Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com) 182
itwbennett writes: This year, women made up 26.8 percent of Microsoft's total workforce, down from 29 percent in 2014, the company reported Monday. In a blog post discussing the numbers, Gwen Houston, Microsoft's general manager of diversity and inclusion, pointed the finger at the thousands of layoffs the company made to restructure its phone hardware business: 'The workforce reductions resulting from the restructure of our phone hardware business ... impacted factory and production facilities outside the U.S. that produce handsets and hardware, and a higher percentage of those jobs were held by women,' she said.
SJWdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
This place is getting worst than Tumblr.
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Man SJW has always been a thing, just nobody thought of a glib term for it before. You know... Civil rights, suffragettes, peace prize, conservation and recycling, some idiots wrote books like 1984. Oh noes... We would have been much better off building a society of Trump clones and slavers
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Those aren't SJW activities. Just saying, SJW's are much like Freedom Fighters. They fight real social equality, while advocating racism to fight perceived and often phantom racism.
Re:SJWdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those aren't SJW activities. Just saying, SJW's are much like Freedom Fighters. They fight real social equality, while advocating racism to fight perceived and often phantom racism.
This; One of the main things that SJWs struggle against is "microagression [wikipedia.org]". Here's the thing. Where discrimination against black people (in the USA) is a scientifically observed fact, measured, e.g. by many different experiments like sending the same CV with different photos, microagression has no science behind it at all. All the examples you look at will break down to two things - real discrimination ("oh - I'll put your son into sports class - black kids are always better at sport")- or a lost chance to explain something about your culture (cases like someone asking "oh - where are you from"; you could also include here "cultural appropriation" which is a terrible way of naming a bunch of different ways in which cultures cross pollinate and also misunderstand each other). It's actually mostly a way to attack different cultures where words have different meanings whilst often avoiding explaining to people what is wrong with what they are saying or, e.g. in the case of Germain Greer, trying to understand the rather advanced point she is trying to make (women are not simply men without penises).
SJW could be characterised by extreme attempts to discriminate against other social cultures within the same grouping. It can be characterised by attempts to stop the speech of people who have different viewpoints and to block an interrupt debate and interaction between groups with different views about equality, society and relations between people. SJW is a right wing (or extreme left; approximately where the political circle meets at the point of totalitarianism) reactionary grouping which should be seen as closer to the neo-con / neo-liberal / stalinist thinking than to anything which looks for social equality.
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While I agree with most everything you're saying here, I've begun to notice that just like the term "Race Card", the far right is beginning to use "SJW" to shut down serious discussion over real issues - or any topic that might lead to the conclusion that a extreme right wing ethos might not be for the best. This news in this article here shows that Microsoft largely is not hiring women in the U.S., but only for low paying, rote phone manufacturing work overseas, which they've been recently laying off. Pers
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... microagression has no science behind it at all.
Microagresions is a well established scientific theory with literally (and I really mean literally) thousands of peer reviewed papers published on the subject, including many papers with objective measurements.
Just because a subject goes against your prejudices doesn't mean that you get to falsely claim that it has no science behind it.
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A search on Google Scholar for the term 'microaggression' turns up 2,230 results for me at the moment. Not all of the results will be peer-reviewed journal articles, but many of them will.
Apparently, the origin of the term:
I am
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Civil rights, suffragettes
Yes, those people advocated for social justice. Had I been born 100 years earlier, I would have been doing everything I could to support them. Random factoid: the suffragettes were compared to Amazon women in the newspapers of the day. I kinda like that.
I'd think about helping out somehow girls in the worst parts of the Middle East being denied an education, but I'm afraid the problems over there go far deeper than just some civil rights issues for certain demographics. Maybe that's something for me to
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Thank you. You have explained this very succinctly.
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Nobody cares, apk. Do you have a script that just posts this junk whenever Coren posts?
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I can see you, lmao, holding the camera shooting a Pr0N flick or something
On an odd sidenote, I might actually do this. I have been wanting a pr0n flick that had some actual plot, possibly a gender change at some point, consensual of course. There are many themes to explore here. I hate this plague of non-consensual gender (and species!) changes that has established itself in the TF community.
In a footnote, I would like to note that I find your hosts file admirable.
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Nice false dilemma. The SJW moniker is apt. It indicates how 'social justice' has become oppressive in its own right. However I give you props for at least implicitly admitting its marxist underpinnings.
Re:SJWdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft's general manager of diversity and inclusion
I can think of another job that will be on the cutting block when times start to get lean for MS.
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Agreed.
Bitcoin Monday
SWJ Tuesday
Microsoft / Apple Wednesday
etc.
