Companies: “We believe diversity is our strength. We don’t discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, ……”

*departments hire 90% women and 10% men*

Companies: “See! Diversity solved!”

That can mean any combination of a lot of problems. What's the staff churn among men and women? Distribution of roles? Salary ranges? Distribution of superiority relationships among gender pairs?

Something is clearly wrong here, but what it is and who's getting screwed can depend on a lot of things.

I like diversity in office as long it's not caused for the sake of diversity. It departments around here are mostly men but marketing for example are women. Tadaaa, diversity

I read a while back that women tend to be much stricter superiors, but if this is true, is it because the majority of subordinates are men? Is it because they're held to a higher standard than their neighbors in hierarchy and correctly relay the expectations to their team? Sufficiently developed research about gender differences in organizations is much too rare.

In my experience, the morale of the men suffers when the team is made of a 70% or more of women. Socialization at department functions tilts heavily toward activities and conversations the women enjoy that tend to exclude the men, ranging from lack of interest to silence out of fears of reprisals for “saying the wrong thing”. Men tend to quit or change departments when that occurs. Glass ceilings against men and in favor of women also develop such that there are superfluous managerial, director, and executive positions created for the sole purpose of promoting the women and which men are not seriously considered for. When layoffs occur, the men are sent packing first. It happened to me and other men in my departments increasingly over the past 10 years. It’s a form of reverse discrimination that is just as wrong as the former kind.

@retoor HRs women, accountants women. Prettyuch everywhere 🤔

Companys who are promoting diversity in percentage instantly get my alarm bells ringing. Because it basically means diversity hires. I am all for companies promoting being diverse and giving anyone a fair chance. Just take the whole deal serious and KEEP equality!

If we're talking tech departments, this basically means that 93% of the hired workforce consists of useless hires. Let's see whether such companies can still remain competetive like that.

How to get to 93%: among the 10% of hired men, half of them are through nepotism or diversity clowns themselves, so 5% of the total applicant pool are capable men who have been hired only for actually getting shit done.

Women are much less interested in tech than men, so even one third is already on the high side, and one third of 5% is 2%, being generous. Adding these capable female 2% to the capable male 5% is 7%, hence 93% useless hires.

@Fast-Nop A little generalizing, but accurate.

@Fast-Nop Truth. People outside the tech industry love to roast it for lack of diversity, but you can’t force anyone to love tech or STEM in general. And for some reason it just has not been historically appealing to women. I seriously don’t have any problems with women in STEM. I think it’s great. But it’s just not a compelling enough proposition for a lot of women. I’ve done this job for 1/4 century now and that pattern hasn’t budged regardless of how much emphasis and how many opportunities have been presented from kindergarten though college and beyond (I worked 12 years in education). Most, for many reasons, gravitate toward the marketing/design/writing/creative sides of business.

We're discussing this topic at my workplace.

I'm arguing that it's good we encourage more women to apply, and it's even fine to have special campaigns for women - but when it comes to looking at resumes we should never pick someone for their genitals.

Allthough the counter argument I hear is that "If a team is all male that might deter some female applicants. So it's good to have at least one woman per team so that we don't deter any candidates"

I can sort of see some point to that as I've personally declined a job offer after an interview when I was younger, and saw that the entire dev team was very old.

I'd like to think no one assumes they can't relate to anyone who's not entirely like them - but I guess there's a bar where if the ENTIRE team is different you might feel off.

@jiraTicket Yeah, I can see that. Though, I really enjoyed working some of the older folks when I was younger. They forgot more than I ever knew about tech, so it was a great way to learn. I will say that I do get along better with women on teams than with men. I was raised by my mom and grandma and a lot of my social interaction is shaped by that. Still, I’m also a guy and when I want to have guy professional and joke interactions, there’s little to none to be found.

God why is it so hard to just hire based on competence and fix the inequality in terms of opportunity for development and education. The whole "women quotas" and whatnot are duct tape solutions that are so common it seems.

Most companies waited to long to change their gender splitting, too long was it male dominated which throws off a lot of female candidates.

Also as most existing employees are close to retiring, getting younger employees into the company will help survival, so take any good candidate no matter the gender.

@max19931 Plenty of women were in the workforce from World War II onward because of the men being off to war and women being needed to fill their job placements in factories and in offices. The problem has become a sort of vengeful hiring practice of tipping the scales the other direction to retaliate for real and perceived wrongs from decades past. While that may feel “just” to the social justice warriors in HR who are implementing this, it truly isn’t “just” at all because it’s just another form of discrimination.