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."
Hmm.. (Score:5, Funny)
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I guess this means my prime subscription will never include snu-snu.
And Amazon's not the only one either! (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also a surprisingly low percentage of female garbage collectors.
Since that particular job requires very little education, it would be far easier to start there when trying to close the gender gap.
Why aren't we?
Re:And Amazon's not the only one either! (Score:4, Interesting)
Rubbish collection isn't an attractive job, do there is little advocacy to address the gender divide. Turns out there is more interest in equality when there is more interest in the unequal thing. Talk about stating the obvious.
Still, one would hope that if a woman wanted to do that job she would not be discouraged, and if she were people would be rightly upset about that.
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Most of the people working for Amazon are box shifters in warehouses. A lot of people claim those are de facto sweatshops.
http://www.mcall.com/news/loca... [mcall.com]
So women still want to work there?
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Purely out of curiosity: what percentage of this "management 'S' team", that the article refers to, are working as box shifters?
Re:And Amazon's not the only one either! (Score:5, Interesting)
Purely out of curiosity: what percentage of this "management 'S' team", that the article refers to, are working as box shifters?
It's amazing to me how so many people in these threads keep missing each others' points.
Like GP, and apparently the parent commenter, who seem to have totally WHOOSHED the point that "gender inequality" is usually only raised when the subject is attractive, well-paying jobs, which is hypocrisy. Equality is equality, including garbage collection. Anything else is inequality, by definition.
This only serves to reinforce the same old point I have been making for many years: most "feminists" I have met did not really want equality; they wanted advantage.
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Until you long to become a makeup counter salesman or birth a child, there will be some jobs that will attract nobody.
Sitting in a cube working on spreadsheets should be reserved for the most capable.
What makes you think nobody wants to do either of those jobs? Just because you don't doesn't mean other people don't.
I have a male friend who loves to sell makeup. I also know plenty of people (male and female) who want to have the childbirth experience.
On that same note, you couldn't pay me enough to sit in a cube and work on a spreadsheet all day.
One of the main reason that there are gender difference in jobs is that men and women like to do different things and pick
their jobs and careers accordingly.
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So women still want to work there?
What a stupid question. Yes, I think women should be given equal opportunities to work in most jobs. No, I don't think anyone, of either gender, should work in a sweatshop.
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Turns out there is more interest in equality when there is more interest in the unequal thing.
Exactly, feminism is all about money rather than equality.
Amazon just hired the best people for the job regardless of gender. This to me would be the most likely scenario, although if it turns out that they have engaged in discriminatory hiring practices I'll happily change my tune. It's the same situation as the pay gap myth, once you factor in hours worked, experience and qualifications the pay difference disappears.
This story is another feminist hit piece angling for quotas in private companies, which is
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Frankly, in 2014, any transsexuals and one-legged midgets should be prepared to have a tougher go of it than the majority.
Is it fair? No, the fair is in October, that's just life...
Anyone who is very different from the mean is simply going to have a harder time in life. But life is what you make of it, you can bitch and moan about it, or find your place and be accepted there and move on.
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Mod parent up, please.
I'm sick and tired of this thought process that there must be exactly X portion of a given race, gender, etc in a particular job field or working at a particular company to match the demographic portions of the overall society.
The fact is, not everybody wants to do these jobs in equal numbers. I recall not long ago a slashdot article mentioning the science of why given races/ethnicities prefer sticking together instead of intermingling (I'd get the link, but I don't want to take the ti
Re:And Amazon's not the only one either! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Venn diagram for "WOMAN" && "STRONG" && "NO EDUCATION" is smaller than the same for "MAN". Women tend to be more educated and weaker.
Educated and physically weak happen to align well with the stereotype of tech nerds.
Re:And Amazon's not the only one either! (Score:5, Interesting)
Women tend to be more educated and weaker.
Educated and physically weak happen to align well with the stereotype of tech nerds.
The types of education women tend to get on the other hand do not align with the types of education associated with tech nerds. No, your gender studies degree is not as valid as my programming experience.
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HR doesn't know jack shit.
About anything.