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Wait a sec, SJW articles are supposed to be posted only on Fridays. That way people have time to get the latest penis and vagina counts for their office.
Since it is a holiday in the States this week, we have to post the Friday stories early.
Now we know what it stands for (Score:1)
You have to put new cover sheets on all the Tunnel Pecker Statistics reports before they go out now.
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No, but personally I would rather not have a raving crowd of lunatics dox me and cause me to lose my job because I don't do enough to encourage women to work in tech. Despite that I don't do anything to prevent or discourage women from tech either, it doesn't matter to that crowd.
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The useless employees were disproportionately female.
It's a little more subtle.
- Microsoft bought Nokia
- Nokia was a company that was much more enlightened than Microsoft, and actually had some female employees
- Now Microsoft is canning a bunch of those people
And so - the layoffs are disproportionally female compared to *Microsoft* standards, not compared to Nokia standards, and not compared to other sane companies.
Re:what are they saying (Score:5, Insightful)
Nokia was a company that was much more enlightened than Microsoft, and actually had some female employees
They also had a factory. They didn't have more female programmers, just more female factory workers. Microsoft purchased them then fired most of the factory workers.
OMFG! (Score:1)
OMFG! There was a fluctuation of 2.2 percent in the female employees of a major corporation that has bizzilions of employees that come and go!
This is a very disturbing trend, and I tell you I'm on the phone to Jane Fonda right now!
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OMFG! There was a fluctuation of 2.2 percent in the female employees of a major corporation that has bizzilions of employees that come and go!
No, it was because they cancelled the phone business.
<sexist sarcasm humor> Clearly since they aren't working on phones any more, they don't need the women. They must have used the women to QA those phones so receptionists and secretaries would be satisfied with the phone's shape and comfort on the female face. Now that the phone division is closed they don't need the women any more. </sexist sarcasm humor>
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I work in a division where the gender population across the tech folks is 50/50 There is still an open position so depending who we fill in that roll will make the determining factor. However I work in health care, that industry will naturally attract a higher female group.
However in terms of looking at rolls to fill and the people who apply I find the following trends.
Male Tech workers: Focus a lot on the technology, they like to build and create, when there is a problem they will jump in and tackle it. W
Re: OMFG! (Score:4, Interesting)
No I am saying different genders will gravitate towards different jobs. Towing more women at a job to meet a quota even if that isn't what they want to do, will just cause a higher level of turn over. However as I stated before this is a trend, not a rule. Like any trend there are exceptions... A lot of one, a Trend can mean 51% of a population will fall in such a category (assuming I have a low margin of error) meaning 49% will fall in the minority. 49% is a big minority.
There are a lot of talented women who are just as good if not better then men at the building and creating of technology, if that is what they want to do, we shouldn't say they can't because of their gender. However if there is a balance in the stereotypes and you find your organization isn't having the gender equity, then there is a problem with the organization which will need to be corrected, such as fostering values that will attract women stereotype tech workers to your field, as they will bring something the organization needs anyways.
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Heh, we've reached the point where I'm not sure if this is actual trolling. I have one nitpick:
and extend unemployment to deal with the loss of jobs for some it will cause.
That will never happen. If the male gender is what's on your birth certificate, you are expendable.
The problem with these kinds of articles I see is that painting male tech workers as a bunch of sexually frustrated misogynerds (no idea if that's what TFA does) is going to turn women off to the idea of majoring in CS. Hell, it's scaring me out of tech!
Furthermore, focusing on the state of the industry is putting
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Imagine what hospitals and doctors offices would be like, they would have to find men to work as nurses!
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Against my better judgement, I am going to comment instead of modding you down for trolling in your signature.
The nursing profession has been trying to attract more males for decades. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that having physically stronger people around can help a lot with immobile patients.
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My signature is a response to a trolling campaign, if you want to down mod me for it, so be it, it doesn't much matter to me. I tried to have an adult conversation with him, and discuss issues I saw in his advertising, and with his actual product. All I have gotten in response is this on every post I make:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
He has stopped this week, but it doesn't change the behavior. I have responded to every one of his points, and demonstrated my side with evidence, but yet I still get tr
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As far as the nursing profession, I am simply giving an example, there are many fields just like it, and there are many fields that no one talks about the gender imbalance in. But when it comes to STEM, we must fix the imbalance, despite all the evidence pointing at women not being interested in the types of jobs STEM offers. Women tend to gravitate to jobs involving socialization, and there is nothing wrong with that. Men tend to gravitate to jobs involving isolation, and there is nothing wrong with tha
Re:OMFG! (Score:5, Informative)
The larger the corporation, and the less turnover it has in general, the more significant a small number is. If there are 49 employees, a 2.2% fluctuation is someone quitting. If there were 2 million employees, with say, 20% layoffs, that a 2.2% reduction between gender groups is extremely significant (p
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Microsoft has exceptionaly high turnover. It doesn't fit the standard curve.
