Interesting Links for 18-10-2016

[andrewducker]

UK spy agencies 'broke privacy rules' says tribunal (tags: uk surveillance spying ) 20 Artists, from Photo Reference to Final Artwork (tags: art viaElfy ) Terrifying headmistress quite prepared to make Scotland re-sit referendum (tags: scotland referendum satire independence ) A sense of scale: the best microscopy of 2016 (tags: photographs

Comments

[bart_calendar]

I agree with most of that secretary article with a few caveats

[andrewducker]

I can totally see that it would be in the interests of the business to discriminate.

Heck, there are various places where it would be totally in the interests of a business to act in a discriminatory fashion.

Which is why you need laws to make them stop, so that it's a level playing field. If we left it up to individual businesses to stop out of their own good will then obviously they wouldn't, because who can afford to give away money?

[bart_calendar]

I don't think "hiring the person who is going to help your business the most" is "discrimination" in any real sense. It would be like saying "well why should we only hire people who know how to program become programmers?"

If having a neutral female voice at the other end of the phone is going to get you more clients then that's a reasonable skill set to expect from who you hire.

[andrewducker]

It's not just a skill though a skill, it's also an in-built facet of the person. I can't learn how to have a female neutral voice.

If hiring only white people for your front desk gave you a 50% boost in sales I would still _totally_ be in favour of that being illegal.

When it comes to accents I agree that people's voices should be clear. But "neutral" basically means "Home counties". Everyone has an accent, it's just that some people have defined theirs as "The normal one".

[bart_calendar]

Would you argue that a strip club catering to straight men has to be willing to hire a dude?

(Also you could get a neutral female accent if you really tried. Voice coaches exist for this reason.)

[andrewducker]

No I wouldn't. And it strikes me as a remarkably silly comparison to bring up.

Would you be ok with discrimination against black people if it turned out that doing so made the company more money?

(Also, I thought that pretty much all strip clubs operated with the strippers being effectively self-employed and paying for use of the space. In which case I'd be totally up for a guy demanding their right to dance, and then making no money at it.)

[bart_calendar]

The thing is race doesn't really play into talking to a potential customer on the phone.

And let's be practical. There are hundreds of professions where women are less likely to be hired simply because they are women, even if they can do the job as well as men can.

You really want to open up some of the few professions where they have an innate hiring advantage and take that advantage away from them?

The end result of making it illegal to discriminate against males doing initial phone contact with potential clients - even though that it can be verified that they do a worse job of it - is simply costing women jobs in order to benefit less qualified men.

That's not good.

[andrewducker]

I am against discrimination against people on the basis of their gender.

I believe in the full force of the law against anyone discriminating against people on the basis of their gender.

I really don't have any leeway around this.

I want to open up all professions to everyone. And I want anyone who stands in the way of this to be bulldozed into the ground.

[bart_calendar]

Fair point. We'll agree to disagree.

[andrewducker]

Fair enough :-)

[alitheapipkin]

You really want to open up some of the few professions where they have an innate hiring advantage and take that advantage away from them?

The problem is that it all plays into the same toxic, gender essentialist crap in society. My husband is a nurse, he gets discriminated against for being male in a bunch of settings and this is in no way better than me being discriminated against in tech for being female. Because he's discriminated against because nursing and caring are seen as women's work. So far from helping women keep an advantage by keeping men out of nursing, all you are actually doing is re-enforcing the idea that it's women's work, and that other things are by definition men's work.

If gender discrimination is wrong, it's wrong in all professions, for the same reasons.

[bart_calendar]

The key difference though is that being male doesn't make him worse at his job, while when dealing with new customers on the phone it's proven that being male does make them less effective.

[alitheapipkin]

I don't think survey results showing feelings of trust really prove anything objectively in a way which excludes the impact of personal prejudice. I suspect you could probably survey chunks of the population who would equally judge that in their opinion, a male nurse is less trustworthy.

[bart_calendar]

But trust has no impact on a male nurse's ability to do their job. If you are trying to sell someone on your services trust does have an impact on your ability to do your job.

[alitheapipkin]

But trust has no impact on a male nurse's ability to do their job

I would argue that's about as scientific as the idea that men are inherently more trustworthy when trying to sell you stuff over the phone.

But I think you are rather missing my point. No-one is made better or worse at any job by their gender (unless their job is being a certain gender), they are made better or worse by traits which may or not correlate strongly with gender. Many of these traits probably only correlate so well with gender because of societal re-enforcement of gender essentialism. If we want to get rid of that enforcement, we need to do so equally across all fields. It's a matter of principle.

[erindubitably]

They're only less effective because of societal expectations and conditioning - they aren't less capable by nature. The more we buy into that by allowing this discrimination to continue the longer it will exist.