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Three Women Suing Microsoft for Bias Want To Add 8,630 Peers (bloomberg.com)
A reader shares a report: A lawsuit accusing Microsoft of discriminating against women in technical and engineering roles is poised to grow a lot bigger if it wins class-action status. With the technology sector awash in challenges to white male dominance, the three women spearheading the case against Microsoft told a Seattle federal judge they want to represent about 8,630 peers who have worked for the company since 2012. The women said their expert consultants have determined that discrimination at the Redmond, Washington-based company cost female employees more than 500 promotions and $100 million to $238 million in pay, according to Oct. 27 court filings. They also accused the software maker of maintaining "an abusive, toxic 'boy's club' atmosphere, where women are ignored, abused, or degraded." Microsoft said it strongly disagrees with the allegations, saying the filings "mischaracterize data and other information."
they have an amazing number of peer reviews.
. . . .was working for Microsoft. . . .(rimshot)
As a male who worked at a sausage party fortune 3 company in their "cyber defence" dept with only white males; tbh i see what they are saying. Multiple times I thought "are they really doing this? Yes they are". Racist jokes are the "black friend", making "curry" jokes around Indians, talking about which chick in xyz dept to "bang" or "her hair is JBF".... Needless to say I left that company. If a woman did bring a class action on the co I'd definitely be on their side....
They will distort reality to entitle themselves to whatever the fuck they want, paint you misogynist, and then sue you in a case with worldwide visibility.
If you had never hired them in the first place, then you wouldn't owe them anything and you wouldn't have to deal with this shit.
Seriously... you want to be treated like an equal? Take your lumps like the rest of us and stop making a big fucking stink out of the fact that you are a woman.
There is a stigma in the tech sectors, Men do coding and Women do data entry. Women who are in coding, usually need to double down on their attitude, to show that they are one of the guys. This is unfair, and often has the women, either not being proactive enough, or being too much of a bully to get the promotion. A lot of the these problems isn't overt sexism, but a combination of many subtle differences that really add up.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
> Or maybe you need to think about how widespread and pervasive the problem actually is...no, wait, no,
Except that can cut both ways. It can cut against your pre-set agenda too. You are only out to try and prove yourself right. You have no real interest in the truth.
You are unwilling to consider that you're wrong.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How can you prove a company systematically discriminated against a certain group of people? Are a few testimonies enough? Wouldn't those only prove that specific people was discriminated against?
I don't like discrimination but also don't like people who play victim
like souls, lawyers don't have genders.
There are truly egregious behaviors that need to be stopped. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein are a great example of conduct that goes ridiculously far beyond the limit of what is reasonable and acceptable behavior. There ought to be consequences for that behavior, especially when it's so egregious, repeated, and the person responsible for the harassment doesn't seem to even accept that the behavior was altogether inappropriate and offensive. The problem is when someone like George H. W. Bush is accused of sexual assault for what he supposedly did while taking a photo. There's a massive difference between Bush's actions and Weinstein's actions. Bush's behavior wasn't appropriate but it is an overreaction to label it sexual assault.
The problem is that it's easy to rush to judgment, to assume the accused is guilty, and to demand harsh consequences without considering whether the behavior truly is that serious. Virtually everyone has done things that are inappropriate at one time or another, and things we regret. If all of those things were made public, none of us would meet the standards the outrage machine demands. Men like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby absolutely need to be held accountable for their actions. But we also need to be careful to avoid knee-jerk reactions. We should be able to hold predators accountable while not demanding a pound of flesh from anyone who's ever made a mistake and crossed the line occasionally.
I actually never made a claim one way or the other in favor or against the lawsuits. However I will point out that many of these have come up and many of them have been tossed out.
is there a firm out there trying to ride the Social justice wave to the bank? I dont know. but it is a valid question to ask.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
is there a firm out there trying to ride the Social justice wave to the bank?
LOL. If you're a law firm, and you want to "ride a wave" to the bank, you don't do it through "social justice" cases. You do it by sucking up to big firms and getting that sweet monthly payout. Y'all nerds really need to learn how other industries work.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Incorrect. I know quite a few women coders. I even know a few really excellent coders who are female. They are not common, but any really excellent coder isn't common either..
Indeed. Lawyers reproduce by fission, like all other germs and fungi. . .
You lack reading comprehension skills. I made it clear that people like Harvey Weinstein deserve exactly what they're getting. Weinstein is a predator, plain and simple. He used his position of authority to intimidate women, his actions were egregious, and he deserves what he's getting. I said as much as my post, so twisting my words as you're done is intellectually dishonest. And reactions like yours are why people don't want to speak up about this issue.
