I found this chart (from OKCupid, a supposedly popular online dating site)quite interesting to feed my data-science soul. It basically comes to the conclusion that as far as online-dating goes, racism is prominent and whatever you say, a sample size of 750K diverse people is representative in my books.
(Click on the chart for a link on further details about it)
But on a different note, a friend of mine recently asked me a very simple question, “If two candidates possess the same-skill, and one of them is a local and the other is foreign, would employers have a bias to pick the local over the foreign candidate?”
Now from an socio-economic standpoint, and from legal standpoint, the answer to that question is no. It is illegal to discriminate(at least in OECD countries) based on gender, sex, race or sexual orientation.
But I’m not going to talk about whether such biases occur or not, but instead focus on something else. If you ever find yourself facing a situation like this and start reverting to the answer-‘damn I probably didn’t get that job because I’m foreign’, then let me ask you this-‘is there any way possible for you to know that answer?’. The answer is a simple NO. If you didn’t get a job, it could have been because of a variety of reasons-poor skill set matching, poor interviewing, high competition, language barriers etc. What is critical to understand is that you will never know and that is all.
Whatever the reality be, considering that you can’t change the outcome makes it a fruitless effort to be concerned about and that time dwelling about it could be spent applying for other jobs.
If you can’t change the outcome of events, don’t bother being concerned about it, or as they say in French – ‘Nous ne pouvons pas nous échapper’, or more plainly in English, ‘we cannot escape ourselves’.
