Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
wired.com
The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
This really sounds like a failure of the organizers more than anything- first off, lumping in non-binary is a catch all that anyone will take advantage of, and second and most importantly, everyone was complaining about long lines. Long lines means lots of people. Lots of people means the event over-sold their $600-$1000 tickets.
Sounds like the event organizers were more interested in making money than helping women in tech- women would have had the same problems had it been 100% women.
Edit: I’m not bashing non binary people, I’m just saying that people will take advantage of it, that’s all.
Including non-binary people was not the problem. Relevant quote:
"AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was “an increase in participation of self-identifying males” at this year’s event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US."
They identified as male, not non-binary, and the event allowed men to come.
So they identified as men, and the event allowed the men to come? Then I'm failing to see what the issue is?
The problem is, the event's not allowed to discriminate officially. The article is about lamenting the ability to discriminate
I'm sure so many people right now have that shit eating grin, especially after reading
the article quotes a bunch of people frustrated at pushing, shoving, line cutting etc at the job fair portion that weren't visiting presentations - basically people who didn't want to listen to the speeches but wanted to throw out resumes, fuck everyone else.
IMO they could solve the problem with a stamp system for people who sat through a presentation but its kind of shitty to have to treat everyone like kids because a couple dudes can't behave themselves.
It also mentioned how some were lying about their identity, but I'm not sure how they figured that out
Tangentially related, but are job fairs even worth it? In my limited experience, you wait in a long line for someone to tell you to apply online. I was better off getting a list of employers who were attending, and then looking through each of their websites.
I think I figured it out... only rarely you'd get immediate interviews, but the idea is you get LinkedIn contacts to chat with later and industry insight, and something to tell recruiters/hiring managers that you did, but you dress it up in a way that shows you look for opportunity like "I met members of [industry/company] at a recruiting conference in [town]". I found industry conferences to be more useful than jobfairs in this respect, but those can be a little to a lot expensive.
Otherwise it's pretty much just being told to scan QR codes, business cards and maybe getting a couple plastic cups and pens.
All in all I say job hunting is such an awful game.
No. Mostly you run around collect business cards and then go online to apply for the jobs.. that you could have done without going to the job fair in the first place.
TBH It's a huge red flag if a recruiter wants upfront payment with no guarantee at the end of it (or even if they 'guarantee' one). If the recruiters are so desperate for someone they want to organise a job fair, they can bloody well pay for it themselves.
Also watch out for the recruiters who give you a challenge to fulfill just to be considered. It’s free work they are looking for.
My experience of going to a tech fair was:
They're basically box-ticking exercises for companies that want to work with specific organisations.
I've been on the opposite side. A company I used to work for did a table at a job fair once. The candidates who showed up to talk to us were mostly under qualified for the entry level position we were trying to fill. And by that, I mean that people with zero knowledge, training or experience in our industry. Even one class or a little knowledge might have sufficed.
We had one guy lingering near our table who really seemed to want to work with us even though his skill set didn't fit our needs at all and we told him as much. The whole thing was a big waste of time for us, we never did another one after that.
Was it really "entry level" then?
If "one class" or "a little knowledge" is enough, then yes, assuming it's a position with advancement opportunities.
For a desirable or career type position, showing some initiative is not an unreasonable ask.
Yes. This wasn't an open "literally anyone can do it" job. It's entry level as in starting a path to a career. A certain aptitude is definitely necessary.
Let me ask you this, is a job that requires a two year degree and zero years of experience entry level? Because our requirements were even less than that.
I don't know why you're trying to convince me, its obvious its not as "entry level" as you thought, ans you cant find employees because the pay is very much "entry level".
This.
"Entry-level" is employerese for, "a professional position for which we don't want to pay a professional rate".
Guessing from your username you've encountered plenty of hiring managers looking for someone with multiple years experience in their specific niche field on exactly the software they use...for their entry level position that they want to pay less than 2x minimum wage.
The last time I was job hunting, I thought there had to be a typo so I actually responded to an ad for a CAD drafter to fill an "entry level" position that they wanted ten years of experience to fill.
