4 ms·

The article states that they get more male applicants than female, but then it also states, "Women know where the women are" and that they have a relatively equ

The article states that they get more male applicants than female, but then it also states, "Women know where the women are" and that they have a relatively equal ratio of male/female employees. So basically, they "solved" Silicon Valley's "Woman Problem" by turning away a large number of qualified male applicants and hired from the smaller pool of females. Sounds like gender discrimination to me. A truly non discriminatory workplace would have a ratio of male/female employees that was in line with the ratio of qualified male/female applicants (even if that meant more males than females). Just saying.

bryondowd 11y ago
more applicants != more qualified applicants You leave out the possibility that the smaller pool of female applicants happened to have more of the highest quality applicants. That could potentially be explained by more quality filters being in place on women before ever reaching the application stage. What those filters might be isn't really important, but I could come up with several possibilities. They would be pure guesses, of course. Edited to add: This effect of course would decrease greatly as you scale up. For instance, imagine there are 700 men and 300 women looking for jobs in your area, and women have been pre-filtered somehow such that they skew to high quality significantly more than men. You can hire the best 50 people and end up with more women than men, but by the time you are hiring the top 600 people, you're going to have more men than women. So, this works for a smaller operation better than a larger one, at least for creating an observable result. That said, perhaps changing the hiring practices of many larger companies would have an eventual secondary impact on these mysterious filters.
- t0mbstone 11y ago
  The problem is that it sounds like one of the factors they are using to determine whether or not someone is "qualified" is whether they are a female. The article clearly states: "It starts with the hiring process. Applestone doesn’t just pick through the applicant pool that comes to her; she goes out and actively looks for qualified women." So she is ignoring the male applicants and is actively looking for women instead. That's pretty much the definition of gender discrimination.
  - lsy 11y ago
    Of course, it doesn't say that anyone is being ignored. It sounds instead like a type of Rooney Rule [1], where all applicants are considered, and under-represented candidates are explicitly included. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
nickff 11y ago
I think you are getting to the core of the disagreement here. You can have a process that either ensures equal treatment or ensures equal outcomes (for certain groups), but you cannot guarantee both. The only way to guarantee both is for all groups of interest to be emotionally, intellectually, and preferentially identical. Essentially, you can view any (HR or other) process as a function, and you can either guarantee a 'fair' function, or a 'fair' result, but not both unless you restrict the inputs. Some people prefer to have equality of treatment, while others prefer equality of outcome; I think this is why people disagree so vehemently on this issue, and rarely change their minds or compromise after a debate.
- reefoctopus 11y ago
  >Some people prefer to have equality of treatment, while others prefer equality of outcome; I think this is why people disagree so vehemently. Yes, because those who prefer equality of outcome are wrong, and they see no problem with discrimination against me when it comes to education and employment. In order to bring about equality of outcome along gender or racial lines you would also have to create separate job markets along those same lines. Instead of competing against everyone for a position I would only be competing against white males. At some point in our history it was decided that separate is by definition not equal.
- bryondowd 11y ago
  Good way of putting it. I think most people would prefer equality of both treatment and outcome, if possible. Additionally, I suspect that it is possible, just not in the short term (or even decades, possibly). But in the long term, I think that if you achieve equality of outcome, then new norms begin to take root, and eventually, you can remove any artificially created inequality of treatment and still get an equal outcome. Your function example really nails it down if you consider it cyclical, with the output being averaged with previous inputs and then re-entered as input. So, inequal input to an equal function generates inequal output. But if you change the function to be inequal but opposite to the existing input, then your output becomes equal. When you average it, it becomes inequal again, but less so than the original. Once your average approached equal by repeating this, you can replace your inequal function with an equal one and your system should remain fairly stable. Essentially, your function just needs to compensate for biased input, and if there is no biased input, it can behave equally. However, simply having equal treatment/function with inequal outcomes/input/output results in a system that just remains the same. So basically, affirmative action type steps could potentially lead to an environment where those steps are no longer necessary, and can be removed, achieving actual equality. But maybe I'm an idealist.
drdeca 11y ago
Hm, I suppose that if the goal is to hire solely based on qualifications (and what salaries people are willing to work for, but that might be part of "qualifications"?), and qualifications (and prices) are equally distributed among genders among applicants, that the number of persons hired of each gender would be roughly proportional to the number of applicants of each gender. (Wow that sentence that I just wrote sure was a run-on sentence. I hope it isn't too too badly worded.) One might consider other motivations. Is it possible that the proportion of applicants of each gender is influenced by the proportion of persons of each gender of those who are employed in the industry in question? (E.g. maybe persons are less likely to apply for a job if they know that their gender is in the minority in either the industry in general, or in the specific company? I don't claim that this is the case, but it does not seem fundamentally absurd.) If this does turn out to be the case, there might be a positive feedback loop on the difference in ratios of genders, causing a small initial disparity to have a tendency to get larger over time. Would this be a problem? I don't know. It could be fine I guess. It also seems plausible that this could cause some disadvantages as well. I don't know that any would be significant. So, uh, it seems like the question is: Is there an /unfortunate/ cause for significantly unequal proportions of genders in applicants for an industry, and if there is, and if changing hiring practices could "counteract" that in some way, should they prioritize , I guess you could call it fairness to the individual, or should they prioritize addressing some sense of "fairness" to groups as a whole? I think this is a difficult question? One question might be whether there is an obligation to do either. (Note: I do not mean a legal obligation.) If someone wants to hire only, say, left handed people, or only men on odd days of the month and only women on even days of the month, or only people who went to the same college as them, is there a reason they shouldn't do that? Maybe. It seems reasonable to me that both of the options I mentioned regarding gender would be better (in the current climate) than , for example, having a policy of only hiring males, even if it is ok to have a policy of only hiring males. (I also don't know why one would have such a policy, and I think that such a policy would likely be wrong, but if it isn't wrong, I still think the other two things mentioned would both be better than it.) Hmm.
derf_ 11y ago
Yeah, so here's the thing: 1. Your job application probably has language that discourage women from applying [1]. 2. Men tend to apply for jobs even though they don't meet all of the qualifications, whereas women tend not to [2]. So there's bias introduced before you even see the list of applicants, and given no other information, it would not be that surprising to find a randomly selected woman from that candidate pool would be more qualified than a randomly selected man. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/textio-unitive-bias-software_n_7493624.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/textio-unitive-bias... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-conf...
- digler999 11y ago
  why would you select any candidate at random, though ? When sifting through candidate pools, (i.e. stack of resumes), isn't it a given that we should only call the best-qualified candidates ?
  - jjn2009 11y ago
    It a thought experiment rather than a suggestion. Asking to consider the talent distributions of each gender given those two points presented.
- jjn2009 11y ago
  While that may be true, out right discrimination by turning away qualified male applicants is not how to correct a bias in applicant hiring, it would be extremely hypocritical to suggest that is some how okay. Give people tools to find the best candidates and they will use them, the market for tech talent is extremely competitive.