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Unfortunately they don't have to. In fact I believe a frontal lobotomy is a prerequisite for consideration of a position in HR.
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And this is why I don't do my hiring through HR.
People who care about a sheet of paper more than what a person is capable to do will get what they deserve.
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Try this [nsf.gov] on for size for US science and engineering degrees by gender. Here's the short version for bachelors degrees:
Agricultural sciences: slightly female
Biological sciences: strongly female
Atmospheric sciences: strongly male (but very small overall)
Earth and ocean sciences: strongly male
Computer sciences: strongly male
Mathematics: slightly male
Astronomy: strongly male (very small overall)
Chemistry: Parity. The parity persists through masters degrees but doctorates are strongly male. There has been roug
Why strong? Modern garbage collection automated (Score:2)
The Venn diagram for "WOMAN" && "STRONG" && "NO EDUCATION" is smaller than the same for "MAN".
And?
Our garbage collection service has a truck that hooks into an arm on the large garbage can they give us. The truck picks it up with the garbage person only jostling it into place slightly (sometimes not even that).'
Anything very large or heavy, they just leave behind... there are union rules on what they can lift you know.
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There's also a surprisingly low percentage of female garbage collectors.
Since that particular job requires very little education, it would be far easier to start there when trying to close the gender gap.
Why aren't we?
Different AC here. You'd be surprised - this IS happening, e.g. over here in Germany, with many larger cities explicitely trying to get more women into garbage collecting and related professions.
And the end result's the same as in all other professions: instead of being hired based on grades, competence, suitability for the job etc., people suddenly get hired based on gender, and men get rejected in favor of less-qualified women. Not everyone's happy with that: that is to say, men aren't. Women, by and larg
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Because garbage collection is not as influential or important as IT right now
We get it, you C the eternal truth. ;-)
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Teratogens are the concern but that only tends to turn up in specialist areas.
And this is just fine. (Score:2, Insightful)
The most qualified people rose to the top, regardless of their sex.
Amazon, nor any other company, owes it to gender ideologies to fulfill their delusion of complete gender equality.
Some genders are more skilled in certain areas and less skilled in others. Deal with it.
Re:And this is just fine. (Score:5, Interesting)
Childbirth is exactly one of the reasons why women are at a disadvantage. Because getting kids is actually considered a health risk, much like a bad back or failing heart would be. The mere fact that woman may get pregnant, have a child and would take time off to at least raise it for a few months is a risk that simply cannot happen to a man.
Or rather, if it ever happens to a man, I sure as HELL want that guy in my team, the PR alone is worth everything...
Children are a health risk from an employer's view. Depending on the local laws you may not be allowed to use the woman fully while she is pregnant, especially during the last trimester, she will be absent (obviously) for a while during birth and depending on your local laws again she will be out of commission for a while afterwards, in my country this can be up to 3 years.
That alone makes woman very unattractive as employees.
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There aren't really that many extra external barriers stopping US women from starting their own Amazon or Linux kernels compared to the external barriers stopping US men from doing similar stuff.
Founders of companies and OSS projects tend to focus more on ge
how come we never hear (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does it seem that tech is being unfairly beat up because of a apparent lack of women? the lack of women does not automatically mean that there is some sexist agenda, It could simply mean that there are A - not enough women wanting to be in the field or B - better qualified candidates who happen to be male.
Females wanted equality, I define equality by giving the job to the best candidate, not an artificial quota of genders in each position
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Females wanted equality, I define equality by giving the job to the best candidate, not an artificial quota of genders in each position
They wanted equality of outcomes. They never said they wanted to work as hard as men, they just wanted an equal share of the credit.
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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.
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Because they are handicapped. That's why they need so much promotion and still don't measure up to men.
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Females wanted equality, I define equality by giving the job to the best candidate, not an artificial quota of genders in each position
They wanted equality of outcomes. They never said they wanted to work as hard as men, they just wanted an equal share of the credit.
Because there are no lazy men? No, there are lots of men and women that want equal outcomes with no effort.
