6 ms·

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m femal

When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have? Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.

tiles 9y ago
Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  In an interview, Damore said part of the "lowered bar" is extra interview rounds for minority candidates. You could call that "more energy", but it also reduces the chances that a given candidate suffers from bad luck.
  - notreallythough 9y ago
    Luck doesn't reduce skill, it alters opportunity.
    - arcticfox 9y ago
      Consider a 90% free throw shooter vs. a 50% shooter. To get the job, you have to make 3 shots. But the 90% shooter gets 3 shots and the 60% shooter gets 5 shots. All of a sudden the 60% shooter is more likely to get the job. It highly depends on the details of the interview process, which I don't know, but just to discount it with that logic is impossible.
      - AlexandrB 9y ago
        This analogy doesn't work at all. 3/3 shots is 100% success rate whereas 3/5 shots is 60% - you're literally describing lowering the bar for the 60% shooter. Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. Doing multiple rounds may, of course, increase the chance of false positives (reduce specificity); but the assumption in this case is that when hiring minorities the sensitivity of the interview process is much worse than the specificity.
        arcticfox 9y ago
        Right, that's why I said it depends on how the interview process is done. Some companies do thumbs up / down by round. On a reread, Damore actually implies that Google's policies as applied to their interview process are "decreasing the false negative rate" for minorities. Whether this is harmfully discriminatory or not is open to opinion, but what I think is clear there is that the statement is favorable and understanding of his minority peers - the policies did not let anyone through who should not have been. I certainly don't think he should be fired for having given that statement.
        hackinthebochs 9y ago
        I don't see how you don't recognize this as effectively lowering the bar (if not intentionally). >Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. The difference is that what they're testing for isn't a binary proposition (do you have the disease or not), but a spectrum (what is your skill level). Viewing this in terms of false-positives or false-negatives is insufficient. If we think of programming skill as a spectrum, we can ask what is the average top-% of candidates who pass the interview (we might guess its top 5% of all developers). If everyone has the same test then the average top-% is unchanged regardless of any efforts to get more minorities to take the test. But once you start giving more tries to minorities your average top-% necessarily reduces. Whatever your test is designed to admit (say you're interested in hiring only the top-10% of developers), the average of those who pass will be higher precisely because of the chance factor. Being significantly better than the intended cutoff gives you a better chance at passing and so those who pass skews towards better than the intended cutoff. I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad thing, but the average skill of those who pass must reduce. It is very straightforward to see this as effectively lowering the bar.
- dandare 9y ago
  This argument reminds me of the "waterboarding is not torture" argument, both suffer from slothful induction fallacy. If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't? Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
  - fche 9y ago
    "If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it ..." This applies to any sort of interrogation tactic along the spectrum between The Comfy Chair and Execution. Each step would not be applied if the detainees confessed at the next-below step.
  - hackinthebochs 9y ago
    >Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them? reply The point is to find the ones that can pass at a higher rate than you normally would. No bar is lowered, and your representation increases.
    - fche 9y ago
      If you search harder for them, the bar is lowered by virtue of letting them be less outstanding / noticeable.
      - hackinthebochs 9y ago
        That doesn't follow if they're passing the same hiring process. It's not hard at all to get a contact for a phone screen with Google: I've been contacted by Google recruiters on linkedin with a barely filled out profile with one or two unremarkable positions listed. If you're counting the initial discovery phase as part of the hiring process, you're mistaken.
        fche 9y ago
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  > Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still. That has a very pernicious effect across the industry though. Think about what that policy does to other companies. The other companies won't have as many high quality women because Google scouted and hired them already, but will have just as many low and medium quality women who aren't good enough for Google, and more high quality men who were displaced from Google. Which skews the gender ratio even more and creates the impression that women at those companies are lower quality than the men there or else they would have been hired away by Google -- because it causes that impression to be the truth. And you can't fix it by having all companies adopt that policy, because it would still transfer high quality women from lower tier companies to higher tier companies, causing problems for all the women who don't get to work for the companies in the highest tier. Even the high quality women who are still in second tier companies. The lower tier companies are where almost everybody actually works -- small and medium companies employ more people than huge companies because there are so many more of them. Google is being quite selfish with a policy like that.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    But isn't that true of any hiring practice? Should people start lowering their standards just so other companies can get better candidates too?
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      It's only true of hiring practices that cause the gender ratio in your company to be different than it is in the industry as a whole.
      - fche 9y ago
        And then watch out if your company bases its diversity targets on numbers from the rest of the industry. All the good ones may be taken (in order to get to the mythical 50%), but now we want to follow suit (to get to 50%), but what's left? What a mess.

tiles 9y ago

Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.

