I only got that job because I’m a girl

http://www.technologywoman.com/2012/09/27/i-only-got-that-job-because-im-a-girl/

by glaak • 14 years ago

55 86 14 years ago

technologywoman.com

dlss• 14 years ago

Unfortunate, given the title of the article, that the site went down...

zobzu• 14 years ago

I clicked thinking i'd see some some skin.

(Oh yeah I'll deserve the down-votes for that one, go ahead!)

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

It's back now. Here's a mirror in case it goes down again: http://i.imgur.com/hR9Mc.png

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

To level the argument, let's just say that everyone has the same skill for a position. You can probably assume that there are a lot of equally qualified 'A' players who have applied at Google, Valve, Facebook, etc. So what sets all of them apart? Off the top of my head, I can only think of two things: personality and looks.

While I can't comment on the personality of the author, from the picture in the article it seems as though she is attractive. Is that enough to set her apart? Would she have seen the same possibilities if she wasn't so attractive? Would she have seen the same possibilities if she didn't have the novelty (not sure what to call it) of being an attractive, capable woman in a male-dominated field?

alid6• 14 years ago

Hey man! I didn't quite understand your argument, but in this arena looks shouldn't come into it. The greater weight attributed by some people to women's appearance is a form of unconcsious discrimination. I appreciate you weren't sure what to call it, but the 'novelty of being attractive' doesn't sit well with me. She has the novelty of being highly skilled - that's what counts :)

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

He is trying to point out that unfair bias is everywhere.

glaak10• 14 years ago

Interesting, but I disagree.

(1) You can't assume that there are a lot of equally qualified A players for those companies. In fact, those companies struggle to hire enough qualified engineers.

(2) You're assuming that those companies, if they were presented with multiple qualified people, can only hire one of them. In many cases, they would just hire all of them.

(3) You're assuming that, if a company has to decide between multiple qualified people, it would use personality or looks as a dividing factor. Obviously, the people aren't actually identical, other than looks. The companies could instead decide based on a preference for public universities over equally ranked private ones, or what city the people are from, or whatever. There are many differences between people.

(4) You're assuming that attractiveness would help someone's candidacy for an engineering role, and not hurt it. If you were talking to two people -- one was a very attractive woman and one was a very unattractive woman -- which would you assume is more technical, if you had to bet? You'd probably bet on the less attractive person.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

The implications of your point 4 are precisely the same as the implications of the GP post.

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

(1) True. However, I was making an assumption for sake of the argument to take it out of the equation.

(2) Even large companies have needs that wouldn't allow them to hire 5 great individuals for a singular position.

You seem to just be complicating the argument with undue thoughts about the position and a company. My post was trying to remove the job-specific factors and think about how personality and looks affect hiring.

(3) I've interviewed a lot of people for various positions that were all capable, that when it finally came down to it we argued more over team fit than anything else. If you had a grumpy, divisive individual or a friendly, articulate individual, which would you chose? This happens in 'A' player companies as much as any.

(4) I'm not assuming anything about attractiveness of an individual. I merely presented a couple (albeit somewhat loaded) questions to invoke a conversation.

breadbox• 14 years ago

In my experience (and studies seem to bear this out), most people will automatically assume an attractive woman has poor skills in X (where X is anything that doesn't involve dealing with customers). So I don't think your "commonsense" argument actually holds in the real world.

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

"most people will automatically assume an attractive woman has poor skills in X (where X is anything that doesn't involve dealing with customers). "

Could you provide a source on that please? Because from the wording of your statement it seems that what you are claiming is completely anecdotal. I remember studying in one of my psychology courses that attractive people are instantly assumed to be smarter and more successful than unattractive people. It even has a name although I can't think of it right now. If I could I would provide a source.

edit: Here is a source, not really great but it's something. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201108/why...

edit2: The word I was looking for was halo effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness_stereot...

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

So assumptions aside, once you've vetted the person (a woman in this case) through an interview and they seem to be the real deal, what would be the deciding factor at that point?

People can exploit any number of traits to help them accomplish things, be it connections, looks, charms, etc.

alid6• 14 years ago

This is such an important issue, and it affects bottom line! - a recent Forbes article highlighted that companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics.

Global research group Catalyst recently interviewed 325 American chief executives and 10,000 female executives around the obstacles to womens' progression into senior leadership roles. 52% of women cited male stereotyping, but only 25% of the male chief executives identified it as a problem - so there's definitely unconscious stereotyping at play.

btilly15• 14 years ago

I did not see that article, but would be interested to. Do you have a link?

The only research that I am aware of along those lines was specific to South Korea.

alid6• 14 years ago

Hey man, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2012/01/26/the-...

"Companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics. Failure to resolve the obstacles that keep women from these roles means executives are leaving money on the table."

spindritf2• 14 years ago

> companies with more women at senior levels earn upwards of 33% more on important financial metrics

There are two major problems with that. First is that it's just correlation, "greener" companies also do better but it's quite likely that they simply can afford to be greener.

Second why is no one buying that? I mean, if companies with many women at senior levels really did significantly better, speculators would bet on those companies, their stock prices would jump and there would be a boom for female execs (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/femfirmfinance.html). That is not happening.

btilly15• 14 years ago

It is easy to rail against employers for showing the complained about bias against minorities and women. And doing so is clearly against the law.

However playing Devil's advocate it is justifiable by the fact that hiring decisions are naturally risk adverse. The difference between a perfect hire and a merely good one is typically not that big. The difference between a hire that works out and one that does not is huge. It does not take many wrong hires to destroy a working team.

If you've ever been burned by a hire where a person did not work out for reason X, then you're going to naturally think 2 and 3 times before making a similar hire. I personally have seen a couple of situations where a black person had credentials only because of affirmative action and did not deserve those credentials. I've also have seen multiple cases where a woman gets hired, gets pregnant, and then you lose that employee in a painful way.

Can you really blame an employer for leaning towards being risk adverse in this situation?

(Turning it around, if everyone else is discriminating to an unfair degree against a specific group of people, a company that merely discriminates less will enjoy a competitive advantage. A while ago I ran across a fascinating study of how much better South Korean companies that were willing to hire women into management do than ones who are not. I've seen no data either way on whether the USA is past this tipping point for women in various professional careers.)

glaak10• 14 years ago

Have you ever seen a white person not be good at their job? Yet you don't associate their failures with their race. Why do so with black people?

Also, read the studies. Black people and women actually have a harder time getting a job. So by your logic, of people getting jobs that they may not be the most qualified for, you'd be better off hiring women or black people. They have to be more qualified into to be seen as equals.

btilly15• 14 years ago

Have you ever seen a white person not be good at their job? Yet you don't associate their failures with their race. Why do so with black people?

The specific situation that is burned in my mind was a black girl who was in a math PhD program at the same time that I was. The department wound up bending their rules to the breaking point to give her a Masters on her way out because nobody wanted to risk the discrimination lawsuit that she was threatening. Her actual math knowledge was not even to the level that I would expect from a BSc in math.

I have never witnessed anything involving a white person that was anywhere near being similarly egregious. And I had experiences with that department which demonstrated in spades that white people were not given anywhere near as much leniency.

As for your final point, I thought I pretty much said that. I've not seen the specific studies that you're referring to.

tsotha2• 14 years ago

>Have you ever seen a white person not be good at their job? Yet you don't associate their failures with their race. Why do so with black people?

That's one of the better arguments against "affirmative action". Competent minorities and women are naturally lumped in with people working the system and pay the price in terms of reputation.

alid6• 14 years ago

Sorry man, I appreciate your point but the general tone of your argument comes across like you think women are more of a 'risky' hire?

btilly15• 14 years ago

It is not politically correct to say that women are riskier hires than men. But given biology and current culture, women of child-bearing age clearly are riskier hires. Women have non-trivial odds of getting pregnant, sometimes unexpectedly. In the event of pregnancy, moms usually require more time off than fathers, and are more likely to never return to their jobs.

That said, I am sympathetic to the position that employers tend to unfairly overestimate that risk. And furthermore US law is very clear that discriminating against women based on that risk is illegal. (But, laws notwithstanding, I've seen it happen in practice. Both directly in my workplace, and indirectly in my wife's.)

krigath• 14 years ago

Depending on the country, they may in fact be more risky from a purely financial point of view. They could have children!

DenisM• 14 years ago

>Can you really blame an employer for leaning towards being risk adverse in this situation?

Yes. It's called "the right thing to do", not "the easy and convenient thing to do", and for a reason.

Discriminating by race is convenient, but it puts a number of people in a dead end through no fault of their own. Had everyone done the convenient thing to do, those people would be locked out forever. For employers it's a matter convenience, for recruits it's a matter of having or not having a life. The impact is disproportionate.

gatordan• 14 years ago

It's strange how convenient and accepted unchecked anecdotal evidence can be around here under certain circumstances . If this was a strictly tech article I would hope more people would be saying your sample size here is two or three, that's clearly not the best predictor of the future. But you're talking about race and gender from the majority white male centered perspective so your comment is at the top.