Re:how come we never hear (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:how come we never hear (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a team of all male, all white people. Since I don't care about the sexual preferences of my workers I can't really say whether they're gay or not (in my experience, an oddly large amount of good programmers actually is), so I can only stereotype by the things I see because, frankly, I don't really care. For all I care I'd hire a blue-skinned alien that has all three genders instead of just two as would be normal with his species, as long as he/she/it performs what I need from him/her/it.
The main reason why they're all male, all white is simply that so far only male and white people even applied for the jobs. That doesn't mean that I'd hire a black dyke because she's a black dyke. But if she knows her shit I'd hire her. Not because she's a black dyke, not despite her being a black dyke, but because she knows her shit.
I can only hire people who apply, though. If you bemoan the lack of "diversity" in a field, first of all LOOK at the field. If you have two female engineers in a team of eight, it looks very unfair to the women, until you notice that one out of ten engineers in total is female. Then it suddenly looks quite unfair to the males.
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You, sir, deserve mod and karma points for being correct!
BTW, why are blue skinned aliens always the ones we talk about, they tend to be quite pretty (Avatar, Mass Effect, etc...)
Re:how come we never hear (Score:4, Funny)
I talk about the blue ones 'cause every other one had me sign an NDA that I will not talk about the ... hey!
Clever. You almost had me!
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Because blue is one of the least-likely skin pigmentations of earthbound organisms, thus making it the most alien color.
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.
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It's the job of the person doing the hiring to choose the best candidate. If they choose an inferior candidate their company is stuck with the consequences.
Enforcing equality of outcomes in a field with an imbalance in the numbers of qualified men and women will force choosing inferior candidates. In those fields there is nothing unfair about an imbalance, any disadvantage is completely just.
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If they choose an inferior candidate their company is stuck with the consequences.
You must be living in a different reality than me. Companies are never stuck with the consequences of their actions, banks can lose billions and just get it reimbursed or do some bookkeeping magic to keep their executives fat and rich.
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How can you ensure that the job is going to the best candidate though? If you agree that women should not be unfairly disadvantaged, how can you enforce that except by equality of outcomes?
Ensuring that women aren't unfairly disadvantaged shouldn't be the goal. Ensuring that no one is unfairly disadvantaged should be the goal. Enforcing the kind of equality of outcomes you are talking about essentially means putting men at a disadvantage, which you also shouldn't be OK with.
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How cool would it be if we had some system whereby companies compete, and thus the companies that aren't as good at selecting and promoting the best fail while those who do choose the best dominate the landscape. No one would need to pick the rules ahead of time, no Intelligent Design needed for the economy, just evolution in action. Wouldn't that be an interesting system?
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Companies that don't hire the best candidates tend to collapse, slowly or quickly, as their more savvy competitors eat them up. And equal opportunities are already enforced by laws, if a woman feels she has been discriminated against she can certainly take people to court.
Equality of outcome is completely insane. Everyone gets the same no matter how hard they work or what they do? The communists tried that and it led to corruption on an unprecedented scale, horrific human rights abuses, ever diminishing sta
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It's really hard to prove that you were discriminated against unless there is a written record of the employer basically saying, "I don't want to hire her because she's a woman."
Not really. Compare her CV to the CV of the candidate that got the job, if she's better qualified and more experienced it's time to start looking at everyone else's CVs. Really, it's not that difficult.
Lets also not pretend that you can only be successful by hiring the absolutely best candidate. If all you want to do is hire white males, and it costs you 10% of your revenue, then maybe that is worth it to you because you are a bigoted asshole.
10% of revenue or less is the profit margin for a great many companies. I don't think you get how capitalism works. Companies don't and shouldn't care about anything other than your ability to do the job. Companies that do start caring get eaten by companies that don't. Greed may be the only completely blind
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Companies that don't hire the best candidates tend to collapse, slowly or quickly, as their more savvy competitors eat them up.
lolwut? I assume you must be an alien because you appear to be unaware of how things work on earth. On earth, large, lumbering companies basically swallow up anything that looks small and promising leading to these massive incompetents who seem to mysteriously win all the large contracts. The seem capable only of chewing up money and subcontracting work.
