www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/ibm_red_hat_discrimination_lawsuit/
IBM Red Hat accused of discriminating against white males
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I work in big tech and by far the biggest discrimination I see is perpetrated by Indian men, who are strongly biased against Indian women, and softly biased against almost everyone else.
There is no point in escalating even for Indian women, but if you're a white man and try to cry discrimination you're immediately fired and there are no protections for you.
If the righties wanted to, they could push to reform discrimination law to apply to ANYONE, not just specific protected classes (of which white men are not), and id support them on that. Unfortunately, they'd rather just remove anti discrimination law all together, because they don't actually object to the act, they just want to be on the side with power.
At many tech companies I’ve been at, once an Indian man becomes a manager, his team slowly becomes comprised of Indian men only. It’s crazy but it’s just put up with by HR when it’s straight up discrimination.
HR loves it because many of them are on work visas, and so are more easily abused and exploited.
You can make similar comparisons to a lot of different professions. For example, black women in HR departments.
I know an executive who had to specifically tell his HR Director that she had to hire at least one non-black person.
This… and once I got a chance to understand (and work with) Brahmins, I was truly blown away. It’s not just women, it’s any one that’s under them (work, spiritual, societal).
My friends own a production company in Boston and they weren’t able to get a grant from the city because the city didn’t meet their quota for non whites
As a business owner in the Boston area who’s tried getting some government deals, this right here. Because my team doesn’t include enough of the preferred race, we’re not eligible for certain bids.
That’s absolutely insane.
Is it illegal to set quotas for disabled workers? I was applying to a job and when prompted if I was disabled, it claimed the employer was looking at hiring at least X% of disabled workers.
Time to disable some of your work force
It’s illegal to discriminate against certain protected characteristics. Race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and age over 50 (our entire economy is based on discriminating salaries against young people).
Abled persons & young folks are not a protected classes. So you can set quotas to have more disabled persons or elderly employees
Yes, Wood may not be a likeable guy, but companies should be challenged for such DEI discriminatory practices.
And shareholders should also hold their companies accountable. When you set arbitrary DEI quotas, what will end up happening is that you'll hire or promote unqualified people just for the sake of meeting those quotas. And that won't lead to a healthy environment and to a prosperous company.
Why do I say arbitrary quotas? Because:
Women account for approximately 21.3% of those who earned a Bachelor's degree in computer and information sciences, 22% in Engineering and Engineering Technology
Source: https://www.womentech.net/en-us/women-in-tech-stats
So how can you get 30% women in a tech company when they make ~22% of the workforce and there are better and larger companies with similar DEI goals? Does RedHat really think they're the dream company for women? They'll have their pick of what remains of that workforce after Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have had their pick.
So yes, firing someone to hire someone else is discriminatory, but may not impact the business if the replacement is just as qualified, so shareholders may not care about that. But they should care about quotas leading to less qualified employees being injected at all levels of a company.
Ask IBM’s direct competitors (SAP, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc), they’re all around the mid thirties percentage wise. Getting to 30% would only make IBM better than Oracle. Furthermore, tech companies have far more roles than just engineering or technical roles. There’s marketing, product, finance, sales, program management, customer success, professional services, HR, Legal, etc. IBM isn’t even perceived to be a cool company to work at anymore and certainly not from a compensation perspective vs the other companies I mentioned. It could really just be they’re seen as bottom of the barrel when looking for a tech company to work for and women who can clear their interview cycles would rather work somewhere with better pay, prestige, and benefits.
Ask IBM’s direct competitors (SAP, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc), they’re all around the mid thirties percentage wise.
Because these other companies introduced these quotas around 5 years ago. And I know just how they did that. :)
Furthermore, tech companies have far more roles than just engineering or technical roles. There’s marketing, product, finance, sales, program management, customer success, professional services, HR, Legal, etc
Of course, but the quotas were set for engineering organizations as well and that's the challenge I wanted to focus on, because there are fewer women in engineering than in other fields, so filling those quotas became a forceful process.
BTW, I'm all for equal representation, but it's not realistic to expect a higher representation than what is available in the workforce.
The article itself that OP posted says nothing about the 30% being applied to the engineering org. If you’ve got proof, please share.
The article says it’s a 30% goal. The plaintiff, who is in a tech role, says that he was let go because of this. If the target did not apply to engineering he would have no case. So it’s pretty clear.
Also, If someone says the goal of teachers is for students to get A’s, and you say “3rd graders are excluded, why do you assume it is them too”, the burden of proof sits with you to show this to be the case.
