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Carri Bugbee

New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iscrimination-jobs-hiring.html

bias hiring ageism

shared by Carri Bugbee on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • It is complicating an already challenging juncture of life. Workers over 50 — about 54 million Americans — are now facing much more precarious financial circumstances, a legacy of the recession.More than half of workers over 50 lose longtime jobs before they are ready to retire, according to a recent analysis by the Urban Institute and ProPublica. Of those, nine out of 10 never recover their previous earning power. Some are able to find only piecemeal or gig work.
  • “If you lose your job at an older age, it’s really hard to get a new one,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist who worked on the analysis.‘The Look in Their Eyes’Tom Adair dressed in a sharply pressed white shirt and a blue blazer with gold buttons for the weekly meeting for ExperiencePlus, a group for job seekers over 50 held in the small library at St. John the Baptist Church in Madison, Ala., near Huntsville.A former quality manager at Toyota and an Air Force consultant, Mr. Adair said he has had temporary consulting assignments over the last decade but has not been able to get a steady full-time job since the recession’s nadir in 2009.
  • “I ace the phone interviews,” Mr. Adair said. “They say: ‘Your résumé speaks volumes. You could hit the ground running. It looks like you’re the perfect fit.’”“But you come in, and you’re D.O.A.,” said Mr. Adair, who is 71 and has neatly clipped gray hair. “You can see the look in their eyes.”“My wife says: ‘We need to get you a face-lift. We need to get your hair dyed,’” he said.Older workers are much more likely to wrestle with prolonged joblessness than younger ones, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On average, a 54-year-old job hunter will be unemployed for nearly a year.Repeated inquiries can go unanswered, like space probes lost in a distant galaxy. In one of the most comprehensive studies, résumés were sent out on behalf of more than 40,000 fictitious applicants of different ages for thousands of low-skill jobs like janitors, administrative assistants and retail sales clerks in 12 cities. In general, the older they were, the fewer callbacks they got.
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  • Those in their 60s “never do better, and often do worse,” than those a decade or two younger, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the research.It is toughest for women, who suffer more age discrimination than men starting in their 40s, the researchers found. “The evidence of age discrimination against women kind of pops out in every study,” Mr. Neumark said.
  • As for Mr. Adair, he said he had been through the same job-application routine so many times that it felt like “Groundhog Day.” Over the years, he consulted three lawyers about age discrimination. Each time, they advised that an individual lawsuit would not be worth the legal costs.
  • With a small pension and Social Security, he said, he and his wife are “just getting by.”“It’s devastating,” Mr. Adair said. “You go through the stages just like dying. First you can’t believe it. You’re so sure and your wife is so sure, and even the recruiter is. Then you get mad.” By the end, you feel like giving up, he said.Wanted: Greener EmployeesHiring complaints and lawsuits are rarely filed because they are difficult to prove and the cost is high, said Robert E. Weisberg, a regional attorney with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Florida.
  • To bring a case against Seasons 52, a national restaurant chain, Mr. Weisberg said, the commission looked to establish a pattern of bias over a period of years by combining statistical analyses with testimony from applicants.The agency examined whether the chain could have hired so few applicants 40 or older if there had been no age discrimination, and calculated the odds at less than one in 10,000, according to court documents. The commission also collected affidavits from 139 applicants at 35 restaurants.George Simmons was 45 when he applied at a Seasons 52 in Lone Tree, Colo., in 2014. “My interview was going well until the interviewer asked me my age,” he stated. After he answered, he said, he was shown the door. “I asked what was the problem,” he said, “and the interviewer responded that the restaurant was looking for younger people.”
  • Heidi Barsaloux was 44 when she applied for a bartender position at a Seasons 52 in Schaumburg, Ill., in 2010. “An interviewer told me that they were not looking for people with that much experience and wanted people who were more green,” she said.
  • A third applicant was told, “We are not looking for old white guys.”Ultimately, the chain, part of Darden Restaurants, agreed last year to pay $2.85 million and hire a monitor to prevent discrimination against applicants over 40. As part of the settlement, the chain denied any wrongdoing.There have been other legal offensives.The Communications Workers of America has filed a lawsuit on behalf of millions of older Americans against Amazon, T-Mobile and Cox Communications, accusing them and hundreds of other major employers of systematic age discrimination in hiring based on targeted online advertising.
  • The union and several workers have also filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against more than 70 employers and employment agencies related to age discrimination in recruiting. It expects that some of those will turn into class-action lawsuits.By exposing so much of the help-wanted process on the internet, “the transformation to digital recruiting has shined a spotlight on how discrimination happens, and it’s made it much easier to do so,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer at Outten & Golden working with the union. “We’re going to start going after these companies, one by one.”And in a broad settlement with civil rights groups and the union, Facebook agreed to eliminate the ability of advertisers to screen out minority groups, women or older job seekers from seeing particular help-wanted listings.
  • “We want the E.E.O.C. to declare that this type of exclusionary advertising is unlawful” on any online platform, Mr. Romer-Friedman said.Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, said the company had taken steps to combat hiring discrimination and was exploring what more to do.A Cap on ExperienceDale E. Kleber had been out of work for three years when he saw a posting in 2014 for a legal position at CareFusion, a medical technology company. At 58, with three of his four children living at home, in a suburb of Chicago, he was feeling the financial strain of prolonged unemployment.So even though the ad specified that applicants should have no more than seven years of experience, Mr. Kleber applied. CareFusion ended up hiring a 29-year-old.
  • Mr. Kleber, a veteran lawyer and former general counsel of a national dairy and food company, sued, arguing that a limit on experience effectively ruled out older applicants.“Litigation is a terrible way to settle disputes,” said Mr. Kleber, who during his career had defended companies against complaints filed with the E.E.O.C. “It’s a very uncertain process, it is fraught with risk, and sometimes it comes out wrong.”Putting a cap on experience, though, “just seemed so egregious,” he said.The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did not agree. In a ruling this year supporting CareFusion, it stated that recruiting practices that have the effect of screening out older applicants — what is known in legal terms as having a “disparate impact” — did not violate the law.
  • The decision mirrored one involving R. J. Reynolds Tobacco made earlier by the Court of Appeals for 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which the Supreme Court declined to review. It ruled that unlike employees already on the payroll who can show that a policy has a negative impact on a group regardless of the motivation, applicants would have to prove intentional discrimination.Troy Kirkpatrick, a spokesman for Becton Dickinson and Company, which owns CareFusion, said, “We are deeply committed to providing equal employment opportunities and a workplace free from discrimination, and as such we are pleased with the decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.”In April, Mr. Kleber and the AARP Foundation asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case.“It defies common sense,” Mr. Kleber said, to think Congress “intended to offer greater legal protections to people who have jobs than people looking for jobs” when it passed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1967.
  • Other older workers and advocates elsewhere are making the same argument, pushing for a broader interpretation of the law.In a federal court in California, a class-action lawsuit against the global accounting firm PwC that claims “substantial evidence of age disparities in hiring” was certified in April. The company noted on its career website and in reports that the average age of its 220,000-member work force was 27, and that 80 percent of the staff members were millennials (born after 1981).PwC responded that the company’s “hiring practices are merit-based and have nothing to do with age.” It added, “The plaintiffs’ accusations are false, and we will prove that in court.”
Carri Bugbee

