You've seen people promoted because they were women, well, you've seen it once. My wife worked at a company that employed thousands, and the further you got up the ladder, the less women and minorities there were. The top four salary grades, representing over 100 people, were exclusively white and male. The lowest four salary grades were mixed at about 60% male/40% female. There is no way that every one of those top 100 people was head and shoulders better than every female and minority candidate.

Your one instance of a female being promoted for being female is sure, a bad thing, but we have a culture that promotes males because they are male. It's like complaining about a splinter when one of your legs has been chopped off.

That analogy wasn't accurate :P My point is yes there is fucking sexism and it's disgusting but I haven't heard a reasonable preventative tool other than educating people and letting the ingrained old fucks die off who strongly help perpetuate it. Is there a study that shows the % of sexists by age? I wanna see that one.

I have to work my butt off to stay on this team, because it is made up of qualified people.. And guess what, if I went into my wife's field of elementary eduation, I'd get a job tomorrow, even though the district is cutting teaching positions left and right. Why because I'm a male. My wife's school had 4 males at the school. One is 1st grade teacher, one is a PE coach (big surprise there), 1 is a janitor, and the last was the assistant principle (worth less than crap) but he got a job as the district high school principle because he was one of 3 male administrators in the district. He regularly lied to teachers, spent half the day on his I-phone, and lied to parents, yet he got the highschool principle job, because he was a man. It goes both ways and it should not be tolerated in both cases.

wow. I spelled principal wrong three times in my hurry to type that..

lol @ leif. As long as you caught it no one will hold it against you.

My field has massive movement in regards to fighting against an oppressive majority. The most effective methods when you have less power is education and fighting harder than the other team.

I love artificial tools to "fix" the numbers because the numbers aren't what we want them to be. For how many of the 100 jobs were there no female applicants? Let's say 40%, well to even match that 60/40 ratio in the lowerpaying jobs you mentioned means you needed to higher every one of those female applicants, simply because they were female, never mind the fact that you may have had 10+ male applicants and 1 female applicant for those positions. But to hell with the idea of hiring qualified applicants, these ones are female!

Granted I know that for top level positions in companies, "applications" are often not used, but you get the picture. Deal with individual cases of discrimination, but don't force the numbers to change because you dislike the numbers, regardless of ability or capability.

again with the spelling: higher = hire

I wanna see that sexist vs age study as well, I know where I work that has a lot to do with discrimination vs females.

I don't advocate it becoming 60/40, but going from 60/40 to 100/0 smacks of some kind of issue, does it not?

no, but is an artificial tool to change the numbers the way to fix it? I agree there is an issue, just fix it the correct way without creating another issue..

@Sayjo
"It's neither, why would you assume those are the only possibilities? "

Well... there's a hell of a lot of distance between an A and a D. He was either extremely wrong with his original mark (in which case he is a fool and I pity the other people in his class whose marks aren't worth the paper they're printed on), or he was right to give you a D but allowed himself to persuaded somehow into hugely inflating your grade to far beyond what it merits (which is a bloody awful way of doing things). Fair enough if it was pushing a high B up to an A, but D to an A is not something that should ever happen.

What I love about this forum, people will call you out on everything because they don't know you have haven't perpetuated inhibitions.

"Fix ignorance and you solve all these other problems you fucking complain about. You cant possibly rid sexism, racism, any other fucking narrow minded judgmental perception without having a world that is dominated by intelligent free thinkers who have enough awareness to perceive outside of themselves."

But then you people would complain about 'diversity training' or 'political correctness' or find some other excuse to rail against minorities and spout off your sense of entitlement.. Really, relying on old people to die off and education is very convenient when you're already at the top. All affirmative action does is require employers and schools to *consider* an equivalent number of female candidates. The problem has always been that employers don't even bother looking at female or minority candidates.

So, what's the correct way to fix it? I, by the way, never advocated using affirmative action, which makes it pretty interesting that the anti-affirmative action people who are complaining about words stuffed in their mouths are claiming such.

