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Report Shows Another Diversity Challenge: Retaining Employees (sfchronicle.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Women, blacks and Latinos are far more likely to quit jobs in tech than white or Asian men, according to a new report by the Kapor Center for Social Impact. The Oakland nonprofit commissioned an online survey by the Harris Poll, which asked 2,006 people who voluntarily left tech jobs in the past three years about why they quit. It found women were twice as likely to leave as men (alternative link), while black and Latino tech workers were 3.5 times likelier to quit than white or Asian colleagues. The most common reason they gave for their departures was workplace mistreatment.
Maybe not. It sounds like a waste of resources.
Let me guess, they were expected to be productive members of the team and not just the token minority, and that got to be too much for them, so they quit rather than be fired for incompetence.
I know it doesn't account for all of it, but I've lost many female co-workers to motherhood and their decision to stay at home with their children.
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The most common reason they gave for their departures was workplace mistreatment.
If that reason is given more often by women and minorities then it is whites and men... perhaps companies ARE mistreating women and minorities which WOULD make it the company's fault.
It's possible that those groups just "perceive" mistreatment more often, or they could actually be being mistreated more.
Being the perennial centrist, on-the-fence person that I am- I don't know which is the real reason.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
While this claims the primary reason as mistreatment, we know that most people leave their jobs because of their relationship with their boss. Their boss's primary concern is performance. In colleges the highest dropout rates are seen in the groups that are selected for what amounts to diversity programs. More commonly known by affirmative action. A lot of the other issues being removed for, it is presumed that the high drop out rates from affirmative actions selected candidates is because of the lack of ability to perform to the standard that is being controlled for by entrance requirements. You can't goto MIT and expect to survive if you are only in the top 5% of Math ability, when everyone else around you is in the top 0.5% of Math ability.
When a White person (or an Asian) gets mistreated, then he just thinks "Man, people are assholes!"
When a Black or Latino gets mistreated, then he thinks "Man, white people are assholes!"
When a woman gets mistreated, then she thinks "Woman, men are assholes!"
In my black, female opinion (I'm transgender and transracial): Only the Whites (and Asians) have the right understanding: People are assholes.
Before the Great Recession, I changed jobs every three years by either staying at the same company or leaving for another company. After the Great Recession, I took whatever job that came my way that lasted anywhere from four hours to years. I'm currently halfway through a five-year contract. Someone leaving at the three-year mark seems normal to me.
Mistreatment in the eyes of the employee could also be that the individual was under qualified for the position they were in due to aggressive diversity hiring practices. If individual wasn't prepared for their work role, being held accountable by management or their peers for a certain level of performance could be perceived as mistreatment.
I'm certain that self-esteem plays a big role in this.
I know it doesn't account for all of it, but I've lost many female co-workers to motherhood and their decision to stay at home with their children.
"The most common reason they gave for their departures was workplace mistreatment."
Motherhood is one factor, but I hesitate to go there first because there is still such a problem with harassment in tech. Still, a company can make the job easier for working mothers in a couple of ways (e.g. good maternity leave policy, providing good day care, providing a place and break time for recent mothers to express milk even if they are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, etc...).
Real lawyers write in C++
In my experience, job hoppers are those who have the freedom of options. This would indicate that these folks are more enabled than those stuck behind.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
On the whole, if you want to see who is most successful in IT just watch who walks out the office's front door at 1am, exhausted, stumbling to their car.
In a vast majority of cases it will not be the female employees. Invariably they have to leave at 5pm to catch the commuter train, or to pick up the kids, or a million other things.
Who it will be will be the single man who has no life or a married man who has a strong wife who works as a team with him to fulfill the goals of family.
That's been my experience. It's just the reality of life. It's not discriminatory. It is to each his own.
The real problem is that women are of the opinion that career success == life success. That is about as far from reality as you can get.
Women should consider the ability to hold a job and contribute to their total family as a "Battle Win".
Then they should look at their long-term ability to have children and raise them well as a "Winning the War."
Caution: Contents under pressure
is "Are women and minorities mistreated more often, or are white men more tolerant of being mistreated?"
Unfortunately, there's no possible way to ask that question that won't produce an hysterical, blind hatred response from pretty much everybody.
The real blame goes on the people that hired unqualified people to improve the company image, not the people in the trenches that object to working with/carrying 'quota hires'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The company can't force employees to like someone. If there are known incidents, they can perhaps do something, but most "mistreatment" is subtle and/or unrecorded. The organization cannot micromanage social encounters at that level.
