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I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

643 点作者 Lisa2000将近 12 年前
"I made one change that day. I put Mr. in front of my name [Kim] on my CV. It looked a little too formal for my liking but I got an interview for the very next job I applied for. And the one after that. It all happened in a fortnight, and the second job was a substantial increase in responsibility over anything I had done before. In the end I beat out a very competitive short-list and enjoyed that job for the next few years, further enhancing my career."

27 条评论

cupcake-unicorn将近 12 年前
I get this so much, although I&#x27;ve had the opposite experience, where when people notice that I&#x27;m female, certain companies get excited for the chance to have a &quot;token woman&quot; on their team. Isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, it made me think of all the LinkedIn spam I get <i>addressing</i> me as sir, Mr., &quot;we&#x27;re looking for some cool dudes like yourself&quot;, etc.<p>Sadly it&#x27;s not just the gender thing that&#x27;s going on here as well, I&#x27;m thinking of some study they did where they attached photos with the resumes - the &quot;attractive&quot; people (both men and women) were rated as better skilled than the &quot;normal&quot; and &quot;ugly&quot; people that had the same resume. Although, I think that if I took some fancy photos of myself and primped myself up, I don&#x27;t think it would do me any favors and I&#x27;d get some unwanted attention!<p>My name isn&#x27;t even gender neutral, very feminine...I think I once was on some board online using my real name and people were still assuming I was a guy. When I asked how they could possibly think it was a male name, they replied, &quot;I dunno, I was thinking it was like one of those fancy Italian names, like Fabio or whatever..Fabia..yeah, same thing...they always sound like girls names.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve now started picking the most ridiculously cutsie usernames possible, like this one, to keep people guessing. Sometimes it backfires still and people just get homophobic, but I generally stick with it anyway for fun :)
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robot_friend将近 12 年前
I am female with a hybrid background in UI design and front-end dev. A while back I created a fake linkedin profile identical to mine except with a male name. Even though it has no profile picture and no contacts, the fake profile gets more recruiter messages than I do, and for more technical positions (I get ones for design, he gets ones for engineering).
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crazygringo将近 12 年前
That&#x27;s really, really sad.<p>And the worst part is, it&#x27;s surely conscious on nobody&#x27;s part. There have even been studies showing this effect.<p>What&#x27;s even sadder is that there&#x27;s no obvious or easy way to fix it.
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Peroni将近 12 年前
The fact that this post is getting so much attention is baffling me. There is literally nothing in this story to indicate that the name made any difference.<p>It&#x27;s blatant confirmation bias. Nothing more.<p>Allow me to state, once again, there is absolutely no denying that sexism exists and that it&#x27;s an issue that needs to (and eventually will) change however this article adds absolutely nothing new to the debate.
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johnvschmitt将近 12 年前
As a father, when I had my first kid, &amp; read a few &quot;Parents&quot; magazines, I was so disheartened to see 99% of the references in articles referring to the parent as the &quot;mom&quot; or &quot;She&#x2F;her&quot;. I said, &quot;WTF! Are fathers not parents!?&quot;<p>Then, it hit me. As a male engineer, manager, etc... I just got a very small taste of the less than subtle gender biases that exist all around us. That made me appreciate my wife more (who is also an engineer), and all the others who put up with that crap even in this modern day.<p>This is the only forum I&#x27;ve complained about &quot;Parent&#x27;s Magazine&quot;&#x27;s female gender bias. And, I only do so within a context that shows it&#x27;s just a lesson in empathy for a much more severe bias in the other direction.
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throwaway420将近 12 年前
Interesting, enlightening, and thought-provoking article.<p>To me, another interesting experiment would be changing the first name of the resume to something that&#x27;s nearly unambiguously male, say instead of Kim O&#x27;Grady to just Robert O&#x27;Grady, and seeing if that has the same effect.<p>Another interesting experiment would be adding &quot;Mrs.&quot; in front of the name Kim and seeing if that has the same effect.<p>Personally speaking, I believe that technical people are sick and tired of the sausage fests at most technical companies and all other things being equal would go out of their way to hire more women.