OMG!! Female STEM workers again!?!?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who fucking cares al-fucking-ready?
If women want a STEM career they will get one. Clearly they don't want them. Stop trying to artificially equalize something that has no natural desire to be equal!
Where is all of the outcry about males being less than 10% of the nursing field in the US? https://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupations.pdf
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If women want a STEM career they will get one. Clearly they don't want them.
This is so mind numbingly stupid, yet brought up in every debate on the subject, that I can't even be bothered to refute it any more.
Where is all of the outcry about males being less than 10% of the nursing field in the US?
Try ask the American Assembly for Men in Nursing, and look up Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan. Don't people know how to google any more?
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You answered a rhetorical question. He didn't really want to know where it was, I'm sure he had no doubt that there was *some* outrage someplace; and yes he could have googled it. The point to be made in posing that as a rhetorical question is that to get "women in STEM" outrage you don't have to google. It's served up on a platter every other day.
This, despite the fact that demographics indicate nursing will be in high demand over the next several decades, and can't be outsourced. So sure, let's encour
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Fair point for nursing. That is becoming less of a problem. See homecare providers also. I somehow got on a mailing list for a local nursing/homecare association, and they even have a spotlight for men in those professions.
If women want a STEM career they will get one. Clearly they don't want them.
This is so mind numbingly stupid, yet brought up in every debate on the subject, that I can't even be bothered to refute it any more.
Would you please help me to understand why this is mind-numbingly stupid? Up above I talked about my various experiences mentoring women programmers. One was quite brilliant. However, the only woman I know personally who does programming outside of work is trans. There is something
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AmiMoJo is the local SJW. He is fighting the good fight against everything anti woman. He doesn't care if it is women making the choice, they must be being forced out of the profession at a young age, we must force them to go into STEM as they are too simple and don't know better.
He is fighting for equality, but only for women, who cares if there is sexism against men, men are tough, they can take it.
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I am aware, but thanks anyway. SJWs like AmiMoJo are why I registered an account again. The red site might be where we all wind up in the long run, but for now, the discussion is here. I left after Slashcott when the red site became stable. (Well, actually /. didn't go in my hosts file until we got Brianna Wu's answers to our interview questions.) When I learned that one of my best apprentices was a feminist I kind of had a moment where up was down, left was right, short was long, and everything I knew
Re: OMG!! Female STEM workers again!?!?!? (Score:1)
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Let me Google that for you. The first result was a professional association for male nurses, so I'll skip that.
Male Nurses Break Through Barriers to Diversify Profession [rwjf.org]
Enhancing Diversity in the Workforce [nche.edu]
Man Enough: Recruiting Men into Nursing School [collegexpress.com]
Hope that helps!
(It turns out the nurse shortage is so real that they are actually trying to fix this gripe, and salaries are rising as one would expect in response to the demand, unlike in a certain industry. Iow, you're not necessarily wrong in a general se
Gwen Houston should be next (Score:1, Troll)
It's a difference of .2%, explained by any number of facts.
She is creating a mountain out of a molehill. What real value does she provide? I'd fire an employee in that position making a nonsense post like this without a second thought.
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Creating mountains from molehills is how these positions are created (director of diversity, etc).
Why do you think that womens studies majors and culture critics majors and media studies majors are so obnoxiously loud about every retarded little invented thing? Because they have to gin-up their own business. They have to create outrages that only they are qualified to fix for your business, organization, or institution. Otherwise they have literally no employable skills whatsoever.
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While correlation is not causation, it's a statsitically significant difference. Therefore, there is something separating those groups. It could be a confound (for instance, maybe the layoffs were limited to those with PhDs, and more women at MS had PhDs), but the test for "is the size of the delta worth talking about" passed.
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One more layoff required... (Score:1)
While they are at it why not just get rid of the Diversity and Inclusion bimbo? I cringe every time I hear that term. The position should be replaced with General Manager of Competence. That person would be in charge of making sure that the company hires and retains top talent...regardless of their fucking gender or ethnicity.
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Your advice is rejected for the following reasons:
[x] It makes too much sense
[x] It is politically incorrect
[x] It has been tried before
Seriously, if a massive layoff occurs in the construction field, the vast majority of those affected will be male. If a massive layoff occurs in the nursing field, the mast majority of those affected will be female. The underlying problem is that people continue to conflate equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.