In general, many people are tribal jerks. I've had white colleagues who told about mistreatment when they worked with a uniform non-white group, such as all Asian. The "minority" is often targeted. Sometimes it's driven by resentment of "white culture" discriminating against them in general. They channel that frustration into an individual who happens to be white.
I'm not sure how to fix this because it's probably fundamental to human nature. Mass nagging about "being good" only goes so far. If you over-nag, people often do the opposite as a protest to the nagging. (Is the word "nagging" sexist?)
Table-ized A.I.
They treat everyone like shit :(
I hate that phrase too; it's people of color. ;)
need to learn how to suck it up
Why stay in a job where you are unhappy? Just so you can complain every day and bring everybody else down? The right thing to do is leave and find something else.
Probably, they have retired or left California and moved to Colorado or Texas. They saw the H1B replacement program in progress 20 years ago. Housing became so expensive, employers were unwilling to pay jumbo salaries for jumbo rents and mortgages so they figured it's cheaper to hire people who are willing to house-share.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The same as the manager thays been there for 20 years does not count as mistreatment.
50% of my graduating class were valedictorians of their high schools. Something like 80% got perfect mathematics SAT scores. I got perfect math SAT scores, and was by far the smartest in mathematics my school had ever seen. I got a 5 on my AP Calculus BC test. At MIT, I did only just OK in 18.014 and 18.024 (Calculus with Theory, for non-MIT folks) ... only just OK
I did fantastic in high school, valedictorian of my high school, high math (and English, after enough retakes). Got to college, struggled in the Calculus courses, started doing even worse after the first year. Was the problem that the university was that much harder? Well yes it was, but there was a bigger problem. Away from home, I was away from the pressures of my parents. They were the ones that pushed me to excel, to make sure that Bs weren't something to settle for. I had control over my own time and my own work ethic, and I crumbled without those pillars, and had to relearn how to be a good student all over again.
Many smarty-pants don't do nearly as well in college as they guessed, and sometimes it's just they're introduced to freedom, and they might not know how to handle it.
Accuses white men of "the inherent racism and sexism" and then proceeds to call them "little white male snowflakes".
I guess it's ok to be a sexist and a racist as long as you're racist and sexist against white men.
My Ex is a very competent programmer/manager and I know a number of very competent female programmers. Good female developers put in the same number of hours as men married men and maybe even more. Harassment from male engineers is almost non-existent with one exception.
Institutional stupidity and harassment towards women occasionally happens. There still are some senior managers that will promote a man over a woman and some companies are clueless when it comes to pregnancy or bathroom availability.
The biggest problem by far that I have seen is harassment by other women. And I've seen it at every single company I've worked at. Women will back stab each other and withhold key information. Secretaries are passive aggressive to female engineers, will refuse or be late with simple but critical tasks to other women, short change other women in petty ways like giving them the noisy office, saving $20 on a flight by choosing the flight with 2 extra stops,etc. If a woman gives the same instruction a man would give a woman in the exact same way the woman receiving the order will be resentful. Woman have to be friends and show they are a team or some bullshit like that and then make their orders requests. And women are expected to put up with this crap and not make a big thing about it. This last point is the exception. If the secretary was passive aggressive to a male engineer he could complain and at least get a sympathetic hearing of his complaint. If a woman complains then the problem is the women in the office not getting along.
This marxist response to valid criticism of modern social justice shows why it's so hard to maximize organizational talent: These insecure losers have managed to make skin color and sex more relevant to worthiness than ability and accomplishment under the guise of fighting against such bigoted discrimination. There are, however, quite a few people who actually see this hypocrisy for what it is as the western world has starting moving away from such damaging ideology.
If Blacks, Latinos, and Women don't want to work in tech, what's the big deal? Why do we need to socially engineer that industry? Why don't we have the same concerns about primary teachers or nursing?
I feel like I'm wandering too far off the topic here, but I just find it interesting that your anecdote is opposite to mine. Nobody ever really pushed me in high school, I just coasted and slacked off and ended up with only a 3.7 GPA. Thinking of myself as the smartest kid around my whole life, I was super disappointed when I learned at graduation that there was an honors program and other graduating classmates got special recognition for it and I was just one of the plebs in the audience watching them. My family was falling apart at the end of high school and I entered adulthood with no guidance or support and my life kind of fell apart almost immediately. By the time I figured out that I still could go to college without family to pay for it, and how to get there, I was driving my own life for the first time and actually cared and tried, and when I found I got a perfect 4.0 my first semester that felt so good that it drove me even harder to keep doing that semester after semester until I finished... that associate degree I was doing en route to my bachelor's degree. Once I got to a real university and did the upper division stuff, and also had a lot more adult life problems to juggle at the same time, my grades dropped back down to a 3.9 again, but still better than high school.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
but I know why most of the women in my area of expertise tend to leave the workforce....they get married and have kids. Its that simple.