I had the experience, so I figured I'd see what was going on. Surely someone along the hiring pipeline had screwed something up
Nope!
They really wanted a CAD drafter with a decade of experience for their entry level position to work for like $14/hr.
When I told them how unrealistic that was, the response was something to the effect of "When we say entry level, we mean it as entry into our company. The pay may seem low but this will give you the opportunity to quickly earn raises as you take advantage of your employment in our great organization!"
Ha! Good luck with that. You might be able to hire a kid out of high school who got to try solidworks for 30 minutes one afternoon for that much.
And you're right, I've seen it. One place I talked to had some obscure CAD software I'd never heard of, they wanted someone who could just sit down and use it with no instruction, they were 40 miles from the nearest "major" city, and they wanted to pay $13 per hour, $14 for "the right person". Nope.
It used to be once upon a time. Because companies invested in people and fully trained them themselves.
Yes I know, times have changed.
>hiring for entry level
>saying people are underqualified
The problem is with the companies, not the job seekers. Actually offer true entry level positions, and actually hire the people that apply.
Entry level doesn't necessarily mean literally anyone can do it. What I meant was basically first job out of college. Except you could apply while you were still in college. If that isn't entry level, I don't know what is.
I remember when a lady tried to scam me into an MLM at a job fair I attended several years ago.
I got scammed into attending a seminar for "business women empowering business women." It was just this lady giving a talk about what a great job coach she is and then pressuring everyone into hiring her for $300 per month. She saw me as a mark and was really targeting me, I actually wrote the check for her first three months and was about to hand it to her, but saw the look in her eyes, looking at my check and realized I should just tear it up.
It's not a pyramid, it's a triangle.
reverse funnel
That's been my experience as well. Totally pointless when they just want you to apply online. What's the use of networking then?
If recruiters are trying to discriminate, and you have the attributes they're discriminating in favor of, getting a face-to-face with them can be a way to get your foot in the door that doesn't leave a paper trail.
Which really highlights how bad the job market is now. All the recruiters at this job fair are going to share the sentiments the organizers are expressing in this article. They're there to hire women and are pissed at all the men who showed up, so significantly less likely to hire them... but those dudes are so desperate they still gave it a shot.
I think we should specify, "in tech". The greater job market is doing fine. Tech has been over hiring and over compensating for years.
That's been my experience as well. Totally pointless when they just want you to apply online. What's the use of networking then?
It depends on the job fair. My mid-tier university's career fair was as you describe. From talking to (women) classmates who attended Grace Hopper on the other hand it sounded very worth it. The lines were short (in the mid 2010s anyway) and many of the companies in attendance were scheduling next-day, single round interviews with job offers sent out by the end of the week. I have no idea if it's still like that but I can't say I'm surprised that, given how the tightly pool of entry-level jobs offering visa sponsorships has contracted, affected male students have gotten desperate and shameless enough to try it.
I like how this comment section highlights why a job fair specifically not for cis men is needed lol
It's so fucking cringe. I work in tech, I see how weirdly women get treated and I see their unusually high turnover rate. Early on I was told "women don't last long here" and it was very true, that woman in particular quit to do freelance work (good for her). Why can't women have a job fair? Men don't fucking need one, NEARLY ALL of the other tech job fairs are dominated by men.
I'm really being sincere, but why would men magically not need a job fair? They can also be unemployed and struggle to get a job. That's not a 2x specific issue.
Because men dominate the tech industry. It just doesn't make sense to hold one for men.
I guess I'll just copy and paste from my previous comment:
What’s worse is when you see workplaces that want more women for only the idea it will ‘bring up the standard’ like….I think there’s something telling about the culture alone if they need a specific gender to help understand better standards of working. I would hope they are hiring inclusively for more reasons than just ‘our standards are low cuz the men here are poo and we won’t confront them on it. We will leave it to women to mommy manage it for us. Know any women looking for a job?’
some of the comments here are downright scary. women can't have a single thing, it seems.
And article makes it clear what is to blame
lol
Yeah if there’s ever a sign that a group doesn’t need representation is when they brigade someone who does.
Ignoring gender, are job fairs overrun by job seekers now? Is it that bad?
