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You're asking the very same questions that troubled me. If people belonging to a certain group are not doing well,why do you take a group based approach instead

You're asking the very same questions that troubled me. If people belonging to a certain group are not doing well,why do you take a group based approach instead of asking why individual applicants and employees are not doing well? I get why you are trying to find cause to explain your correlation and I understand adjusting whatever barrier tests and controls there are that are found to be unfair or discriminatory. What I am saying is,adjust the tests for everyone,not for specific groups. At the end of the day,whether I get the job or school acceptance or get rejected,I want my test to be the same as everyone else. Jim crow era voting tax is a good example,the test was unfair and discriminatory in nature so they got rid of the test(tax). Imagine if instead they made it so that black people were exempt but everyone else had to pay the tax. That is what I am against. An unfair test should be removed because it is unfair. It should not be augmented so that the intended victims of the unfair test are exempt from the test or get special considerations. If a job requirement test can unfairly be abused to discriminate against a candidate,then get rid of the requirement. Good example - "Must be an excellent oral and written communicator" - this is too vague and too subjective. How about laying out the specific communication requirements of the task and testing all candidates based on their use of slang words,verbage,vocabullary,etc.. ?

burkaman 9y ago
I take a group based approach because there are too many examples of group-based discrimination and unfair treatment to count. I think history shows that group-based solutions are much more widely effective than individual approaches. Your voting tax example is perfect: poll taxes were applied to everyone equally, so why do you think they were unfair? Everyone, white or black, had to pay the same tax. What's the problem? What do you mean by "unfair and discriminatory in nature"? There are 26 female CEOs of S&P 500 companies. http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 I see four possibilities. One, biological differences: Women are somehow innately less capable of leading a business. This is obviously wrong. Two, random chance: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but 95% of CEOs just happen to be men at the moment. This is obviously wrong. Three, unfair hiring practices: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but essentially every large company has an unfair CEO hiring process that usually selects men. This is possible, but it seems unlikely to explain the whole gap. There would be a competitive advantage to hiring good female CEOs that were unfairly screened out by your competitors. Four, societal inequality: Men and women are not equally qualified because they face unequal obstacles in the workplace and in life, and an unbiased hiring committee will find that almost all qualified candidates are men. If this is true, what do we do? It doesn't make any sense to ask companies to hire less qualified women; that's bad for everyone, and doesn't address the underlying issues at all. This can't be solved at the hiring stage, because the real problem is with the pool of candidates. Instead, we need to address why there are so few women in leadership positions, why they tend to leave the workforce earlier. We need to look at history, and acknowledge that since the best qualification for a CEO job is already being a CEO, there's a kind of bootstrapping issue that's difficult to solve. If we just look at individual CEO candidates, we won't even really there's a problem to be solved. We'll just look at good candidates with former C-level experience and probably end up picking a man.
- insickness 9y ago
  > Women are somehow innately less capable of leading a business. This is obviously wrong. What about the real possibility that men are in some way more ambitious than women? IQ tests show that the average intelligence of men and women are the same but that men occupy a more extreme distribution: they are more likely to be idiots and geniuses. Science has proven that there are innate differences between men and women. Discrepancies of representation between men and women in many fields are in part biological. To say that they are 100% social construct is an extreme position and easily disputed. Men are 4 to 5 times more likely than women to commit suicide. Men are 13 time more likely to die on the job than women. 15% more women are graduating college than men, and the gap is increasing. Are these differences due to genetics? Mostly likely at least in part. To not at least admit that this can account for some of the difference is to create solutions for problems that don't exist.
  - burkaman 9y ago
    It's possible, but I've never seen any evidence and it seems obviously wrong. CEO is not the only position that requires ambition. How about surgeon, another profession that requires an immense amount of work over a very long time? But surgeons are 59% male, not 95%: https://wire.ama-assn.org/education/how-medical-specialties-vary-gender https://wire.ama-assn.org/education/how-medical-specialties-... Also, CEOs are not solely driven by ambition, it's one of the best-paying jobs in the world. If women were somehow less motivated by profit than men, I think economists would have noticed by now. So of course it's possible, but I don't think it's a good idea to push these theories without any evidence. It gives people an easy way out, so they can rest easy that there's no real societal issue, it's just unchanging biology out of anyone's control. But there are very real, very obvious societal problems that would close at least some of this gap, and they can't be ignored just because they're hard to fix. If there's some kind of ambition gap, of course we need to know, but don't spread that idea until there's a reason to. There's plenty of problems with mountains of evidence that need to be solved.
  - badrabbit 9y ago
    You took quite a twist there. Suice rates and the way men die has much more to do with social expectations and culture than genetics.you need to at least have a theory on how genetics explains your correlation (other than saying "how else can you explain it")

