Gender Based Hiring Practice (Was: Where Have All the Boys Gone?)

["B. Esser" <besser@MARIAN.CREIGHTON.EDU>]

> Can you elaborate? I mean, all off-the-cuff gender comments aside,
> this is technically illegal, is it not? What types of technical jobs
> are -truly- female only? And, did you somehow feel that the legal
> system was also against you, to the extent that you just felt like
> walking away from it and not fighting? I'm not trolling here, just
> trying to understand this better.

At U S West Direct (the yellow pages subsidiary of what is now called
Quest) I received a quarterly report which indicated the
gender/racial makeup of the staff working for me (N=200). These were all
technical staff/management positions (programmers, data base
administrators, systems support personnel, network programmers etc.  In
addition I was given a series of "targets" to meet.  While it was never
written down it was clear that meeting these targets was a necessary (not
sufficient) condition for "at risk salary" (corporate speak for a bonus).
While there was much corporate doublespeak about "hiring the best
candidate" the bottom line was that
acquiring a workforce that was as diverse as the communities we served was
as important as hiring the most technically qualified person.




Bruce Esser
Physics Teacher                    Something witty
Marian High School                     Should go here
http://marian.creighton.edu