A jury previously awarded Shannon Phillips $25.6 million.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ditto here: I’ve actually seen “token” hires on gender (and only in one place), never on race.

    Furthermore, that one place which had gender quotas and which at least in the departmemt I was working with clearly had hired some people for their gender, not their competence, had massive corporate culture and even profitability problems (think bankrupt bank with strong political connections that got unconditionally rescued with taxpayer money after the 2008 Crash and just kept losing billions and getting even more disfunctional).

    It makes zero business sense to care about anything but competence when hiring somebody, and I say this as somebody who has actually been part of hiring decisions in a few places.

    • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      There were two women that were rumored to have been hired/promoted into a VP position and a Director position only for their gender about 6 years ago. I didn’t work with either of them closely. They both left the company a year later. I’m not sure whether that was vindication of the rumors, or just a turn of circumstance, but worst case their gender bought them only a temporary position.

      Just to be clear - plenty more women in both leadership and technical positions, and have been for years. Just those two were the only ones where I ever got a hint of that sort of thing.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, this one time was also the only time I saw any such thing and my career spans over 25 years and 4 countries.

        • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I think we’re overall in agreement, just putting a finer point on it - On this and the related racial topic, I’m of the opinion that far more people think these policies result in unqualified people getting jobs they don’t deserve than ever actually happens. No business has payroll to spare that they can just shovel onto worthless bodies to satisfy diversity goals, and I refuse to believe that there’s more than a vanishingly small percentage of folks who remain in such a position longer than the time it takes for management to realize they are worthless.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Well managed places hire the best person for the job and don’t need to try to hide the visible results (racial or gender imbalances in a company which cannot be explained by pre-existing manpower inbalances in that professional domain) of the kind of widespread mismanagement which includes treating hiring responsabilities as a license to do favours for one’s mates, using yet more merit-ignoring practices such as quotas.

            It really isn’t a benefit for anybody to be hired as a token anything because places which hire people for token reasons are just covering up mismanagement with it and are thus not good places to work in.

            PS: I can tell you from my own professional experience which is quite extensive (as I worked as a Freelancer in most of my career so saw a lot more places than average) that lots of places do have payrol to spare and there’s a lot of wastefulness going on in the business world: the idea of a Free Market where there’s lots of competition is pure fantasy in a lot of domains and even in competitive areas non-core-business departments often have a lot more budge than they would if they were in an Industry were what they do is core to the business.

            On the outside of businesses, the Economy is riddled with markets with less than “flat playing fields” (most of them, actually have barriers to entry, some even being natural cartels and monopolies) and the very same informational-advantages that allow for example companies in expert domains to swindle non-expert customers (say, car mechanics overcharging) also apply inside the companies themselves (which is why people at times discover to their surprise that the CEO of their company is a complete total idiot).