When The Preferred Candidate Is Hardcoded

I’m a network engineer working on a team in an office, and I’m a man. We just had another network engineer join our team, a woman. It’s her first day, and our boss (also a woman) and I are talking about the new engineer. Coincidentally, she and I used to be coworkers on another team years earlier.

Me: “I was so surprised when she walked in. I’d forgotten her last name, or I would have realized it when you made the onboarding announcement.”

Boss: “She seems pretty good. I knew as soon as I saw her that I was going to hire her. There are so few women network engineers. Every time I get an applicant who’s a woman, I always immediately hire her!”

I didn’t know what to say to that. She just admitted gleefully to gender based discriminatory hiring practices. My new teammate had won out over the other applicants because of her gender, and had I been competing against any female candidates when I was hired months earlier, I wouldn’t have gotten the job.

It’s one thing to encourage people to pursue careers in fields that might have been considered gendered roles in another time, but discrimination isn’t ever going to be a solution to discrimination.