Shown the Door, Older Workers Find Bias Hard to Prove - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-find-bias-hard-to-prove.html

shared by Carri Bugbee on 07 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Spirit AeroSystems — formed from Boeing’s 2005 sale of its Wichita division and Oklahoma operations — is an important supplier for Boeing, its biggest customer, and a rival, Airbus, chalking up nearly $1.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year.When it laid off 360 workers in summer 2013, the company was not closing down or moving jobs to Mexico or anywhere else. Spirit, which has 11,000 employees in Wichita and operations in Europe and Asia, said layoffs among its salaried employees and managers were necessary to remain competitive.
  • Today, a lawsuit filed by 70 former employees, including Ms. Raymond, is in proceedings in the Federal District Court in Wichita. The lawsuit was cleared first by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which must decide the validity of any claim of age or disability discrimination before it can proceed.The workers brought the suit after discovering that nearly half — or 164 — of those in the 2013 layoffs were 40 or older, the age that initiates federal age discrimination law protections. And workers charge that they were singled out, in addition, because either they or their spouses had serious medical conditions.
  • Such lawsuits are popping up as the nation’s work force ages and as many longtime workers claim that they are being deliberately targeted for such reductions.
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  • “Once layoffs were done by reverse seniority. It was last in, first out, so the more senior workers kept their jobs,” said Robert J. Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University, who studies the country’s growth and work force productivity.“Now we’re seeing a transition from the age of favoritism to that of age discrimination,” Mr. Gordon said, “because newer workers are allowed to stay on while more costly, older workers are let go.”
  • One of the few recourses for employees is to file a job discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
  • In recent years, the number of filings has hovered in the 21,000 range, and age discrimination accounts for nearly a quarter of the overall complaints filed with the agency
  • he Age Discrimination in Employment Act — which Congress passed a half-century ago — may not be up to the task
  • nd a 2009 Supreme Court ruling has made proving age discrimination more difficult legally.
  • proving age bias is difficult. Even companies that decide that older workers are too expensive, with their larger paychecks and costlier health insurance, rarely detail this in internal documents or emails. And court rulings have given companies significant leeway to defend against such lawsuits.
  • Age-related harassment complaints, especially remarks that belittle or demean longtime workers’ skills or contributions, are up noticeably. They rose to 4,185 last year, an increase of almost 14 percent since 2011, according to E.E.O.C. data.
  • But under the law, comments that perpetuate stereotypes — like “older workers are deadwood” — do not carry a stigma equal to that of similar remarks on race or sex. While such demeaning remarks are not seen as conclusive proof of bias, they can help persuade a fact-finder, mediator or court that some wrongdoing has occurred in a workplace.
  • In Wichita, dozens of laid-off Spirit employees who are challenging their layoffs say their situation was exacerbated by the company’s use of personal medical information to single them out for layoffs.
  • A short time before the dismissals, they said in legal papers, Spirit switched to self-paid medical insurance, giving it an incentive to jettison higher-risk or sick employees to save money, they say.Then a few months after the 2013 layoffs, Spirit held a job fair to recruit for empty jobs, some of which appeared to have the same or very similar duties to the positions that had been vacated.But, according to Ms. Raymond and others, the company, Wichita’s largest employer, with few exceptions, would not accept résumés, interview or rehire the discharged workers.
Carri Bugbee