Perhaps you've never heard o
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I've certainly heard of Nortel, I used to work there. At their peak they were employing over 120,000 people spread across the majority of countries on earth. Now they've been sawn up for spare parts, not even taken over. And they're far from alone - I mean how many companies are around today, and/or are bigger today that were also around in 1994?
Believe it or not, competence always comes home to roost in the end. Unless you're working for the government of course.
Re:how come we never hear (Score:5, Insightful)
Your examples all select for good upper-body strength. You may as well point out that there are no female linebackers in the NFL. Office work and management has nothing to do with raw physical ability, so unless you’re prepared to make the argument that women are genetically unsuited to the cutthroat world of sitting on one’s ass in front of a keyboard, you better re-examine your premise.
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why dont we complain that there are not enough male kindergarten teachers? or male flight attendants or librarians?
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Re:how come we never hear (Score:4, Interesting)
Are there? I've never heard of any, frankly - that doesn't mean there aren't any, but advocates for more males in education aren't making the rounds of the night shows talking about it. And it's probably more important - there's a substantial body of research showing how important it is for boys to have male role-models.
As a personal anecdote, there were definitely a few male teachers in my elementary school who were driven out by mothers terrified of having a man around their child... I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
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Are there?
Yes. But that's not the point. Pointing the finger at other areas and proclaiming their shittyness doesn't make tech any better.
but advocates for more males in education aren't making the rounds of the night shows talking about it.
So what? I think that's more a problem with the night talk show hosts than anything else.
I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Same. That and I don't like kids.
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Yeah, just like women needing to be able to do a certain amount of chinups to join the military... oops, nevermind...
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Awww come on... Gender is just a social construct. If you teach little girls the same way and the same things as boys, they will have the same upper-body strength. The will lose their tits and grow beards, too.
Re: how come we never hear (Score:2)
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It's ironic in a way that there are so many brogrammers deriding womens' ability to code when there were so many women who wrote early computer programs in assembly language, and there are so few brogrammers who could do the same. After all, most of them only seem to know JavaScript or Ruby...
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AFAIK truck drivers don't earn $100K+ a year
and you would be wrong. There are a large number of truck drivers being paid much better then IT workers. A low level truck driver is usually higher paid than a low level IT worker these days
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However you often get sexism manifesting as women requireing on average higher qualifications to get the same job as men.
Where, exactly?
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Where, exactly?
[citation here] http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.1759 [arxiv.org]
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Can you explain to me how this:
Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities re- reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain.
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I'm not sure that's it. The attraction to (or lack thereof) for IT fields seems to start a lot earlier than college.
I remember in high school going to the Skills Canada competitions where there were competitors in everything from cooking and plumbing to electronics and airplane mechanics. I think I saw more females competing in aircraft mechanics (by which I mean repairing engines) than any of the IT related fields (robotics, computers, etc). Note: this was at the provincial level, so we're talking about a
Summary makes my head hurt (Score:2)
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I had to read it about 4 times before I realized what it was trying to say, but the math works out. It says there are 132 people. 12 are secretaries (all women), 12 report directly to Bezos (all men). If you cut out the secretaries and Bezos himself, you're left with 119 people, only 18 of whom are women.
Amazon is not a "bookseller" (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried to explain why Amazon does not need to have more women executives, unlike bookstores and publishers, but I cannot quite put it into words. I do not think Amazon would be hurt by having more women executives. It is just that the nature of the company is such that men are more likely to have the characteristics which cause them to rise to executive positions.
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Amazon does not do a lot of face to face customer interaction. That about sums it up.
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Re:Amazon is not a "bookseller" (Score:5, Insightful)
One major problem is that human beings over-generalize. It's very easy for a field where there might be a "natural" split on the basis of ability and inclination of 60-40, that quickly becomes 90-10. Why? Because every member of the minority is subject to far higher scrutiny (see the famous "you suck at math", "women suck at math" (XKCD comic [xkcd.com]). Their errors are remembered, their abilities questioned.
Now, this is *not* deliberate discrimination. This is how the human brain works. We see a pattern and we over-generalize from it.
However, in the end, it does mean that a substantial social injustice is done. People who have both ability and inclination are driven out of the profession (who wants to be in a profession where every mistake you make will count for 5 times everybody else's in the opinion of your peers).
