11 ms·

You know what, though? If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. Certainly not at a big corporati

by Frondo 10y ago

You know what, though? If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region. But then, when I listen to the stories women in tech (for example) tell, and they do tell a LOT of the same stories, it's clear we're pretty far from equality of opportunity. And I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names... guess who doesn't get called in for an interview. So I just don't buy that most people even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mulmen 10y ago
I completely agree with you but I'm not sure that we should tackle this problem by targeting employers alone, I think it is a much wider reaching social problem. Discriminatory hiring practices are but one of many symptoms of the disease.
- randomdata 10y ago
  Interestingly, someone pointed out in another discussion that women are more apt to be found in careers that have educational barriers to entry. Women also obtain college degrees at a rate that is meaningfully higher than men, presumably in part because they want access to those restricted professions. Is the social problem that the discriminated are pushed to 'over achieve' while the rest have no expectations placed on them and are more likely to fall into whatever work is available? I think this definitely holds true for the tech profession where for many of us the jobs appeared as extension to hobbies, not something we actually sat down to plan to do. If we were pressured to go to school and get a good, well respected, job above all else – which I think we can say certain segments of the population are – the path into tech would have been far less obvious. Especially when you go back several years ago, before tech was 'cool', but even now doctor or lawyer sounds better than programmer.
frozenport 10y ago
Asians are 6% of the population, should big companies like Google start firing people? Palantir got sued for hiring Asians at a ratio of 20%. 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool.
- omginternets 10y ago
  > 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool. What if they were actually the better candidates? Bias in hiring may well reflect bias in talent.
  - frozenport 10y ago
    Yeah, so that's why they are being sued. But saying that large corporations should achieve the percentage of demographic as is present in the population is wrong.
ninkendo 10y ago
> Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region. That is a drastic oversimplification. The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified. Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large. Which can only hope to be reflective of the pool of people who have the right education and experience. Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who graduated with the appropriate degree for which they're hiring (in most cases). Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who got accepted into those schools. Which can only hope to be reflective of those who chose that education/career path to begin with. Which can only hope to be reflective of the population that sought out things like math and science when in secondary school. Which only then can only hope to be reflective of the general population. At each step there is filtration. It's affected by people's upbringing, their role models, what advertising they were heavily exposed to as impressionable children, who their friends are, who their teachers were, whether computers were popular when they were going through school, the list goes on and on. The problem of under and over-representation in tech is a real one, but pretending that companies just need to somehow make up for all of this filtration, at the very very end of a literal lifetime-sized pipeline, is folly. Outreach needs to happen much, much, much sooner than that. At the end of the day, companies are at the mercy of who's in their hiring pool.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Frondo 10y ago
  You're right, the problem is bigger than a company. It goes deep, society-deep. And I don't think anyone would say "poor black kids have a fair shake, right up until Oracle doesn't hire them". Of course not. Some groups get shafted from birth, by being born into poor communities, by being born into communities where the police split their heads for looking the way they do. You're right, it's not just on some tech company to fix societal racism. What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!" I mean, jesus, the status quo does not need any defense. It's already winning by default.
powertower 10y ago
> But then, when I listen to the stories women in tech (for example) tell, and they do tell a LOT of the same stories, it's clear we're pretty far from equality of opportunity. From the stories that made it to the front of HN (and the stories that made it into the main-steam media) - almost without exception - each case (after it had its full run) turned out to be a false narrative driven by the need of someone to prove that sexism and racism is everywhere and is everything (and to profit from it in some way). There is an entire industry dedicated to this behavior. In my personal experience, if anything has been shown, it is that females, and non-white males, are given an enormous amount of help at the expense of other people - simply for having the proper genitalia and skin color. If you are qualified, a female or a non-white male, you have the upper hand in gainful employment right now. This is the reality.
- maehwasu 10y ago
  You get what you incentivize. If you incentivize sob stories about women in tech, you get sob stories about women in tech.
wallace_f 10y ago
>it doesn't seem like Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described: >most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out). The fact is we already have things like state-sponsored racist entrance policies to our most prestigious educational programs. In law school, it can be several standard deviations worth of LSAT points-- that is a VERY big deal. Even pointing this out, though, means someone is going to flip this on its head and misconstrue it, calling me the evil monster you described. As I said in another comment, you're never going to see equality of outcome. The NBA will never be dominated by people of Asian descent. Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs. Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men. Men will always have more statistical outliers existing in the "fat tails" of male distributions relative to distributions of women. People are different. It doesn't mean better, or worse. For example, I'm not that exceptionally good at maths, but my friend is -- he's not any better of a person than I, though, and no sane person would make that argument. There's nothing wrong with being different. Demanding that everyone be the same will end up with us in Harrison Bergeron's world, and in that long-run scenario everyone ends up losing except those who take joy in ruling over others. I believe it important to ensure everyone has equal outcome with respect to human rights, civil rights, and human dignity. There is no good reason why we cannot provide everyone with these. I believe that's where attention should be focused, and we're getting off track by pretending everyone is the same and demanding that the only reason for anything else is that the NBA is racist against Asians! (or coding companies are racist/sexists against whomever it is that doesn't have coding jobs).
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this. You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players. You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice. Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  I was a white kid, and I wanted to be a basketball player much more than a programmer. I just wasn't any good at it.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    Choose a 20 year old black man completely at random and pit him against the worst player in the NBA. What result do you expect?
  - phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
    That doesn't seem fair. Which NBA teams did you try out for?
  - hnbro 10y ago
    not everyone can be dirk nowitzki :(
  - sangnoir 10y ago
sadly_impolite 10y ago
>I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names... There is no polite way to put it, but I would be surprised if among black applicants having a "black" name did not predict worse actual performance than having a "white" name. The same goes for white applicants with "white trash" names. If there are Asian equivalents, same for them.
- AbrahamParangi 10y ago
  You know, resumes contain other signaling information on them other than the applicants' names. It would definitely surprise me if you could predict any performance metrics with statistical significance based on name alone. I mean honestly imagine a resume that says: graduated from Yale 2011 with a BS in Computer Science. Worked for Qualcomm for 2 years before taking a job as a PM at Google. Currently looking for a new job to move back to the east coast to be nearer to their family. And you're telling me you can predict this person's future job performance based on whether their last name is Park, Lewis, or Johnson?
urahara 10y ago
Could blind hiring practices be a solution to the absence of equal opportunity? Or quotas are a better answer? What in your opinion can be done to battle hiring discrimination problem?
ryandamm 10y ago
I wish I could upvote this 1000 times. I think the counter arguments (haven't read the entire thread yet, and probably never will) often engage in abstract thought experiments, which are often very simplified models with tons of unspoken assumptions... rather than dealing with the reality on the ground. Which is often really ugly for women and minorities.
iopq 10y ago
>If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. But we don't have equality of education, equality of upbringing, etc. so it's natural that given the equality of opportunity we get unequal results.
tomohawk 10y ago
If you start with $1 million in pennies and I start with $1 million in pennies and we play a game with a fair coin: heads I win, tails you win - with the winner getting a penny, guess what happens if we play the game over and over again? Over time, one of us will have $0, and the other will have $2 million. So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time. The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  That's not true, but I agree with you that people should work together to pursue happiness.
- uiri 10y ago
  A fair coin means that it is equally likely for you to take a penny from me as it is for me to take a penny from you. For instance, if we play the game 1000 times, heads might come up 505 times and tails might come up 495 times. Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0. Therefore, over time, we'll both stay at $1 million.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin
  - digler999 10y ago
    > Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0. That doesn't preclude arbitrarily-large variances in between that could add up to a Head/Tail difference > 10^6.

