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Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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How dare workers in (potentially desperate?) need of a job to look for jobs. They are men and belonging to that category automatically makes them rich and privileged. The working class should be united against common enemies, not divided because of gender. While it's obvious that women in tech are discriminated, alienating fellow victims, even if males, is not the answer to the problem.
Capital really won the class war...
I know you didn't mean it like this, but the result from this line of thinking is that we only try to put women on equal footing with men in tech when it's convenient for men because times are good. Which in turn means we never put women on equal footing because the needs of men always come first.
Put differently women have to deal with being women in tech on top of times being desperate, men only have to deal with times being desperate. Things like this are why spaces like these are necessary in the first place, and if you break them down at the first discomfort you're not a working class hero fighting the capital, you're tearing down women and setting everyone back.
Gender is absolutely not the only nor the most important discriminating factor in tech. Being a foreigner and, probably most commonly, being old is an extreme disadvantage in tech. Similarly, a woman coming from a wealthy family might be a privileged compared to a man coming from a poor background (which translates into lower access to education, resources, etc.).
Look at the video in the article, and tell me you don't notice some commonalities among the men in the queues.
I see mostly foreigners, who most likely have no network of support, and need a job to maintain a VISA before getting kicked out of the country. Are they in a better or worse position compared to a local woman? Does it even make sense to start asking these questions?
I want to challenge this vision where discriminations are only looked at through the lens of gender division. This is shortsighted because discrimination on the workplace is extremely diverse and it exists for the benefit of those same sponsors of this event.
As a teenage girl into coding, I was treated like absolute shit. If I made a mistake in my botball code, it was because I wasn’t good at coding. If a boy made a mistake in their botball code, then it was something that the other boys would help them debug. I remember it being assumed I just wouldn’t be able to figure out what structs were, so the boys running the botball code didn’t teach me. In college, any group project was an opportunity for boys to try to fuck me.
As a trans man, someone who has experienced life as both a man and woman in STEM, there are massive barriers to women. It’s invisible to you because you haven’t lived through it.
I am fully aware that those barriers exist. I am arguing (in other comments I am more explicit) about fighting against barriers, not a particular barrier.
I am also a foreigner in another country, and despite being a privileged person from many point of views (I could attend public university despite my family being poor), I have experienced some form of discrimination myself, so please don't make assumption about other people's. I am not blind to those kind of barriers, I simply have different opinions on the actions to take to improve the overall situation, with the goal of removing the concept of barrier, not any particular one (if that makes sense).
Neither and both, depending on the context. There is no point to tell a person (who is maybe in need of a job and behind with the mortgage) "sorry, your group is privileged, fuck off". At the same time it still makes sense talking generally about solving sexism, ageism and other form of discrimination still too common in tech. Both perspectives exist, but you can slice the population in many groups, with different "average" experiences, therefore is overall shortsighted to categorize people only based on "one slice". Hence, the class analysis which is I find both more effective and more functional.
You didn't mention in which context you are suggesting I am changing scope, so I am not sure what am I supposed to discuss.
Yes?
I didn't negate any general trend using any particular experience. The only particular experience I mentioned is my own, with the sole purpose of responding to:
Which suggested that I don't acknowledge the existence of certain barriers because I did not live through it (assuming a lot about my personal life). This is completely irrelevant to the overall argument I am trying to develop anyway, as I am not arguing that women don't have barriers in tech, I am fully aware they do (even if at the individual level some might not). I am simply stating that since there are multiple levels of discrimination in tech, and people might be victim of many of those (classism, ageism, sexism, racism, homo-transphobia, etc.), workers - and in particular victims of discrimination (but also the "privileged" ones) - should acknowledge each other situations (in other words, develop a class consciousness) and join the struggle against the overall system that generates discrimination, not create fragmentation between them because of the specific discrimination(s) they suffer. To me, this rhetoric since to push for a kind of "feminism of the regime", in which the status quo stays effectively the same, but the oppressor substantially are untouched, with a new coat of paint for supporting diversity.
That said, the population who attended this job fair is not a random sample of the "tech worker" population, therefore even in this case it might not make sense to use broad categories (like male and female) alone. For once, if you spend 600-1200$ for a job fair, chances are you are in dire need of a job. This probably means that at least a good chunk of those men are indeed outliers, so judging by broad categories (such as male=privileged in tech) might be especially wrong. This is my personal guess, and also why I would have liked for the article to interview some of them and understand why they were there.