This is with STEM, where if you leave regardless of gender it's going to be tough coming back because you are going to be out of date/rusty/lack of relevant experience/ ect. It's not easy to just jump back into the same programming job after 3-5 years of being out of the loop.
Not that most of the ones I know wanted to go back even after 3-5 years when the kids got old enough, some of the women I knew were pretty hard line workaholics too, but once they got the freedom of not having to work and being a mom, they completely switched attitudes and went all suzie homemaker and stay out of the market until the kids are graduated or in late high school.
For office jobs, this is why most women tend to gravitate towards jobs like sales, recruiters, accountants and office assistants, because they can pick up and go, there is literally no ramp up time for the technical skills required.
Most women I've known put money far above men's looks. If I had to use a point system, I'd assign it as such:
Earning power/potential: 60 pts.
Protecting and caring: 30 pts.
Looks/muscles: 10 pts.
True, the muscle part could be seen as "protecting and caring". I'm rather large in general such that perhaps that part mostly took care of itself despite me NOT resembling a super-hero. A man small or slight in stature may need muscles or karate skills to make up that portion of the report card.
Women want to be able to walk down the street at night with their guy and feel safe. There are different ways to achieve that. Some men fake it well with pure attitude.
Table-ized A.I.
We're all mistreated and we mistreat each other.
First - there's the serious mistreatment. I.T. is treated like a pariah at many companies. We are an expense, and we are an expense that many companies have a difficult time grasping. "We send the plumber away after he fixes the toilet, why do we have this guy on the payroll after he fixed my printing issue?" Bean counters especially hate us, because the things we support and provide to the users are expensive. I don't care who the computer is for, I.T. is blamed for it being purchased for it needing support. This is very much a "shoot the messenger" problem. I've seen companies that get rid of their support people, and I've seen it hurt them in the end. I've seen executive assistants - the guard dog types - really hate on I.T. because their master had a computer problem that wasn't immediately fixed and you're expensive.
Second - there's the peer to peer mistreatment. We're I.T., we eat our own. We are continuously cruel towards one another, especially if we like you. Holding back and treating you like a customer means we really don't want you around or we consider you a volatile liability. It's something I've found as pretty much a universal culture among competent technical people. We like practical jokes, well placed insults, and picking at each others issues. We're like a bunch of junior high kids, never mind we're in our 30's and 40's. Most of the people I've seen have a problem with mistreatment seem to only have the problem after they become accepted as part of the group. Some people just don't know how to fit into the culture. This isn't a race or gender thing, I've seen acceptance and breakdowns in about every combination of race and gender you can imagine. We're geeks, competence is currency, if someone is placed in an I.T. area due to affirmative action or nepotism they aren't going to become part of the pack. If you can't pull your own weight they're not going to feel sorry for you, they're going to eat you for lunch. Most successful technical environments I've been in have been meritocracies with the exceptions of rule by the person signing the checks, in which case even those setups are virtual meritocracies where you have the alpha-geek and the guy who can over rule the alpha geek.
Third - the serious real discrimination. Most real discrimination I've seen comes from H.R. departments and busy-bodies. Forced diversity is discrimination. I've been in really good self-governing technical departments. Usually the more offensive and wolf-packish they are, the better they are. I have on occasion had the pack destroyed due to concern from busy-bodies who don't understand that mode of operation intentionally changing seating arrangements, injecting people who aren't exactly up to par, and intentionally injecting people with polar opposite personalities into the team (who don't even technically qualify for the job) just to break up the wolf pack. I saw the intentional pack breakup happen by an injection that increased the size of the team 25%. Productivity fell by 40% as the old wolf-pack had to drag anchors through the work day. FYI, in the situation I'm talking about - the rudest, crudest, and the leader of the pack was female, she was awesome, she told the dirtiest jokes I've ever heard and had a photographic memory, able to recall data at will that I had to look up. We had both Hispanics and Blacks on the team that were part of the pack. The intentional breakup had nothing to do with race or gender - they wanted to break up what they saw as a homogenized personality type. The injected individuals consisted of a white female, a white male who was tech savy in an engineering sense but was mild mannered and couldn't handle high pressure rapid fixes of in a monitored queue environment. He was the type who would spend a day or two getting at a problem the rest of us knew how to plow through. The third was a black female that could barely operate Outlook. In the end their attempt at diversification actually percentage wise increased the white percentage, it increased the female percentage as well, but it destroyed productivity.