According to you a couple black people got farther than they should have because of affirmative action and because of that you wouldn't blame an employer for considering all black people "risky" hires. Doesn't that sound a bit ridiculous? Put another way, has anyone ever said "a couple white people screwed over the team a few years back so we think twice nowadays before hiring white people". Or "we found that guys seem to slack more during work hours and now we shy away from hiring men". Of course not, because white and male are normal when it comes to jobs in tech and so they enjoy the privilege of being treated as individuals. To drive the point home your bias is obvious in your comment - "you're going to naturally think 2 and 3 times before making a similar hire" - "similar" applies to black or female because it's understandable to aggregate those individuals, their actions easy fit into a narrative that already exists in your mind. Pick two white men at your work who consistently perform poorly and I don't think you would be as comfortable attributing their behavior to their race or gender.

btilly15• 14 years ago

Are you familiar with the concept of playing Devil's advocate?

Also did you read the final paragraph?

zem• 14 years ago

"risk averse" here really means "it may be a problem for society, but let someone else bear the cost of solving it". one point of antidiscrimination laws is to spread those risks and costs out evenly so that no one is unduly affected.

glaak10• 14 years ago

Mirror here: http://i.imgur.com/hR9Mc.png

bravura2• 14 years ago

Cue up a lot of people who are going to use rhetoric to take make a "reasonable", "non-dogmatic" issue about this topic, while only barely acknowledging sub-conscious prejudice for or against.

I don't have a solution here, I'm sorry. But whenever I read a comment that sounds too cool, even-headed, and rhetorical, I know I'm going to be hit with some contrived hypotheticals and not much supporting data.

I don't know how to address the issue of prejudice. I just dislike it when people engage in discussion and pat themselves on the back for having taken a "reasonable" position. Not that I think arguments should be unreasonable, I simply see in practice that most "reasonable" arguments don't actually illuminate and are simply exercises in rhetoric.

oinksoft• 14 years ago

Erm, do you have anything to say about the article or the general subject matter? And are you saying that anybody who would have nits to pick with this article is immediately discredited by your lurking suspicion that they are driven by prejudice? Further, "sub-conscious [sic] prejudice", which by definition the accused cannot refute?

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

I acknowledge that there is a huge sub-conscious prejudice. I don't like how society doesn't focus on all of the types of prejudices that exist. Like I posted before, there is the halo effect, prejudice against women, fat people, old people, people of a different race, people with disabilities, etc.

I refuse to believe that this person (although she is qualified) managed to be hired completely free from any bias and only on her skill.

edit: I don't want anyone to believe I am trying to undersell the prejudice women have to experience daily. It's absolutely horrible that it still happens. I just posted the rest of this because I'm a nihilist and have trouble seeing good things with humanity....

bravura2• 14 years ago

I agree that there probably was bias in her hiring. Positive? Negative? What is clear is that there is bias when it comes to the gamut of groups that you mentioned.

In certain circumstances, this bias manifests as favorable, and sometimes it is unfavorable. (A particularly company might go out of their way, or be negatively prejudiced, respectively.)

Also, some particular people are able to use bias to their advantage overall in their lives. Whereas other people are harmed by bias, overall, because they don't work around it.

It's a really tricky issue.

eightbitman• 14 years ago

You got the job because you're a girl. You kept it because you're competent. It's annoying how women refuse to acknowledge their gender opens certain doors for them. I want to work as a bartender, which means more than half of the places I apply will never even look at my resume because I'm not a girl.

I'm all for giving disadvantaged people a chance over advantaged ones, but it's offensive when you pretend "Oh no, the odds are totally even!" No. They're not. You're lying to protect your ego.

glaak10• 14 years ago

Um. Read the studies. No, the odds aren't even. In technology, they're stacked against women. (And against black people in general.)

(I would very much believe, however, that in bartending, it's stacked against men.)

jules• 14 years ago

Since you're familiar with the studies, please cite them. As it stands your comment is just "RTFM!!" without even saying which manual.

snogglethorpe• 14 years ago

> (I would very much believe, however, that in bartending, it's stacked against men.)

OTOH, bartending is a customer-facing business, and partially entails "entertainment" (e.g. the bar-tender talking with the customers), so in many cases there's an actual business reason to prefer female bartenders (when most customers are men who prefer talking to a woman bartender).

No such excuse exists in software development...

scarmig• 14 years ago

So, there are some claims here that should be made explicit...

1) Some people get benefits undeservedly.

2) People will often rationalize after the fact to say that they deserved to get those benefits.

3) Women are people, so sometimes women will get benefits undeservedly but lie to themselves after the fact by thinking that they deserved it.

All certainly true. But I'd like to offer another claim:

4) Men are people, so sometimes men will get benefits undeservedly but lie to themselves after the fact by thinking they deserved it.

Is 4) unlikely, particularly relative to 3)?

How likely do you think it is that you might be deceiving yourself in the same way, about the relative benefits of being a man versus being a woman in tech?

dradtke• 14 years ago

If I've ever gotten undeserved benefits for being a white male, then nobody's ever told me about it. I won't deny that they exist, but from my experience it's more a case of cultural acceptance than outright discrimination. I love programming, and damn it, I'm good at it. Is my benefit simply the lack of feeling bad about my choice of career path, that I don't belong?