Tech is overcrowded as a field and it gets worse each year. So yes.
Sadly, the perception will always be that there aren't enough workers in tech, or that there aren't enough "good" techies, when that hasn't been the case for many many years now.
While a lot of people do leave tech for management or other careers, bootcamps still sell the dream to make money, and people always talk about how "learning to code is so important to society". There has been an effort in the last decade or so to flood the market with entry-level workers, that we're now in a situation where people are spending thousands on qualifications, only to find it near impossible to get the job - or finding that no one gives a fuck where you went to college and that you need to "LC or GTFO".
Yup qualifications are only one of the things we look at, and it's way down the list. which college.. who cares?
Show us an active github page, boast about how you installed lemmy whilst fighting off a herd of wildebeast... top of the list.
Fuck. I graduate next year in tech
This comment section is a perfect example of how capitalists have won the class war. Such hatred for half of the population of the world that people seem to have forgotten that people need jobs to survive.
I would like to know which half of the population you think is receiving the hatred and which half of the population is lobbing it.
Yes that is very unclear in the last sentence. Same with the responses beneath it.
It's a delicious free-for-all and I'm all for it
Seriously.. no one should be blamed for trying to earn a living. Instead of being supportive of each other and fucking organizing in unions, we are fighting with each other.
Divide and conquer is a strategy old as world
Pretty sure Lenny's user base is heavily male dominated.
But then earlier:
So... We'd like to discriminate against men and would conversely see no problem if someone else hosted male only hiring events...?
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).
You're arguing while shifting scope which is a problem. Are you arguing about averages or individual experience?
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.
The context is important and central to the argument. I would say its critical to discuss it in any kind of valid way.
That's the because mixing the scope means you're arguing about two different things.
Talking about how females or minorities or other groups are impacted by something is measured using averages across the whole population.
How would that make sense to the argue about the individual who breaks that trend? Because it doesn't change the original point that a group experiences an event. Outliers are expected. I didn't smoke cigarettes, I'm still able to get cancer. That shouldn't mean that people who smoke shouldn't quit if they want to be healthier.
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.
That sounds like you're saying the job fair should have just been a job fair for everybody. Which would defeat the problem solving that these groups have worked towards solving simply because what? Guys are left out? Is society just suppose to ignore all solutions now if it doesn't apply to the entire population? How is that reasonable
No one is saying gender is the only point of discrimination, but this specific event is focused on gender issues.
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.
A lot of times people arguing like that ignore the imbalance that exists and they go on to argue as if everything is equal to start with.
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.
Privilege doesn't mean that things are easy or automatic, just that (in general) people with privilege don't have the same systemic negatives that those without it have. And it's very indicative of privilege for the men who went to this thing, which was built up over a number of years by a community specifically to benefit the members of that community, to just assume they had the rights of a community member without ever having contributed to that community. Something exists, and therefore they are automatically entitled to it.
I can have sympathy for people desperate for jobs, and I can understand class warfare, and yet ... once again something that women and enbys spent years and decades building up, is ruined because cishet men decided it was more 'convenient' for them to invite themselves into spaces not designed for them.
And yes, I do get frustrated with men not understanding issues of consent, in all of it's different aspects.
Couldn't this same logic be used by men to justify not allowing women into the tech industry in the first place? If someone of the wrong gender being around counts as "ruining" then men could say "once again something that men spent years and decades building up, is ruined because women and enbys decided it was more ‘convenient’ for them to invite themselves into spaces not designed for them." In fact I'd say something like that attitude really is what underlies a lot of tech industry sexism.
Gender-exclusive spaces often seem appealing to the favored gender, but they're really not good for anybody.
No, it couldn't. Because men excluding women from tech in the first place is wholly excluding them - there isn't another tech industry they can participate in. Men are being excluded from a single event when there are many other events doing the SAME THING that they are encouraged to attend.
Not saying I agree one way or the other, but the argument you make about the logic is not sound.
This argument is nonsense, but to humor it, there are other "industries", and tech is just a collection of companies ultimately. " go do your fair" can sound also as "go make your own company (and hire who you want)". Again, this is overall ridiculous, but at a purely rethorical level I think it works?