Actually I am more referring to the analysis that is being done on the outcome of the fair than to the fair itself. I have no problem with the fact that the event was targeting women. Rather than asking why would some men join this event? Which men joined the event? etc., we stopped at "men steal places meant for women". No depth in the analysis, no expansion of perspective, just alienation of some workers.
No one is saying gender is the only point of discrimination, but this specific event is focused on gender issues.
My point is that there is nothing else for issue related to other discriminations. And yet, before thinking whether those men (who showed up) maybe are also oppressed and discriminated, they have been simply labeled as "men" and therefore intruders, by definition. I would think that an oppressed community would realize the commonalities with other oppressed categories and use this to expand the struggle to them as well. Instead the rethoric behind this article makes me think that this is one of those events which is ultimately functional to the conservation of the status quo: big tech companies which sponsor the event and gain some visibility and good karma points to boost diversity while nothing really changes or is done to address the fundamental issue with discrimination (in general, not a specific one), because this is ultimately functional to the companies, which can leverage them to fight a fragmented worker's front.
Bang fucking on point. Dont trust the people who profit off inequality and a desperate workforce to make things less desperate and more equal
I've had a lot more foreign male colleagues than I have female colleagues. Where are you getting you information about who's disadvantaged?
Quantitative measuring tells you nothing. You have no visibility of the "starting condition", how many foreigners are not even accepted a job interview, how many apply, etc. Discrimination is not something that can be measure with a scale.
Not to talk about age, ageism is huge in tech. Old people are sometimes fired to be replaced (hello IBM). In my company we are at around 25% women, 20% on engineering. I still need to meet a person over 50 (in engineering), I think there are maybe 3-4 over 40 (on a total of 300).
Also, discrimination doesn't mean just not getting hired, it means contractual penalties, less salary etc., which happen in some cases with women too, of course.
That said, I am not arguing that women in tech are not discriminated, of course they are. I am saying that there are multiple vector of discrimination and that we should be able to fight against the general phenomenon, without having to choose which discrimination to keep and which to fight.
You need to do a lot of reading about intersectionality and intersectional feminism. You're right about there being multiple possible systemic disadvantages because of someone's identity (gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, disability, etc) but the answer to that is not to sit around going NUH UH THIS GROUP HAS IT WORSE. Everyone needs uplifting, and it just so happens that this event was for women. If you think there needs to be a foreigners in tech job fair, go do one.
I respectfully disagree. If you think that organizing such events, with sponsors of that caliber is just a matter of "go do one", then we simply have different point of views. I also did not make qualitative comparisons between who gets oppressed, I am simply observing that there are so many components to discrimination in tech that focusing on only one (intentionally, even after the opportunity to expand opened up presented itself) is not synergic with the long term strategy.
It's fine to disagree, this is ultimately a subjective ideological call. I simply disliked the tone of the article overall. I would have liked some more in depth analysis of the impact (and reasons) of layoffs and maybe some interview to those people who "crashed" the event. Maybe with some sprinkle of discussion of unionization and collective fight, but I guess it was not fitting in an article about an event sponsored by the very same who laid off tens of thousands of people.
The paywall dropped on me before I could get to the end of the article, but a couple of observations:
“Overrun” is dehumanizing language. I’m otherwise highly sympathetic, but casting desperate people, many likely staring down deportation unless they can find a new position, as an effective horde is gross. I would like to trust that Wired provided that characterization, not the organizers.
The organizers ruined their own event, by not establishing and enforcing guardrails for attendance. This is a problem mostly of their own making. Rather than pointing, again, at desperate people, they should be accepting responsibility and planning to avoid the issue in the future.
I think part of the problem is that everyone- regardless of race, sex, gender or orientation has MASSIVE debt, in part due to the greed of the housing and rentals market, student loans, and unpayable medical bills- on top of caring for families and children. While people in a 1:1 conversation would definitely acknowledge cons for minority groups, this situation is more like a sinking ship with everyone fighting over the same few rickety lifeboats. Everyone else is just a faceless competitor as debt sharks get closer and closer.
I still don't understand why we don't write laws preventing CEOs from making disgusting amounts of money and why we don't have laws against multibillionares hoarding vast amounts of cash that should be getting invested into the very job fairs and infrastructure people are squabbling over.
It's an unfortunate situation any way you look at it. And it's a bummer that people are missing the forest for the trees in this thread :/