I think the culture of tech fields can generate these feelings even when the cause is a bit different.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The Pakistani guy at my office smells, and the way he talks makes me feel really uncomfortable. Of course if I ever uttered any of this in meatspace, I'd be publicly branded as "culturally insensitive". It's not that I don't appreciate Pakistani culture, it's just that the guy really does smell something fierce. He's a nice enough fellow but I mean, come on, take a bath once in a while. And use soap. I can't imagine where he came from, what conditions he lived in, but he's here now. He's got a house, and the house has a shower in it. Use it, damn you! It's not a question of culture, just plain basic hygiene. And the way he talks? I'm not talking about his accent of course, I'm talking about the way he mumbles, and he coughs and slurps every other sentence, it drives me crazy. And cover your damn mouth if you're going to cough all the time. Am I culturally insensitive? I don't know. Probably. What's it to you anyway? Why do you even care what goes on inside my head?
I ran into the "Curse of the gifted student." I was able to do quite well through most of high school. I wasn't top of my class, but near the top, but I rarely had to study. I could pretty much just figure things out, do the minimum amount of homework, and get by. I got to University, and with the exception of a couple of subjects, I couldn't do that any more, and I failed hard.
That failure, though, is one of the best things that happened to me. It forced me to re-evaluate myself, and to work harder and change my ways to do better. I was never at the top of my class, but I did well enough.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I guess it's ok to be a sexist and a racist as long as you're racist and sexist against white men.
Please tell us what it's like having lived under a rock for the last 10 years.
Every survey supports that statement too. Women want money. Not only money... but mostly money.
Women are very open about the fact that number one on the list of criteria for marriage is the size of a man's paycheck. Google is your friend. There have been dozens (if not hundreds) of similar studies around the world.
Women are not even remotely sweet little creatures in this respect.
Men marry down. Women don't.
Male doctors marry nurses. Female doctors statistically don't
Male pilots marry flight attendants. Female pilots statistically don't
Male restauranteurs marry waitstaff. Female ones statistically don't
Male bosses marry their secretaries. Female bosses statistically don't
So much for equality...
Mostly, men are expected to keep their boring jobs even after they have their first kid. In fact, especially after they have their first kid.
And, make no mistake: most jobs are boring. Having a kid just gives you a good excuse to leave a job that you'd rather leave anyway.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
You're missing a "scis". Just reading that doesn't make someone have too much knowledge; knowing how to read it does. "Si hoc legere" = "if you read this", while "si hoc legere scis" = "if you can read this".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If they were maximizing talent, they'd choose those most fitted for the role. However, those things are skewed for a variety of factors (some of them genetic) towards the very groups you are accusing of advantage. If you truly want to get past the "advantages don't exist" perspective, you'll have to actually come to terms with the fact that genetic advantages exist (with the important caveat that there is more inter-race disparity than intra-race disparity). If you are willing to "get it", we can begin to talk about ways to balance a society that can deal with these disparities in a way that isn't overtly racist.
I would think this would include not trying to balance membership in specific types of labor with those for whom it is not as well suited. As such, we would expect the numbers in any given labor field to reflect a sampling of the groups of people for whom their talents and interests match up well with the labor division.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Think of a fictional book or movie script about a person wanting to enter a company. For party political reasons or part of an undercover media investigation.
What tools would a fictional work place have to try and prevent such issues?
Hire only on merit. Interview every person considered. Can they talk, think, can they think and respond to different questions expected in the work place. Read their resume. Look at what education they have. What they did when not having to study. Did they study in their free time? Take other subjects? Did they join groups? Protest?
Hobbies? Interests? Travel? Try social media and the internet to look back over the resume.
Once a fictional company in a movie has some cash flow, would an investigator to walk the story an applicant told?
Did the person study well? Get good grades? Study alone? Pass exams well? Or did they always need support from their fellow students and have issues getting work in on time or to a good standard?
Did they need the support of others just to get good grades?
Did the person learn to study and pass well or learn how to get lots of help and pass?
Did the person attend protests? Political? Did they want a good job and good grades or talk a lot about working conditions?
