Are you really? If you’re involved in nuclear accident, you get to live anywhere from days to months to years to decades. Even in the worst of the worst cases (you literally touched the fuel rod), you will have time to say farewells to the family, perhaps even write a will.
That's where we disagree. All effective teams are exclusionary; I've never seen an effective team chosen by lottery tickets. And effective intra-team communication is their most defining trait. In my experience, so long as diversity does not impede communication, it is a neutral trait (neither positive nor negative correlation).
Didn't you just describe the downsides in dealing with women in perfect detail?
That complicated attempts at telepathing how emotional it is for them, "subtler approaches", "slower processes", "shutting things down because it's uncomfortable". None of that is needed when both parties are males. Not to mention the entire possibility of that scenario happening is then about nil to begin with.
He should probably not. If it works for the majority of the team (which from the grandparent comments seems it does), the impetus is on candidates to fit in existing culture, not the culture to change to fit candidates.
Most effective teams are usually ones with least communication impedance. The less you have to judge your words and go through diplomacy/"re-examination" dance in routine conversations, the more time you have to do your job. That's the reason "team fit/culture fit" is such an important criteria when hiring people.
> Having friendly, healthy relationships with your colleagues isn't valuable? Or just with the ones who are women?
Just with the ones who are women (from a male perspective). This specific point is because of #MeToo - this movement normalized the fact that "friendliness" and "healthiness" of a relationship is judged post-factum, sometimes years and decades post-factum, and the male perspective is rarely taken into account.
Think about it this way, even if one follows OP advice, and builds what he considers very healthy and friendly relationship, he exposes himself to (based on recent news stories, very real) risk of the relationship being second-guessed by the female, at any point in time in future, with the severe penalties resulting from mere accusations, not convictions, even if not true.
What you think is harassing might quite well disagree with target female view of what harassing is, complicated by the fact that HR department might disagree with you both. And should that whole thing become public, you'll be judged by the entire office, with the entire spectrum of views on what harassment is.
Personally, as a male, you have absolutely nothing to gain, and everything to lose. The most rational thing is to not engage at all.
Just wait a bit, and with the way things are going, "Did you see all the snacks?" will be declared the thought crime against fat people.
I prefer using the same language in interviews as we do in office. If the candidate gets offended, chances are, he would be offended on the first day on the job; better weed those out early.
By his logic, "cities of the future" are cities of childless families, set exclusively in temperate climate, on flat terrain.
Bicycles are environmentally friendly (BTW, so are electric cars), but they are ultimately a statement of "edge cases are someone else's problem".
Kid sick and needs to be picked up from school couple hills away in 1/2 hour? Depend on someone else with a car. Three toddlers to deliver to childcare and be on time at work? Depend on someone else with a car. Need to get to an older parent that is not feeling well half a city away in the middle of the night? Depend on, yes, someone else with a car (mass transit basically does not work at night even in large cities). Need to have enough groceries for a weekend getaway for a family of five - good luck with your bicycle (or depend on delivery company, or on someone else with a car).
I have to disagree with OP. Cities of the future are cities with abundant personal transportation set over non-planar infrastructure (i.e. many grades, not 2-3 max today) with grade separations for all intersections - or flying cars, powered by non-polluting energy sources.
Until we all get there, let's be mindful that preaching niche transportation options needs to consider real life scenarios, with all their ugly cases, and not only the best case fantasy of their author.
ParaTransit specifically is a non-profit organization. "Non-profit" and "incentives" generally don't mix well. Better service would require paying market rates - by the city, or partly by the city.
And it'd still be cheaper than building accessibility over existing subway infrastructure.
You make a very good point that disability is not binary; there is an entire spectrum from Michael Phelps to Steven Hawking. In some ways, having three kids on your back can be considered a [temporary] disability ;) My main point is that going down the percentage of affected population drastically changes the ROI of changing the infrastructure as a whole versus addressing the people involved individually. And wheelchairs specifically is fairly far down that scale.
I highly suspect it is plain cheaper (and more convenient) to just subsidize private car rides for disabled people than making entire transit infrastructure in huge city to account for them.
Better yet, take the money that government would otherwise spend on building all the wheelchair accomodations, and just distribute that between wheelchair users. I am sure many of them would prefer that over subway improvements which they might never use.
"Disabled people cannot reach their [work, school, childcare, w/e]", if true, is a valid problem. There are multiple ways to solve that problem. "NYC subway does not have wheelchair accomodations" is a useless outrage over circumstantial symptoms.
Why are we talking about women here? Anything particularly special about them?
Managers should focus on retaining top talent that allows organization to move forward. Interacting with others productively is one facet of top talent - regardless of what personal traits (love of geeky things, particular choice of hobbies or whatever else) ultimately allows for team fusion.
The moment management starts socially engineering the team on any other metric than team's ability to contribute to company cause, they are harming their organization.
Commercial entities are not avenues of social justice. They are instruments of making money.
I am professionally involved in space tech. Have to say, I like Trump's administration stance on NASA (quote):
"We see NASA in an exploration role, in deep space research," Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, told the Guardian newspaper. "Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission."
...much more then I liked the previous administrator (Charles Bolden) mission:
"When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things," Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
Why were Muslim national relationships a NASA mission? Thought we had State Department for that.
Dublin? Sure. Amsterdam - if you believe you can grow decent startup scene in location with 52% income taxes and 1.2% wealth tax and 21% VAT, I have a bridge to sell you.
Silicon Valley happened before the tax madness, and there is now net wealth outflow to lower-tax locations.