So I work for a company that has a recommendation system. If the person you recommend gets hired and works for more than 3 months you get a bonus.
$500 if you recommend a man
$700 if you recommend a woman

Isn’t this discrimination?

I know they are trying to incentivize women to get into tech but this is just ilegal and quite frankly not the best way to get results.

I don't know the laws in Honduras, but in the US, an employer is entitled to tax breaks for employing a woman over a man, in service of Affirmative Action. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that said employer shares a morsel of that with the referrer. And it's certainly not illegal.

Yes, sounds discrimination

@bahua it’s remote work, the company is based in Argentina. I read about affirmative action and how it affects white people lol. I never liked these laws where a group is placed above another just because they have been “oppressed” in the past. I’m black and I just want to be seen as another dev don’t take into account my skin color, just take into account my ability. Is it that hard?

Yes, it's discrimination.

There is no "reverse sexism," only sexism.
Same with racism, etc.

If you're making a decision based on someone's race, sex, etc. instead of the person themselves, you're probably an asshole.

@HnDev

Not defending it. Just trying to explain why it's not illegal.

Pretty sexist to me.

@bahua there needs to be a gender equality amendment to stop the dems from this shit. But good point, American governments are still allowed to screw you on the basis of your "identities". Sounds like a civil rights violation, but the usual suspects think they can gane something from this.

@p100sch There already is, isn't there?
The whole Equal Opportunity Employer/Lender/etc. thing.

It forces companies to hire/lend/whatever based on the applicant's merits/credit/etc. instead of identity.

-$1000 if you complain about it...

@Root so how the fuck did Goldman Sachs manage to not get sued with theire new bordmember diversity rules? Ah fuck politicians they always write that shit so a court can arbitrarily decide what it all actually means.

@p100sch There you go.
Also, liberal judges.

Plus, if you complain that "affirmative action" or identity politics, etc. is unfair or counterproductive, people (usually lefties) just scream "racist!" at you until you shut up, or scream at your boss until you get fired. Or at your boss's boss, etc. until they get their way. (Meaning something bad happens to someone.) It's remarkably similar to toddlers' temper tantrums.

😂😂 just say he's a women. They can't discriminate. Done

@p100sch
You can't really sue Goldman for anything, they own a majority share of the revolving door that is the SEC and sponsor basically every politician on both sides.

@bahua The legality will vary by country.

Traditionally in many countries it would be illegal barring falling through loop holes. Things like this may often fall into that category.

Affirmative Action in most places is illegal because it's a form of racism or sexism.

It is however sneaking back in due to the rise of the cult of political correctness.

Disclaimer: I generally feel the efforts made to "equalize" employment in the industry are equal parts misplaced and ineffective, as well as ignorant of statistics and demographics. If anything it's so absurdly game-able it has resulted in an outsized and lopsided representation of imported male south asian developers who shouldn't even count against any form of diversity employment quota as they just make the pool larger.

That out of the way, this is a fairly tactless approach. Their normal channels failed to engage female developers at any significant level for whatever reason. So their solution is to tell existing engineers, "hire a womens, it's worth 30% more than a mens for a (presumably) limited time." It's sloppy at best.

I won't pretend bias doesn't exist, it's a fact of nature. People hire their friends. Exhibiting low emotional intelligence isn't a solution to the problem or encouragement to think outside the bun.

I see its easy to misunderstand this, but It's not discrimination to support a gender that don't have a lot of space in the area

The extra money is not because they are women, but because is harder for any women to grow professionally in an environment that has mostly men

The fair thing to do would be offer the same bonus for each gender and say they are looking to increase the number of women employees in the company

Discrimination would be to hire women over men because they are better just because they are women. But i dont think thats the case

@priandpasta so if this were the other way around would it be discrimination? I fail to see how this is not discrimination when the company is actively encouraging the hiring of one gender over the other.

If they really wanted to increase female participation in tech they could play ads or pay for scholarships something that as an actual impact.

@HnDev
Interesting point. Thought exercise:

Is it also discrimination if they pay for advertising that specifically targets female developers?

@SortOfTested advertisements are made to target a specific demographic. So no, I don’t consider it discrimination.

Video game ads usually target men, kitchen utilities ads usually target women. Are men the only ones who play video games? Of course not. Are women the only ones who cook, clean and make use of the kitchen? Hell no. But in both cases they are more inclined to buy the product the company wants to sell.

@HnDev
Makes sense, so let's continue the thread:

What are the demographics of your company? % male female split in the developer headcount.

