Your D&I consultant is saying this because those words make certain demographics less likely to apply. They aren't trying to police language; they're trying to help whomever hired them increase the diversity of the people who apply.
If you think straight men are the victim of toxic workplaces because of this, imagine how other people feel.
I'm not sure why having a more diverse applicant pools should even be a goal. Often diversity hinders team cohesion and creates communication barriers. What's wrong with homogenous teams and organizations?
Furthermore, when did the (highly subjective) masculine/feminine coding of a word become more important that its actual definition? What if you do in fact need an "independent" person? Does that mean you need a man? Aren't we just back to stereotyping then?
My understanding is not that independence as a trait is more common in men, its that independent women are less likely to apply for positions when its specified they're looking for an independent person.
Like, for example, if I read for a competitive, independent, ownership, whatever buzzword position, I think "wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves? I'll pass, thanks".
I would say I'm a fairly independent dev who takes a lot of pride in my craft. But a lot of toxic workplaces in my time excuse their toxicity in saying their employees just aren't tough enough to handle the workplace.
> wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves?
But what if that's an accurate understanding of the company culture? There are surely people who thrive in these sorts of environments, even if you (and I) are not among them. Are you suggesting that these people are mostly men?
I made one point that women (apparently) apply less to something with X language even if the language describes them. Then I made a completely separate, personal experience anecdote of how I feel when I'm exposed to that language because of what it tells me about the culture. I didn't link my personal experience to that of a gendered experience representative of anything broadly, you did.
My point was that if this hypothetical company, in the interest of inclusiveness, modified the language in their job postings to be less masculine-coded, they would be actively destroying useful information that you and I would use to pass them over.
homogeneous teams made up of people who think the same way, have similar backgrounds etc are more likely to have blind spots. Having a diverse set of viewpoints involved in decision making means you are less likely to overlook some corner case that is obvious to some people but not others.
And how do you define "diversity"? Through externally presenting traits? Through who and how people decide to have sex? Much of diversity efforts seem to focus on these things instead of actual diversity of thought and experience.
You might have three "white guys" and one grew up in poverty in the US south and made his way out of it, one who was born in a tiny town in eastern europe, and one who grew up in a middle class family in the SF bay area. But there are many people, if seeing those three guys in a photo, would make some snarky comment about "tech bros" or "white dudes" and completely discount the fact that they are three unique people that have grown up with completely different backgrounds and come with completely different experiences and approaches to life.
Most, if not all, diversity efforts I have come across, including where I currently work, focus exclusively on externally presenting traits like race and gender, with the explicit goals of reducing the numbers of white men in category.
The first question is not hard to find answers to if you genuinely want them. But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways. Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious?
The actual definition is the meaning ascribed by users of a word as it is understood by their audience. The dictionary is a recording of meaning, not a creator of it.
> homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways
And more effective in other, measureable, ways. This is very much not settled science. There are many ways to measure effectiveness - idea diversity is only one of them.
Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant?
The fellow may bring a new perspective on how to run things, but if the owners are not interested in his perspective (which they are entitled not to be, right?), then all they're left with is the communication difficulties he would face performing his function.
> Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious?
Generally the mechanism has been that many people actively seek to associate with people similar to themselves, people they can easily relate to. This generally includes hiring. I think it's perfectly benign and quite natural for people do cluster around cultural similarity. It's why we have things like Chinatown.
Most other behaviour, to me, seems to be in this category: people preferring the (professional) company of those they can relate to. If it's OK for a Chinese restaurant to only hire Chinese people, why is it wrong for an investment bank or programming firm to only hire people similar to the founders? It seems to be the same mechanism at play.
> Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant?
This isn't the position though. This is adding additional hypotheticals like language barriers. It would be more like hiring a white american waiter of a chinese restaurant, where both the white american waiter and the chinese kitchen staff don't have significant language barriers. In that case it might actually be helpful depending on the demographics of people eating at the restaurant.
Culture and language are inexorably intertwined. Just ask anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language. A cultural barrier is just a softer communication barrier, where language has to be much more formal than speakers are typically accustomed to, in order to be understood and not to offend.
When I'm speaking to people whom I relate to well (including colleagues), half of it is movie quotes, rude jokes, varyingly subtle digs, etc. I suspect most people are the same. In order to write for a wider audience, I have to add rather a few more layers of thought and consideration to what naturally comes to me - to formalize my language.
This burden of formalization is in fact exactly what Google is trying to help with. It is only required when people don't relate to each other well. Having a homogeneous team eliminates the problem.
>But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways
As far as I'm aware there is a single contrived study which looked at financial metrics from boards with female representation to come to that conclusion. This is a tenet that activists desperately want to believe but flies in the face of conventional experience and basic reasoning. At the very lease some minimum common culture, like language, is necessary for a functioning team. How do you expect a team to function if half the members believe that traits like "independence" are toxic and words like "analysis" are offensive? That's culture too.
>Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious?
Another recently popular fallacy used to justify these toxic policies. That a team is composed primarily of one demographic does not imply sexism. People who share cultural values and personality traits are likely to gravitate toward certain disciplines, it is an entirely emergent phenomenon and does not require invocation of discrimination to explain. For example, regardless of the amount of sexism actually present in the tech workplace, it is absurd to expect gender parity if one acknowledges that women are fundamentally less likely to be interested in programming in the first place, as a consequence of human nature.