by Frondo 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mulmen 10y ago

I completely agree with you but I'm not sure that we should tackle this problem by targeting employers alone, I think it is a much wider reaching social problem. Discriminatory hiring practices are but one of many symptoms of the disease.

randomdata 10y ago
Interestingly, someone pointed out in another discussion that women are more apt to be found in careers that have educational barriers to entry. Women also obtain college degrees at a rate that is meaningfully higher than men, presumably in part because they want access to those restricted professions. Is the social problem that the discriminated are pushed to 'over achieve' while the rest have no expectations placed on them and are more likely to fall into whatever work is available? I think this definitely holds true for the tech profession where for many of us the jobs appeared as extension to hobbies, not something we actually sat down to plan to do. If we were pressured to go to school and get a good, well respected, job above all else – which I think we can say certain segments of the population are – the path into tech would have been far less obvious. Especially when you go back several years ago, before tech was 'cool', but even now doctor or lawyer sounds better than programmer.

frozenport 10y ago

Asians are 6% of the population, should big companies like Google start firing people? Palantir got sued for hiring Asians at a ratio of 20%. 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool.

omginternets 10y ago
> 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool. What if they were actually the better candidates? Bias in hiring may well reflect bias in talent.
- frozenport 10y ago
  Yeah, so that's why they are being sued. But saying that large corporations should achieve the percentage of demographic as is present in the population is wrong.

ninkendo 10y ago

> Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region. That is a drastic oversimplification. The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified. Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large. Which can only hope to be reflective of the pool of people who have the right education and experience. Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who graduated with the appropriate degree for which they're hiring (in most cases). Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who got accepted into those schools. Which can only hope to be reflective of those who chose that education/career path to begin with. Which can only hope to be reflective of the population that sought out things like math and science when in secondary school. Which only then can only hope to be reflective of the general population. At each step there is filtration. It's affected by people's upbringing, their role models, what advertising they were heavily exposed to as impressionable children, who their friends are, who their teachers were, whether computers were popular when they were going through school, the list goes on and on. The problem of under and over-representation in tech is a real one, but pretending that companies just need to somehow make up for all of this filtration, at the very very end of a literal lifetime-sized pipeline, is folly. Outreach needs to happen much, much, much sooner than that. At the end of the day, companies are at the mercy of who's in their hiring pool.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Frondo 10y ago
You're right, the problem is bigger than a company. It goes deep, society-deep. And I don't think anyone would say "poor black kids have a fair shake, right up until Oracle doesn't hire them". Of course not. Some groups get shafted from birth, by being born into poor communities, by being born into communities where the police split their heads for looking the way they do. You're right, it's not just on some tech company to fix societal racism. What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!" I mean, jesus, the status quo does not need any defense. It's already winning by default.