Hey Putin if you were looking at a candidate and one was female and one was male wouldn't you make the decision knowing that gender doesn't mean anything? I would, there are plenty of us that would. Do we need laws that determine that course of action? No, we know, I repeat know that it is irrelevent. So what exactly is your point? Are you saying you have an all powerful tool other than education that will enable people to look past bias and make the decision? No, without education they won't know how to make the proper decisions because they can't comprehend it.

What the fuck do you mean I'm at the top? Pulling more shit out of your ass I see.

"Hey Putin if you were looking at a candidate and one was female and one was male wouldn't you make the decision knowing that gender doesn't mean anything?" - Everyone says that. Everyone thinks they mean that. But it's never the case. People have unconscious biases that come to light whenever this issue is studied. Everyone says "Oh I'd hire people completely on merit, with no thoughts about gender, or race, or ethnicity, or religion or sexual orientation." But when they do experiments they find that virtually everyone is more likely to consider a resume submitted by John Smith, over Sandra Jones, or Navdeep Sidhu, or ... OK well I can't think of a gay sounding name... but you get my point.

(Obviously the anti-LGBT biases come to light during interviews)

Yeah, there were studies that submitted identical resumes to a variety of positions, one from a white male sounding name and an identical one with an African-American sounding name and the white ones got about 4 times as many callbacks.

Yes studies statistics blah blah blah. Who here doesn't consider themselves to be more analytical than the average person? I'm pansexual, the idea of LGBT biases is pathetic to me. My genderless identity wouldn't know what to do with thinking one body part is superior to another.

I never got those resumes now did I? It just shows that there are plenty of oppressive people still in power but in no way fucking applies to me (seeing as I've never done that) so how does that refute my point?

"Yes studies statistics blah blah blah."

It's difficult to have any conversation or debate with this sort of response.

Oh is it? You say I'm black, someone says statistics show that only X% of people are black so that's unlikely. How do you respond to that?

"Yes studies statistics blah blah blah. Who here doesn't consider themselves to be more analytical than the average person?" - What does that have to do with anything? I'm not making a point about the kind of person you are. What I'm saying is that we can't take anyone's word for it that they hire fairly, because everyone says that. And yet so few people actually do it. Obviously there are outliers, and it's possible that you are one. The way in which it refutes your point is that it indicates that simply leaving things and hoping to "educate people better" is insufficient to stop workplace discrimination. What I'm arguing is that this study shows that unconscious biases, of the sort that can't be amended by sensitivity training or what have you, lie at the heart of gender based or race/ethnicity based hiring biases.

Ah, Mafialligator I took that as you denying my personal stance. You have to admit, the populace as a whole is still better in terms of racism/sexism than it was 100+ years ago. We aren't remotely close to eradicating it but people speaking out and fighting the oppression is the most effective. That is the education, not some silly seminar to teach, no means no, and good touch vs bad touch.

Gonna say this thread is silly since most of us believe the similar premises but are disagreeing about inane details that were probably just misrepresented haha

I, too, would be interested in more details. To me, a D->A indicates one of two possibilities:

1) He was in a bad mood and didn't pay attention to your paper the first time around (not good)
2) He can't be bothered to deal with you, so he just gave you what you wanted (probably worse)

Don't forget agism and discrimination against fat and/or "ugly" people in hring practices. All other aspects equal, the young handsome stud or hot chick will get the job over the older, heavy or frumpy man or woman.

@Draug

HA! I'm an engineer, so no worries there! Just stick me in the basement!

haha

Now, you want to know a really stupid hiring practice? My friend, a computer engineer of a high level (used to work for the Department of Defense) recently interviewed for and got a job where, to his shock, his boss-to-be was not allowed to ask him any technical questions or any questions about his technical credentials. He asked after getting the job why there hadn't been any technical questions, and that was the answer.