What I said is that the allegations against George H. W. Bush are nowhere close to those of Harvey Weinstein, yet he's been accused of sexual assault. There is a massive difference and it's a huge overreaction to respond to Bush the same way we respond to Weinstein. The response needs to be proportional to what the person has done, but all too often it isn't. It's reasonable to label Bush's behavior as inappropriate, but labeling it as sexual assault like people have done is an overreaction.
It's also counterproductive to make intellectually dishonest statements toward people trying to have a nuanced discussion about the issue of sexual harassment. Nowhere did I say that Weinstein is being treated too harshly. Either you're a troll or someone who is excessively politically correct. Regardless, you're a jackass.
But they have no souls, right?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well then you can opt out. Or not join the class. Nobody can make you become a part of the group.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, I've never seen anybody suggest why "systemic sexism" has been so massively successful in keeping the supposed hordes of "qualified women coders" out of programming, but failed so miserably in keeping them out of sales, marketing, law, medicine, journalism, finance, government and education. Especially when you factor in the fact that anything that even vaguely looks like systemic sexism gets you fired and blackballed immediately with no warning or review and we've been bending over backwards to put anti-systemic-sexism programs in place for at least thirty years, the power of the systemic sexism in tech is really a wonder to behold.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I think that for a company as large as Microsoft, it should be easy to get a credible sample size of witnesses to describe their experience working there, and records of hiring practices, to either confirm or discredit this claim.
From what I've heard, they have a toxic culture that makes life miserable for most of them, not just women.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"an abusive, toxic 'boy's club' atmosphere, where women are ignored, abused, or degraded." Microsoft said it strongly disagrees with the allegations, saying "we ignore, abuse and degrade underlings regardless of gender."
FTFY. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The problem is that it's easy to rush to judgment
That's half the story - the other part of the problem is that it's dangerous not to. You sure as hell don't want to be seen as the one who was supporting their behavior by not condemning them as strongly as the other guy.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
You laugh, but there are quite a few law firms out there that are in the business of suing business that are out of technical compliance (real or imagined) with social justice regulations. And by "out of technical compliance", I mean such things as restroom mirrors mounted 1/8" too high per Americans With Disabilities Act rules. See, for example, this.
... would be hard to find.
They do it to everybody, without regard to gender.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
I singled out one sentence of yours that seems to let such behavior off the hook.
In other words, you took one sentence out of context. In the sentence you fixated upon, he wasn't talking about Weinstein or Spacey. Go back and read it again.
bullshit
women dont want to code when they realize how much work it is
I am a man and I code and I don't want to code because I realize how much work it is to not just code something but to constantly recode something to match some ill-defined and ever-changing business process. It's a Sisyphean task.
This is the way it should happen... you have six different cases involving a dozen women or less with very specific evidence and testimony. You win all those cases and establish a pattern. Then you file for class action.
I'm sure someone somewhere at Microsoft discriminated against women,
But categorically? Of that I have a lot more doubt.
With lawsuits like these against many major companies, at some point won't companies start to think "the only way I can be sure not to discriminate against women is simply to not hire them", creating even more of a problem than it was trying to fix...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not saying these firms don't exist, I'm saying their preferred methodology is too risky to be considered a nice, fat, comfortable payday, the kind you get working for Fortune 500 companies. They'll make money, sure, they just won't make bank.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Don't ever be the first to stop applauding! I mean, booing!
Really, who comes up with this drivel?
Has anyone noticed that the CEO is not a white male? How about the top HR person? Most of management? Microsoft is FAR from being a place where white male dominance is a thing. In fact, on the team I was on for several years, it was commonly observed that the best way to not get a promotion was to be white. It didn't really matter if you were a white male or white female, you were probably getting a mediocre to poor review no matter what you had done, so that someone the same race as the director could get the promotion. If you were a female from the same part of the world and were sufficiently subservient, you might also get a promotion, but us uppity white folk were last in line (in addition to being last to leave the building every night).
There are a lot of problems with the culture of Microsoft, and racism *is* one of them, but it's certainly not white-dominant racism. The biggest difference is, as a white male, I don't have a voice if I try to claim discrimination. My recourse is pretty much limited to either "shut up and deal with it" or "find a better company to work for." So, after years of the first option, I finally took the second option. That's white male privilege at work right there... "you're a white male, so you have the privilege to shut up and take it or get the hell out."