Understand who they where friends with over the years. Lawyers? Artists? People into workers rights? Journalists? People into political issues?
What happens in a plot when a poor person is just given a "good" free education and then expects the same feelings of good to flow over into the fictional work place?
Like in a fictional book or movie with a plot complex issues are interesting to think about.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sounds just like me.Cruised through high school with straight A average. Physics teacher gave bonus marks for extra lab and exam questions, I scored 114 %. First year science I was having way too much fun and my marks dropped to Bs. First year engineering I was much harder than I expected and I came within a millimeter of failing the year. Finally figured out that three months of foosball and an all-nighter cramming before the exams wasn't going to cut it any more. I started working problem sets on the blackboard with three other coneheads every night after class and (holy shit) actually learning the course material. By 4th year the marks were back up to As and Bs.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
It's kind of sad but some years back when I did a bit of work at University a very large group of the first year engineering students had the "curse of the gifted student" due to the entry requirements - they were all "big fish in little ponds".
A tactic that seemed to work was to confront them early with things they would find interesting enough to get off their arses and work, and a lot of early feedback (with little impact on final scores) to show they were on the path to failure if they didn't lift their game. Maybe it helped that most of the final results rode on the final exam so they had time to get over the culture shock. By then most had got over the damage from the high schools in that state using rote learning even for calculus and they could work out that unlike before they needed more than a good memory to pass.
And yes, back a dozen years before that I went through the same sort of culture shock too, going from thinking I was very smart to looking at a textbook and saying "where the hell do I even start?"
So this is what happens when those hopeless student politics types who think the world owes them everything because they have wealthy parents grows up? Where apart from your imagination are people really getting jobs just because they are in a minority and not because they can also do that job? The magical Kingdom of Prester John? Why continue the trivial and stupid student politics fight against the marxist student club or whatever it was you used to waste time arguing with.
You have a fucking President who tells kids to grab women by the pussy - those marxists and "SJW" types are not running the world and are far more powerless than you imagine yourself to be and there will be far less of them than you seem to imagine.
Calculus with Theory, for non-MIT folks
As a non-MIT folk, I didn't know there was calculus without theory. Isn't that a little bit like "medicine with(out) anatomy"?
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh crap, that belonged under a different parent, obviously.
Ezekiel 23:20
Obama fit that perfectly.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Do we have actual studies that indicate women in tech are treated worse than in other fields? It seems to be accepted but is it true? It certainly matches the stereotype of the socially clueless STEM brain, but that isn't evidence. And any truth to that stereotype applies to female STEM brains as well, so perhaps they perceive the same or similar treatment differently? That isn't to say programmers should be jerks anymore than a lawyer in a firm should, but training people to be sensitive to what might offend is only half the problem. People can be offended by anything so some training on how to be less easily offended would do all of us some good as well. A simple question "when you said X what did you mean? I heard you to mean Y is that right?". Solves so many issues.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
You tell me. They're the ones majoring in social justice instead of employable majors. Of course, they don't exist in a vacuum: Educational institutions have whole departments indoctrinating them with this nonsense. Too much protesting and not enough studying make jack and jill unemployable dullards.
Trump's presidency hasn't made these people go away. If anything, it's made them louder and more obnoxious. They should take it as a lesson in how crybullying can backfire. His 'grab 'em by the pussy' comment isn't any worse than the 'boys are stupid throw rocks at them' style 'justice' from feminists. They're just mad they lost a bit of their mostly unopposed control over the dialogue. Too bad. I have no sympathy for hypocrites.
It's not the KKK Fedora Hat Association that's crybullying in the streets and on college campuses.
No I can't tell you - you are the one in the cesspool not able to see what it outside and under some sort of impression that Marxism is somehow a force to be reckoned with instead of a toothless paper tiger.
I haven't seen this sort of stuff since I was working as staff at a University and the little rich boys playing politics would turn up to disrupt classes and complain about how minority groups got some resources in the University instead of being forced to fail - are you in that sort of environment? Are you one of those deluded political wonks or just stuck listening to them? Normally tech environments weed out such types who are at University to play and not work hard enough to pass something difficult.
My first uni calculus class just went with the 'very hard first test' a month in.
The average score for the class was 30%. There were two people who broke the curve with scores over 80%. Both were mature (ie. older) students.
For dozens of students who had never gotten less than an A in their lives, it was a good wake up call that it was time to actually study.
Still didn't save me after 2nd year when they stopped spoon feeding and we were expected to do independent research. I eventually got a degree, but only after padding it out with some easy electives.