Last week, I came across an article with a familiar name, titled “How one Silicon Valley engineer negotiated a starting salary from $120,000 to $250,000 in just a few weeks.”

The Business Insider article told the story of Haseeb Qureshi, a graduate of App Academy like me, who recently received a $250,000 offer from Airbnb, his first engineering job. This offer was the result of an initial rejection, a referral from the founder of App Academy, that got him “promptly unrejected” and a series of interviews and negotiations. This is all detailed in his personal blog.

For the hundreds of thousands of people who read that article, Haseeb is now someone to idolize. Countless comments on the Business Insider piece compliment his negotiation techniques. Haseeb is also the guy who once told a room full of App Academy students — where men outnumbered women 5:1 — to:

“Shake hands like a man, especially if you’re a woman.”

Let me give you some context.

It was September 2015, and my App Academy cohort was nearing the end of our 12-week coding bootcamp. The curriculum had shifted from pure coding instruction to soft skills: How to tell your story, how to network. Haseeb was delivering a lecture on how to present yourself in an interview. He only had three months more coding experience us, but was an instructor of my cohort. His slides covered “power stancing” and “faking it till you make it” — basically, how to pretend you have more confidence than you do, in order to reinforce and create that confidence.

Then, about 75% of the way in, came the slide in question:

“Shake hands like a man, especially if you're a woman.”

Yeah. Read it again. This statement isn't implicitly sexist, it’s explicitly sexist. If the words aren't enough to make you cringe, Haseeb followed it up with a verbal comment to the effect of:

"I know, but, the reality is that most of the people interviewing you are going to be men."

I adopted my best power stance, raised my hand, and said:

“Hey, that’s pretty f*cking sexist.”

Haseeb at first defended his choice. I pushed again. He started to translate,

“Okay, you’re right. Shake hands with confidence?”

The ‘translation’ highlights the sexism at the root of his comment. He changed the slide on the fly, and hurriedly moved on.

Stop. Let’s imagine some similar statements that marginalize other groups.

"Shake hands like a straight guy, especially if you're gay.”

… or maybe …

"Shake hands like white guy, especially if you're black.”

Picture that on a slide. And imagine then hearing the educator at the front of the room follow it up with a comment like:

"Sorry, but the reality is that most of the people interviewing you are going to be ______”.

In a different lecture, or work environment, or conversation, this comment would be offensive. What makes this comment inexcusable is the fact that Haseeb took as a basis of his lecture the power of implicit biases. His goal, his job was to strengthen the confidence of the App Academy students, including the female engineers, who made up a strong group of 9 in a cohort of 55.

Instead, Haseeb implicitly reinforced the entrenched bias that creates inequality of opportunity for women. He undermined all the women in that room, who were already outnumbered by male students 5:1. He sent a message to those women; women who had left other jobs and had taken big, expensive bets on themselves — choosing to enter an industry with only three months of training, where they would be vastly outnumbered by men. And his message was "Women don't belong here, and you'll have to change who you are if you want to stay."

A few days later, I raised the incident to Ned Ruggeri, the founder of App Academy, who a few months later would refer Haseeb to Airbnb. He responded:

“When I read the comment you quoted, I was mortified and upset. For precisely the reasons you outline, that is ridiculous, offensive, and counterproductive. No one, much less an instructor, should be making a comment like that at App Academy (or anywhere else). The gratuitous, unnecessary, injection of gender is completely out of line and disappointing.”

(Thanks, Ned. I agree.)

...instructors have a special obligation to avoid entrenching biases, given their position of authority in a classroom… it is not enough to wish that bias not be entrenched; it is necessary to examine carefully what we think and say, to seek out and confront our biases, and to be aware of and take responsibility for the ways in which our words and actions can disempower others, even when that is unintentional.

(Again, Ned. Couldn’t have said it better myself.)

For his part, Haseeb appeared to take seriously our discussion, and agreed that what he said was wrong. I believe he sincerely regrets it, and he offered to apologize to you personally.

The apology that Haseeb “offered” to deliver to me personally never came. And honestly, who cares. It’s not really about something one guy said one time — it’s about the system that acknowledges sexism, but continues to tolerate it.

It was Ned’s recommendation that got Haseeb his “unrejection” from Airbnb. It was Ned’s personal referral that helped land Haseeb a total compensation package of $250,000 — about $150,000 more than the average App Academy graduate’s starting salary, and a high amount by any standard. It was the fact the people who knew Haseeb and helped him get the job, at the end of the day, didn’t really think that what happened was that big a deal.

The subtle perpetuation of entrenched bias, and the tolerance of it by those with power, contributes to the skewed gender ratio and the persistent wage gap in the tech industry. As many as 92% of software engineers are male. Even companies with an eye on the issue like Facebook and Google can’t seem to make that ratio much better. And, studies have shown that when a woman does actually get a job as a developer, her chances of getting paid equally are next to none.

I attended App Academy because I wanted to be an engineer; I liked coding. I wanted to create software — to be empowered to solve problems in almost any industry. But increasingly, I think that the only way I can be an empowered, impactful engineer is to wage these battles, to try to change the landscape I’m operating in, and to push others to do the same.

Haseeb is probably a great engineer — he might even be $250,000 great, but it’s important to consider more than that when hiring, or recommending. Haseeb's story is not one of success. It's the story of an industry's failure to combat the sexism that pervades it. So rather than celebrate Haseeb, let’s recognize that he got that recommendation, which helped him get that job, and that salary, because he was let off the hook for explicit sexism — and that the endemic acceptance of that kind of behavior will continue to harm women, and men, unless that passivity is eradicated.