Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

[paulca]

But that might open the other can of worms I mentioned earlier, about lady justice being blind.

She's got a nose.  She can smell the money and she loves it.

[james_s]

But how about taxes? What kind of income tax percentage are you looking at? Health care insurance ain't cheap over here either... The bottom line may not be better at this side of the big pond.

I don't even know, I know they're lower here than there, but taxes still take a big chunk out of my income, roughly 30% IIRC, but it doesn't feel the same as money I have to pay because it's money I never see in the first place. The one that really bugs me is property taxes because that goes up and up with rising property values, it's not uncommon for elderly people who have paid off their mortgage to be taxed out of their home they own. That's a completely different topic though.

[james_s]

To add on to the madness, a little bit off topic, the wife just read somewhere that even the fairy tale snowwhite is under the magnifying glass of political correctness and #metoo movement because "the prince did not ask if he may kiss her" 

While I haven't heard about Snow White, I'm not the least bit surprised somebody has complained about something about it. I've seen the whole ask for permission thing come up before though and that is further complicated by the fact that a large percentage of people are turned off or otherwise bothered by someone asking permission to do something in the heat of the moment rather than reading body language. All the various human courting rituals were not engineered out of nowhere, they have evolved throughout our history and trying to change them suddenly to fit some random ideology is bound to create problems. I personally do not want some gal to ask permission if she wants to do something, just try it and if I don't like it I'll politely decline.

[IanB]

I don't even know, I know they're lower here than there, but taxes still take a big chunk out of my income, roughly 30% IIRC, but it doesn't feel the same as money I have to pay because it's money I never see in the first place. The one that really bugs me is property taxes because that goes up and up with rising property values, it's not uncommon for elderly people who have paid off their mortgage to be taxed out of their home they own. That's a completely different topic though.

Although taxation is a little lower in general in the USA than in Europe, it is not that much lower, and really not low enough to justify the complete absence of government benefits in return. Based on public services provided, overall taxation in the USA should be much lower than it is.

[pcprogrammer]

To add on to the madness, a little bit off topic, the wife just read somewhere that even the fairy tale snowwhite is under the magnifying glass of political correctness and #metoo movement because "the prince did not ask if he may kiss her" 

While I haven't heard about Snow White, I'm not the least bit surprised somebody has complained about something about it. I've seen the whole ask for permission thing come up before though and that is further complicated by the fact that a large percentage of people are turned off or otherwise bothered by someone asking permission to do something in the heat of the moment rather than reading body language. All the various human courting rituals were not engineered out of nowhere, they have evolved throughout our history and trying to change them suddenly to fit some random ideology is bound to create problems. I personally do not want some gal to ask permission if she wants to do something, just try it and if I don't like it I'll politely decline.

I might have been mistaken with Snow White and that it was about sleeping beauty, but that is not of importance. It is showing how things get out of hand, because come on it is a fairy tail, and when it bothers someone to what kind of message it could send to some youngsters, then just explain it after reading or watching it, but don't go on a witch hunt.

In the courting rituals the consent often is indeed visual, but I can also see a problem then when one of the participants changes it's mind and says no, it does not always sit so well with the other participant. And then it possibly gets ugly. In my case the wife would not be that happy if a nice lady came up to me and started kissing me

[james_s]

In the courting rituals the consent often is indeed visual, but I can also see a problem then when one of the participants changes it's mind and says no, it does not always sit so well with the other participant. And then it possibly gets ugly. In my case the wife would not be that happy if a nice lady came up to me and started kissing me

Well yes, but it has always been complicated, there is no way to prevent someone from not taking rejection well other than to teach them ahead of time how to handle rejection. At least where I'm from, polite people don't just walk up and start kissing somebody they find attractive out of the blue, let alone married people. For those who wish to cut to the chase, there are people whose career centers around providing such services.

[paulca]

This might tell you why I stick it.

On enumerations, tax, et. al.  It's pretty good here.  Starting with the highlights.

30 days paid annual leave.  Additional sick days as you need, don't take the piss.  37.5 hour week (40 hours basically, but they don't pay you for 30 minutes of the day, lunch).  US Companies here put that to a 40 hour week, which forces them to provide a full hour for lunch making it a 45 hour elapsed week.  That's not nice in winter this far North, you don't see daylight from November till March!

Private company group medical policy (BUPA).  By using a group policy they can turn the bells and whistles on and it still only costs about £300 a month 'each', obviously some use it more than others, but the group premium seems to work... especially as I have been a smoker as they don't even require any medical history beyond the usual "duty of care" questions for HR you don't have to answer.   A personal medical insurance quote for me alone was £700 a month for the most basic plan and about £1100 for an equivalent one! 

The health cover is "benefit in kind" or something, meaning while the company pay it for me, I still have to pay tax on it.  So it get's added back INTO my salary for tax and then removed!  Works similarly for other things. 

