Two readers are very wary of hiring practices in the tech industry that strongly take gender into account. Here’s Sally:
This article [“Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?”] refers a couple times to people saying that hiring women or minorities may “lower the bar” as some kind of evidence of bias. But usually when people say that, they are referring to using gender as a criteria for hiring. When you do that, you have to give less weight to technical merit.
And indeed, towards the end of the article, using such criteria is advocated. Whenever you set a “goal” (i.e. quota) that 40 percent of your workforce should have quality X when X has nothing to do with your ability, you are going to get people with lower-than-average ability. What’s worse, you have a situation where those in the company with quality X have less ability than those without that quality, which only reinforces the stereotypes about those people—which is unfair to those Xs who are competent.
Personally, I’d much rather companies focus on treating their female employees equally than worry about increasing the number of female employees. But that’s just me.
It’s also Carla Walton, a female engineer in HBO’s Silicon Valley:
More of Carla vs. Jared here. This next reader has an outlook and attitude similar to Sally’s:
I’m a senior tech executive in Silicon Valley who happens to be female. I also have a male name, which makes initial introductions interesting. (“Oh, I thought you would be a man...”) If it matters, in addition to leading an R&D technical team at work, I’m on [the board of a computer engineering department], and a startup advisor [for a prominent venture capital firm].
I have a lot to say about this article. On one side, I am burned out on the “woman in tech” topic. I want to be included/recruited because I totally kill it and always bring my A-game—and never ever ever because I am a woman.
from Technology | The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2nvtbOZ