Anita Hill: Class Actions Could Fight Discrimination in Tech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ould-take-sexism-to-court.html

tech women harassment google silicon valley STEM technology

shared by Carri Bugbee on 10 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • The recent leak of a Google engineer’s screed against the company’s diversity initiatives is a reminder that the notion of Silicon Valley as the seat of human progress is a myth — at least when it comes to the way the women behind the latest in technology are treated.The tech industry is stuck in the past, more closely resembling “Mad Men”-era Madison Avenue or 1980s Wall Street than a modern egalitarian society. It may take the force of our legal system to change that.
  • While the document may be unusual in its explicit embrace of this kind of backward thinking, the attitudes that underlie it are nothing new in Silicon Valley.
  • Sadly, these types of cases represent only one element of the industrywide discrimination against women in tech. There’s also an alarming gap in pay and promotions, which has devastating effects on women’s careers.
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  • In the tech industry, women under 25 earn on average 29 percent less than their male counterparts. Women of all ages receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company 63 percent of the time. They hold only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies and own only 5 percent of tech start-ups. Only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms are women. It is no wonder that the rate at which women quit tech jobs (41 percent) is more than twice as high as the corresponding rate for men.
  • By and large, women are the only ones distressed by such dynamics. Eighty-two percent of men working for start-ups agree that their companies already spend the “right amount of time” addressing diversity. Nearly half of women — 40 percent — disagree, saying inadequate time is devoted.
  • We can’t afford to wait for the tech industry to police itself — and there are few indications that it will ever do so. Consider what lawyers for Google said in May, in testimony in a suit alleging wage discrimination against women: It would be too burdensome for the company to collect data on salaries.
  • t’s hard to foresee serious government intervention coming from the current administration. Nor can we wait for bad press and shareholder class actions to force out negligent chief executives responsible for cultures of inequality.Instead, women in the industry should collectively consider their legal options. Top among these would be class-action discrimination cases against employers.
  • The tech sector is not the first white-collar “boys’ club” to demand an industrywide correction. In the 1990s, Wall Street firms faced a slew of class-action discrimination lawsuits.
  • The lesson of these cases is clear: Class-action lawsuits can force industrywide change, even in the most entrenched, male-dominated industries.
  • Women in tech no doubt have hurdles to bringing class-action lawsuits, including the requisite preponderance of statistical evidence and the prevalence of confidentiality clauses and arbitration agreements, which are, in effect, designed to pre-empt class actions. But this challenge doesn’t mean the suits cannot be brought, or won. This is a route that the women of Silicon Valley should consider, especially if regulation is not an immediate and viable solution.
  • Advancing women’s equality, which includes minimizing the gender gap in labor force participation, holds the potential to add $12 trillion to global G.D.P. by 2025.
Carri Bugbee