I think this is gonna have unintended backlash consequences for women in the job force across ALL industries.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That the problem exists and is pervasive, I have no doubts on that score. However, I don't think it's just against women, ethnic or age groups. In short, I think the problem is mainly about cronyism and the boys club. Even talented white males suffer from discrimination there, but that's deem ok because they are white and male. People joke about the pointy haired boss, but it's actually a sign of cronyism.
Honest question: I'm really curious of your opinion here: do they act and behave more "manly" than other women? by that I mean: less emotional, more no-nonsense, colder mind, focused on the task at hand, less inclined to multitask.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
is there a firm out there trying to ride the Social justice wave to the bank? I dont know. but it is a valid question to ask.
Obviously, they all are. Some might be more successful than others.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Yet at some point someone still has to write that code.
$238 million for 8630 employees over 5 years comes out to about $5,500/year/employee.
That's a lot less than I would have expected for an upper limit at this early of a stage in the proceedings, when numbers are typically very optimistic in order to leave headroom for surprises as the case evolves.
I'd imagine that means their reasonable expectation of what they'll be able to show is quite a bit less than that, and maybe quite a bit less than even the $100 million (about $2,300/year/employee).
Go home and tell your mom how you hate women and think they just make this shit up. I'm sure she'll be real proud.
Well, perhaps more than white males should take IT courses. Women, by far and large, would rather work in other STEM fields over tech. Throwing in this not so subtle jab just detracts from everything else. It's incredibly racist and sexist.
Wow, so three women in a company of thousands know what happened to 8,630 other women over the last five years? That's almost... unbelievable.
For years I was hoping for M$ to go down, and it goes best way possible. Corporate behemoth who only knows money and and how to bend to interests groups is now being taken down by people who bended it over. You have to remember, feminists have no goals, 'it's not the destination, it's the road'. There is never enough. Next, I am looking at you google. I dated 2 girls who indirectly worked for google. One was mah, second was PROPERLY brain washed and she was 22, fat as a whale(don't judge me, i did not know what pick up artistry was). You gonna fail, just matter of time.
Furthermore, men need jobs more than women do because if a man doesn't have a job, people look down on him. If a woman doesn't have a job and her husband works, nobody looks down on her. It is time we stop denying qualified man who need work jobs so that less qualified females can get them.
The obvious response, then, is to change the social conventions that require a man be the primary breadwinner for a family. There are a number of quality-of-life improvements you could make for men once that was done away with.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Funny how at my tech company females outperform all the males in.... vacation days taken per year.
I'd be interested to know if the males in your "tech company" are less likely to have families or hobbies or other reasons to be somewhere other than work. Or if they make their female partners do all the child- or home-related work.
I'd also be interested to know precisely what you mean by "vacation day". Do you, for example, live in some kind of backwards jurisdiction where you don't automatically get N days of paid leave per year which you must use, otherwise you are considered not to be taking workplace health and safety seriously?
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At this point....would YOU hire a woman for most any job, knowing they are likely to be looking for any good reason to sue you and your company?
If there really was a good reason for an employee or ex-employee to sue me and my company, I'd be far more worried about that possibility.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I wish I had mod points so I could +1 funny this.
But just in case you were serious: The main effects of fetishising measurement (be it Agile-as-it-has-become, or whatever) are to give the illusion of objectivity and to establish a system which can be gamed.
See also: Pretty much any Adam Curtis documentary. The Trap is probably the most directly relevant.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
"Women who are in coding, usually need to double down on their attitude, to show that they are one of the guys."
So you are saying that they are being treated equally? None of the guys get any slack but the women should? I have to double down on my attitude and still keep it together in order to compete.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Is it a crime to take all of your vacation days or something?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
BOOOM SHOCALOCKA!! All of our wives shunned corporate life to work as home makers. Can't blame em really.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
That is awesome.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I remember being told I was passed over for promotion at Microsoft because the lawyers determined they needed to promote a woman.... as a side note, she was also a âoeminorityâ employee....
I was told I would get promoted 6 months later, and I was.... but donâ(TM)t believe everything people hype, the company is doing lots (in this case at my cost) to try and stop lawsuits like this....
And yes, I am still pissed about what took place
Holy shit! "The seriousness of the charge demanded that we destroy his life" without any evidence, hearing, investigation, or opportunity to respond.
Yup. Makes sense. SJW has spoken!
Who needs constitutional rights, justice, and any form of fairness when SJW sensitivities are on the line!?
If you talk about this you are either sexist or virtue signaling, there is very little room for being a geek or nerd in this conversation without being called one of these two things in a polarizing debate, everyone seems to be trying to win instead of settle.