I'm allowed to earn something like 14k tax free.  After that it's 20% until you get to around £50k when it jumps to 40%.  Then there is "national insurance", which is more complicated, with you and the employer paying half, it's like 13% after tax.  This "banks" unemployment benefit credits basically - or its supposed to.

If I get a £1k bonus, I usually only see about £550 or it.

Pension contributions are tax free, up to a fairly high ceiling.  Employers usually give between 3-5% into your pension and will match you up to 7-10%.   It's actually worth considering shifting anything in that 40% bracket into your pension if you can.  You do pay tax on draw down, but only at the rate you draw, so you can avoid the 40% completely....   if you can wait on the money.

A clatter of other little perks and benefits.

Obviously Im not saying my actual salary, as it would be 90% meaningless anyway, it's all relative to the cost of living where you work.

[MT]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_03D1iaFJzw

[PlainName]

I've heard time and time again, how people first buy cheap tools, become dissatisfied with them, and end up having to buy the expensive tools anyway.

Yeah, I do that. Generally I have two modes of buying:

1. Know exactly what I want, the precise features it must have, the features I definitely don't want, and sometimes even the manufacturers exact model reference. It costs what it costs.

And I know all that because the other buying mode is:

2. I don't know precisely what I want (maybe it's a new tool) and I don't want to spend all my money on something that isn't right but I can't change because it was so expensive. So I buy a cheap one to find out what all that stuff is so I can then revert to 1 if necessary.

Sometimes the cheap one is just fine anyway

[Ed.Kloonk]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_03D1iaFJzw

Penis envy. Nothing more. Nothing less.

[nctnico]

In the courting rituals the consent often is indeed visual, but I can also see a problem then when one of the participants changes it's mind and says no, it does not always sit so well with the other participant. And then it possibly gets ugly. In my case the wife would not be that happy if a nice lady came up to me and started kissing me

Your wife is quite lenient. I get a lot of flack when a lady just looks at me. That can go on until over a year later...  Like it is my fault I look good?

[pcprogrammer]

Your wife is quite lenient. I get a lot of flack when a lady just looks at me. That can go on until over a year later...  Like it is my fault I look good?

Which probably is part of the reasons why she likes you

[paulca]

Penis envy. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I'm going to try and not derail the topic too much, but a bit of recent tracking of where the front lines of this battle currently lie...  you hit upon a VERY recent and serious crisis among young women. or actually young female children.  I won't derail further than to ask, if you are interested to go and do a bit of digging on current affairs surrounding gender and young girls in UK, US and Canada.  I don't think here is to the place to reproduce this.

Apologies if I open a Pandora's box for you here.

Maybe, just maybe a decade of saying that men are more powerful, have all the money, have all the success and get everything they want has had a strange effect on our children, once they are introduced with the potential to choose their sex and/or gender.  I think we all need to stop changing societal values from week to week based on twitter storms and SERIOUSLY start listening to what we are doing to the upcoming generation in the process.  The poor things are being pulled all over the place at a critical time of personal development and all "we" are doing is confusing the hell out of them.  Being a teenager IS an identity crisis before you introduce neo-identity and gender politics and drugs.

[pcprogrammer]

I guess you have a point there. And by handing them smartphones and computers at a (to) young age the (mis)information is in direct reach.

In my youth you also had things that might have been frowned upon, but the things you hear nowadays about what kind of games are being played on a sexual level, you get to think that the sexual revolution in the 60's was very mild. There is one where young girls have a rating system and earn points on what sexual acts they perform. Good times for young boys you can imagine, but good for society I don't think so. Peer pressure seems to grow exponential with time by the looks of it.

If this is a direct result of "penis envy" who knows.

[paulca]

I guess you have a point there. And by handing them smartphones and computers at a (to) young age the (mis)information is in direct reach.

You maybe miss the gravity I was trying to suggest to.  We are not talking about "mis information" here, we are talking about child sexual abuse.  We are talking about mutilating children.  We are talking about drugging children.  We are talking about councillors, GPs and teachers diagnosing children with gender dysphoria and sending them to clinics to be medically and surgically altered.  En-Mass.

In the UK you cannot even tattoo a minor with or without parental consent.  However, a child CAN consent to a dual mastectomy, potentially without parental consent being needed.  In the medical profession there are allowances for child/minor consent for live altering procedures.  These are being exploited by private (and public medical clinics).  Some patients only receive a 10 minute GP appointment and a 1 hour session with a carefully selected "woke" psychologist to be diagnosed with gender disphoria an PRESCRIBED puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. 

