Comment on Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
bjornsno@lemm.ee 1 year agoI know you didn’t mean it like this, but the result from this line of thinking is that we only try to put women on equal footing with men in tech when it’s convenient for men because times are good. Which in turn means we never put women on equal footing because the needs of men always come first.
Put differently women have to deal with being women in tech on top of times being desperate, men only have to deal with times being desperate. Things like this are why spaces like these are necessary in the first place, and if you break them down at the first discomfort you’re not a working class hero fighting the capital, you’re tearing down women and setting everyone back.
What do you mean by equal footing? Equality in Outcomes, or Equality in Opportunities?
Having a job conference open to all genders sounds more equal then a conference excluding a gender identity.
I personally would love to get to the point where names, photos, genders, and social networks - are removed from all employment material and people are just judged on their ability to do a job.
Women face a huge amount of bias in the tech industry. There’s nothing wrong with giving the disadvantages an advantage.
Us men are basically crying because women are getting what we’ve had the whole time.
So your advocating for Equality in Outcomes?
Disadvantages groups need help to gain equal footing first. Before we can even talk about equality.
Females have a hard time in tech, not women. anyone can be a women. but historically only females were the ones disadvantaged. Transgender women are actually over represented in tech as a proportion of population.
No I don’t mean that because I’m not an incel or a transphobe.
Transgender women are actually over represented in tech as a proportion of population.
That’s great.
I’ve seen it happen multiple times, especially in more corporate jobs.
I try to very specifically mention who came up with ideas even if it’s my work for this reason.
Another common one is not wanting to ask simple questions in meetings as it makes them look less intelegent. While I ask every stupid question I can think of to be sure and look like I’m invested.
My advice is talk to your manager about things like that instead of helping. I know it feels like a dick move but it’s not your job to help someone else with basic stuff.
Something along the lines of “I think John may require more training as I’m having to help him a lot with simple things. I’m happy to do it but my deadlines will need adjusting”
Inequality of outcome is proof of inequality of opportunities 99.9% of the time.
I’m trying to understand the requirements of the parent comment.
I’m not trying to be disingenuous.
Equality means a lot of things to a lot of people. Equality of outcome, and equality of opportunities are very distinct, and nuanced, and well-defined things.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_outcome
Vs
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity
Trying to understand what equal footing means, is helpful for me to understand the parent posters position. I don’t want to be stuck in ambiguity, when I’m genuinely trying to understand people.
And what happens once people are hired? How to you deal with unequal promotion rates or raises?
A lot of times people arguing like that ignore the imbalance that exists and they go on to argue as if everything is equal to start with.
Yeah they are called stupid morons.
So, I’m a moron.
I did it my whole life until I took a stats course and it was like the first this the prof went over and I saw it was pretty obvious once it was pointed out to me but took someone having to point it out to me for me to see that mental blind spot
The paywall dropped on me before I could get to the end of the article, but a couple of observations:
“Overrun” is dehumanizing language. I’m otherwise highly sympathetic, but casting desperate people, many likely staring down deportation unless they can find a new position, as an effective horde is gross. I would like to trust that Wired provided that characterization, not the organizers.
The organizers ruined their own event, by not establishing and enforcing guardrails for attendance. This is a problem mostly of their own making. Rather than pointing, again, at desperate people, they should be accepting responsibility and planning to avoid the issue in the future.
I think part of the problem is that everyone- regardless of race, sex, gender or orientation has MASSIVE debt, in part due to the greed of the housing and rentals market, student loans, and unpayable medical bills- on top of caring for families and children. While people in a 1:1 conversation would definitely acknowledge cons for minority groups, this situation is more like a sinking ship with everyone fighting over the same few rickety lifeboats. Everyone else is just a faceless competitor as debt sharks get closer and closer.
I still don’t understand why we don’t write laws preventing CEOs from making disgusting amounts of money and why we make sure that we don’t have multibillionares hoarding vast amounts of cash that should be getting invested into the very job fairs and infrastructure people are squabbling over.
It’s an unfortunate situation any way you look at it. And it’s a bummer that people are missing the forest for the trees in this thread :/
sudneo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Gender is absolutely not the only nor the most important discriminating factor in tech. Being a foreigner and, probably most commonly, being old is an extreme disadvantage in tech. Similarly, a woman coming from a wealthy family might be a privileged compared to a man coming from a poor background (which translates into lower access to education, resources, etc.).
Look at the video in the article, and tell me you don’t notice some commonalities among the men in the queues.
