Houston should be next by Bengie · · Score: 2

    I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

  12. Opportunities are not equal for everyone by sjbe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everyone has the same opportunity.

    No they do not. You have to be phenomenally clueless or bigoted to think otherwise. The same opportunities are NOT available to everyone. That was the entire point of the civil rights movement and the suffrage movement. Just because you have some choices doesn't mean everyone else does. Opportunity can be taken away very easily by institutions (government and private) if we allow it to occur. Opportunity is a fragile thing and not everyone gets equal opportunity under the law or in society. Bigotry, racism, and sexism and discrimination are real things with real consequences. Those who have to actually face them by definition do not have equal opportunity. The fact that some people manage to break through does not mean that the gap in opportunity is not real for many many people.

    For example, I become a developer; not a cake baker. That doesn't mean I didn't have equal opportunity to become a cake baker. It means that I fucking chose to be something else.

    Wow do you not get it. If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates? Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them? Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country? You think because you chose one job over another that there is no inequality in the real world? That's just ignorant as hell.

    1. Re:Opportunities are not equal for everyone by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      There is no lack of opportunity in STEM, especially computer programming. The barrier to entry is ridiculously low: all you need is a computer, which these days you can get for next to nothing if you get something used and old. You don't need teachers or mentors, you can learn everything on your own. A kid who really has an interest and wants to get into it can, as long as their parents support them.

      The place where things really aren't equal and it really matters is in peoples' upbringing. Parents and society encourage little girls to believe they're Disney princesses and that math and tech work isn't for them. Girls are also trained to be much more social than little boys, and this also makes them avoid STEM careers which are not usually seen as highly social.

      There's not much you can do about this, because it's a product of wider society, and also parenting. The only way you can change this is to ban parenting, and only have kids raised in government institutions like in Brave New World. And finally, trying to do things at, say, the high school level to address the inequity is way, way, way too late.

      If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates?

      That has absolutely nothing to do with why women don't go into STEM. That's a problem with socioeconomic trends that are hard to change, and also with ongoing racism in the law enforcement profession. This last one isn't going to change any time soon when police departments selectively weed out applicants who are too smart, and only want to hire dumb thugs.

      Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them?

      You can blame that on the H1-B program, and of course the greed of employers. Cut the supply and the employers will be forced to shape up.

      Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country?

      The same socioeconomic trends that mean black people still are, on average, poorer than white people. The people in Congress look a lot like the people who run corporations; they're from mostly the same socioeconomic groups. There's a high correlation with racial and gender demographics there.

  13. Re: OMFG! by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No I am saying different genders will gravitate towards different jobs. Towing more women at a job to meet a quota even if that isn't what they want to do, will just cause a higher level of turn over. However as I stated before this is a trend, not a rule. Like any trend there are exceptions... A lot of one, a Trend can mean 51% of a population will fall in such a category (assuming I have a low margin of error) meaning 49% will fall in the minority. 49% is a big minority.

    There are a lot of talented women who are just as good if not better then men at the building and creating of technology, if that is what they want to do, we shouldn't say they can't because of their gender. However if there is a balance in the stereotypes and you find your organization isn't having the gender equity, then there is a problem with the organization which will need to be corrected, such as fostering values that will attract women stereotype tech workers to your field, as they will bring something the organization needs anyways.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  14. Re:One more layoff required... by Locke2005 · · Score: 2

    Quotas may be justified as a court-ordered remedial measure to address an identified pattern of discrimination, meaning they should be limited in time. So there are limited valid applications for quotas, although in general I agree with your assertion that quotas are bullshit -- any company not hiring the best people for the position is hurting themselves, discrimination is a self-punishing transgression.

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
  15. Re:I want quality, not politics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  16. Re:I want quality, not politics by _merlin · · Score: 2

    You know she was never connected to FreeBSD in any official capacity. She helped organise the meetbsd conference, but that's it. She worked for Yahoo at one point but was sacked for under-performance, and she's been a professional SJW ever since as far as I can tell.