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ds9将近 12 年前
I was very surprised to see the admission of his giving family information. Employers are prohibited from asking such questions here in the US, and I&#x27;ve always thought it improper to put it on a resume. It either invites unfavorable discrimination or comes across as a ploy for sympathy or favoritism.<p>It may have been a lesser factor in this case, but I would guess hardly anyone does this today, and I had thought it was no longer considered OK even before the 90s.
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JimmaDaRustla将近 12 年前
Not to negate the point, but I witnessed some MALE gender discrimination when applying to a local IBM office for a college co-op.<p>Ratio of females to males is low in computer programming courses, but 100% of females were interviewed for an IBM position, and 0% of males were interviewed (approx. 6 females and 16 males). This happened twice in back-to-back years.<p>It seems the whole gender discrimination has taken a swing in the opposite direction for this small office - work hard to find female workers over male workers. But I haven&#x27;t figured if they are doing this because they care about female workers, or they want to boost their public image? Are they giving females a chance to prove themselves to work for IBM, or are they just filling the most menial jobs with females to balance out their gender ratio?<p>This doesn&#x27;t seem like the &quot;give the job to the person best fit for it&quot; mentality, but maybe to them the &quot;first glance&quot; isn&#x27;t enough to make that decision. Plus, this was just a co-op, almost anyone in the class could perform the position. I decided to view IBM&#x27;s actions as a form of tactic to develop female presence in IT industry rather than gender discrimination.
king_jester将近 12 年前
Interesting article. I wouldn&#x27;t necessarily say you can understand gender discrimination just because you were affected by it as a side affect. It is true the author became aware or more aware of gender discrimination because of his name, but he still doesn&#x27;t have the experience of living in a society where gender discrimination is a daily occurrence.<p>That said, gender bias a real thing in hiring and faculty practices in the US.<p><a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;unofficial-prognosis&#x2F;201...</a><p><a href="http://www.upenn.edu/provost/images/uploads/Gender.Racial_.Bias_.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upenn.edu&#x2F;provost&#x2F;images&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;Gender.Racial_.B...</a> (pdf warning)
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lsiebert将近 12 年前
If your company is discriminating, it&#x27;s not getting the best applicant for the job, it&#x27;s getting the best young male for the job. That is missing out on at least 60% of applicants. That should be all the reason any intelligent person needs to be concerned about these factors. It is hard to hire good people. Also the pool of individuals discriminated against by other employers is perhaps more likely to contain qualified people who have not been hired.
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nashequilibrium将近 12 年前
Okay HN, I knew this sounded familiar and then i remembered a similar story which was flagged and kicked off the front page. <a href="http://www.techyville.com/2012/11/news/unemployed-black-woman-pretends-to-be-white-job-offers-suddenly-skyrocket/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techyville.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;news&#x2F;unemployed-black-woma...</a><p>Could someone explain why one was flagged and the other not? I am honestly just curious.
crazysaem将近 12 年前
I am graduating in a few month and also applied for some jobs in the USA (I&#x27;m from germany). I found it somewhat intresting that every employer I sent my resume to was asking what gender and race(!) I was before I could submit. You could also choose the option not to give an answer, but I have never seen that in germany.<p>On the other hand some people on HN find it odd to have a picture of you on your CV - which is the norm here.
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simonbarker87将近 12 年前
We&#x27;ve been interviewing for our first 2 roles recently and I have to say that male or female doesn&#x27;t bother me either way - we&#x27;ve interviewed in equal quantities and, while we&#x27;re yet to fill the positions, I genuinely am not bothered if the successful person is male or female.<p>Reasons for this could be: 1. I&#x27;m 25 so I wonder if I haven&#x27;t experienced enough to bias me one way or another (what that experience would be I&#x27;ve no idea)? (don&#x27;t claim I&#x27;m being ageist, I&#x27;m not it&#x27;s just one possibility) 2. My fiancé is an excellent engineer so I might have had the male dominated field bias squashed by that.