Ok, that said, I want to point out something that seems obvious to me. Much of this conversation revolves around competence instead of interest in the field. Second thing I notice is women have different power structures to men and this is something we have never incorporated in the workplace, as peers, before. So how do you do that?
I'm happy to say, I've worked with competent women early in my career, one a C programmer another a systems administrator and it was great because they were sane and interested in what I was interested in. The power structure was male our relative interests and it worked. No-one thought about it, we were all too busy to notice.
The next relevant example that comes to mind, was my fault. I hired, who I thought, was the best candidate on paper however, in practice she was fucking lazy, excuses, excuses, excuses and a real dead-weight in the team. Plus, she wanted to fuck me, to the point it was almost sexual harassment (not unattractive, I simply wasn't interested in her and the whole woman scorned thing) and all I could see was a manipulative person. Fortunately my boss was a woman and there were no illusions about competency in her mind, she recognized what was happening and she used female power structures to deal with the issue, ended up having her transferred and I had to block her emails, chat and phone. Not as if the project wasn't hard enough.
Last was my external experience of female power structures on competent women. Two females in a dominant role with questionable competence encountering a young, attractive woman competent interested in the technology. Asking intelligent questions, thinking about them, going away to work things out and coming back to discuss progress and next step, I genuinely respected her attitude to learning. The two dominant females absolutely destroyed her self-esteem and she left, it was disgusting, but showed that women have power structures completely different from men.
So, from my observations, if you are going to have women in the team, you need to find a competent matriarch figure aligned with the business that can assert female dominance because, as a man, if you are challenged by a woman you can't assert physical dominance the way you would with a man (men know what to expect from each other) and you are just pathetic if you back down when you are being disrespected. As a man, you really have to be on your game, psychologically, to handle that form of female aggression and maintain your self respect because it is outside of male power structures.
And nothing I've mentioned here even touches on toxic narcissistic people of both sexes in the workplace.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Indians promote Indians. They promote only Indians of their own caste, of course. They actively seek to damage and destroy Americans. And if an Indian gets into HR, no white people, chinese or non-Indians will ever get hired again. How this is not an EEOC thing is a mystery.
The reality is 10% of jobs (using your numbers) are completely unavailable to white males. Those, by definition, go to unqualified non white males.
By definition they go to people who are not white males; nothing about the definition suggests unqualified. You have made the assumption that nobody qualified gets hired. Also, in the next sentence, you changed qualified to competent. Those words are related but not synonyms.
Then you comically miss the point here:
once you get a non white non American into a management role that entire part of the company soon turns into a mirror image of that manager's racial background
So...you acknowledge that people hire and retain matching their racial background over the competence pool of the society around them? That's *exactly* the point you were fighting against in the rest of the sentence. Most managers in the US are white males. You appear to be claiming that somehow, only white males do not have this problem. That's crazy. Everybody has the problem.
Whether Affirmative Action is the best possible solution is a legitimate point for debate. But your math sucks worse.
If those women are disadvantaging her son, you know what she will say, the fucking bitches need a good cunt punt. Mothers favour their own children over all other children including the female children of other fucking women. Of course you'd expect the typical mother to be more polite but basically the gist of it will be the same. Most clambering all over feminism nowadays don't do it for other women, they just do it for themselves and the other women they suck in or men, are just useful idiots to be used and exploited.
Now if your mom thinks fuck you, you should take the shit job, with the shit pay because some other woman's daughter deserves better, than you have a shit mom ;P.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Blame the person I responded to.
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Look at the sexism just in this forum alone. Now extrapolate to an entire company filled with losers like these.
No, but the company can get in trouble.
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Oh sorry. Responded to wrong post.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Sure there are.
Just ask any MBA in HR or poster on ziprecruiter and they will tell you a coder with 5 years of rust experience who also has 3 to 5 years of project management experience is only between 45,000 to 57,000 a year.
http://saveie6.com/
Sexism is rampant in every field. 50% of all women have been assaulted and 1/3 raped according to statistics
http://saveie6.com/
"outrageously lucrative, if you got lucky. The career became insanely competitive"
Outrageously lucrative? Seriously? It's just a paycheck unless you roll your own product--albeit a really good paycheck.
Insanely competitive? The dev cube farm certainly functions like a boys locker room but I would not say it is "insanely competitive."