burkaman 9y ago

I take a group based approach because there are too many examples of group-based discrimination and unfair treatment to count. I think history shows that group-based solutions are much more widely effective than individual approaches. Your voting tax example is perfect: poll taxes were applied to everyone equally, so why do you think they were unfair? Everyone, white or black, had to pay the same tax. What's the problem? What do you mean by "unfair and discriminatory in nature"? There are 26 female CEOs of S&P 500 companies. http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 I see four possibilities. One, biological differences: Women are somehow innately less capable of leading a business. This is obviously wrong. Two, random chance: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but 95% of CEOs just happen to be men at the moment. This is obviously wrong. Three, unfair hiring practices: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but essentially every large company has an unfair CEO hiring process that usually selects men. This is possible, but it seems unlikely to explain the whole gap. There would be a competitive advantage to hiring good female CEOs that were unfairly screened out by your competitors. Four, societal inequality: Men and women are not equally qualified because they face unequal obstacles in the workplace and in life, and an unbiased hiring committee will find that almost all qualified candidates are men. If this is true, what do we do? It doesn't make any sense to ask companies to hire less qualified women; that's bad for everyone, and doesn't address the underlying issues at all. This can't be solved at the hiring stage, because the real problem is with the pool of candidates. Instead, we need to address why there are so few women in leadership positions, why they tend to leave the workforce earlier. We need to look at history, and acknowledge that since the best qualification for a CEO job is already being a CEO, there's a kind of bootstrapping issue that's difficult to solve. If we just look at individual CEO candidates, we won't even really there's a problem to be solved. We'll just look at good candidates with former C-level experience and probably end up picking a man.

insickness 9y ago
> Women are somehow innately less capable of leading a business. This is obviously wrong. What about the real possibility that men are in some way more ambitious than women? IQ tests show that the average intelligence of men and women are the same but that men occupy a more extreme distribution: they are more likely to be idiots and geniuses. Science has proven that there are innate differences between men and women. Discrepancies of representation between men and women in many fields are in part biological. To say that they are 100% social construct is an extreme position and easily disputed. Men are 4 to 5 times more likely than women to commit suicide. Men are 13 time more likely to die on the job than women. 15% more women are graduating college than men, and the gap is increasing. Are these differences due to genetics? Mostly likely at least in part. To not at least admit that this can account for some of the difference is to create solutions for problems that don't exist.
- burkaman 9y ago
  It's possible, but I've never seen any evidence and it seems obviously wrong. CEO is not the only position that requires ambition. How about surgeon, another profession that requires an immense amount of work over a very long time? But surgeons are 59% male, not 95%: https://wire.ama-assn.org/education/how-medical-specialties-vary-gender https://wire.ama-assn.org/education/how-medical-specialties-... Also, CEOs are not solely driven by ambition, it's one of the best-paying jobs in the world. If women were somehow less motivated by profit than men, I think economists would have noticed by now. So of course it's possible, but I don't think it's a good idea to push these theories without any evidence. It gives people an easy way out, so they can rest easy that there's no real societal issue, it's just unchanging biology out of anyone's control. But there are very real, very obvious societal problems that would close at least some of this gap, and they can't be ignored just because they're hard to fix. If there's some kind of ambition gap, of course we need to know, but don't spread that idea until there's a reason to. There's plenty of problems with mountains of evidence that need to be solved.
- badrabbit 9y ago
  You took quite a twist there. Suice rates and the way men die has much more to do with social expectations and culture than genetics.you need to at least have a theory on how genetics explains your correlation (other than saying "how else can you explain it")