A template for investor/founder sexual harassment policy | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...harassment-policy-template

investor founder harassment policy startups women entrepreneurs female founders sexism silicon valley tech

shared by Carri Bugbee on 06 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Founders should expect and push their investors or those they consider partnering with to have made a clear commitment to eliminating harassment. Those looking to support this drive can share this template with the hashtag #HarassmentPolicy. 
  • Statement of values regarding why protecting founders from harassment by investors is necessary due to the imbalanced power dynamic Explanation that standard  sexual harassment law does not adequately cover the investor/founder relationship, so voluntary policy is needed Recognition that harassment and discrimination perpetrators and recipients can be of any gender or identity, though most often women are harassed by men Discussion of the need for a culture of explicit consent
  • Zero-tolerance for investors overtly sexually assaulting, harassing, or discriminating against founders or their teams
Carri Bugbee

Closing the gender gap in venture capital deserves immediate attention - Recode - 2 views

www.recode.net/...y-minshew-gouw-fonstad-hoffman

gender venture venture capital sexism female women silicon valley tech entrepreneurs startups

shared by Carri Bugbee on 13 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Last year, female founders received about 2 percent of venture capital funding — and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. While the average investment in companies led by men jumped 12 percent, to $10.9 million, the average investment in companies led by women dropped 26 percent, to $4.5 million. Statistics tell us that funders award women founders just a quarter of the funding they ask for. Male founders, meanwhile, are getting half.
  • only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture firms are women. Fewer than two in five firms had even a single female partner.
  • there is a lot of evidence that unconscious biases are impacting the way female founders are received. Consider, for example, the finding that investors tend to describe young male entrepreneurs as “promising,” and young female entrepreneurs as “inexperienced.” Or that the managing partner of one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms admitted that one of the things he looks for when deciding whether to invest is an entrepreneur who fits the Gates, Bezos, Andreessen or Google model — which is to say, “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.”
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  • We also need to encourage better measurement and data on diversity in the venture and startup ecosystem. Project Include has designed some helpful frameworks and recommendations — and funds like Reach Capital and First Round Capital are ably demonstrating what these efforts look like in action.
  • At the VC level, funds should commit to treating harassment and discrimination against female founders with the same legal protections as harassment and discrimination against employees. Commit to a clear code of conduct, share it openly with your team and portfolio,
  • If your company screens for “culture fit,” look closely at how that operates: Is it thoughtfully assessed based on company values, or has it become an excuse for people to prefer those “like them”? Anything involving “I would get a beer with this person” is a sign that unconscious bias is alive and well.
  • What often gets lost when you have a persistency in underclass representation — be it women, minorities, introverts, etc. — is that the persistency in and of itself becomes justification for the outcome. In other words, if 7 percent of the venture industry is women and has been for decades, it must be something inherent to women in tech, not conditions or other factors. Only by examining that narrative and challenging it with experimentation, initiatives and constantly evaluating results can we drive systemic change in our industry.
  • referring to “the pipeline problem” is really just a way of saying, “It’s not my problem.”
  • And, frankly, anyone who says this is also saying, “I'm okay with sexism. I'm okay with inequity.”
  • According to a 2016 survey produced by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte Consulting, women make up just 11 percent of partners at venture investment firms. And of the $60 billion in funding the industry disbursed in 2015, female founders received just 7 percent.
Carri Bugbee

Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got 'Greedy.' - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hours-greedy-professions.html

women female gender

shared by Carri Bugbee on 28 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 28 Apr 19
     
    American women of working age are the most educated ever. Yet it's the most educated women who face the biggest gender gaps in seniority and pay: At the top of their fields, they represent just 5 percent of big company chief executives and a quarter of the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. There are many causes of the gap, like discrimination and a lack of family-friendly policies. But recently, mounting evidence has led economists and sociologists to converge on a major driver - one that ostensibly has nothing to do with gender. The returns to working long, inflexible hours have greatly increased. This is particularly true in managerial jobs and what social scientists call the greedy professions, like finance, law and consulting - an unintentional side effect of the nation's embrace of a winner-take-all economy. It's so powerful, researchers say, that it has canceled the effect of women's educational gains. You have 1 free article remaining. Subscribe to The Times Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother. [Sign up for In Her Words, a twice-weekly newsletter on women, gender and society.] This is not about educated women opting out of work (they are the least likely to stop working after having children, even if they move to less demanding jobs). It's about how the nature of work has changed in ways that push couples who have equal career potential to take on unequal roles. "Because of rising inequality, if you put in the extra hours, if you're around for the Sunday evening discussion, you'll get a lot more," said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who is writing a book on the topic. To maximize
Carri Bugbee

Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517788

startups women entrepreneurs female founders sexism silicon valley tech racism

shared by Carri Bugbee on 04 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • it was a reminder that as a woman in tech, she should be prepared to have her authority questioned at any moment, even by some guy trying to get a job at her company.
  • at some point, something inside her broke. Maybe it was being at tech conferences and hearing herself, the “elder stateswoman,” warning younger women to cover their drinks, because such conferences—known for alcohol, after-parties, and hot women at product booths—have been breeding grounds for unwanted sexual advances and assaults, and you never knew whether some jerk might put something in your cocktail. She couldn’t believe that women still had to worry about such things; that they still got asked to fetch coffee; that she still heard talk about how hiring women or people of color entailed “lowering the bar”; that women still, often, felt silenced or attacked when expressing opinions online.
  • At one party, the founder of a start-up told Wu she’d need to spend “intimate time” with him to get in on his deal. An angel investor leading a different deal told her something similar. She became a master of warm, but firm, self-extrication.
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  • Wu is struck by “the countless times I’ve had to move a man’s hand from my thigh (or back or shoulder or hair or arm) during a meeting (or networking event or professional lunch or brainstorming session or pitch meeting) without seeming confrontational (or bitchy or rejecting or demanding or aggressive).” In a land of grand ideas and grander funding proposals, she found that the ability to neatly reject a man’s advances without injuring his ego is “a pretty important skill that I would bet most successful women in our industry have.”
  • a recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions.
  • nly about a quarter of U.S. computing and mathematical jobs—a fraction that has actually fallen slightly over the past 15 years, even as women have made big strides in other fields. Women not only are hired in lower numbers than men are; they also leave tech at more than twice the rate men do.
  • Studies show that women who work in tech are interrupted in meetings more often than men. They are evaluated on their personality in a way that men are not. They are less likely to get funding from venture capitalists, who, studies also show, find pitches delivered by men—especially handsome men—more persuasive. And in a particularly cruel irony, women’s contributions to open-source software are accepted more often than men’s are, but only if their gender is unknown.
  • For women of color, the cumulative effect of these slights is compounded by a striking lack of racial diversity—and all that attends it
  • Three years in, Silicon Valley diversity conferences and training sessions abound; a cottage industry of consultants and software makers has sprung up to offer solutions. Some of those fixes have already started filtering out to workplaces beyond the tech world, because Silicon Valley is nothing if not evangelical.
  • The industry’s diversity numbers have barely budged, and many women say that while sexism has become somewhat less overt, it’s just as pernicious as ever.
  • When Silicon Valley was emerging, after World War II, software programming was considered rote and unglamorous, somewhat secretarial—and therefore suitable for women. The glittering future, it was thought, lay in hardware. But once software revealed its potential—and profitability—the guys flooded in and coding became a male realm.
  • The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
  • “workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career” are the main reasons women leave. “Undermining behavior from managers” is a major factor.
  • gender bias is a big problem in start-ups, which are frequently run by brotherhoods of young men—in many cases friends or roommates—straight out of elite colleges. In 2014, for instance, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel was two years out of Stanford and already leading a $10 billion company when his frat-boy-at-his-misogynistic-worst undergraduate emails were published and went viral. In them, his only slightly younger self joked about shooting lasers at “fat girls,” described a Stanford dean as “dean-julie-show-us-your-tits,” and for good measure, saluted another fraternity because it had decided to “stop being gay.”
  • “I, and most women I know, have been a party to at least some sexist or discriminatory behavior in the workplace,” she wrote, explaining that she and many other women had witnessed things like “locker-room discussion during travel with colleagues,” which they tried to brush aside, since “any individual act seems silly to complain about.” The Pao trial, however, shifted her attitude.
  • Eighty-four percent of the respondents had been told they were too aggressive; 66 percent had felt excluded from key networking opportunities because of their gender; 90 percent had witnessed sexist behavior at conferences and company off-site meetings; 88 percent had had clients and colleagues direct questions to male peers that should have been addressed to them; and 60 percent had fended off unwanted sexual advances (in most cases from a superior). Of those women, one-third said they had feared for their personal safety.
  • many people there believe—despite evidence everywhere to the contrary—that tech is a meritocracy. Ironically enough, this very belief can perpetuate inequality. A 2010 study, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” found that in cultures that espouse meritocracy, managers may in fact “show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women.”
  • telling participants that their company valued merit-based decisions only increased the likelihood of their giving higher bonuses to the men.
  • a 2015 study published in Science confirmed that computer science and certain other fields, including physics, math, and philosophy, fetishize “brilliance,” cultivating the idea that potential is inborn. The report concluded that these fields tend to be problematic for women, owing to a stubborn assumption that genius is a male trait.
  • “The more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female PhDs,” the study found, pointing out that the same pattern held for African Americans. Because both groups still tend to be “stereotyped as lacking innate intellectual talent,”
  • At Google, the initial tally showed that just 17 percent of its technical employees were women. The female technical force was 10 percent at Twitter, 15 percent at Facebook, and 20 percent at Apple.
  • Lately, unconscious-bias training has emerged as a ubiquitous fix for Silicon Valley’s diversity deficit. It’s diversity training for the new millennium, in which people are made aware of their own hidden biases.
  • “That sort of discipline really, really resonated effectively with the hard scientists we have here.” Facebook put unconscious-bias training front and center in its diversity efforts, too; both companies have posted online videos of their training modules, to offer a model for other workplaces. Since then, talk of unconscious bias has spread through Silicon Valley like—well, like a virus.
  • Too many decisions are made on gut instinct, the training argues: A time-pressed hiring manager looks at a résumé and sees a certain fraternity or hobby, or a conventionally white or male name, and bang—thanks to the unconscious brain making shortcuts, that person gets an interview
  • “Virtually every company I know of is deploying unconscious-bias training,” says Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute. “It’s a fast and feel-good kind of training that helps you feel like you’re making a difference.”
  • Unconscious-bias training may not work. Some think it could even backfire.
  • even just talking too much about gender inequities can serve to normalize them: When you say over and over that women come up against a glass ceiling, people begin to accept that, yes, women come up against a glass ceiling—and that’s just the way it is.
  • “You would think all things are equal,” she said, “but these backdoor conversations are happening in settings that women are not invited to. The whole boys’-club thing still applies.
  • Mike Eynon, wrote in a Medium post that bias training makes “us white guys feel better” and lets the “privileged realize everyone has bias and they aren’t at fault,” while nothing changes for discriminated groups.
  • if you can’t easily dispel bias, what you can do is engineer a set of structural changes that prevent people from acting on it.
  • the first 20 seconds often predict the outcome of a 20-minute interview.
  • The problem, he wrote, is that such quick impressions are meaningless. He added that Google strongly encourages interviewers to use a combination of skill assessments and standard questions rather than relying on subjective impressions.
  • It is, for example, a hallowed tradition that in job interviews, engineers are expected to stand up and code on whiteboards, a high-pressure situation that works to the disadvantage of those who feel out of place. Indeed, whiteboard sessions are rife with opportunities for biased judgment.
  • “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,” she says. “Managers will take it seriously.”
Carri Bugbee