The UK NHS client count went from 5 in 2010 to 2600 in 2020.  In order to meet demand they have admitted to "fast lining the process".  35 child physchologists have resigned from the clinic in the past 10 years.  Most citing that there are not enough checks, balances and no psychological or psychiatric approach is considered or can even be discussed due to "trans gender" critisim.  Even when parents CLEARLY demonstrate homophobic bias and are only wanting to make their child "not gay".  "trans the gay away" they call it.  Is happening in the NHS.

It would seem that the medical profession is being held to ransom by trans-activists.  Nobody can speak out about it.  When people challenge it via the high/supreme courts, the courts CANNOT be seen to be over-ruling the medical establishment.  So this cancer within it is allowed to grow and grow.  Private medical clinics conducting this are making a f'ing fortune of course.

A lot of this reporting could be right wing biased.  So I went "grass roots" researching and searched YouTube for examples of these children.  What I found was far, far more shocking.  It was very easy to find dozens and dozens of kids of various mid to late teens discussing and even giving tutorials on "how to get it done".  The right things to say, how to play and prepare for the psych tests, how to bypass waiting lists and even... even contact details for private doctors online who will proscribe testosterone and puberty blockers over an online chat with anyone under the age of 18.  There are trans-gender professors in America openly selling proscription HRT and PB prescription medication to minors openly.  Fathers have been sent to jail in Canada for objecting to their daughter of 15 under going NRT.  He was silenced, gagged, preventing from calling his daughter "she" in public and finally when he refused to comply, got sent to jail!

In the UK they have shut the clinic down last month.  People have hailed this as a success.  However if you actually read the story, the clinic is being closed because it cannot meet demand for sexual transformation of minors so it is opening TWO brand new centres to cope with demand.

People now hold "re-gender" parties for children as young as 7.  Presenting them on TikTok, YouTube etc. in various sexualised and gender-ised guises IN PUBLIC to millions of peple!  A recent star hit on Disney+ was a 11yo boy strutting around in drag, with fully grown drag queens, even mimicking snorting ketomine of his hand and appearing drunk or high.  Has Disney been repromanded for this?  No, it would clearly be anti-gay, anti-trans and anti-transvestite, so nobody says anything.

That is where the front lines are on this whole thing.  Not office politics.

[sokoloff]

This thread and the implications of DEI efforts on the engineering workforce is valuable (IMO).

I would respectfully suggest that perhaps nudging it back towards the impacts on engineering, the workforce/jobs, and related may help to keep it productive and in-range for the site.

[Nominal Animal]

Any suggestions on how to successfully avoid being targeted/canceled, say because one chooses not to support current D-E-I efforts because they will not lead to the results and effects their proponents claim?

I have no good suggestions myself.

Dave already mentioned some cancellation attempts; hearing about known working strategies to defend oneself would be encouraging.

[paulca]

This thread and the implications of DEI efforts on the engineering workforce is valuable (IMO).

I would respectfully suggest that perhaps nudging it back towards the impacts on engineering, the workforce/jobs, and related may help to keep it productive and in-range for the site.

Agreed and appologies for my previous highlighting of the real front lines.  Which are extremely remotely relevant if at all.

[jpanhalt]

@Nominal Animal

To the extent that DEI is an extension of Affirmative Action, there have been numerous lawsuits over the years that AA violated American laws against discrimination based on race.  Individual plaintiffs have won on the specifics of their cases (See: Dr. Bakke decision*), but that is a very long and expensive process.  Generally, the decision upholding AA as a concept has been affirmed.  Once again, that issue has bubbled up, and SCOTUS has decided to visit the issue again:  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/02/supreme-court-affirmative-action-harvard
The current court is considerably more conservative and textual (e.g., recent Roe decision).  Time will tell.

I suspect if there is any near term solution in the US, it will be by our courts and not by legislatures.  Although, legislatures have has some impact follow Bakke. 

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke

 

[ebastler]

Any suggestions on how to successfully avoid being targeted/canceled [..]?

I would be curious to hear about personal experiences of engineers being "canceled" in the workplace.

I am working for a US company myself, which is encouraging diversity, non-discrimination, awareness of biases etc., on what I consider a reasonable level. But I have not witnessed any "canceling", and struggle to imagine what that would look like in the workplace. Thank you if you can illustrate that!

[pcprogrammer]

Agreed and appologies for my previous highlighting of the real front lines.  Which are extremely remotely relevant if at all.

Here too, but @paulca, thanks for supplying dinner conversation. The wife recently watch a documentary by Louis Theroux about it.

It has been discussed on the forum before: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/life-advice-dont-dismiss-or-lose-respect-for-people/msg4279981/#top

Dave posted that video in this thread too.

[sokoloff]

Any suggestions on how to successfully avoid being targeted/canceled, say because one chooses not to support current D-E-I efforts because they will not lead to the results and effects their proponents claim?

I have no good suggestions myself.

Dave already mentioned some cancellation attempts; hearing about known working strategies to defend oneself would be encouraging.

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
DEI efforts mix items from both groups, IMO.