bryondowd 11y ago

more applicants != more qualified applicants You leave out the possibility that the smaller pool of female applicants happened to have more of the highest quality applicants. That could potentially be explained by more quality filters being in place on women before ever reaching the application stage. What those filters might be isn't really important, but I could come up with several possibilities. They would be pure guesses, of course. Edited to add: This effect of course would decrease greatly as you scale up. For instance, imagine there are 700 men and 300 women looking for jobs in your area, and women have been pre-filtered somehow such that they skew to high quality significantly more than men. You can hire the best 50 people and end up with more women than men, but by the time you are hiring the top 600 people, you're going to have more men than women. So, this works for a smaller operation better than a larger one, at least for creating an observable result. That said, perhaps changing the hiring practices of many larger companies would have an eventual secondary impact on these mysterious filters.

t0mbstone 11y ago
The problem is that it sounds like one of the factors they are using to determine whether or not someone is "qualified" is whether they are a female. The article clearly states: "It starts with the hiring process. Applestone doesn’t just pick through the applicant pool that comes to her; she goes out and actively looks for qualified women." So she is ignoring the male applicants and is actively looking for women instead. That's pretty much the definition of gender discrimination.
- lsy 11y ago
  Of course, it doesn't say that anyone is being ignored. It sounds instead like a type of Rooney Rule [1], where all applicants are considered, and under-represented candidates are explicitly included. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

nickff 11y ago

I think you are getting to the core of the disagreement here. You can have a process that either ensures equal treatment or ensures equal outcomes (for certain groups), but you cannot guarantee both. The only way to guarantee both is for all groups of interest to be emotionally, intellectually, and preferentially identical. Essentially, you can view any (HR or other) process as a function, and you can either guarantee a 'fair' function, or a 'fair' result, but not both unless you restrict the inputs. Some people prefer to have equality of treatment, while others prefer equality of outcome; I think this is why people disagree so vehemently on this issue, and rarely change their minds or compromise after a debate.