Over-60s being overlooked for job interviews 'because of their age' - Starts at 60 - 0 views

startsat60.com/...cruitment-too-old-finding-work

shared by Carri Bugbee on 01 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • “Our position is that ageism is not a highly recognised form of prejudice or discrimination, it’s very normalised, it’s so much a part of our language and what we’ve grown up with around what it means to get older. But it just doesn’t acknowledge the changing realities about what it means to get older.
  • “Essentially we think of ageism in three aspects; the prejudicial attitudes towards older people, discriminatory practices, so that might be employment practices, but also institutional practices and policies, and the choices that older people have.”
Carri Bugbee

Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech | Technology | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-diversity-black-women-workers

shared by Carri Bugbee on 08 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Google’s workforce is, by its own accounting, 69% male and just 2% African American. Just 20% of technical jobs are held by women. Google may be unequivocal in its “belief” about diversity, but the figures make its shortcomings clear. The company tends to hire white and Asian men over women and other racial minorities.
  • ack of diversity in Silicon Valley is an old story. Eighteen years ago, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson first launched a campaign to encourage the region’s tech companies to hire black and Latino workers.
  • Google is the subject of an investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has accused the technology corporation of systematically discriminating against women (the company denies the charge.)
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  • the tech industry has lately been shaken by allegations that high-profile venture capitalists have abused their position to prey on female startup entrepreneurs.
  • Meanwhile, the representation of black, Latino, and female employees at top Silicon Valley technology firms remains so disproportionately low that a government report published last year described the problem with the same word that Jackson uses: “segregation”. For all its forward looking technologies, Silicon Valley is in many ways mired in the ugliest practices of the American past.
  • The DC area is a kind of mirror image to Silicon Valley when it comes to hiring African Americans. Overall, blacks make up 14.4% of the workforce nationwide and 7.4% of high-tech employment. In the DC metro area, which includes parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, blacks hold 17.3% of the jobs in 12 computing occupations, according to government employment data. But cross over to the west coast, and in Silicon Valley African Americans hold just 2.7% of the jobs in the same categories. At premiere employers like Google and Facebook, black representation in technical jobs drops below 2%.
  • the fact that northern California’s workforce is heavily Latino (more than 20%) is not reflected in the area’s tech companies (about 6% Latino).
  • Where the DC tech industry grew in a symbiotic relationship with government, many of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were techno-libertarians, ideologically opposed to government regulation and oversight.
  • Tech leaders like McNealy and Cypress Industries CEO TJ Rodgers were openly hostile to the idea of consciously diverse hiring. Rodgers wrote an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News in 1999 declaring that “the only sharecropper I know is my dad” and calling Jackson “a hustler who exploits white shame for his own financial and political ends”.
  • At the top 75 companies in Silicon Valley, only 3% of employees are black, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Premier employers Facebook and Google have yet to crack 2% in technical jobs.
  • It’s not the fault of tech companies that the pipeline is overwhelmingly filled with white and Asian people, Silicon Valley’s defenders claim.
  • But there’s a problem with that argument: black students are earning computer science degrees at higher rates than they are being hired by Silicon Valley companies. In 2014, they received 9.7% of the bachelor degrees awarded in computer science, according to the National Science Foundation.
  • “How difficult do you think it would be to go to an engineering meeting and tell all these people who went to Cal, Stanford, and MIT that the person coming from the University of Texas El Paso or a community college can do their job as well as they can?” Miley asked. “You will not be able to convince them of that. They don’t want to believe that they’re not special.”
  • “Amongst the African American students that I engage with, I don’t hear many of them aspiring to work at Google.” he said. “They hear Silicon Valley and they think, ‘I’m not going to see people like me.’”
Carri Bugbee

