Amazon Embodies the Gender Gap in Tech 302
New submitter chpoot writes: "The Guardian reveals the gender breakdown among Amazon's management 'S Team.' At one end of the team of 132 are 12 secretaries. All are female. At the other end are 12 who report directly to Jeff Bezos. All are male. Of the 119 remaining when Bezos and the secretaries are put to one side, 18 are female. Amazon, of course, grew out of book selling. Book selling, publishing, and writing have all a fairly admirable tradition of employing women. In its attempts to overthrow traditional book selling, Amazon seems to have been particularly successful in subverting that part of the tradition."
Re:how come we never hear (Score:2, Informative)
My personal experience is that most of the female engineers I know, like real engineers with a PE, are really hard workers and can go toe to toe with any of the men in the same field. In IT, particularly programming, women don't seem to measure up. I don't know why, maybe it's lack of interest, worse culture, etc.
Re: And this is just fine. (Score:0, Informative)
Apparently you have not worked at Amazon. I have. Amazon is the most sexist place I've have ever seen, and I'm saying this as a man. Amazon has a huge selection bias when it comes to hiring and promoting. The few women that were there were treated as more junior and taken less seriously than men of the same experience, education, and abilities. And if you think Amazon promotes the best and most qualified (regardless of gender), you don't know the Amazon I do...
It comes down to this an awful lot (Score:4, Informative)
That's the situation we have at work. I work at an IT department, and we are all men. Why? Because that's basically all that apply. In the last round of hiring there weren't any women. Ok well I could be clear that I can't say that for sure: The three candidates we picked to interview were all men, and the names on the resumes of the other 20-ish that made it past HR sounded male. We don't ask for pictures or anything so there could have been women in that mix, I don't know. Also I don't know who HR filtered, as they don't pass those on (hence the filtering).
We have had a woman work for us before. Our previous web dev was a woman. She was the only woman to apply, and she was hired (not because she was a woman, because she was the best). However, after about a year her fiance took a job in New York and she moved off with him. In the next round of hiring for that, it was all men.
We can't hire people who don't apply. We really don't have the opportunity to discriminate based on gender because there are just almost no female applicants. I suppose, in theory, HR could be discriminating on our behalf but I find that unlikely because:
1) We are a large state agency and thus have very strong anti-discrimination/EEO rules.
2) HR has quite a few women on staff, perhaps the majority.
3) Most importantly: All HR really does is check qualifications and pass on resumes that seem to meet the minimums for the job. They tend to know fuck-all about the position, it is just match our minimums list vs the resume.
So ya, 100% of the IT people in our college are male, and about 90% of the secretaries are female. Well, in the case of IT, that's because of who applies. We can't go and make women apply.