So, I see no great leap that we consider changing the the "natural" outcomes of a system to compensate for certain defects in human reasoning systems by building in certain other compensating elements.
To make a *rough* analogy, in a "natural" setting, the physically strong dominate the physically weaker. As a society, we've decided this domination is not ideal, and we've passed laws to restrain the natural interactions between people. At this point, this unnatural intervention is so all encompassing, we don't even blink at the idea that physically strong individuals are denied their natural dominance. (And indeed, lose the culture among the strong that they would otherwise enjoy.)
Obviously male dominance in the executive suite (or tech) is a far more subtle matter calling for far more subtle compensations, but lets not fool ourselves. Pretty much every reader here is already the recipient of interventions on their behalf. And no surprise, the world is a lot better for it.
Naturalistic fallacy (Score:2)
You do a Naturalistic fallacy[1]. Only because it is natural for something, it does not mean that it's a valid excuse. By the same argument you could argue that racial discrimination is natural and therefore it's not a problem. What you described is exactly why we have laws against discrimination of minorities, i.e. precisely because minorities are perceived as something different and get a different treatment for no valid reason.
Now there are valid reasons to have a special treatment for woman, for example
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One major problem is that human beings over-generalize. It's very easy for a field where there might be a "natural" split on the basis of ability and inclination of 60-40, that quickly becomes 90-10. Why? Because every member of the minority is subject to far higher scrutiny (see the famous "you suck at math", "women suck at math" (XKCD comic [xkcd.com]). Their errors are remembered, their abilities questioned.
So, the solution to this is to get people to stop worrying what society thinks, and not worry so much about being 'questioned.' Because if you do anything in life, you will be questioned by society. If scientists let 'questioning' stop them, the light bulb never would have been invented. Part of becoming mature is to stop worrying when society 'questions' you.
The solution is not to implement questionable laws that are likely to do as much damage as anything.
huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
I don't know what i'm supposed to be picturing here? what is the significance of the ends? are employees implicitly linear? is it particularly damning that the secretaries are all put on one end instead of being allowed to freely mingle with the other 120 team members? Do the 12 team members who report to Bezos somehow balance out the 12 secretaries? why are there 12 of both? Why are they at the other end? do they never get to see the secretaries being so far away? Is this just a super complicated way of saying that out of 132 team members 30 of them are female and the most important 12 members are all male?
Are any of them hot?
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Interior design is not an attractive career option for men, BFD.
So because you declare one area to be unattractive to men, it's OK to dismiss all problems in another area as simply being "unattrative to women"?
OK, since you're a tech person, here's a tech thing. Enter "interior designer" into google. You get a bunch of men and women popping up. Apparently it isn't unattractive to men. Try again.
Ironic given the etymology of Amazon. (Score:3)
Or it could be amazingly appropriate. That corporation wants only females willing to chop their own breasts off to be in the "team".
I'll just say it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just say it out loud for everyone. Most women are not that aggressive. Most men are. Often it's a detriment in the modern world. Where it's not is in leading business. Why are most HR departments filled with women? Because women and men are in fact different and our gender does affect how well we perform and enjoy certain tasks. We have equal opportunity laws because most is not all. There are women that make great executives and they should have the chance to show it. But to expect very specific roles in a single company to be gender equal numerically is just stupid. Are we going to accuse Etsy of sexism because the majority of their customers/stores are run by females?
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Most women are not that aggressive. Most men are.
You can't pretend that is some kind of biological difference though. It is entirely socially constructed, the way we teach little girls to be caregivers and quiet little angels while we let boys run around playing loud, violent games. If it means that women are now disadvantaged in the job market, then we should either 1) control for that and make sure that companies hire women anyway or 2) change the way that we condition girls so that they are more useful in the workforce.
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I vote for the second. Seems more useful. And while we are at it, we should also teach our boys how to also be caregivers and quiet little angels when they need to be.
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You can't pretend that is some kind of biological difference though. It is entirely socially constructed, the way we teach little girls to be caregivers and quiet little angels while we let boys run around playing loud, violent games.