Yeah that was my first thought. For men to be trying to get a job here means there is real serious desperation. Don't hate the desperate people, hate the people that created this desperation
Who picks their gender identity? The individuals or Cullen White? If anything this underscores the insanity of identity politics. If gender is whatever an individual feels like, then this event was just thousands of women and non-binary folks, and White needs to stop being such a bigot. However I think most of us understand that this is nonsense.
Gender is indeed based on what an individual feels like. That's a perfectly reasonable way to categorize people - it's also for example what religion is based on. It's just hard to implement systems where you give different rights to different genders when there's no way to check what gender someone is besides asking them. Probably the best solution is to just treat people the same regardless of gender so nobody has an incentive to lie.
I couldn't agree more.
This is an excellent take! Especially considering everyone has historically been treated fairly and there's no reason to consider the compounding effects that would've likely occurred due to generations of white men getting preferential treatment
Just because gender is a complicated matter, it doesn't mean people can't be dishonest about it. Trying to invalidate transgender people for the lies of male registrants intruding on women's spaces is doubly shameful. Really, transphobic people love to put up a flimsy mocking pretense that they are a different gender to discredit trans people.
Even entertaining this argument seems like a mistake, but trans and non-binary people are a small minority. It's extremely unlikely that they would outnumber cisgender women.
It's sad to see this sort of two-faced transphobic talk taking starting to take root in Kbin and Lemmy. It's bad enough how much of this happens in other places.
I think it points out the fact that saying you are something does not mean you are that something. Anyone willing to lie (lots of people) can abuse this freedom to the detriment of the protected group. self id cannot be a thing if you want to exclude a certain group, because you have no basis to call them out, no matter what your hunch may be.
When I talk of "transphobes trying to discredit trans people", it's about your kind of talk that I'm talking. Now you want to make it about trans people and their right of self-id, because cis men are being shitty. Entirely the wrong group of people.
These aren't guys who claim transgenderism or non-binary identity, these are men.
Gender is what an individual feels like: and it's a consistent feeling regardless of their circumstances.
Nobody in good faith argued that your gender changes at the drop of a hat or whenever convenient. The transgender people I know have experienced significant suffering for decades due to a mismatch in feeling vs societal impositions.
White isn't being a bigot: you are with your terf talking points. Fuck off.
They didn't poll anyone already at the conference. There were no genital checks at the door. This is Cullen White making a prima facie observation of people who present as men and claiming they "lied about their gender identity when signing up."
It sounds like both you and White feel entitled to dictate to others their gender.
But how did they know the people lying about their identity were actually lying? That's what I was left wondering. Hopefully it's not just based on what the organizers assumed because that'd be (while admittedly funny) quite contrary to what I assume they want to advocate for.
I read the article but didn't see it clarified. Dunno if they clarified in the video
ITT: men who can't ever admit they might be the problem. So many excuses here it's pathetic.
edit: I love the "not all men" and "not me". As always, it's not all men. But it's enough. And the men here getting so defensive really prove the point. And before anyone gets into it, it's not really the sex or gender. It's the societal expectations and allowances that encourage men to engage in abusive shit like we see in the article here. I.e. the patriarchy and those who support it.
Can you expound on that statement?
It sounds as if the organizers were too quick to take the $650 from attendees and those willing to pay were very eager to pony up the cash in the hope of networking.
The attendees should be able to tell that they would be intruding even if the organization didn't bother to check that. Both were in the wrong.
How would they separate those intruding and those who the event was made for? Seems like a hard issue to solve
Problem for what?
I exist, I need a job to live, I have job, I try my best not to be an asshole, I fight (and vote) for a better society, for social and civil rights.
Why exactly I - since I am a man I feel included in your statement - should be THE problem?
Maybe people are getting too in the weeds with this because muh culture war
But it is an asshole move to show up to an event meant for one group of people when the original issue is how over represented your group is. I'm a developer. The grind sucks. But I would be an asshole to show up to this.
