Talent Acquisition Specialist Oksana Hnatiuk told a story about a candidate who turned out to be sexist.
Talent Acquisition Specialist Oksana Hnatiuk told a story about a candidate who turned out to be sexist.
«About sexism. We communicate with the candidate, everything goes quite well — clear answers, clear motivation, preparedness and interest. We talk about the role and the team. Here the conversation goes in a way that makes me freeze and cross out the impression:
Candidate: Do you have any women on this team?
Me: Hmm, why do you ask?
Candidate: «I’ve just never met normal female engineers,» Oksana wrote on LinkedIn.
Further, the specialist said, there was a position that we evaluate and work with people only for their skills and abilities, and not on the basis of gender characteristics or other factors that are not related to professional activity. «To which the candidate said that female engineers often make him stressed,» Oksana added.
According to her, such a situation can erase even the strongest experience and highest achievements. For those who are «stressed» by women in the professional space, Oksana left a McKinsey report on Women in the Workplace, which describes many challenges for women even in a supposedly modern and progressive world.
There are over 100 comments under the expert’s post.
Andriy Varenko, Java Developer, noted that most women really have a harder time with technical knowledge than most men. «But I’ve seen both female engineers who could easily tell me about the product and technical aspects (how it works, why, how it doesn’t work and why, what options they tested and didn’t work and why), and men who are far from basic technical knowledge (for example, they didn’t know the difference between 10,000 mA and 10A),» he noted.
«Probably, we will soon move away from the stereotypes of the scoop that women are humanitarians and men are engineers. It’s very sad to hear. I know cool female specialists in the team, in technical positions, and outside my team I know quite successful and effective female specialists,» says Android Developer Artem Pelevin .
Sexism, in his opinion, in any direction is a disgusting phenomenon. «There are thousands of studies, a whole layer of fields of psychology, which explain that there is no such thing as a female or male brain, but rather the development of certain areas of the brain. About the characters and habits that make people more inclined to analytical sciences or to the humanities. And here in the 21st century, someone still talks about how someone cannot effectively engage in some kind of activity because they failed with gender. You can also connect race to it.
«It’s a shame that people are not interested in psychology, but are interested in stereotypes,» the forest worker noted.
Orest Zagayskyi said that he once worked at a company, «where a girl from the marketing department wore a T-shirt with the words f-e-m-i-n-i-s-m and was so toxic that you didn’t want to cross paths with her in the hallway or in the kitchen.»
In the same company, according to Orest, he had a middle-level protégé who showed technical abilities that could be envied (in short, the engineers there were simply wonderful, he was friends with everyone).
«If I only had experience with female engineers like that person from the marketing department, I might have said the same thing in an interview to protect myself from repeating the experience. If you haven’t asked the candidate about the details of his experience to reveal any real bias against women, including what he thinks is „normal“ in the details, then immediately labeling him for what he said, even with all the public support, looks unprofessional: he dared to say that, he’s a sexist!» he noted.
«Maybe he just didn’t meet normal female engineers and was stressed by those he worked with. You called him a sexist, or maybe he told you the truth. Why do you label people when you could say that your female engineers are top-notch?», notes Andriy Lavinsky, Chief Growth Officer.
Co-Founder & CEO of if.team Oleg Frolov believes that the issue here is not even about women, but about the candidate’s presence of stereotypes and strange principles. «For me as an employer, this immediately raises big red flags, because it dramatically increases the risks. Tomorrow it will turn out that he is still skeptical about people over 50, or short clients, or Toyota owners,» he ironically says.