Also, as someone who follows tech and sees these goals applied to tech roles all the time, it fits pretty well.
I shared my experience about how such quotas were implemented elsewhere, which you seem eager to dismiss because ... a short article didn't go into that level of details. Instead, you seem willing to believe that RedHat did a more sensible job than it was done elsewhere. I guess we'll see at the trial.
EDIT: Anybody that expects that I would offer "evidence" for such things is out of their mind:
What do you expect? That I would dump here corporate emails and recordings of conversations with people in my company? You want candidate profiles accompanied by recordings of interviews and after-interview discussions showing how they were hired despite failing the interview, just to meet quotas?
Ignore these folks - there is a basic reading comprehension fail here since they default to “when the CEO day the goal is for the workforce is A”, it doesn’t mean my team is included. Prove it to me! Now if I were to say people responding to your comment with that are being dimwits, they could apply the same logic to assume “that doesn’t mean me, I’m excluded from it!” 😅
Anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence.
BTW, I'm all for equal representation, but it's not realistic to expect a higher representation than what is available in the workforce.
It can be. Depends on company/team size. If the place only has 200 employees, 30% would be 60. 60 qualified women would not be terribly difficult to find. Women may only be 22% of the overall workforce in that field, but that overall workforce is tens of millions.
Yes, it can happen, but it is a challenge when everyone competes for the best talent. You can find 60 qualified women, but they may not be interested in working for you or they may not be able to join your company where it is located. Possibility and probability are two different things. Just because something can happen doesn't mean that it is likely to happen.
So you are just pulling this all de votre derriére.....
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See I take issue with this, you can agree that there are issues with opportunity in hiring, but also think that making identity too important can result in missing out in good candidates. These policies, no matter how you phrase it, eventually lead to at least one incident of rejecting someone against an equally or less qualified candidate due to their race or gender. That’s illegal, and the only reason these suits are rare is that it’s a massive pain in the ass to prove.
A lot of this stuff you’re talking about is idealistic, and yes if you were playing a simulation game you’d be well within your rights to play with employment law like that. But the fact remains that a lot of what you seem to advocating for is illegal, ESPECIALLY the implications of your last paragraph. If you’d just said “companies need to get better at finding talent without falling back on credentialism and socioeconomic background” that would have been fine.
Thought experiment: what happens if you DO get away with this supposedly necessary discrimination and it doesn’t actually create that post-identity world you mentioned? Will you give up? Reconsider? Or just claim that you didn’t discriminate hard enough? If you answer option 3 you’re operating on extremely dangerous ideology.
I have an honest question about practical alternatives. Let's say for he sake of argument I'm an extremely sexist racist that only hires white men for my team. But you really have no concrete proof. Whenever asked I fall back on terms like 'cultural fit' and it's not like their resumes are bad. All else being equal I hire the white 100% of the time.
is there any practical measure we can do to stop my racial bias without someone crying "reverse racism!" You going to keep forcing me to go to cultural 'training' sessions? Hope I somehow one day have a change of heart?
Or are you just going to say "well you ain't harming the bottom line. They're equal" and move on.. isn't that just propping up the existing systematic racism?
You don't even need this level of cartoon-villainy to illustrate how bad this is. DEI initiatives are designed to target systemic racism.
When the system has historically kept under-represented groups out of the conversation for centuries, you have to force the hands of those controlling things to start creating equitable treatment.
That's what affirmative action was supposed to do: kids that had never been in conversation for attending university because they started the race of life 2 miles behind everyone else got a chance to go to school.
I, personally, think one of the biggest things holding back a lot of these discussions is this idea that America is a meritocracy. It creates this air of, "well, if you just work harder." - arrogance that is so difficult to dispel because we love to champion the "winners".
We talk about the Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbergs, Steve Jobs, Elon Musks (which, thankfully the tide is turning on) etc. about how they dropped out, created these remarkable companies and are rewarded for their hard work.
But we leave out that Bill and Mark were attending Harvard, backed by their wealthy parents. Steve Jobs came from a wealthy Syrian lineage. And we all know Elon is a SA emerald mine beneficiary.
American's don't like stories that begin with: "A person with plenty of resources continued to succeed into adult-hood." because it's hard to see ourselves in that story. No one wants to admit that they have an advantage over another person because it makes their achievements seem less.
So when we look at DEI initiatives, they apply it to themselves, and it becomes internalized as "I only got what I got because I was white." It's not hard to see why that incredibly easily emotional response dictates a lot of these "reverse racism" conversations.
