stephanie

personally i am fascinated when i myself receive "diversity hire"-type comments because in nearly all respects i am a perfectly generic east asian software engineer with a wealthy & highly educated family background and degrees from a "top cs school"

you could argue that i am underqualified precisely because i have been overresourced my whole life, and that the "boxes" i check are things like "flashy degree" and "brand name". but men with similar backgrounds rarely hear this kind of comment from "anti diversity" types

the only differentiator is gender. but it's a pretty inane twist of logic to trust the perfectly generic credentials of my male peers and imagine that somehow all of My perfectly generic credentials have been for my entire life the result of "lowering the bar"

in high school a boy told me i got into MIT because i was a girl. there are many reasons why i think i got in but idk maybe one of them was that i took calculus when i was 13 and he did not

gender is an interesting piece of diversity bc it's one of the least tied to large socioeconomic forces. race and income are more linked to structural inequities in education and job opportunity but the main thing preventing girls from doing what they want is men being assholes

which just makes it extra stupid whenever some dude is like "she got hired bc gender". in sv tech, most entry level women have literally the same schooling & experience as entry level men. they're just as interested & qualified but have to deal w so much more bullshit

and at least in my experience the gender ratio in industry is categorically worse than in school, so it's not like companies have run out of qualified female candidates and are just trying to pump up the numbers