I have mixed feelings about this. I am absolutely aware this can be a means to intentionally exclude specific groups due to prejudice and can be a polite way to do terrible things. I get that.
But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there must be a better way than what we are doing currently."
Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.
The "modern world" sucks at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for one of two reasons:
1) they keep thinking about gender and age as qualifiers for jobs for which those factors have absolutely zero relevance (girls are bad at math! Old people can't learn new things!), or
2) They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave! oldster can only do Cobol, they'll never learn Python!).
> They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave!
This is not a delusion, and it's a thing commonly talked about in my country (Poland). It's not just about that girls will get pregnant and leave - it'll be that girls will get pregnant and out of the sudden[0] go on paid maternity leave, which they can extend to a year, during which you have to keep their position open, after which you can't legally fire them even if you've already found a replacement, and there are many women[1] who plan another pregnancy just after the leave period ends, in order to extend their employment period by another two years. The incentive here is that health leave and maternity leave both count as employment, so they don't have a break in years of employment on their CV (and both are paid, too).
Overall effect of our legal landscape makes companies prefer men over women, and/or prefer employment contracts that don't offer these legal guarantees, and there's always noise being made whenever our government (which is currently pro-family) starts talking about adjustments that would extend some protections to those other work contract types.
(Now I'm not saying this to justify the bias in general, but just to point out that there are real economic pressures in play that do get considered by the employers.)
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[0] - You don't have a "notice period" on maternity live; if a doctor decides there are concerns about the health of a mother or a child, your employee can just give you the doctor's note and stop coming to work.
[1] - And I've personally heard parents encouraging their daughters to do that. It seems to be a common theme, at least among the less well-off parts of our population. The boss-employee relationship is pretty antagonistic.
This is actually a hard problem to genuinely solve. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm not really happy with the current way we typically talk about such things, which often amounts to denying that such issues exist.
You can't solve problems while pretending they don't exist and making it Verboten to speak of them.
Beyond inertia of the traditional family model, there are real biological constraints that you can't bulldoze with calls to equality - pregnancy is taxing on the body, childbirth doubly so, the mother needs time to recover, and she's arguably the more important parent in early stages of a child's life. You can't e.g. declare equal amount of childbirth leave for both genders and call it a day.
(Though equal, paid mandatory leave for both parents would probably be fairer and also more beneficial for the child.)
I don't have first clue what the optimal, or "most fair", way of equalizing career prospects in context of childbirth is. But as you write, we can't reach it if people are pretending that the problem doesn't exist. And in context of companies, that means realizing employers aren't discriminating here out of spite or evil nature, but because there are economical considerations in play, and with them comes market pressure.
It is a good thing that parents can do that, for some reason these issues do not come up when men take paternity leave here. It is very common for fathers to be gone for a 6-12 months after their babies are born.
You just need to change the laws, and how you deal with parenting socially, then it will all make sense ("just").
Our laws allow for two types of paternity leave; one is 14 days, the other is 6 weeks for a single child and taking it reduces mother's maternity leave. This makes it impossible for a man to play shenanigans that make them stay on leave while employed for couple years.
Definitely there's a lot of work to be done on parenting in Poland, both in regulatory and social fashion. Currently it's a tension between the traditional family model and the desire to allow women to have equal career prospects to men.
I'm not sure what "play shenanigans" means in this context, but it seems out of context? I agree that the laws and socialnorms surrounding the care of children are complex. But being able to spend time with my children was of immense value to me, and as you said it allowed my partner to have a very productive career.
By "play shenanigans" I meant what I described about how it commonly works in Poland - a mother going on an early health leave, followed by a year of maternity leave, followed by another pregnancy, rinse repeat. Basically, intentionally stacking planned pregnancies in a way that maximally exploits a single employer.
I'm glad you care about these things, but to say those are the only two reasons why we have trouble correctly matching people to fulfilling jobs is asinine.
This very post is about targeted advertising to keep women and older people from seeing job ads. You then went off a tangent about employer-prospect matching in general.
What other reasons are there that lead women and older people to be excluded? I'd probably add salary as a factor with older people.
> The "modern world" sucks at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for one of two reasons:
> 1) they keep thinking about gender and age as qualifiers for jobs for which those factors have absolutely zero relevance (girls are bad at math! Old people can't learn new things!), or
> 2) They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave! oldster can only do Cobol, they'll never learn Python!).
I didn't "go off on a tangent" about anything. OP already refocused the conversation to apply to the entire problem domain of career matching, which is absolutely absurd, so I teased the two issues back apart. Put on your reading glasses.
What is your proof, that gender and age has zero relevance?