reefoctopus 11y ago
>Some people prefer to have equality of treatment, while others prefer equality of outcome; I think this is why people disagree so vehemently. Yes, because those who prefer equality of outcome are wrong, and they see no problem with discrimination against me when it comes to education and employment. In order to bring about equality of outcome along gender or racial lines you would also have to create separate job markets along those same lines. Instead of competing against everyone for a position I would only be competing against white males. At some point in our history it was decided that separate is by definition not equal.
bryondowd 11y ago
Good way of putting it. I think most people would prefer equality of both treatment and outcome, if possible. Additionally, I suspect that it is possible, just not in the short term (or even decades, possibly). But in the long term, I think that if you achieve equality of outcome, then new norms begin to take root, and eventually, you can remove any artificially created inequality of treatment and still get an equal outcome. Your function example really nails it down if you consider it cyclical, with the output being averaged with previous inputs and then re-entered as input. So, inequal input to an equal function generates inequal output. But if you change the function to be inequal but opposite to the existing input, then your output becomes equal. When you average it, it becomes inequal again, but less so than the original. Once your average approached equal by repeating this, you can replace your inequal function with an equal one and your system should remain fairly stable. Essentially, your function just needs to compensate for biased input, and if there is no biased input, it can behave equally. However, simply having equal treatment/function with inequal outcomes/input/output results in a system that just remains the same. So basically, affirmative action type steps could potentially lead to an environment where those steps are no longer necessary, and can be removed, achieving actual equality. But maybe I'm an idealist.

drdeca 11y ago

Hm, I suppose that if the goal is to hire solely based on qualifications (and what salaries people are willing to work for, but that might be part of "qualifications"?), and qualifications (and prices) are equally distributed among genders among applicants, that the number of persons hired of each gender would be roughly proportional to the number of applicants of each gender. (Wow that sentence that I just wrote sure was a run-on sentence. I hope it isn't too too badly worded.) One might consider other motivations. Is it possible that the proportion of applicants of each gender is influenced by the proportion of persons of each gender of those who are employed in the industry in question? (E.g. maybe persons are less likely to apply for a job if they know that their gender is in the minority in either the industry in general, or in the specific company? I don't claim that this is the case, but it does not seem fundamentally absurd.) If this does turn out to be the case, there might be a positive feedback loop on the difference in ratios of genders, causing a small initial disparity to have a tendency to get larger over time. Would this be a problem? I don't know. It could be fine I guess. It also seems plausible that this could cause some disadvantages as well. I don't know that any would be significant. So, uh, it seems like the question is: Is there an /unfortunate/ cause for significantly unequal proportions of genders in applicants for an industry, and if there is, and if changing hiring practices could "counteract" that in some way, should they prioritize , I guess you could call it fairness to the individual, or should they prioritize addressing some sense of "fairness" to groups as a whole? I think this is a difficult question? One question might be whether there is an obligation to do either. (Note: I do not mean a legal obligation.) If someone wants to hire only, say, left handed people, or only men on odd days of the month and only women on even days of the month, or only people who went to the same college as them, is there a reason they shouldn't do that? Maybe. It seems reasonable to me that both of the options I mentioned regarding gender would be better (in the current climate) than , for example, having a policy of only hiring males, even if it is ok to have a policy of only hiring males. (I also don't know why one would have such a policy, and I think that such a policy would likely be wrong, but if it isn't wrong, I still think the other two things mentioned would both be better than it.) Hmm.

derf_ 11y ago

Yeah, so here's the thing: 1. Your job application probably has language that discourage women from applying [1]. 2. Men tend to apply for jobs even though they don't meet all of the qualifications, whereas women tend not to [2]. So there's bias introduced before you even see the list of applicants, and given no other information, it would not be that surprising to find a randomly selected woman from that candidate pool would be more qualified than a randomly selected man. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/textio-unitive-bias-software_n_7493624.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/textio-unitive-bias... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-conf...

digler999 11y ago
why would you select any candidate at random, though ? When sifting through candidate pools, (i.e. stack of resumes), isn't it a given that we should only call the best-qualified candidates ?
- jjn2009 11y ago
  It a thought experiment rather than a suggestion. Asking to consider the talent distributions of each gender given those two points presented.
jjn2009 11y ago
While that may be true, out right discrimination by turning away qualified male applicants is not how to correct a bias in applicant hiring, it would be extremely hypocritical to suggest that is some how okay. Give people tools to find the best candidates and they will use them, the market for tech talent is extremely competitive.