Is there any actual evidence for this one way or another? It is nice to sit here and argue that men are strong or that women would be strong if their parents just made them join the football team. What actual scientific evidence exists one way or the other?
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I never said that women and men are exactly the same physically. No one can deny that men are generally stronger than women. I was referring socially conditioned behavior and attitudes.
So, I'll just ask the same question. Is there any scientific evidence that the behavior and attitudes you're referring to are socially conditioned? I wouldn't be surprised if many if not most or even all of them were. However, in the absence of some kind of actual study, it is pure conjecture. One could just as easily argue that the reason there are so few women in tech is that most women just aren't cut out for it, as ridiculous as that may sound.
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It is a religious dogma. Don't question it.
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It seems to be a little of both, with some differences being attributed to social norms and others being related to sex-based developmental differences between girls and boys.
That said, I'm wondering if it's a moot point as we're begging the question to begin with as we're assuming that aggression is the important factor that accounts for the difference that we're seeing. I don't
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Most women are not that aggressive. Most men are.
You can't pretend that is some kind of biological difference though.
It is. It's a proven fact. It's not true for all animal species, but for ours it is.
http://www.webmd.com/balance/f... [webmd.com]
Again, these are generalizations. The bad part about generalizations is that they are only generally true, but humans tend to take things that are generally true and apply them to everyone that meets the criteria. Women are generally less aggressive than men, but I still bow to my sons female Tai Kwon Do instructor when we enter the building. I don't want her to kick my ass.
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I am sure you don't have any children. If you do, you would have noticed that girls will play with dolls without any prompting, and boys will run around an be loud without any prompting either.
Just because that is your experience doesn't make it a general truth. I didn't say that the parents were necessarily encouraging it, although many do. It is impossible to avoid all the gendered advertising and media which is mostly what I'm talking about.
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don't have children? the small amount of extra testosterone little boys have make for a huge difference in behaviour. For 95% of the human race, the difference is biological and deep. Nothing will change it, sorry femi-nazis
Sexist (Score:2)
Yes, we all get that in the Mad Men era it was all about white males (non-Jewish) and everything else was second-class. But things have evolved and it's not because of idiots fighting yesterday's battles.
Those people look at existing ratios and make the conclusion that the culture or leadership is somehow wrong. This is bullshit.
Why don't they look at the gender ratio at Curves or at the ABWA. Those places thrive on sexist policy and nobody says a thing, but gay bars catering to a specific subset of the gay
equality is in the pipeline (Score:2)
the reality is, women are just as capable as men. the _only_ issue is, the _current_ talent pool is deeper on the male side. this is rapidly changing, look at the pipeline. 20 years from now equality will happen organically.
The gender gap will only close so far, here's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Too-long-will-not-read version: There are things we should change now to bring pay into a gender balance, there are vestiges of past practices that will "take care of themselves" over time which will bring gender pay into balance, and there may be things which should not be "fixed" just for the sake of achieving gender balance because the "fix" will be worse than the "disease."
Long version:
The gender gap will only close so far, here's why:
* As long as we live in a society where more women prefer to halt or "downsize" their career in favor of their family than men, women's average career opportunities will be lower.
* As long as we live in a society where child-rearing after divorces falls more on women than on men, the women who have to reduce their work hours or drop out of college so they can raise their kids will drag down the average career opportunities for women.
* It will take generations to "bleed out" the vestiges of past discrimination. If today's boys and girls see that their grandmothers or great-grandmothers were nurses and teachers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were doctors and headmasters, they will notice and may choose a career path accordingly.
* If today's boys see elementary-school-teaching as female-dominated, they are more likely to grow up thinking that the job is "beneath them" and not worthy of being paid well.
* Some jobs, such as being an administrative assistant or schoolteacher, are much more tolerant of long career breaks than others, such as science and engineering. They are also much easier to get into as a second career. This means the talent pool of those who could become trained for the job in less than 2 years if they wanted to resume that career or switch to that career is larger, which in turn means wages may be lower.
Here are some other factors that are likely to give one gender an advantage over another but the advantage could just as easily be a women's advantage as a man's.