humanrebar 9y ago
In an interview, Damore said part of the "lowered bar" is extra interview rounds for minority candidates. You could call that "more energy", but it also reduces the chances that a given candidate suffers from bad luck.
- notreallythough 9y ago
  Luck doesn't reduce skill, it alters opportunity.
  - arcticfox 9y ago
    Consider a 90% free throw shooter vs. a 50% shooter. To get the job, you have to make 3 shots. But the 90% shooter gets 3 shots and the 60% shooter gets 5 shots. All of a sudden the 60% shooter is more likely to get the job. It highly depends on the details of the interview process, which I don't know, but just to discount it with that logic is impossible.
    - AlexandrB 9y ago
      This analogy doesn't work at all. 3/3 shots is 100% success rate whereas 3/5 shots is 60% - you're literally describing lowering the bar for the 60% shooter. Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. Doing multiple rounds may, of course, increase the chance of false positives (reduce specificity); but the assumption in this case is that when hiring minorities the sensitivity of the interview process is much worse than the specificity.
      - arcticfox 9y ago
        Right, that's why I said it depends on how the interview process is done. Some companies do thumbs up / down by round. On a reread, Damore actually implies that Google's policies as applied to their interview process are "decreasing the false negative rate" for minorities. Whether this is harmfully discriminatory or not is open to opinion, but what I think is clear there is that the statement is favorable and understanding of his minority peers - the policies did not let anyone through who should not have been. I certainly don't think he should be fired for having given that statement.
      - hackinthebochs 9y ago
        I don't see how you don't recognize this as effectively lowering the bar (if not intentionally). >Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. The difference is that what they're testing for isn't a binary proposition (do you have the disease or not), but a spectrum (what is your skill level). Viewing this in terms of false-positives or false-negatives is insufficient. If we think of programming skill as a spectrum, we can ask what is the average top-% of candidates who pass the interview (we might guess its top 5% of all developers). If everyone has the same test then the average top-% is unchanged regardless of any efforts to get more minorities to take the test. But once you start giving more tries to minorities your average top-% necessarily reduces. Whatever your test is designed to admit (say you're interested in hiring only the top-10% of developers), the average of those who pass will be higher precisely because of the chance factor. Being significantly better than the intended cutoff gives you a better chance at passing and so those who pass skews towards better than the intended cutoff. I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad thing, but the average skill of those who pass must reduce. It is very straightforward to see this as effectively lowering the bar.
dandare 9y ago
This argument reminds me of the "waterboarding is not torture" argument, both suffer from slothful induction fallacy. If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it to detainees to confess information they otherwise wouldn't? Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them?
- fche 9y ago
  "If waterboarding is not torture then why would you apply it ..." This applies to any sort of interrogation tactic along the spectrum between The Comfy Chair and Execution. Each step would not be applied if the detainees confessed at the next-below step.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  >Equally, if diverting more energy in to finding minority candidates is not lowering the bar for them then why would you need to divert more energy to find them? reply The point is to find the ones that can pass at a higher rate than you normally would. No bar is lowered, and your representation increases.
  - fche 9y ago
    If you search harder for them, the bar is lowered by virtue of letting them be less outstanding / noticeable.
    - hackinthebochs 9y ago
      That doesn't follow if they're passing the same hiring process. It's not hard at all to get a contact for a phone screen with Google: I've been contacted by Google recruiters on linkedin with a barely filled out profile with one or two unremarkable positions listed. If you're counting the initial discovery phase as part of the hiring process, you're mistaken.
      - fche 9y ago
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still. That has a very pernicious effect across the industry though. Think about what that policy does to other companies. The other companies won't have as many high quality women because Google scouted and hired them already, but will have just as many low and medium quality women who aren't good enough for Google, and more high quality men who were displaced from Google. Which skews the gender ratio even more and creates the impression that women at those companies are lower quality than the men there or else they would have been hired away by Google -- because it causes that impression to be the truth. And you can't fix it by having all companies adopt that policy, because it would still transfer high quality women from lower tier companies to higher tier companies, causing problems for all the women who don't get to work for the companies in the highest tier. Even the high quality women who are still in second tier companies. The lower tier companies are where almost everybody actually works -- small and medium companies employ more people than huge companies because there are so many more of them. Google is being quite selfish with a policy like that.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  But isn't that true of any hiring practice? Should people start lowering their standards just so other companies can get better candidates too?
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    It's only true of hiring practices that cause the gender ratio in your company to be different than it is in the industry as a whole.
    - fche 9y ago
      And then watch out if your company bases its diversity targets on numbers from the rest of the industry. All the good ones may be taken (in order to get to the mythical 50%), but now we want to follow suit (to get to 50%), but what's left? What a mess.