If you're in the US, there are already several universally protected classes (race, gender).
Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...)
Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.
So, in this case, you were young and irrational and didn't understand the cost of replacing a good developer?
I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and either of them would have swung any way you asked for their next hit. I am not going to claim that this experience is representative in any way.
I couldn't tell you if I was irrational or not without knowing the number of tech bosses conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh at their desk and strike up pro Tea Party/anti liberal discussions as a way of making casual conversation, and then the number of those that would fire a developer over their sexual orientation. I don't know what that percentage looks like, so I can't say whether or not I justified in my concern. I know I was wrong in this specific instance thankfully, but I don't know what the real probability looks like given my boss' behavior. I had gone through some negative prior experiences that could have made me jumpy, admittedly.
Maybe the methodology was incorrect or the sample unrepresentative, my only personal experience with it is the one friend.
Wow. wow. wow. I find it incomprehensible that this would be a concern. I am sorry that you have been made to feel this way.
I'm probably so far right as to make Rush Limbaugh un-listenable (to me) because: 1) he's irritating and repetitive, and 2) too far left. :-) (that's kinda/sorta a joke)
But I've gotta say that even though they were outnumbered (80/20?), females made up at least half, if not more, of my top developers in a start up in the late 90s. And from what I understood (I was afraid to ask), half of the female developers were homosexual. The point is: I would have had to have been insane to fire them. It would have knocked $20M (maybe $200M) off my market cap the very same day!
I guess I need to thank you. I have a lot to learn about the way that the world works...
No problem, glad my anecdotes are interesting/helpful!
To be fair, the internship and his mentorship were both invaluable to me, I was very lucky to be hired, I don't want to make it sound like a sob story. Firing over sexual orientation isn't really tracked so there's no hard numbers, but IME it is incredibly rare--never happened to me or anyone that i personally know, to the best of my knowledge. My concern could have been (probably was? your anecdote brings N up to 2, anyway) completely irrational, like the above poster was wondering.
I don't know. I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".
In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about.
Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what should I do to be better?
>I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".
FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers.
>what should I do to be better?
I don't know, honestly. I know that's an inadequate response, but I'm not sure how to appropriately address ingrained societal sexism either. As far as subconscious bias in hiring goes, having rubrics and standardized interviews goes a long way at eliminating it. I'd theorize that standardized metrics for performance reviews would help on that front, too, though I don't think that's been studied.
If you browse the million and one women in tech posts out there you can see people talking about it at length, though I would be wary of taking somebody's opinion as truth just because they're female, and I would be doubly wary of taking a tech blogger at her word vs an actual female engineer. Your personal set of ethics re: equality of opportunity vs outcome also plays into what you "should do" quite a lot. Some suggestions (like formalized hiring rubrics) are completely valid whether or not you believe in equality of opportunity vs outcome, but others (like instituting diversity quotas in hiring) are not.
And this personal anecdote is a positive story, which I think is just good to keep in mind (that not all individual women necessarily feel or have been through the standard negative Women in Tech narrative): http://lea.verou.me/2015/12/my-positive-experience-as-a-woma...
Maybe its my interpretation, but it seems that you are in favor of equality of outcome and tools like affirmative action. I have always wondered what proponents for it thinks if it was to be used in gender equal language, like if government would have a policy to always use affirmative action for work groups that has less than 40% women or men. A lot of professions have above 90% of a single gender (a trend that has been increasing in the last 30 years), and universal use of affirmative action would cause a lot of movement from typical male or female professions.
Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...)
Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.