Rough is fine, the thought here is to try and derive their motivation for the action. Please bear in mind we're in general agreement they're being rather hamfisted in their current solution 🙂

@SortOfTested I’d say 20%ish. All of the recruiters and their boss were female. There was one woman in the team I was in. Some PMs are also women, but most devs are men

@HnDev
Not great, but also common. Granted I don't know the graduation statistics in your locality.

So, my thought is one of two things brought this about:

1. The person who made the decision regards people are "resources." They were presented with the problem, "we lack [left handed scissors] in development, change that." They looked and saw a smaller supply of those and applied basic economics to the problem, "[left handed scissors ] are scarce, therefore we should pay more for them." That holds water with office supplies, but utterly fails at the "employees are human beings" side of management"
2. They looked at a statistic and saw that, depending on the source, somewhere between 70 and 80% of hires come from employee networks. If the existing networks aren't producing a lot of women, they imagine offering more money would incentivize employees to approach people they'd previously ignored.

Seems like they mostly made bad assumptions about you, either way. That's kind of awful.

@SortOfTested

I'm glad you brought up graduation statistics - because along with application statistics (to account for those not applying for the role from university) these are the only stats that matter as a comparison to show bias at the hiring level rather than a systematic lack of a gender or group being interested in the field in the first place.

Here in Australia plenty of companies are aiming for 50/50 with graduation rates of women in Engineering at ~20%. You seem to think 20% at HnDev's company is bad - why? If it was here that would be representative?

@priandpasta You are completely wrong! It does not matter how there are other areas going on as soon as there is a rule that differentiates it's discrimination. Look at quadratic equation discriminant for instance. Sexism is a variant of discrimination, just as racism. Not all discrimination is bad (I discriminate by sex, sexism even, I'm heterosexual). Extremism is really bad though; genocide is a form of extreme racism; communism is a form of extreme equality (look how that goes for Venezuela). We are not all equal trying to force it. How many female car mechanics do you know? How many male nurses do you know? Never heard a fuss about that for some reason. If it's bias by gender interest in fine by it. If there is a toxic sexist culture towards it (and that goes both ways) that is a problem that should be solved.

@hjk101 mate, discrimination is common but it should not be ok

@HnDev exactly that would work as well, the company should have plan the whole thing better instead of trying to find a token tech girl

@priandpasta yes it should. Without discrimination there is no organisation

@hjk101
Yeah probably is like that
This organisation might work for you but doesn't work for a bunch of people

@priandpasta Do you really want to be operated on by an untrained monkey? Because refusing is discrimination and therefore bad?

Guess it's working for you too...

@hjk101 Judging based on merit isn't exactly discrimination, unless someone is bent on changing the meaning of discrimination. Which honestly wouldn't surprise me, since it would allow them to discriminate indiscriminately. 😅

Humor aside, manipulative douchecanoes have been doing this for decades and longer. See: radical leftists, jihadists, feminazis, the nazi party itself, Westboro Baptist Church, PETA, etc.

If you change the language, you change how people think, and therefore how people can act. Words can transform into shackles.

@Root that is exactly what triggered me in the first place. You can call it positive discrimination or not discrimination at all. However it is by all definitions of the word.
Fighting sexism with sexism seems the wrong approach to me. Even I would feel resentment while I ordinarily could not care less in professional life. I think we need to put more focus on cultivating a culture where the fittest florish and the culture that is stuck in the middle ages just fails.

@hjk101
I'd love that as well. There is some merit to elitism. That said, it eventually has to deal with the fundamental failure of democracy; eventually the weak will outnumber the strong and simply used outsized numerical advantage to seize control. No system is perfect.

@hjk101
Nah, only by a trained monkey

its not a matter of skill, but of opportunity

Its a historical thing and that takes time to change. It reminds me of the fact that aboriginals were not considered australian citizens until the 70's (no health care, no education, no roght to work etc..)

Young aboriginals today dont have the same opportunity of other australians because their parents had nothing and were considered nothing

So now they have special scholarships, pay less taxes..

makes sense for me that they have these types of benefits

Yes, it's discrimination.

It's the new big thing to do to look acceptable in the eyes of societal organisations with millions of dollars to due people with.

Equity is the name of the game now, not equality.

Trump fired the 2 witnesses yesterday... That's technically illegal some that's workplace retaliation?

@Root doesn't work, u can't use it if you can't prove they discriminated and well it's hard to prove.

And then when you sure they have 100 ways out, one of them being, "we're sorry, we won't do it again..."

What's the website, link me ?