If I was out of job, I would honestly care less about the fact that "my group" is over represented. There is no white male lobby that pays my mortgage. That said, I - as in the actual me - would not go to such event either, but that's also because I wouldn't go to any job fair atm since I don't need a job.
Sure, that's what makes people behave like assholes. "I don't care about X" is why we have a pretty shitty world in many areas.
This is pure rhetoric, I can flip the argument:
"You care more about the gender than about my material condition."
Also, the moment I need to let prevail abstract concepts over my material condition (i.e., caring about "my group" being over represented while I am out of a job) is the moment in which the class unity is broken. Me and those women who are out of a job have so much in common that there is no reason for me to consider us part of two separate groups. That's the whole point of my argument, I advocate for worker solidarity and I absolutely feel that this attitude is overall harmful for it.
I don't agree. I can be at a disadvantage and still accept that another group has even greater disadvantages that I would continue or make worse by stepping into something they built. Its freeloading in a pretty assholish way. I'm not just some animal trying to get a nut with narrow focus that says fuck everything else. I can job search and find my own opportunities without freeloading
Let me say this: to me this seems the completed detached thought of someone who never faced material difficulties.
I can only think this if I am in a position of privilege where I can choose. I absolutely can't relate with any of this, I completely agree to disagree.
That would only make sense coming from a position where you assume people have no sense of integrity.
First issue is assuming your material difficulties is some how superior to others.
Second assuming the only thing that matters when facing material difficulties is how to advantage only yourself.
Lots of people in life are capable of enduring difficult times while also sacrificing or placing themselves behind others. I don't see how you don't understand that. I can promise you I have faced and continue to face many difficulties which all have taught me life lessons. One of the most important lessons is that overcoming those times by hurting others is not a position I enjoy.
I genuinely think this has nothing to do with integrity.
This is not an issue, it's absolutely normal, because I am aware of my material difficulties, while I am not aware of other people's one to the same extent. I can't decide not to buy a house because by doing so I increase the demand, which increases prices and makes it harder for poor people to afford housing. You are putting the burden to address a systemic issue on another victim.
I am not saying this is the only thing that matters, but I am saying it matters, and I think it's completely unfair to think that people shouldn't take care of themselves. I turn my eye to the mechanisms that create the scarcity that put me and a woman to fight for resources, not on either one of them.
Again, I think we have simply too different of a perception of what means a difficult time. Sorry, but this argument to me sounds as complete madness.
So not only I am forced to sell my labor to survive, which is the only chance I have, but when I do I am anyway hurting others. So what are my options? Suicide? Any job I am going to take, whether it comes though this fair or not, I am taking it potentially from an under represented category, be it a woman, an old person, black folks, LGBTQ+ community, etc. So I should just stop working?
I will say more, if you carry on your line of reasoning further, any of the people working in tech is US are participating in a system that in a bigger scale hurts people from third world countries (thinking for example of labor exploitation) and pollutes the planet. So what should people do?
The working class should build solidarity, should develop a consciousness that allow them to fight united against the system that creates arbitrary scarcity of resources, not self-police and create a hierarchy to split the crumbles among themselves.
Do you realize that there are women out of a job too? It's not just out of good vibes that people bring up issues of representation, they represent the material conditions of people. For you the percentage of women vs men in the workplace might be a meaningless number, but for those women, it's their chance of a living.
I am just saying that this burden shouldn't fall on other people in material need. It is simply extremely unfair from my point of view to imagine that a person which happens to be a man, and is in need of a job should just sit quietly and leave space for women, because generally, in the whole field, women are under represented.
Again, this is just some kind of thought process that can only come in my head if I am not risking for my house to be repossessed by the bank, or when I have enough cash to keep paying rent, or I don't have a family to support. It's a complete luxurious form of integrity that is completely detached from the real world (the one I live in, at least). This seems completely peak war between poor people, where we stop challenging the arbitrary scarcity of resources and we want to solve the problem just by creating a hierarchy by which the crumbles should be shared.
I am from a different country, maybe it's cultural, but this position is completely alienating and unrelatable for me.
You are still not thinking of the women who are also struggling to get jobs, who are poor as well. Women also struggle to pay rent or to feed their families too. You are contrasting women against struggling people as if they couldn't be in the same position.