The Google affair bares Silicon Valley's trust deficit - 0 views

www.ft.com/...10-7cfe-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c

google silicon valley sexism women female harassment venture capitalists tech entrepreneurs founders

shared by Carri Bugbee on 11 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Male bias? That was not the Valley’s fault; women just would not knuckle down and get engineering degrees.
  • Moreover, Mr Damore’s outburst backfired, drawing attention not to his grievance but to his employer’s grievous lack of diversity. The company’s leadership is 75 per cent male. A mere 20 per cent of its engineering team — where most of the clout resides — are female. In an ongoing lawsuit, the Department of Labor claimed that “compensation disparities” are systemic across its workforce.
  • This year, Uber — one of the most highly valued private companies in Silicon Valley — lost 20 of its employees, a board member, and its chief executive officer after numerous scandals involving bullying, sexual harassment and even interference in investigation of a rape by a driver in India. In the computer games industry, the Gamergate campaign publicly targeted women with harassment, bullying and threats of rape.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Around the world, the tech industry has failed to prove itself an open, exciting place for women to work, to be taken seriously and to advance.
  • The temptation of huge financial gains, and a quasi-religious faith in the hyper-capitalism of Ayn Rand, has brought in a new, macho generation with no time for any principle beyond self-interest.
  • A frat boy culture of bullying and exclusivity is accompanied by aggressive attempts to avoid tax. The sector is secretive in its attempts to hoard and capitalise on the private data of its customers. It balks at legitimate government attempts at accountability and restraint.
  • All this calls into question the legitimacy of the industry and its new role as one of the most powerful movers in the global economy, and in wider society.
  • When commentators routinely compare Silicon Valley today with the arrogance, isolation and destructive might of Wall Street before the crash 10 years ago this week, it is time to start thinking about reputation — and what might ensue when the glamorous superficial allure of these tech giants wears off.
Carri Bugbee

The Ways Tech Companies Alienate Women - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ey-women-hiring-diversity.html

tech sexism female silicon valley entrepreneurs harassment technology discrimination

shared by Carri Bugbee on 15 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • at least one small component of this problem is immediately solvable: Many companies are alienating the qualified women who want to work for them, and who they want to hire, during the interview process itself.
  • While Silicon Valley companies are enthusiastically putting money into STEM programs in schools and nonprofits focused on diversity, with the goal of creating a richer pipeline of talent in 10 years, they’re missing opportunities to make simple, immediate improvements by changing how they communicate with women who are sitting across the table from them now.
  • here’s how it usually goes in the introductory meeting: A well-meaning executive boasts that his company has been financially supporting a number of nonprofit coding organizations that aim to train female engineers. He tells us he’ll have a booth at the Grace Hopper conference, the largest annual gathering of women in tech. He complains about how hard it is to “move the needle” on diversity numbers, especially when a staff is in the thousands.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • what the executives don’t give as much thought to are some of the simplest determinants of how successful a company will be in hiring diverse candidates. Will women have any input in the hiring process? Will the interview panels be diverse? Will current female employees be available to speak to candidates about their experiences? Many times, the answer to each of these questions is no, and the resistance to make simple changes in these areas is striking.
  • We have to tell these companies to talk just as proudly about their parental-leave policies, child-care programs and breast-pumping rooms. At the very least, they need to communicate that their workplaces have cultures where women are valued. They need to show they’re not places where attitudes like that of the now-infamous Google engineer who wrote a memo questioning women’s fitness for tech jobs dominate.
  • executives balk at my suggestions and even wonder if explicitly talking about the place of women is sexist. But I remind them that when it comes to gender, they have to play catch-up, after long histories of eroding trust
  • Silicon Valley companies are in love with themselves and don’t understand why the love isn’t always returned by the few women to whom they extend employment offers.
  • I’m often asked which companies are getting diversity and inclusion right in Silicon Valley and across the country. Most aren’t.
Carri Bugbee