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Wouldn't be the first time my ideas have been rejected. But it won't stop me from trying :-)
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the company hires and retains top talent...regardless of their fucking gender or ethnicity.
"top talent" is a code word for rich white people
Re:One more layoff required... (Score:4, Insightful)
"top talent" is a code word for rich white people
"$TERM is a code word for rich white people" is a code phrase for "I'm too lazy to actually debate the case on its merits, so I'll just create an intentionally flawed argument and pretend like you said it."
Not that there's not a bunch of racist sexist elitist assholes in the world, but you don't get to just glibly dismiss their points and pretend like you've won the argument. Well, I mean, you absolutely can do that, but it doesn't really count.
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No - all it means is get the right person for the job. Gender and ethnicity are absolutely meaningless when evaluating skill. If the most qualified person happens to be an Indian female then, by all means, hire her. But the fact that she is female and Indian should in no way give her "bonus points" in the evaluation.
I hire technical people all the time. If you can write code and get along with people then you're in. I could not give a rats ass whether that person is male or female or white or black or asian
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I just think that there are a lot of variables that contribute towards a given representation. For example, if a company gets 25 applications for a series of positions and 20 of them are men does that mean that they should hire equal number men and women to fill those positions? Maybe there were not enough women qualified, or even interested.
Sure, if there are valid and provable discrimination then a limited remedy might be appropriate. But throwing a big wet blanket over the whole thing just doesn't seem w
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and yet everyone here is complaining that this article even exist, yet are happy to ignore that this means hardly any women hold senior positions at Microsoft, and a huge amount of their female work force basically worked the lowest level jobs. Glass ceiling, anyone?
FTFA
Microsoft's uppermost management ranks have become more racially diverse, with African-Americans making up 2.9 percent of corporate vice presidents, compared to 1.3 percent a year ago. That's likely only a few people, but it's a sign of progress at the top. Microsoft's senior leadership team is now 27.2 percent women, which is the greatest representation of women in that role in the company's history.
The moral of the story is, as usual, that upper management is more likely to survive the cuts. While employment of women overall went down, management beat the trend ... and that you should RTFA before commenting.
I want quality, not politics (Score:1)
Excuse me, but what I expect from corporations (where I am not myself a shareholder) is quality products. I don't give a damn, who they hire and why — as long as they don't enslave workers — and neither should anybody else. Mind your own business, people.
FreeBSD project, to the best of my knowledge, has no females at all — though, at some point, one member chose to identify as one. (He had to announce it because of the name-change.) I doubt, Linux is very different. Compared to that, Micr
Equality of opportunity matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me, but what I expect from corporations (where I am not myself a shareholder) is quality products. I don't give a damn, who they hire and why — as long as they don't enslave workers — and neither should anybody else. Mind your own business, people.
Maybe you don't give a damn about your fellow human beings but those of us who aren't sociopaths do. I want to see people get good opportunities and not be held down because they happened to be born with a different set of genitals or a different skin color. Glass ceilings are a real thing. Clearly you've never seen anyone bump into one but I have. These are real issues that affect real people and in a civilized society we care about what happens to them. People don't have to be enslaved for a workplace to be a very bad place.
We have certain protected classes of people (gender, race, age, etc) precisely because there is clear and unambiguous evidence that if we allow discrimination based on those criteria that the results are bad both for society and for the individuals. The market demonstrably cannot fairly deal with this problem.
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Easy with the name-calling. Please, don't hate.
Whether that's true or not, there is not one in Linux (nor FreeBSD) project. And yet, the ratio of females there is even worse, than at Microsoft.
If the free people willingly choose to work somewhere, then it can not be that bad.
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Opportunities are not equal for everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone has the same opportunity.
No they do not. You have to be phenomenally clueless or bigoted to think otherwise. The same opportunities are NOT available to everyone. That was the entire point of the civil rights movement and the suffrage movement. Just because you have some choices doesn't mean everyone else does. Opportunity can be taken away very easily by institutions (government and private) if we allow it to occur. Opportunity is a fragile thing and not everyone gets equal opportunity under the law or in society. Bigotry,
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Wow do you not get it. If everything is so equal as you claim then why do we see non-white people incarcerated at disproportionate rates?
There's a certain correlation between incarceration and committing crimes. Whites are slightly more violent than Asians (chinese/japs, not Indians) so that's why fewer Asians are in prison. People are not equal, the opportunities are.
Why do we see older people having trouble getting tech jobs even when they are well qualified for them?
Experienced old people are more expensive and work less insane hours than young people.
Why do we see a congress that doesn't even begin to resemble the demographics of the country?
Democracy at work.
