[quote=an]Coronita, when it comes to higher education, it’s worst being Asian than white.[/quote]
I remember when I was a freshman in college. I was interviewing for an internship at HP. Same as my friend. My friend and I both had limited work experience in electrical engineering. We both had roughly the same understanding and grades, after all we were lab partners.
We both had the same interview with the same guy, I’ll call HP asshole.
We were both asked the same 3 technical questions, figuring out the resistance, current , voltage of various circuits. I got 2 out of 3 correct. He got 1 out of 3 correct. In the last 15 minutes of the interview, the same asshole, Eric, made a snide comment about how I couldnt do all 3 questions, lecture about how we expect all candidates to know these questions , and another lecture about how HP prides itself on diversity and specifically said we hire “a lot of black engineers” (his exact words)..
My friend shared me what he and “Eric” talked about…. Football and the 49ers. he was complemented how well he got 1 out of 3 questions correct, no mention of how “diverse” HP is and no mention about how many “black engineers we hire”…
Eric was white. I got a rejection letter for the HP internship… My lab partner was white and could carry a much longer conversation about the 49ers…and so got the internship.
This is what the the essence of
unconscious bias. See if I was black, I probably would have been hired according to what Eric said. if I was white, I probably would have been hired like my lab partner, because I could have that all american 49er convo to blend in.. being neither, I was fucked even if , as a freshman I did answer 2 of 3 interview questions that took 2/3 of the entire interview…and that was for an engineering technical skills based position… I can’t imagine what the arbitrary criteria would have been even more so for something in sales or marketing…
And it had a very ugly result…You see, throughout my career, I never ever sought a job with HP. I was celebrating when Carly Fiorina destroyed HP, and when many people at HP from that Palo alto office were looking for a job when I was still up there, I made sure to toss all their resumes in the trash can, among many reasons, many of their engineers had their head up in the clouds with that sorry excuse of a distributed software architecture called “e-Speak”…. I never entertained a resume from Palo Alto HP. Neither did anyone in my group…never bought any office equipment from HP, or computer, or computer peripherals with HP label on it.
For me, there was no unconsciousness in my bias. I was young them, and didn’t know better ..
So forgive me if I roll my eyes when someone mentions about how “diverse” they think they are champions of “diversity”. In my experience, most of the time people who claim they are champions of diversity are most of the time full of shit and have a lot of unconscious biases lurking in their closets that either they don’t realize or even if they do, don’t care so long as they have something they can do to easily check the diversity box….