The next #MeToo movement: Older women confront ageism - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

www.chicagotribune.com/...ation-0321-20190320-story.html

shared by Carri Bugbee on 31 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 31 Jan 20
     
    Similar to the shame women felt about sexual harassment prior to the #MeToo movement, many professional women remain silent when subjected to ageist behavior in the workplace. They choose silence, afraid to complain and draw attention to their age for fear they'll lose their jobs. Because then what? For many, it's almost impossible to get rehired as a woman over 50.
Carri Bugbee

Part II: Experience vs. Ageism in Communications - Mark Story's Web Site - 0 views

www.markstory.me/...ageism-in-comms-part-ii

shared by Carri Bugbee on 17 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • , ageism (intentionally not hiring people over a certain age – in communications and social media sometimes, 50, sometimes, 40, sometimes even 30) – does not only exist, it is prevalent.
  • At 52, I was by far BuzzFeed’s oldest employee. The under-30 editors there used ‘The Olds or ‘Olds’ internally (sometimes even in posts) as shorthand for anybody above the age of their demographic target, people who just didn’t ‘get’ it.
  • Digiday has been able to discern a growing phenomenon of agency discrimination against employees over the age of 50.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • If is not uncommon to see communications or social jobs advertised encouraging “digital natives” to apply (here are all of the jobs on Indeed.com with those words in the job description, including one for Amazon.com).  I have sadly learned that it is code for (“if you are over 30, don’t bother.”).
Carri Bugbee

Proposed California Law Targets Sexual Harassment in Venture Capital | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-harassment-in-venture-capital

shared by Carri Bugbee on 23 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • A California state senator says she will introduce legislation to clarify legal protections for entrepreneurs facing sexual harassment. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson says the proposal, which she revealed Thursday, is in response to “recent and stunning” allegations by women entrepreneurs of harassment by venture capitalists.
  • The proposal would amend California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sexual discrimination at California businesses, to clarify that it covers sexual harassment in relationships between entrepreneurs and potential investors. Current law specifies doctor-patient and attorney-client relationships, but does not explicitly mention entrepreneurs and potential investors.
  • Equal Rights Advocates, a national nonprofit that champions gender rights in workplaces and schools, will support the measure. The organization has previously worked with Jackson to successfully strengthen California’s Equal Pay Law.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The tech industry “can’t claim to lead innovation at the same time it lives in the dark ages about the value of women and their ability,”
  • The National Venture Capital Association, an industry trade group, welcomes these legislative efforts
Carri Bugbee

Under Silicon Valley's Rough Turf, Tunnels of Women's Networks Spread | Xconomy - 0 views

www.xconomy.com/...nels-of-womens-networks-spread

female women entrepreneurs sexism startups venture capitalists harassment founders tech silicon valley

shared by Carri Bugbee on 01 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • women aren’t facing these challenges alone, female entrepreneurs say—not if they tap into the dense ecosystem of engineers’ groups, startup founders’ organizations, meet-ups, conferences, mentoring relationships, and female-friendly investors that have evolved in parallel with established Silicon Valley institutions mostly staffed by men.
  • women’s groups—representing thousands of members—seem energized by the eruptions of public attention to gender discrimination and harassment that arose after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and other women accused powerful men in the tech industry of pressuring them sexually, touching, or groping them.
  • Even if a male venture partner or company executive hasn’t been outed on the front page of a national newspaper, his behavior might already be the subject of scorching accounts by women on their group channels, possibly damaging his reputation among hundreds or thousands of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This could come as a shock to some of those men if they haven’t been directly confronted about their conduct.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A Geek Feminism wiki is keeping an annotated list of news reports on VCs accused of harassment and gender or racial bias.
  • The FairFunders group plans to gather facts for a profile of each investment firm, such as its ratio of female partners, and the number of women-led companies it has backed.
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