All of this to say that you don't need to be explicitly racists to contribute to the systemic racism of mintorities in America. You could very well be looking at a pool of candidates that contains zero minorities, simply because our culture has intentionally limited minorities' access to furthering themselves.
I'm not disagreeing with you but to play some devil's advocate, candidates are never 'fully equal' it's like shopping for a house. When we talk about qualifications we are normally referring to technical expertise but I'd sooner give up some technical expertise and have someone I work better with
But to your examples about gates and Bezos. I still tip my hat to them. If you have me a 'small loan of a million dollars ' I could not turn it into a billion dollar empire. I think Redditors grossly overestimate their own chops lol. Hard work is correlated to success for most cases I think we can agree to that and to your point we do overly attribute it to causation.
You immediately did what I was talking about.
No one wants or is trying to diminish the achievements of these people. They still did incredible things with their resources.
But they still started with more than others.
Would they have built the companies they did if they started in a trailer park and food scarcity? Maybe, but statistically speaking, it would be pretty damn unlikely.
DEI movements want to take those that started with less as a result of centuries of systemic subjugation and give them the opportunity to prove that they can do the same thing as those with more.
You can't just go "see i take issue with that" when what they are saying is demonstrably true. Affirmative action doesn't decrease workforce quality. Its never even remotely been shown that it does.
You are lying.
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People actually say this on unironically?
Racism is wild.
It doesn’t matter how you dress it or how eloquently you word it; you are discriminating based off of skin color / race. I will say it again: you are discriminating based off of skin color / race.
You are hiring based of the content of their skin melanin and not their qualifications.
Your argument against systemic racism is that the ends justify the means, as long as we are racist towards the right people.
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I personally have been on hiring committees that have chosen less qualified candidates in favor of hiring folks from marginalized communities. I didn't care then and don't care now, because I agree it's for the best particularly for my white male dominated industry. But to pretend that it never happens is just wrong
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I'm on your side, I think, I'm just not putting my head in the sand.
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That's fine, I personally think it's a necessary evil to combat a larger injustice, and so in that sense I think we agree
Always funny when racists try to invoke MLK to attack affirmative action. He was very explicitly in favor of it.
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What on earth are you talking about? They are just different terms for the same thing....
How do we fight systemic racism? By introducing systemic racism hiring practices, of course!
Please...
He isn't a likable guy specifically because he's a race baiting agitator who does stuff like sue companies to enforce white supremacy.
If you are supporting him for doing the things that make him unlikable, something tells me he might no be all that unlikable to you....
what does that mean for normal people who run into this discrimination? Are they just screwed?
Normal people in tech run into racial and gender discrimination all the time.
I don't think there's anything wrong with setting a target to have your workforce accurately represent the demographics of the actual population. The issue in this instance is a group of employees were allegedly fired to "make room" for that target.
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Setting a hiring target related to DEI is not a quota. And it's not discrimination. Diverse workforces perform better,.period.
It is often discrimination, but diverse workforces definitely perform better. Still, anytime you bias hiring on race, that's racism. If you bias it on sex, that's sexism. Good business sense or even good moral intentions still don't make discrimination any less discriminatory.
Lol no they dont
Mediocre white guys don't want to hear this (especially the racist ones). But of course it's true.
They want to lean on the fiction that DEI results in hiring less qualified candidates with non-white skin. (this is a racist mentality to have). And they straight up ignore the systemic racism that gives mediocre white guys an advantage in hiring practices.
You're spot on. And, I was unsurprised by the down voting.
Why does this sentence rankle you: "hire non-Whites"? Asking managers to diversify their staff doesn't mean "hire unqualified minorities" or "don't hire white guys". It means diversify your staff. In an industry that's not short of talent in every color, if you have a staff that's primarily white and male, then yes you should be making intentional efforts to diversify your staff.
If it takes well-connected right wing agitators (like in this case)
I would be wary of right wing agitators bearing gifts. Even if you think you agree with them...believe me, they're going where you don't want. Or maybe you do want...I don't know you.
not short of talent in every color
Only sort of. But what happens when EVERY major tech company sets a target percentage of marginalized groups that is higher than the actual percentage of those groups with that specialty? IBM is somewhat farther down the ladder of big tech in that they don’t need as many people, so it would be very unsurprising if IBM engaged in illegal hiring practices to make up for Google and co. “stealing” their diversity.
But what happens when EVERY major tech company sets a target percentage of marginalized groups that is higher than the actual percentage of those groups with that specialty?
Then they won't meet their target. Where's the harm?