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redwood将近 12 年前
Interestingly, it&#x27;s not <i>just</i> a case of gender: Rather the uncertainty and its associated cognitive dissonance, leaves a negative feeling in the mind of a reader.<p>There are many other kinds of uncertainty present in a resume; and its always a risky factor because folks like to understand context.<p>Have an ethnic name? Assume people might think you&#x27;re an immigrant. If you don&#x27;t want them to assume that: emphasize where you&#x27;re from, etc. This is good personal branding. Is it unfortunate that you might feel a liability here? yes<p>For example, in my office when someone doesn&#x27;t show their picture in our email system: I feel negative about them. When they don&#x27;t show a picture <i>and</i> have a name that makes it difficult to know how to refer to them, I&#x27;m doubly-frustrated.<p>Much of this frustration is subconscious but people need to be congnicent of how they come across to others in many contexts.<p><i>here</i> I choose to be 100% identity neutral, because I can be. But in work this is a big mistake, because formal expectations are applied in correspondence and you need to feel you&#x27;re meeting those expectations with a job applicant.<p>If you&#x27;re in this position, you&#x27;ve done yourself a disservice: &quot;Dear Sir or Madam, We are sorry to inform you that we cannot offer you a position&quot;<p>Is this a problem with our society? yes.
jessriedel将近 12 年前
There is much better data out there concerning the effect of gender (and race) on CVs. That would be much more useful than this guy&#x27;s anecdotal experience.
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eikenberry将近 12 年前
Not to argue that gender bias doesn&#x27;t exist. But this is not a good study case as he tainted his resume pretty badly from the start. Not being currently employed is a red flag to a lot of employers and gets you immediately discarded. And putting personal information, even if seemingly innocent, triggers the lawsuit avoidance mechanism at a lot of places and immediately gets you discarded.
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vertis将近 12 年前
Original blog post: <a href="http://whatwouldkingleonidasdo.tumblr.com/post/54989171152/how-i-discovered-gender-discrimination" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatwouldkingleonidasdo.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;54989171152&#x2F;h...</a>
rachelbythebay将近 12 年前
I really want to read this, but the site goes completely bonkers on iOS. I can see some content but it&#x27;s wedged behind this top banner. They don&#x27;t really expect people to read through a tiny gap in their images, do they?
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betterunix将近 12 年前
Maybe it had to do with the resume appearing more formal. Try another version with &quot;Ms.&quot; and another with &quot;Mrs.&quot; to really make this something we can draw conclusions from.
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thehme将近 12 年前
This is so sad...wow! I cannot imagine what goes through people&#x27;s heads when they see a very qualifies individual and then they decide it&#x27;s a woman and skip even considering her.
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cm2012将近 12 年前
I kind of doubt that this is true. Wouldn&#x27;t the managers see that she was a female in the interview, and ask why she misrepresented herself or take that opportunity to not hire her?
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eldude将近 12 年前
Since this is entirely devoid of any discernible facts, it&#x27;s a little disturbing that this has made it to the front page of HN. When did random assertions become unquestioned truth?<p>This feels a lot like a sensationalized modern day witch hunt, &quot;Burn the misoginists! Burn the sexists!&quot;<p>Also, for whatever it&#x27;s worth, never have I heard &quot;Kim&quot; considered anything but a woman&#x27;s name.
niccl将近 12 年前
This is scary. I go out of my way to remove gender hints from my CV. In particular I use a shortened version of my first name which is slightly more commonly associated with women. And I have had problems finding work recently. Now, do I change things because I need work? I could even pretend it was a bit of research to give a second data point to this story.
lucb1e将近 12 年前
Oh my god. I&#x27;d seriously write fuck you letters in 72pt bold comic sans ms to all other companies, explaining what dicks they were. Seriously, 4 months of nothing (must have been lots of applications), and then the word &quot;Mr&quot; changes it all? Incredible.
nkorth将近 12 年前
I would love to read this article, but quartz.com is horribly broken in Opera Mobile on my phone...<p>I&#x27;ll just wait and read it on my laptop, but this does look like a sign of Webkit bringing back the days of sites &quot;best viewed in Internet Explorer 6&quot;.
typon将近 12 年前
Is it weird that this article doesn&#x27;t have many comments?
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Dirlewanger将近 12 年前
This was the late 90s. A lot has changed since then. Yeah, there&#x27;s still problems with male-dominated industries but it&#x27;s gotten a lot better. Nowadays it&#x27;s more about getting women even interested in the fields.
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