These policies all feel great but are ultimately half baked, and the danger here is that for merely questioning them, as any rational person should, we risk our livelihoods. The consequences for society are bleak, as we are now explicitly prioritizing gender and race over competence. This is, ironically, top-down mandated systemic racism/sexism.
Edit: in fact I would go as far as to say that all communication is predicated upon common culture, because words, symbols, gestures, and inferred intentions are all inherently cultural. Even things like correcting mistakes of others and questioning seniors/elders are vary with culture. There is absolutely no reason to believe that diversity is an absolute good and cannot hamper communication and cooperation when certain cultures are mixed. We've gone totally off the rails because the same people pushing for these policies have created a system where their discussion is forbidden.
I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less.
But if we're at the point of looking around at this world and saying "Ah yes, human nature caused this and certainly nothing else did" then I don't think I have anything to contribute to that project.
>I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less.
You don't think, given the zeitgeist, that these studies might be a little biased? Maybe designed to produce certain acceptable results? What kind of scandalous pushback do you think google would get from activists if they dared to suggest results which went against this forced D&I consensus?
> Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity.
> This may seem strange to you. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy diversity. You probably don’t observe the problems of low morale and high marginal costs that researchers have found in ethnically diverse workplaces.
>Your D&I consultant is saying this because those words make certain demographics less likely to apply.
Yes, I know very well what the alleged rationale is for this toxicity. But can you spend more than half a second actually thinking critically about the implications of such policy? Let me put it this way: if a person is so sensitive as to be unable to handle a job posting listing objectively desirable traits and behaviors like "leadership", "competitive", "analysis", "objective", etc, then I would question their ability to function as part of a competent team, or even as an adult. The implication is that women are so fragile that they need to be protected from words otherwise representing totally desirable traits in a team member.
We can't find a female senior python engineer because there are almost none in the pipeline, not because our job postings are "gendered". Of course these D&I grifters would be out of a paycheck if they admitted as much. But the gaslighting and forced discrimination is absolutely infuriating and totally demoralizing.
How on earth is "analysis" a non-inclusive word? What if you're hiring someone to do some sort of analysis? Or, for job title that's literally "analyst"?
It's probably the case that a lazy researcher saw a fewer URM applicants for jobs with those words and assumed the causal factor was the word, rather than factors like education requirements or something else.
> Your D&I consultant is saying this because those words make certain demographics less likely to apply.
but if I want to put lead and driven on a job ad for a person, that's because I want someone who feel they can lead and are driven for the job. If prospective applicants don't feel they have those quality (or are ready to apply them for the job offered), why should I care?
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this, but this will help explain it. (I will note that the paper often uses the word "analyze" itself, for what it's worth.)
Yeah, that's the point. The words are supposed to be gender stereotypes, and they are in fact taken from literature circa ~90s-00s (not the 80s but we all know the stereotypes were still prevalent then). It's not supposed to be insulting, these are presented in an academic context with extensive references to the prevailing literature.
Thanks for the pointer, but I am still confused about the categorization of "analysis" and now also "competitive".
For some reason, both of these words are included in patterns ("analy*" and "compet*") in the "Masculine Words" list; however, the methodology for Study 1 indicates that the word "competitive" is agentic and has to do with agency rather than gender.
It then references several papers for where they sourced their lists, but I can only access some of them. In the ones I was able to access, I can't find discussion on why "analysis" or "competitive" are considered masculine words. Many of the ones I can't access are older studies, perhaps not incidentally.
I work with "analysts" many of whom are women and they are expected to perform "analysis" as part of their job.
A research study I found[0] indicates as much as 48% of women are in "Analyst" roles.
The study referenced in the paper you linked looked at roles where the largest group of women in a male dominated profession was 26% for computer programmers.
I am sure it is very complicated and I'm missing lots of things in my quick survey, but in this admittedly cherry-picked example I don't understand how "analyst" is considered a masculine word when there is near parity between genders in "analyst" roles.
I wonder if some of these words are coded based on biases from times gone by -- maybe back in the 1970's and 1980's most "analysts" were male and therefore most "analysis" being performed by males, but in 2020's this does not seem to be the case.
>Thanks for the pointer, but I am still confused about the categorization of "analysis" and now also "competitive".
Let me try to abate some of your confusion: you are approaching this with the assumption that the research and policies originate from a position of good faith. They don't. The motivations are petty jealousy, greed, and insecurity. It's much easier from an emotional perspective to blame "the system" (i.e. white men) than to acknowledge that some groups are more likely to be better suited for certain occupations than others. Racism and sexism are convenient excuses which direct attention away from personal insufficiencies. That's partly why this dogma is so intoxicating - and the other reason is that it's misleadingly presented in a way that implies it can only result in more positive outcomes. Add in the stigma against questioning any of this and the outcome is a rigid orthodoxy which is totally removed from western liberal values of equality of opportunity, which is being deliberately conflated with equality of outcome.
If you think straight men are the victim of toxic workplaces because of this, imagine how other people feel.