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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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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.
White male here.
Coincidentally, I left my last 2 jobs for the exact same reason (perceived mistreatment). I think it is a 'thing', and not just for protected classes.
That's why people leave their jobs. Were they expecting to hear, "I just lost interest in my job?"
No...people don't say that. They blame the job, and those assholes they left behind.
No reason to lie.
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...).
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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.
Admittedly, I have limited perspective on this, but I often I observe the *company* treatment is probably better for women and under-represented minorities, but the *co-worker* treatment is probably much worse for women and under-represented minorities. True that a part of the *co-worker* treatment is part of the company culture and that part might be the company's responsibility, but you can't make co-workers treat each other non-awkwardly in situations that aren't strictly business related, and that makes the co-worker treatment situation very difficult to fix within a human generation of time.
I feel that many folks still want companies to function as some sort of in loco parentis as if working a jobs was some sort of extended university stint. That seems like a bit old fashion to me, but I suspect a large number of people feel that since workers are somehow *dependents* of a company, the company owes some responsibility or duty to the employees. Sadly, as in real life not all entities are wired to be parents, even those that actually have children.
On the other hand workplace norms on overwork demands in the tech business (like many other male dominated industries) are probably not very compelling for some populations and that would be also very difficult to fix within a human generation of time as well. We are long past the "puritan" work ethics that launched our industrial age...
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."
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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.
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.
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.