People bitch about sexism but a lot of males don't want to hang out in the boy's locker room either. Women, unfortunately for everyone, are usually treated equally which is not ideal treatment in any case--male or female. Guys just learn to deal with it and are more integrated into the fold--though not explicitly--because they have a penis and smell bad.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
It certainly is not limited to white males. I have benefited from cronyism in a circle of Asian and other ethnicity. If you are one of the guys you are one of the guys. If they like the way you look, talk, and think you are in. Others have no hope of inclusion whatsoever. Slight lisp or weird pause or tick between thoughts? Never in. Meek and proper? Never in. Pose a slight risk of exposing group think to diversity? Never in. You can be against the grain within the group but you still have to fit in.
I have run against the grain by trying to include more diverse people within teams. I just get ignored on the point but I am still allowed to function within the group because I fit in and have been given a pass.
There is no way to deal with tribal group mentality. It is too ingrained and trying to force it away just makes it stronger.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I work for a large University (37K Students 6K Staff) and about 10 yards down the hall from the School of Computing about 1% of the students are female this compares with the School of Physics which is on the same floor where about 30% of the students are female it would seem that either the bias is present even in academia or that girls don't want to study Computer Science. The University is very big on equalities so I doubt that there's bias there
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
No, but not taking all of them shows dedication to your job and showing that you're a dedicated and hardworking employee helps in getting raises and promotions. These extra raises and promotions then end up giving people the impression that women are being discriminated against.
The whole "Women are being discriminated against in tech" schtick mostly stems the effects of gender differences like this. It's not just one thing, there's loads of other factors like how men (on average) put in more hours, take fewer sick days, are less likely to go on sabbaticals, more likely to actually ask for promotions and raises, both more likely to try to negotiate for pay and negotiate harder, actually have an education in the field, put up with a longer commute for better pay and, much in part due to an increase in the share of women entering the tech workforce over the last few years, have more experience.
Sadly all this doesn't really interest the people who push the discrimination schtick and they either ignore all of this or pretend like you're a misogynist if you dare to bring it up. The way I see it, the way they respond to it is something of a litmus test for people who bring it up. If they take it seriously and don't just dismiss it off hand they should be taken seriously, but if they start calling you a misogynist and dismiss it offhand it's clearly just an attempt at a shakedown.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
"manly" ? No. Socially inept, yes, but most of the really good coders I know are. (And yes, there are exceptions to that as well. But even amongst really good coders, there are the occasional, for lack of a better term, 'superheroes'. I only WISH I was that good. . . )
As one of those wierd hybrid geek/managers, I get called in to . . ."translate" on occasion. The pure management MBA types often can't deal with them well.
Culture. I've been at places where it was unofficially frowned on if you took "excess time off". Defined as your annual two week's leave in more than 2 or 3-day packets.
If you'll notice, I actually said that racism is quite a large problem at Microsoft, but it tends to be anti-white (at least, in the orgs I worked in).
For your next question, "Who gets mad that they enjoy 9 out of 10 opportunities instead of 10 out of 10 opportunities?" I would say "everyone, and rightly so." Black, Asian, Mexican, White, all deserve to have access to 10 out of 10 opportunities. Saying that someone should be automatically excluded from a percentage of them because of race is, *gasp*, racism, even if the excluded person is white.
Interestingly, putting in extra hours won't normally make you much more productive. Not taking sick days when you're sick is likely a negative for the company. Negotiation skills are not particularly relevant to technical skill.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You know, your company might be better off adopting Agile methodologies rather than what you're doing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I remember being told I was passed over for promotion at Microsoft because the lawyers determined they needed to promote a woman....
This is completely consistent with TFA, by the way. If Microsoft corporate thinks that promoting women is something they have to do to satisfy some metric, then they likely don't actually value their female employees. They're just gaming the system, not ending workplace discrimination.
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There's no true Agilist.
Pretty much all Agile software projects crank out low quality code, have lots and lots of bugs, accrue shittons of tech debt, treat users as the QA team, and generate extreme job dissatisfaction and attrition among the programmers. But it's not because of Agile - it's because they're not doing Agile right!
Corollary: no one at all, ever does Agile right.
Read the Agile Manifesto some time, and tell me whether your company's practices fit in. It sounds to me like you're prioritizing processes and procedures over people and interactions, and not paying attention to working software. If you completely reverse the first bullet point in the Manifesto, you're really not doing Agile.
I've seen Agile work very well, producing good software on time with the developers feeling good about it. That's because we paid attention to the ideas in the Manifesto.
It may be that it's very hard for management in general to actually perform Agile, but there are places where it does work.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If that's the case at the AC's workplace, sounds like the "males" are the dumb ones. At least on that point.
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