I believe, that yes, for example women of a certain age, have a high statistical chance of getting pregnant soon (or already are pregnant). That is very relevant. As they will suddenly be not avaiable anymore for quite some time. While the employer still hase obligations to them (don't know about US, but definitely in germany).
Now yes, the correct solution can't be to just exclude women of that age or prefer man. But the reality is, that this is happening a lot. And it sucks and is a hard problem for society in general, but I don't believe the mantra helps to exclaim the problem does not exist.
I feel like we might as well be honest that age has an impact on cognition. You do get slower at learning new things but valuable experience can be big, as someone said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20609100
You know, "younger people learn faster than older people on average" might be true; but even if it is, it doesn't preclude "I learn faster than you even though I'm significantly older".
Ideally, if you need fast learners, you should hire & test for learning speed, not proxies like age.
Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring people recommended to me by others that I trust.
“The boys” in this context are a managers cronies, not any random person who happens to be male. In fact the phrase excludes men too, who don’t play golf or whatever.
Director of engineering at a former employer once said in the span of 30 seconds: “we’re trying to hire more diversity” and “please reach out to your social network”.
To an audience of 98% white males.
The director acknowledged the incongruity, thankfully, but never solved the problem.
I think you're assuming white males don't know how to suggest females and non-whites. We may be statistically more likely to hang out with other white males but I'm pretty sure I can suggest people besides them.
I can and did, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the preponderance of our collective networks were white males. That’s not a strategy for significant diversification.
Replace “don’t know how to” with “don’t know” and it would be more appropriate.
I know plenty of women in the industry, but for the specialty I would recommend for, I couldn’t list more than a couple of names (of which are well employed already).
I can't speak for others, but I'm a white male and less than 98% of the people I know are other white males. This is also true when I limit myself to software developers (but to a lesser degree). It seems to me that reaching out to ones social network would be an improvement. At 98% white males there's not much you can do to make it worse.
I must have spent the last 20 years in a parallel universe where every single hiring manager would like nothing more than to hire a minority or a woman because of corporate edicts. At Microsoft today, for instance, they have _quotas_ for hiring women (I don't know about minorities, but they probably have quotas for that, too), and if you don't meet the quota, you're kinda fucked as a manager. At Google, when the hiring committee is in doubt the official position is to make a "hire" decision if the applicant is a woman and "no" if the applicant is a man. A female hiring committee member told me she saw no issue with this policy.
Yet still, very few females apply. I had interviewed 100+ people for Google. Of them IIRC 8 were women and 1 was hired. You can't get more women into the profession if they choose not to apply.
What kind of person would be qualified for a job but not be actively looking at job boards and LinkedIn? This article is only talking about passive job-seekers being targeted on Facebook, not about active job-seekers being discriminated against.
I've never got a job in response to an ad either. Have you? Do you personally know anyone who has?
Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in response to ads.
Do you mean ads in general or posting to public job listings? Because all my jobs have come from the later and it's been the primary hiring pipeline everywhere I've worked. Can't say I've seen a lot of hiring from general advertising channels but if they're paying for the ads then they're presumably hiring from that channel.
I thought the issue here was with demographically targetable ads on e.g. Google or Facebook. I've been a hiring manager in the past, and we never used those. Most of our entry level employees were from career fairs at the nearby university. Most of our senior employees were either from the network or from (ultra-expensive) recruiters. Frankly it never even occurred to anyone to purchase targeted ads because they're so uncommon.
That isn’t completely true. You can land a job via an ad, it is very very hard, but it is probably a bit higher than 1%. Especially entry level positions where a professional network isn’t expected anyways.
Be that as it may, if I were a hiring manager today whose bonus and promo opportunities depend on meeting the diversity quota, you can guess how I'd be setting up the targeting on my hiring ad campaign, ethics be damned.
That having been said, I fully agree that such targeting in job ads in particular should be illegal. I agree with this out of my own rational self interest, as a straight white male in my 40s. Other aforementioned types of gender, racial, and age discrimination should be made illegal as well.
Well, if you were smart about it you wouldn’t focus on ads at all. Rather you’d figure out how to poach known talent from other companies. Easier still if you were looking for entry levels, hitting the universities directly would work given recent enrollment increases (start them out with good internships during the sophomore or junior years would be much more useful here).
I don’t see how an ad would be effective at all in this hiring climate. Yes, you might get something, but you would be unlikely to get a woman or underrepresented minority hire, even if they were specifically targeted. They have much better options than to answer these ads.
That's exactly what we did, with a modicum of success. The pickings are super slim, though. Most CS students don't really seem to give a shit about CS, meaning they don't do anything other than coursework, at all, and their coursework is pretty primitive, and uses Java which our company had no use for.