I see mostly foreigners, who most likely have no network of support, and need a job to maintain a VISA before getting kicked out of the country. Are they in a better or worse position compared to a local woman? Does it even make sense to start asking these questions?
I want to challenge this vision where discriminations are only looked at through the lens of gender division. This is shortsighted because discrimination on the workplace is extremely diverse and it exists for the benefit of those same sponsors of this event.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 year ago
As a teenage girl into coding, I was treated like absolute shit. If I made a mistake in my botball code, it was because I wasn’t good at coding. If a boy made a mistake in their botball code, then it was something that the other boys would help them debug. I remember it being assumed I just wouldn’t be able to figure out what structs were, so the boys running the botball code didn’t teach me. In college, any group project was an opportunity for boys to try to fuck me.
As a trans man, someone who has experienced life as both a man and woman in STEM, there are massive barriers.
sudneo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I am fully aware that those barriers exist. I am arguing (in other comments I am more explicit) about fighting against barriers, not a particular barrier.
I am also a foreigner in another country, and despite being a privileged person from many point of views (I could attend public university despite my family being poor), I have experienced some form of discrimination myself, so please don’t make assumption about other people’s. I am not blind to those kind of barriers, I simply have different opinions on the actions to take to improve the overall situation, with the goal of removing the concept of barrier, not any particular one (if that makes sense).
Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You’re arguing while shifting scope which is a problem. Are you arguing about averages or individual experience?
Zerfallen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No one is saying gender is the only point of discrimination, but this specific event is focused on gender issues.
sudneo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My point is that there is nothing else for issue related to other discriminations. And yet, before thinking whether those men (who showed up) maybe are also oppressed and discriminated, they have been simply labeled as “men” and therefore intruders, by . I would think that an oppressed community would realize the commonalities with other oppressed categories and use this to expand the struggle to them as well. Instead the rethoric behind this article makes me think that this is one of those events which is ultimately functional to the conservation of the status quo: big tech companies which sponsor the event and gain some visibility and good karma points to boost diversity while nothing really changes or is done to address the fundamental issue with discrimination (in general, not a specific one), because this is ultimately functional to the companies, which can leverage them to fight a fragmented worker’s front.
luthis@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
Bang fucking on point. Dont trust the people who profit off inequality and a desperate workforce to make things less desperate and more equal
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I’ve had a lot more foreign male colleagues than I have female colleagues. Where are you getting you information about who’s disadvantaged?
sudneo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Quantitative measuring tells you nothing. You have no visibility of the “starting condition”, how many foreigners are not even accepted a job interview, how many apply, etc. Discrimination is not something that can be measure with a scale.
Not to talk about age, ageism is huge in tech. Old people are sometimes fired to be replaced (hello IBM). In my company we are at around 25% women, 20% on engineering. I still need to meet a person over 50 (in engineering), I think there are maybe 3-4 over 40 (on a total of 300).
Also, discrimination doesn’t mean just not getting hired, it means contractual penalties, less salary etc., which happen in some cases with women too, of course.
That said, I am not arguing that women in tech are not discriminated, of course they are. I am saying that there are multiple vector of discrimination and that we should be able to fight against the general phenomenon, without having to choose which discrimination to keep and which to fight.
retrieval4558@mander.xyz 1 year ago
You need to do a lot of reading about intersectionality and intersectional feminism. You’re right about there being multiple possible systemic disadvantages because of someone’s identity (gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, disability, etc) but the answer to that is not to sit around going NUH UH THIS GROUP HAS IT WORSE. Everyone needs uplifting, and it just so happens that this event was for women. If you think there needs to be a foreigners in tech job fair, go do one.
sudneo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I respectfully disagree. If you think that organizing such events, with sponsors of that caliber is just a matter of “go do one”, then we simply have different point of views. I also did not make qualitative comparisons between who gets oppressed, I am simply observing that there are so many components to discrimination in tech that focusing on only one (intentionally, even after the opportunity to expand opened up presented itself) is not synergic with the long term strategy.
It’s fine to disagree, this is ultimately a subjective ideological call. I simply disliked the tone of the article overall. I would have liked some more in depth analysis of the impact (and reasons) of layoffs and maybe some interview to those people who “crashed” the event. Maybe with some sprinkle of discussion of unionization and collective fight, but I guess it was not fitting in an article about an event sponsored by the very same who laid off tens of thousands of people.
almar_quigley@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is such a stupid and horrible take. Do you even work in tech?
sudneo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes.
If you can also argument your position, I would be grateful.
JustZ@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well I think the person’s position was that your take is stupid.