kalium comments on Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy - Less Wrong

-7 Post author: Lexico 19 September 2014 10:18PM

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Comment author: kalium 21 September 2014 06:03:22PM 1 point [-]

Looking at this comment section... wow. Yes, regularly encountering people who behave like Azathoth at work would be a level of (not really micro) aggression that could easily drive me out of a company, and I consider myself to have a pretty thick skin. Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence. Doesn't matter if she has a physics degree from Caltech, no, her professors probably just passed her out of sympathy. Doesn't matter if she's written good code in the past, no, her references must all be assumed to be lying for mysterious reasons.

Hypothesis: Azathoth and people with the same attitude encounter few competent women at work because if said women can get a job somewhere else, where they won't be constantly assumed less competent than their achievements demonstrate, they do so.

The bit about quotas increasing the quality of the female applicant pool to the point where they don't even need to be used is counterintuitive and interesting. Myself, I've always avoided any college/company/etc I thought might have a quota because I want there to be no shadow of a doubt that I've earned what I have, but I'm aware I'm far from being a representative woman.

Comment author: ChristianKl 22 September 2014 10:45:47AM 3 points [-]

Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence.

That seems wrong. Woman do get hired from time to time because an employer considers them to be competent and Azathoth doesn't object to that status quo.

Comment author: kalium 24 September 2014 01:53:30AM -1 points [-]

Yeah, I was pissed off and stated things a little too strongly. But having your every achievement constantly doubted and assumed less meaningful than the same achievement from a man really is corrosive, and I would say also makes it hard to be productive and encourages the "keep your head down" mentality that fubarobscuro mentioned.

Comment author: kalium 21 September 2014 08:26:49PM -1 points [-]

Huh. Two downvotes on this, fair enough. But I've also gotten another 9 downvotes for old unrelated comments in the very short time since I posted this. Smells fishy.