For my own account, I try to direct the conversation about principle topics to be anchored in some fundamental principles, which I do fully support.

"I totally agree that discrimination* is bad. For that reason, I agree with you that we must evaluate each candidate or employee based on their relevant skills/abilities and contributions." If the DEI proponent suggests that's not good enough, and that we must actively discriminate against certain groups, we have an identified point of disagreement and they're welcome to take that up with HR, Legal, or my boss. I'm not at all worried about the outcome there because I support the important principles and, even if I were worried about the outcome, I'd way, way rather get fired than to discriminate against a qualified candidate or employee.

For non-important topics, I try not to take a hardline approach.

• As above in thread, I'm 100% fine with stopping calling things "master" and "slave". I never owned a slave; no one I know was ever a slave, but it doesn't offend my engineering sensibilities to call them "leader" and "follower" or "primary" and "replica" or whatever.
• Likewise, it doesn't bother me to put pronouns on my Zoom name. Yes, it's blindingly obvious to anyone who has seen me or heard me speak.

Worry about the things that matter (not allowing "reverse discrimination" or "tokenization" to creep into the organization's hiring and promotion practices), but don't fight every last battle or get agitated over every little thing. If someone who reads my (traditionally male) name, sees my masculine features, and hears my fairly deep voice also wants to read a "(he/his)" next to my name, so be it. If that gives comfort or solace to some others who are struggling with some aspect of their identity, those few characters of blinding obviousness in my case cause me no harm or discomfort.

Overall, focusing on what matters to the workforce ("can you and will you write good software here?") and ignoring irrelevant aspects (what your chromosomal makeup, identity, or romantic relationship preferences are) seems to be the most reasonable path forward. I have friends and colleagues who are non-conforming in a variety of ways. For the co-workers, I measure their contributions as engineers based on their output as engineers. For the friends, I measure their friendship based on the same criteria I would any other friend. If I'm not going to have a romantic relationship with them, why on Earth would I care about their romantic relationship preferences? I don't care what clothes they wear, whether they wear makeup, who they sleep with, which bathroom they use, or anything else that, honestly, just doesn't affect me.

* - Here, I use discrimination to mean "inappropriate discrimination". If you are interviewing to separate candidates into people who can do engineering and those who can't, that's discrimination by definition, but is proper discrimination ("recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another"). "We didn't hire/promote them as a coder because they can't code" is good discrimination. "We didn't hire/promote them as a coder because they're black [or white or Asian] [or male or female]" is bad discrimination.

[fourfathom]

The problem with this place (EEVblog) is that it's one of the few places where we can discuss difficult topics with smart, rational, and logical people.  And of course discuss electronics.

Regarding DEI and technology, I find it interesting that when I was growing up (during the space race -- I still have an elementary school report I did on John Glenn and his first orbital flight), young boys at least were interested in technology.  I was far from the only nerd in school.  And yes, girls were vastly underrepresented -- almost zero percent.

Now, in spite of STEM programs and DEI, the kids seem to be much less enthusiastic about the tech fields.  I sometimes help out at the local High School STEM center and the student participation is quite low.  Why is this?  So much has changed in the last 50 years that it's hard to identify the main factors.  I do find it a bit troubling that in my experience, STEM focuses more on project management than on the underlying tech.  If it were up to me, I would say to hell with the project, just learn enough to build stuff and see what happens.

Another rant:  STEM has become STEAM (the 'A' stands for "Arts").  While I do think that Engineering is as much an artform as a science, that's apparently not what STEAM means. I think it's a way for school Art programs (and staff) to get on the STEM gravy train, and probably helps meet the DEI goals.

[fourfathom]

I would be curious to hear about personal experiences of engineers being "canceled" in the workplace.

I am working for a US company myself, which is encouraging diversity, non-discrimination, awareness of biases etc., on what I consider a reasonable level. But I have not witnessed any "canceling", and struggle to imagine what that would look like in the workplace. Thank you if you can illustrate that!

Look up "James Damore" at Google.

[pcprogrammer]

Any suggestions on how to successfully avoid being targeted/canceled [..]?

I would be curious to hear about personal experiences of engineers being "canceled" in the workplace.

I am working for a US company myself, which is encouraging diversity, non-discrimination, awareness of biases etc., on what I consider a reasonable level. But I have not witnessed any "canceling", and struggle to imagine what that would look like in the workplace. Thank you if you can illustrate that!

Another question to this respect, who got passed by over this. Meaning who applied for a job and lost out to a lesser candidate just because they belong to a minority. Or the other way round, who did not get hired even though being the better candidate but belonging to a minority.

Just before I started my own company I went in for a job interview, wearing a military jacket and a bit scruffy clothes. Not sure if that costed me the job or the fact that I might still have been of a bit due to the earlier break down. I'm talking 1995 here.