So not only women in this field already need to fight an uphill battle against the industry's predisposition to hire men over women, now they are having to fight over opportunities that had been aimed at them to begin with. Don't you think they will also face real financial struggles because of this?
It's not a matter of caring about representation or material needs. It's an opportunity to provide material needs through representation.
I don't know where you are from, but I'm not american or european if that's what you are assuming. Yet there are still women struggling where I live. I assume the same is true all over the world.
Surely, there is a point to be made regarding our need to pressure wealthy people so that more poorer people have means to live. But how does pulling the rug under a poor woman have anything to do with that? That's not even the same discussion, that's just changing topics from the ruthlessness being displayed.
And you know what, as a man, if I were in a situation of need as well I wouldn't look favorably over people who are so intent on tripping whoever is around them to cut in line. Desperation is real for sure, but for that very reason solidarity is important.
Well, good thing it doesn't in this case.
The whole point is that everything in this field is already, by default, directed at men. That's what it's like in the US. It's the same with race. And saying we have have equality when we don't is just ignoring the way these divisions affect historically oppressed groups. Acknowledging systemic hierarchy and division between races and genders in order to fix it doesn't automatically mean you have to ignore class divisions. They're far from mutually exclusive. Why would it be impossible to acknowledge both at the same time?
It's to the point where no one else can have anything without men going "what about me and my problems?" "Well here's what I think about all these social issues that have never and will never negatively affect me." As usual, the "not all men" of every comment section of every article about a women-only-something-or-other are just making a great case for women-only-something-or-others.
That's the part I really don't get. If you're cis male looking for a job, do you really think crashing this event is going to reflect favorably on you and that you'd be more likely to land a job? People are going to look at you and think that you have good judgment and won't be a problem at all? What the heck is the thought process that makes this a good plan?
seriously this happens a lot people will go off and say word for word that a whole group of people are evil and bad when its a subset of a group. When called on it they may simply say that its not talking about the group as a whole or “not for you” if they dont genuinely believe the whole group is bad (which is wrong and discriminatory)
The issue is the discrepancy of what you say in relation to what you mean will lead others to believe in what you say but not what you mean and this harms those just trying to survive normally.
The first comment literally wasn't talking about a whole group of people, they were talking about the men in this thread leaving comments that illustrate the exact reason why this space created by and for women and non-binary people should be about and for the benefit of women and non-binary people.
It also didn't explain why, nor made the distinction you are making. So yeah, it was a blanket statement to karma farm on Lemmy...
Being an asshole is not illegal. Obeying the law doesn't mean you're a good person.
If these dudes were - as the article quotes describe - pushing, shoving, cutting in line then like I don't see why you feel you need to identify with these particular dudes.
You can absolutely wait until some guy actually is being unfairly treated before dying on this hill.
Great Parks and Rec episode
It’s abusive to checks notes apply for a job?
If we had proper public supports for people between jobs, students and immigrants looking to find a way to live and/or not get kicked out of the country, this wouldn't be a problem.
The whole job hunt feels like a rat race, it's practically common recruiter advice to apply for stuff that you don't qualify for on paper, send out as many applications as possible and take every chance you can get. So I can see how people can apply these ideas to participate in spaces where they aren't encouraged to apply.
This is compounded by the pressure put on people to even live without income for short periods of time.
I'd say I'm privileged, yet it took me a year of looking to land something in my field. I had money saved up and enough supports to keep costs at a minimum, I'm aware I'm lucky I was even able to be in this circumstance.
We need smart and capable women, trans and nb people in the workforce, and we need resources to overcome the barriers they face. I'm just saying that it's not easy, even without such barriers and also with comforts that are not afforded to many.
You're saying this like the rat race isn't a feature for employers. They give you that advice because they want you to settle for whatever shit job they can get you to do for as little pay as possible. Employers don't want happy, productive employees. They want desperate, starving employees just happy for the "opportunity" to make just enough to technically be able to survive.
You're absolutely right about that.