You think because you chose one job over another that there is no inequality in the real world? That's just ignorant as hell.
His point is that the difference may be not because there's a huge conspiracy between all White men, whose aim is to only hire men even if it costs them more (no big corp wo
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Because non-white people are, at a disproportionate rate, involved in crimes?
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There is no lack of opportunity in STEM, especially computer programming. The barrier to entry is ridiculously low: all you need is a computer, which these days you can get for next to nothing if you get something used and old. You don't need teachers or mentors, you can learn everything on your own. A kid who really has an interest and wants to get into it can, as long as their parents support them.
The place where things really aren't equal and it really matters is in peoples' upbringing. Parents and s
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Sure, opportunity isn't equal, but with respect to coding, anyone can learn it by studying online at this point. You do not need anything but internet access, and you can get that for free at your local library. That won't apply outside of the country where computers and access are less common, of course, but that's not really what this article is about at all.
As far as incarceration goes, men are incarcerated far more than women. So what has that to do with coding? At least within this country, we cert
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Your "opportunities" are always, forever, going to be represented by a bell curve. The only way to make life "fair" is to put everyone in a cage in a zoo, or make them a battery a la Matrix. I'm sure you'd be completely content either way. Me, I'm happy rolling the dice: that's life. I've had a few ups and a few downs, and though I'm currently in a down, as long as I can keep a roof over my head and stay out of trouble I'm sure I will dig out of it.
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You go off about sexism, racism, bigotry and so forth as the primary points of discrimination.
I've found that it's none of those in practice. Instead it's who you've networked with and how much money you have.
Funny how the social justice warriors never focus on the real inequalities in our society. Maybe the fact that most of them come from well-off families has a part to play in that.
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"Excuse me, but what I expect from corporations (where I am not myself a shareholder) is quality products. I don't give a damn, who they hire and why â" as long as they don't enslave workers â" and neither should anybody else"
Wrong, wrong, utterly wrong.
Corporations are corporations because of their Corporate Charter which is to be approved by the State Government. Since the State Government is the civil servant of the State's people, there you have everybody having their damn about what a corpor
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False. Registering a corporation is not a privilege — it is a right. I don't need your approval to create one. My registration merely informs you, that I intend to do business as a corporation.
False. The only legal mechanism, through which our nosy government pretending to serve the busybody you can justify its interest in the corporation's internal
Re:I want quality, not politics (Score:4, Informative)
FreeBSD has FreeBSD girl aka Randi Harper https://twitter.com/freebsdgir... [twitter.com]
She is not only a woman but an awful SJW attacker. FreeBSD's support of her cause in many discussion list entries is what caused my business to stop our annual donations and migrate >5k hosts over to Linux. Won't disclose the donation amount because that would likely make me identifiable
I don't blame you. I just googled her and she is pretty terrifying, cold, and heartless.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-j... [breitbart.com]
I skipped on the article and started on the list of her victims. Most of those people are people that I'd consider left leaning, but I would not wish what she did on them or anyone. She really has no problem destroying anyone even those that mainly agree with her.
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Breitbart is not a reliable source of information on this matter.
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Breitbart is not a reliable source of information on this matter.
Why? Either way, the Breitbart article is full for references. If you think you're getting a slanted version of the story, just check the references. The facts are there to be had for those who care to look.
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That seems so drastic, it is unbelievable...
Wow, didn't know about her. Well, I think, you can go back now — randi@ has not committed anything (to src/) since 2010... Which brings us back to my point — your concern with a software project ought to be first and foremost on the quality of the product.
But, maybe, she works for Microsoft now?
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Same AC that posted the sibling comment. (Well, I guess I'm not AC any more!)
The evidence is conflicting. All I'm able to find is hearsay. Would you please provide evidence that Randi is trans?
Here's where I display a bit of bigotry. If she's not trans, I don't give a fuck about her. Being a woman does not preclude one from being an asshole. Brianna Wu is a woman who is an asshole, but I single her out because she is trans. I am very uncomfortable with what such a troll as that asshole can do to all
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You know she was never connected to FreeBSD in any official capacity. She helped organise the meetbsd conference, but that's it. She worked for Yahoo at one point but was sacked for under-performance, and she's been a professional SJW ever since as far as I can tell.
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Maybe that title exists because qualified women were being overlooked thanks to the old boys network?
This could easily be seen as trying to get better quality workers without prematurely culling half the herd because of their gender. Nothing SJW there - just sound business sense - if you want to hire the best, you use the largest pool of candidates to draw from. Or do you think that no woman can't be better at a job than a man?
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Obvious solution: (Score:2)
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So reading between the lines, Microsoft's excuse.. (Score:2)
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