Another problem is when you go to career fairs, easily 9 out of 10 people coming to your booth will be looking for an internship rather than a job. This isn't a problem per se, if you're a large company this is actually pretty great. But I was hiring for a small (at the time) startup, so that was a bit of a waste of everyone's time. Still we landed a few diamonds in the rough after a few attempts. 8/10, would hire from local schools again.
Ironically, the most extensively qualified candidate I met at these career fairs was female. She was in grad school and had a resume you wouldn't believe if you'd seen it, and very obviously smart as a whip. She was, however, too smart to work for a startup. Can't say I blame her.
Out of curiosity, how where the applicants selected for the interviews? Because first you limit the funnel for a certain group of people at the very start, then you have maybe an algorithm with a selection bias against the same group before we end up with an potentially also biased interview process before we reach an equally biased work life. I less we have reliable numbers for the funnel just looking at the interview stage misses the whole point.
No idea. Likely through the usual (for Google) means: candidate submits a resume directly to the company, resume is reviewed by sourcer, and a decision is made on whether to interview based on qualifications. I can pretty much guarantee that women not only aren't discriminated at this stage, but given preference if there's any doubt at all. Tech companies are under immense pressure nowadays to improve their diversity metrics. The fact that they are unable to do so is quite telling, IMO.
Do you actually know of any high paying jobs completely dominated by white men anymore? Plenty of non-white doctors, scientists and engineers certainly.
Probably in several ways, along with a gender bias in your network there's probably a high likelihood that there's a racial bias, a class/wealth bias and an age bias.
Your network probably has a strong contingent of people you went college with, people with a shared interested in your sports (which can be a proxy for class and race) and people with a similar background.
There's an awful lot of "yes but I..." going on in this thread, finishing with people not seeing their own bias, or not giving enough information to prove they don't have bias in their recommendations.
Let me start by inverting something that Uncle Bob has been saying for years: If you have less than 5 years experience, then 50% of the developers out there are 'older' from your perspective. Are half of your recommendations for people over 28?
Let's see how mine would stack up. If I had to recommend 10 people right now:
If I'm honest, about 6 of mine will be for people over the age of 28. That should be 5. So my recommendations are biased against young devs, which I hated when I was 26. If you asked me to be fair I could come up with 1 or 2 more young developers, but unbidden it would probably be 3-4.
2 or 3 would be female. If you only consider recent grads, that's low. But there's a hole in the older generation, so 25% is probably spot on, even though I think it kinda sucks.
2 should be black, hispanic or asian. I hit that number sort of. Because I could recommend 3 Indian developers and one East Asian from recent jobs. I have to my knowledge only ever worked with two black developers, one of whom was good, and also understandably frustrated that he is a statistic. I have seen him exactly once in 10 years.
I would wager that my numbers are better than most of the people who are getting rustled here (if you know your numbers are fine, you're likely not getting drawn into the conversation), but they're still biased. My recommendations don't make things better. They don't make them much worse, but they still tug the needle toward the unfair end of the gauge.
This is a great idea. What about a service that allows proctored skills tests for applicants? Like Sitepoint but with some additional verification layers.
Hiring managers would then pick a tech stack or set of skills they need, and matches would bubble up based on applicants in the area with the relevant skills.
The "culture fit" question could be another egg to crack. Who knows if interviews are the best way to figure that out...
Any process that attempts to “solve” the technical skills verification problem will not work unless it replaces the technical portion of the on-site interview. Otherwise, companies can still reject based on technical assessments in which case you’ve solved nothing. You’ve simply changed the shape of the hiring funnel.
Also, looking beyond the immediate need, companies would also need to understand that this only applies to very specific positions. You shouldn’t apply this to entry level, nor should you apply this to positions where the employee is expected to adapt quickly to changing tech stacks. What this leaves you with is contracting. You hire experts with a very specific skillset that you need that is verified by an agency. For everything else, there is still not a good generic solution.
My company selects for people who can pass white board interviews. Which are not only terrible in their own right but also not the way anybody I know codes.
And despite that, most of the people I work with are actually below average at explaining things with drawings or whiteboards. And since that average in our industry is already "pretty awful" that's saying something.
So not only are we looking for the wrong thing, but we haven't even proven our own people can do the thing we thought we were looking at. I'm starting to think a lottery system would be better. We know we have algorithms that do better with random sampling. Maybe hiring is one of them.
Depends on which side of the industry you are I guess. In bespoke software most of the work is either customer facing or at the very least would require team skills, even for 'coders'.
I think even more generally, companies suck at ad targeting. Companies may have all the data in the world about their targets, but they don't particularly have the time nor the will nor the incentives to think about good segmentation, so they fall back to the "tried and true /s" age and gender segments.
But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there must be a better way than what we are doing currently."
Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.