I'm a trans woman and don't bother applying because I know that my resume isn't even looked at, and the interview hurdles are just so high that they'll just say no anyway. What's the point if companies refuse to hire me?
Well, companies can't hire you if you don't apply. Do your best and make them all tell you no, rather than expecting it and not trying.
Just know that it's often not your fault your application didn't make it through. It's half an exhausting lottery. I've had pristinely written CV and letter with family and career counselors editing it not get anything, and applications where I found spelling mistakes after were interested in interviewing. Companies tend to have hiring seasons where if you apply at a consistent pace, you'll get no answers some months and many answers at other times.
Even recruiting itself is a hellscape, you see corps getting recruiters, laying them off because "they don't need em anymore", then all of sudden they need more staff but way more than the recruiters they have can handle.
yeah sorry I don't have that sort of mental health to be able to just continually throw myself at a wall for years on end when there ain't even a person on the other side.
Most of the problems mentioned in the article seemed to be problems with the convention organization and not the attendees.
Layoffs are what caused the long queues to begin with. Event organization and operation makes it seem closer to an average American Black Friday event than a job conference.
I have to sayings I give to my students.
In times of high unemployment: "Be overqualified for the job you are applying to. If you are not, you competition will be."
In times of low unemployment: "If the recruiter picks a name out of a hat among those who applied, your chances are 1 divided by the number of applicants. Find the average number of applicants that apply to jobs you want - that is the average number of applications you have to send out before you find a job. (E.g.: Online WFH jobs with good pay sometimes get thousands of applications)."
I only got my first job in tech for not lying. That was the only way I stood out. The guy hiring me was relieved when I came by and said my stuff was mediocre so I could not be lying like the sea of shitheads (his words) plaigerizing even his own work. Yes,even his own work started showing up in other people’s resumes..
So sometimes being truthful is worthwhile to be the only way to stand out. It’s a way to stay believable especially if they are inundated with liars
I answered the 'why do you want this job' question with 'I'm unemployed and need money', rather than lying about some lifelong ambition to work for a small software company in bumfuck nowhere. Got me the job.
Of course it depends on the interviewer, but TBH I'd rather work for one that values honesty anyway.
and it should be warned that lying on a resume does come with a risk as a person’s career takes effect. Lying on a throw away job is one thing. But as a person progresses in a career and depending on how small and incestuous an industry is, word of a liar travels fast. A person can get blacklisted fast.
From the title I thought this was an article about men driving vehicles into people at the job fair. I was slightly aghast that the discussion was only about whether or not it's ok to have a job fair for women in tech.
The fact that it's illegal for them to ban men because it's considered gender discrimination kind of highlights the problem here.
How? If they make laws to stop discrimination you can't exclude it protecting select groups. That's just legitimizing discrimination as a form of corrective action for... discrimination...
Sorry I didn't mean to imply I was supporting the idea of a career fair that discriminates against men. They problem was this one trying to get around the law by just making men feel unwelcome. The fact that there are laws that prevent them from just banning men should have clued them in that maybe it's wrong
I don't see the problem with the fair. Women are incredibly underrepresented in IT. Creating a space for them to join the industry or create connections seems healthy.
This sounds like the argument of rich white kids complaining about black kids getting the scholarships. If you want to balance an unbalanced system, you have to give incentives to the afflicted group.
I work in IT and I get at least 2 job offers every day in LinkedIn, why the F would I invade a women only fair to prove some point? Let them have something... It's not like this will affect men in the industry.
Specifically disregarding someone in favor of someone else based on discrimination is wrong no matter how you look at it. As long as these companies are evaluating all applicants fairly these women would have the same opportunity as anyone else. I've worked in IT for 20 years and while there are fewer women we also see fewer woman applying. Out of those that apply I'd guess a higher proportion are hired on than of the male candidates just because they typically present themselves better than a lot of the men. I've never seen anyone turned down because of their gender.