powertower 10y ago

> But then, when I listen to the stories women in tech (for example) tell, and they do tell a LOT of the same stories, it's clear we're pretty far from equality of opportunity. From the stories that made it to the front of HN (and the stories that made it into the main-steam media) - almost without exception - each case (after it had its full run) turned out to be a false narrative driven by the need of someone to prove that sexism and racism is everywhere and is everything (and to profit from it in some way). There is an entire industry dedicated to this behavior. In my personal experience, if anything has been shown, it is that females, and non-white males, are given an enormous amount of help at the expense of other people - simply for having the proper genitalia and skin color. If you are qualified, a female or a non-white male, you have the upper hand in gainful employment right now. This is the reality.

maehwasu 10y ago
You get what you incentivize. If you incentivize sob stories about women in tech, you get sob stories about women in tech.

wallace_f 10y ago

>it doesn't seem like Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described: >most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out). The fact is we already have things like state-sponsored racist entrance policies to our most prestigious educational programs. In law school, it can be several standard deviations worth of LSAT points-- that is a VERY big deal. Even pointing this out, though, means someone is going to flip this on its head and misconstrue it, calling me the evil monster you described. As I said in another comment, you're never going to see equality of outcome. The NBA will never be dominated by people of Asian descent. Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs. Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men. Men will always have more statistical outliers existing in the "fat tails" of male distributions relative to distributions of women. People are different. It doesn't mean better, or worse. For example, I'm not that exceptionally good at maths, but my friend is -- he's not any better of a person than I, though, and no sane person would make that argument. There's nothing wrong with being different. Demanding that everyone be the same will end up with us in Harrison Bergeron's world, and in that long-run scenario everyone ends up losing except those who take joy in ruling over others. I believe it important to ensure everyone has equal outcome with respect to human rights, civil rights, and human dignity. There is no good reason why we cannot provide everyone with these. I believe that's where attention should be focused, and we're getting off track by pretending everyone is the same and demanding that the only reason for anything else is that the NBA is racist against Asians! (or coding companies are racist/sexists against whomever it is that doesn't have coding jobs).

sangnoir 10y ago
> Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this. You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players. You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice. Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.

jimbokun 10y ago
I was a white kid, and I wanted to be a basketball player much more than a programmer. I just wasn't any good at it.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  Choose a 20 year old black man completely at random and pit him against the worst player in the NBA. What result do you expect?
- phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
  That doesn't seem fair. Which NBA teams did you try out for?
- hnbro 10y ago
  not everyone can be dirk nowitzki :(
- sangnoir 10y ago

sadly_impolite 10y ago

>I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names... There is no polite way to put it, but I would be surprised if among black applicants having a "black" name did not predict worse actual performance than having a "white" name. The same goes for white applicants with "white trash" names. If there are Asian equivalents, same for them.

AbrahamParangi 10y ago
You know, resumes contain other signaling information on them other than the applicants' names. It would definitely surprise me if you could predict any performance metrics with statistical significance based on name alone. I mean honestly imagine a resume that says: graduated from Yale 2011 with a BS in Computer Science. Worked for Qualcomm for 2 years before taking a job as a PM at Google. Currently looking for a new job to move back to the east coast to be nearer to their family. And you're telling me you can predict this person's future job performance based on whether their last name is Park, Lewis, or Johnson?

urahara 10y ago

Could blind hiring practices be a solution to the absence of equal opportunity? Or quotas are a better answer? What in your opinion can be done to battle hiring discrimination problem?

ryandamm 10y ago

I wish I could upvote this 1000 times. I think the counter arguments (haven't read the entire thread yet, and probably never will) often engage in abstract thought experiments, which are often very simplified models with tons of unspoken assumptions... rather than dealing with the reality on the ground. Which is often really ugly for women and minorities.

iopq 10y ago

>If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do. But we don't have equality of education, equality of upbringing, etc. so it's natural that given the equality of opportunity we get unequal results.

tomohawk 10y ago

If you start with $1 million in pennies and I start with $1 million in pennies and we play a game with a fair coin: heads I win, tails you win - with the winner getting a penny, guess what happens if we play the game over and over again? Over time, one of us will have $0, and the other will have $2 million. So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time. The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.

wallace_f 10y ago
That's not true, but I agree with you that people should work together to pursue happiness.
uiri 10y ago
A fair coin means that it is equally likely for you to take a penny from me as it is for me to take a penny from you. For instance, if we play the game 1000 times, heads might come up 505 times and tails might come up 495 times. Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0. Therefore, over time, we'll both stay at $1 million.
- WildUtah 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin
- digler999 10y ago
  > Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0. That doesn't preclude arbitrarily-large variances in between that could add up to a Head/Tail difference > 10^6.