The problem is that (as far as I know) nobody's explicitly told "congratulations, you have gained additional benefits due to your gender and/or race!" It's easy to pinpoint moments of discrimination when you're the victim, but it's not so clear-cut when it ends up in your favor.

gary4gar• 14 years ago

And the site went down....any mirrors?

smokey_the_bear3• 14 years ago

I also interned at Microsoft in college, and I'm sure the only reason I got the internship was because I'm a girl. MS hired only five interns from my school that year, and all were female, which is pretty remarkable given my school's sub 5% female representation. I also had an offer from IBM's Extreme Blue that summer, which I don't think had much to do with being female.

I also think being female made it a little easier to get my resume noticed, coming from a large state school. It probably helped me get my Google interview, but I don't think it actually helped me get the job much.

There have also been some negative things about being a woman in technology. Everyone has their advantages and disadvantages in life.

glaak10• 14 years ago

It is unusual that all 5 people hired were female. But, remember that coincidences happen. There are plenty of schools in which all 15 people hired are male. Unless there is some reason why your school specifically would be set apart, I don't think this is anything more than a strange coincidence.

It's possible that something in the middle is going on -- a recruiter asked a professor for recommendations and he/she happened to recommend mostly women.

smokey_the_bear3• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure the recruiter assigned to my school was specifically a diversity recruiter.

btilly15• 14 years ago

If the presented figures are true, the probability of that happening entirely independently by chance are about 0.3 in a million.

It is reasonable to conclude that those decisions were not independent. But you're absolutely right that the correlation may come from the school rather than from Microsoft.

glaak10• 14 years ago

Also, think through what it would mean to actually get the offer (not the interview -- the offer itself) because you were female. Your recruiter isn't deciding who is getting an offer; the individual teams are. So how would this collaboration have happened such that only women from your college were given offers? Remember that Microsoft still has a very low percent of female engineers, so it's not a company wide policy.

You're telling me that a set of unrelated teams decided interdependently to specifically offer positions to women from your college? Why? Why your college? It just doesn't make sense.

My guess is that there's something much less sinister going on, such as: -- It's just a weird coincidence. (After all, they recruit from many schools.) -- Some professor referred mostly female students, perhaps even being under the mistaken impression that they were asking for good female candidates. -- The female students are your schools are actually more qualified than the male. (This is not particularly unlikely, if your school is really less than 5% female. To get numbers that low, there may be some pressure to drop out, leaving only the best women there.) -- Microsoft hires mostly PMs from your school, which are more likely than devs to be female. -- Microsoft extended offers to a number of men too, who happened to not take the offer. -- Many of these 5 students were actually given offers for a specific program dedicated to minorities. -- You're wrong about the percent of women in your CS program (very likely). -- You're wrong about the number of women / men hired.

These are just a few of the possibilities I can think of. What seems incredibly unlikely is that a bunch of unrelated teams all decided to hire only women from specifically your university. I just don't understand how that would work.

By the way, are you sure your school is <5% female? That is WAY under the national average.

smokey_the_bear3• 14 years ago

I was in the Computer Engineering program at my school. There are gender statistics here going back to 2003/2004 - http://www.ece.iastate.edu/the-department/key-performance-in...

2003/2004 was 8.7% female in that program, but that was after my year. The statistic I remembered from around 2000 was 4%. Three of the five MS interns that year were also Cpr E, the other two might have been computer science, for which I don't know the ratio. I don't think there was conspiracy among groups at MS to only hire women, I think the only people from my school who got interviews that year were women. And my impression was that MS handles intern recruiting differently than fulltime.

bencxr• 14 years ago

I'm not saying the poster got the job because she was a girl (or not), but the bottom line (imo) is that you have to play the hand you're dealt.

Some people are born rich, into high society etc and some are not. I don't see people unhappy that others are saying they "got the job because their dad was powerful".

Whether or not there was a real advantage doesn't matter. If there was a real advantage, well thank you, I'd take that advantage. If not, prove it. Either way, you still don't deserve to feel upset over it.

glaak10• 14 years ago

First of all, when people are trying to diminutize your accomplishments -- saying that you don't deserve them -- it does matter. It affects not only your morale, but also your ability to achieve things in the future.

Second, the point of the article is not the being a woman is an advantage but rather, that there's good evidence that it's a disadvantage. When you have a group that is already unrepresented in the sciences who face additional disadvantages, that IS a problem.

Yes, of course you play the hand you're dealt. What other choice do you have? That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight for equality for everyone.

I only got that job because I’m a girl

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