Nothing, there’s no real harm in that. But what happens if they meet the target despite the statistical improbability? In those cases it’s perfectly fair to investigate if standards were systemically lowered illegally.
They didn’t explicitly set a quota. A target isn’t a quota.
It’s the bonus cuts. If it was just a “wouldn’t it be nice if…” statement that would be one thing, but if there are penalties associated with it, it cannot just be called a harmless target anymore. I’m perfectly comfortable calling “hire them or else” a quota.
Even if the discussion had never gone beyond target this could be very nasty for IBM, because combined with their hiring records which will most certainly be pulled in during discovery, it could turn out that they were using blatantly illegal methods to reach that target.
They’ll definitely need to show they didn’t pressure teams to do it. That said, they’re already at 25% women vs 75% men. Getting to 30% within X amount of years likely isn’t that hard to do and certainly can be done without discriminating against men (white or otherwise). For perspective, these are the gender breakdowns in similar tech companies, they’re lagging the others:
Microsoft: 34/66
Oracle: 26/74
Google: 34/66
Salesforce: 32/68
SAP: 35/65
Workday: 44/56
They will also need to demonstrate that to get to that number they didn’t explicitly discriminate. This is probably how companies like Oracle (discrimination in favor of South Asians) got caught as well as Palantir (discrimination against Asians). Oracle however appealed and won while Palantir didn‘t.
That target likely won’t be super hard to do as women are 50% of the population. Might simply be a pipeline candidate awareness thing.
See Dell Technologies 2030 Moonshot goals. I was a leader there. If affected who I hired and laid off. It is racism and sexism encoded as company policy.
Cultivating Inclusion Moonshot Goal: By 2030, 50% of Dell’s workforce and 40% of its global people leaders will be women. Among their other inclusion goals are having Blacks/African Americans and Hispanic/Latinos in 25% of their U.S. workforce and 15% of their people leader positions; having 50% of employees participate in employee resource groups to drive social impact; having 95% of employees participate in annual foundational learning on key topics such as unconscious bias, harassment, microaggression and privilege; and having 50% of the people being empowered by social and education initiatives be girls, women or underrepresented groups.
Cringy to see them name it "Moonshot" goals, like something off of wallstreetbets
If you want to know why people think DEI efforts are joke, read this article.
DEI never includes neurodiversity.
It doesn’t or also doesn’t include those who are physically disabled. It’s always we need more gays and women!!
That is because it is easy. Having to engage someone and offer a reasonable accommodation for someone is more work from them and then you become a nuisance.
In that line of work, being neurotypical would be the outlying minority group
Par for the course in tech. See Salesforce goals which specifically call out these practices: https://www.salesforce.com/company/equality/
Because the HR teams are graded on their ability to hit these targets you absolutely see folks get hired who otherwise would not have been, and you see folks who have great cases for termination get significantly more leniency than they otherwise would have.
Diversity is a good thing, and I don't have a solution for solving the inherent bias that happens in hiring but I do see the negative consequences of this practice daily.
Gotta maintain their ESG scores.
And then people wonder why men are shifting hard to the right. The political gender gap in gen Z is absolutely insane
His counsel is Stephen Miller, known white supremacist.
Me thinks he's gotten suckered into being used as a political ploy. Nothing will come of this.
lol of course it's proud neo-nazi Stephen Miller
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If you have all of one thing, it’s not diverse.
Good for them
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I’m surprised the right wing machine doesn’t put this as their 2024 slogan considering all the young white men who would gladly eat their Reverse-racism drivel for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
They’ve already won that demo. Making them more happy doesn’t give them more votes.
Downvote me to hell, but that is not discrimination.
Who are you to presume that the non-whites they hire aren’t as (or more) qualified than the white dudes they would otherwise hire?
It’s like the difference between affirmative action and ending legacy admissions for colleges and universities.
The problem is that this specific industry only attracts overwhelmingly white men, much the same way basketball attracts overwhelmingly black men.
So it's basically impossible to find a non-white male who wants the job, even if they are capable and quality.
Guess they’ll just have to nurture local talent by investing in better educational opportunities for non-white men.
The industry is self-selecting because it is exclusionary.
Being good as basketball is mostly genetics (gotta be tall, right). Not anyone can do it.
Being a software engineer is not. Literally anyone can go to school then get that job.
Not everyone will be good at Math. It's a subject that some students can grasp easily, and others have an extremely difficult time to understand, especially at a higher level.
And there seems to be a genetic preference for that too, with Asians and Europeans more capable to understanding this topic at an earlier age than others.
And understanding Math is a key component to working in this career.
IBM is 99% white men lol
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