* As long as we live in a society where girls are "steered" towards certain career fields and men towards others, then unless by chance the average salaries and other career opportunities in "women-dominated careers" is the same as in "men-dominated careers," one gender or the other will have a statistical "advantage" at any given time.
* If - and I'm not saying there is, but if - there is a gender-specific biological preference for certain types of work and that preference isn't countered by some other force such as encouraging people to have careers outside of their gender's statistical preference, there will likely be one gender with a more average pay and career opportunities than the other at any given time.
* There are certain jobs that women, on average, are simply more qualified to do than men, and vice-versa. Fortunately, many of these, such as being a professional football player or professional soprano vocalist, are so low in numbers that they don't sway the averages. Others, such as certain jobs in the military and law enforcement that require strength and endurance standards that men on average are better able to meet, are common enough that the lack of a 50/50 balance in these careers will affect the "average" ratio of pay for men and women. If jobs that are male- or for that matter female-dominated are stepping-stones to other careers, such as becoming a General in the Army, then the effects will be felt for a much longer period of time.
These lists are by no means complete.
Some of these things will take care of themselves over time. Others will require deliberate effort to overcome. Others, such as the (hypothetical?) gender-specific biological preferences for certain types of work, should probably be accepted as not worth "fixing" as the "fix" - encouraging people to take on career paths that would not naturally be their first choice, merely to achieve some statistical balance - is probably worse than the "disease" - having a small, permanent imbalance in male- to female- average earnings.
Correcting for aspirations (Score:3)
All the studies I have seen on gender, race, sexual leanings, age or any other attribute all make the basic assumption that all the qualified individuals, from all groups, all want the same things and are equally motivated to get it. And therefore any discrepancy between the number holders of those positions and the size of the group they came from *must* be due to some sort of discrimination or favouritism.
Has anyone seen any contemporary (within the last 10 years or so) studies that can assert the validity, or otherwise, of this basic assumption?
This isn't IT (Score:2)
Logic question (Score:2)
Is hiring someone because they have a vagina any less sexist than NOT hiring them because they have one?
gender gap goes both ways (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Where are the male grade schools teachers?
What's your point? That teaching has bad problems too so it's OK for IT to be equally shitty?
Correlation is not causation. (Score:2)
Correlation is not causation.
Percentages of men vs women employed do not prove sexism exists, much in the same way that finding sick people in hospitals does not prove hospitals are making people sick. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and call them a White Supremacist, Anti-Semitic or Pedophile without clear evidence of their bigotry or perversion because those are vile slanderous labels which can damage careers: The same goes for the label of "Sexist Women Hater" too -- Or are we trying to normalize t
Re:sometimes it's about performance (Score:4, Insightful)
My office tries to maintain a gender balance in management... the performance bar is set lower for the women, it's quite obvious.
Congratulations. The ignorance factor among your management will all but guarantee a lawsuit.
From the men.
I know I'd be rather pissed if my job was somehow harder only because I was a male in management. Why does she get a break?
(Yeah, it's practically funny to see how quickly that shit can turn, isn't it..)
Re:Oy vey it's another holocaust (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm... sounds like the wealthy's attitude towards workers more than anything. Perhaps the internecine struggle between women and men in the workplace would be better focused on class differences - it could result in better economic outcomes for the majority of both sexes if workers' energies were focused in this direction.
Workers of all sexes can either argue over how big their portion of a minuscule share is or grow the share for all workers by negotiating a larger cut with those who receive the majority of the gains - it is always such in an economic system. When the greater inequality is settled, providing larger gains to all workers, the smaller one can be addressed. Before then, it's just an economic smokescreen created by the wealthy to exploit a natural division in the ranks of the working class.
Re: (Score:2)
Nonsense, they don't want men to all be unemployed. They want us to be beasts of burden doing all the real work while women receive all the authority and rewards.
I think this is an interesting study in the root cause of much sexism: blind fear and paranoia.
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to HP, Yahoo, Gnome, etc.
How about I tell it to Enron, Barings Bank, Natwest, HBOS, etc instead? Sorry what was your poit again? I lost it between all the cherry picking.
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