So prefacing this with specifying I am Trans masc, former tech support person. Now in another male dominated career. I was read unambiguously as a woman during my time in the field and the number of times I picked up a phone and had someone ask me to put them through to a male tech was astounding. It doesn't really matter if your employer is willing to hire you if you are treated like a second class citizen by the average person in the job. I lasted about three years before I left and trashed all hopes of ever applying for anything in the field ever again. The number of women folk who dip their toes into the entry-level and then decide that they can't deal with the added mental health issues of being treated like a child or an idiot by default for the rest of their working life keeps a lot of women out of a lot of fields. Even if you are passionate about the thing the additional wear on your psyche will burn you out faster.
My new field has a different issue. It's very nepotistic so people tend to hire their friends first. Being incredibly competent only earns you the fourth or fifth spot on a crew of about six or seven people. If you are a male crew boss and your friend base is overwhelmingly male and you hire the people you feel most comfortable around then unthinkingly about 50 percent of the most secure jobs go to your male friends. Women, incredibly competent ones, tend to bounce around our industry, a lot get stuck as temp labor. Female leads are rare as are those who get the secure crew spots despite the total numbers at the hall telling us 40 percent of the hall roll is female. It doesn't matter if the bosses aren't actively trying to discriminate against women because they are just hiring people they like to work with, in the end none of that matters if you are a woman because regardless of the intent in the hearts of the crew bosses you are still stuck having to be incredibly competent just to fight for the leftover scraps.
Do you believe all discrimination is wrong?
Since it seems like you're looking to trap me here, how about you just go ahead and say what type discrimination you don't think is wrong. When I said discrimination I was referring to the protected classes probably should have been more clear about that. Obviously there are traits that can make a person unsuitable for a job. I, for instance, as a short only moderately athletic man, should not be hired on to play for a professional basketball team.
If someone needs a wheelchair I think it is proper to accommodate.
I can't wait for this to be posted on Hacker News, get 5 of the worst techbro libertarian nonsense comments, get 3 angry SJW replies to those techbros, then dang shouts at the SJWs about tone, rate limits them, then flags the article off the site.
/it me, I'm the SJW.
Accurate lmao
Purely commenting on the TikTok and not the article:
"... career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers..." and then there's a TikTok that says "A conference for (wo)men by women" and "the allies are totally allying"
So do only female presenting nonbinary people count?
(I know if you read the article that it says there was an increase in the number of self identifying males but how would the TikToker know that? The TikToker is just looking at the crowd and assuming that the place is overrun with men without actually checking if they're NB.)
That doesn't seem like a job fair for women, but rather a job fair for everybody except men...
Correct. Since you can’t tell if a person in enby by looking at them this is just a bunch of bigots getting mad that enby and trans people were present. Terfs gonna terf i guess.
I think that's heavily implied. But they're not legally allowed to say that
You actually think there's the slightest possibility that a meaningful fraction of the men there are actually ftm trans people?
No one wants to work anymore!
The mating call of terrible managers everywhere…
People in the comments: Discrimination is bad! (Except when it's against a group of people I don't like)
It's a shame these people can't understand the flaw in their logic. More discrimination is not the answer.
Imagine if this was a whites only or over 6ft tall job fair, this stuff just fails to make sense when you divide groups based on criteria you can't control.
I want a job fair for short people. Fuck those lankies, too long have they towered over us short kings! #SetTheBarLow
Glad to see federal anti-discrimination law working to prevent these conference organizers from being as sexist as they wanted to be.
If companies were looking for applicants there, it is clear discrimination.
Companies are definitely looking for applicants there, so it would definitely be discriminatory to ban men from it. That's why it would be illegal to ban men:
"The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US."
if yall are going to a job fair at least don't be assholes about it.
I believe you mean ADMIRAL Grace Hopper
They are all for gender equality, except when...
Except when you cannot find any female candidates to apply for your openings, so you go to a conference to do ad-hoc interviews.
If you cannot find (female) candidates for an opening, maybe it is time to re-evaluate the jobs you are offering, and how you are doing this.
I agree. HR is constantly trying to train managers to write more inclusive job descriptions. I also wonder how many female candidates are lost in pre-screening.
When the economy starts to falter an unemployment rises, people attend job fairs at higher numbers. More at 10.
Hmm.. lots of white dudes on Lemmy then, eh?
It's like old reddit, but with new and improved culture wars