8 ms·

Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate agai

Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate against men to fix it?

denzil_correa 9y ago
Curious - how would gender affect promotion rates?
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Suppose men tend to work harder to get more promotions out of a fair system that rewards hard productive work. I mean, there's a reason men as a class tend to earn more money and die on the job more often than women - most of my model weight is on "men tend to be more willing to make tradeoffs in exchange for higher paychecks".
  - geofft 9y ago
    > men as a class tend to earn more money and die on the job more often than women Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury.... (Also, there are no shortage of barriers against women participating in high-mortality jobs - take the rules against women in combat for a particularly obvious example.)
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury.... Just intuitively, longer working hours (which may correlate with higher pay) and later average retirement age (which may correlate with higher paid jobs, especially with less physical demands), may contribute to greater probability of death from non-work causes, including age-related causes, happening while at work.
    - tomp 9y ago
      Probably; for equivalently capable/educated people, dangerous jobs like construction, mining, oil rigs are paid much more than "office" jobs such as clerk, waiter, warehouse worker.
    - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
      >Are these correlated? Yeah. For one small-scale example, the pay differential between the pizza delivery drivers and the in-store workers who make the pizzas. Roughly equivalent difficulty, drivers make $10-$15 an hour more due to tips and the risk of getting involved in a car accident or robbery. IIRC the gender ratio is more skewed towards men for delivery drivers than for in-store food service workers.
      - geofft 9y ago
        That's a good point (and I think I've also seen a very strong gender bias in taxi drivers, a little less strong in Lyft drivers, and weakest in bus drivers), but also, I think this sort of thing applies pretty firmly to relatively low-wage jobs. Certainly these aren't minimum-wage, but they're also not, like, mid-six-figures. (I think! Given the risks I'd be happy to know that these jobs do actually get to mid-six-figure wages.) I suspect that white-collar senior management jobs contribute a lot more than pizza delivery jobs to the fact that men make more money than women in total. (But probably this is also true for median or first-decile wage?)
- tomp 9y ago
  Two reasons. Women want children earlier (because menopause) and are more affected by them (because giving birth) than equally family-minded men. As a result, women are more motivated to prioritise having children/family. In addition, men derive more advantage from more money/power than women, so they're more motivated to climb the corporate ladder (or take risks and fund companies) than women. I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.
  - lurr 9y ago
    > Women want children earlier (because menopause) women need to have children earlier. I don't see 70 year old men eagerly having kids all that often. Most people want to live to see their grandchildren. > I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere. "I have black friends"
friedButter 9y ago
The general opinion online is that women being promoted slower than men is a problem, and in high paying white collar professions, women being underrepresented at any level is a "bad thing". Make sure you dont use your real identity to question that, you might get blacklisted from ever working at Google :P
- krastanov 9y ago
  I am not certain whether this is sarcasm or whether you are just a troll trying to provoke a reaction, but in case it is neither: How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation? You can try strawman arguments like "they are not equally qualified" or "reverse sexism" or "they are doing it to themselves by not negotiating", but a cursory look at any reproducible social sciences review disproves those (laziness to not use google or google scholar is a tiresome excuse).
  - friedButter 9y ago
    >How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation? "equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised. These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..
  - hi-im-mi-ih 9y ago
    Two engineers placed side by side are never "equally qualified." Their competence will differ. If you look solely at their degrees and work history alone, you'd be ignoring the individual abilities of the engineers. The parent comment to yours was poorly worded and snarky, so you have a right to be upset. But still, I think your reasoning is flawed. People are generally promoted by their competence and their negotiating/office politics skills, and you can't claim that those are the same across all genders. Why would women, who are fundamentally different than men, have the exact same competence and negotiating abilities as men? There's no reason the two genders should be equal. If you really have two equally skilled engineers, one male, one female, and only the male is promoted, that's sexism. But two engineers are never the same, so you can't make that argument.
krastanov 9y ago
First of all, discriminating against the currently dominant demographic is indeed a stupid way to "fix" anything. But "reality" does not seem to be sexist, rather our biases and tribalism is sexist (and racist and plenty of other -ist). When high-quality reproducible research has observed phenomena like "stereotype threat" and "implicit bias" it is worthwhile to spend some of our idle time on thinking how to address this unfairness. Even if we do it simply so that we have a wider applicant pool from which to pick high-quality employees.
- tomp 9y ago
  Links to high-quality reproducible research on "implicit bias"? Last I heard, it was more-or-less debunked.
  - krastanov 9y ago
    If you just want a big list: https://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html https://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html For more digestible information look around their website. I guess it is my turn: What debunking are you talking about besides the more extremist men's rights advocates (which are different from the moderates that have very valid concerns)? "Implicit bias" is indeed only the start of a discussion, as one needs to consider its predictive value in non-test conditions, but if you are sincerely interested in pursuing this conversation, the website above is a good starting point.
    - tomp 9y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843167 This was a discussion a month ago. I'm mostly basing my opinion on it.
      - krastanov 9y ago
        That is a good point, but as I mentioned, this is only the start of the conversation. Implicit bias is an easy thing to measure, but it has predictive issues in non-test situations. However, as it is always in science, it is the flawed experiment that led to better experiments (I am picking up the "popsci" stars, for this conversation to be rigorous we have to include actual meta studies, but you will have to contact the professionals for that): - the John/Jennifer study http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-battle-of-the-sexes/ http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat... - the chairs study http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.3298&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465... - the police shooting armed people in VR study http://www.washington.edu/news/2003/07/08/blacks-more-likely-to-be-shot-than-whites-even-when-holding-harmless-objects/ http://www.washington.edu/news/2003/07/08/blacks-more-likely... - the general idea of "stereotype threat" (which becomes unrelated, not as much of an offshoot) I am not expecting you to spend the time to vet every single of those links (and admittedly I used google, so some of the links might be overly editorialized), however I do believe these are good resources to consider for inclusion in your intellectual toolkit when you have the time.
geofft 9y ago
My post assumes that because there's no good evidence that, as you put it, "reality is sexist" in the relevant ways and that we should reject the null hypothesis. There are plenty of plausible alternative hypotheses (the Damore memo vaguely alludes to them), but I have not seen strong reasons to accept them, just post-hoc rationalizations like "the average woman scores worse/better on $metric, so here's a story for why the job requires more/less $metric". Tellingly, those rationalizations have changed as programming went from a low-status to high-status position: there was folklore several decades back about how programming was obviously women's work because it was like dinner planning. If you do find a scientific reason to reject the null hypothesis, hopefully such an analysis will come with some specific number other than 50/50 - and we can see if Google's processes match those numbers.

Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate against men to fix it?

denzil_correa 9y ago

Curious - how would gender affect promotion rates?

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Suppose men tend to work harder to get more promotions out of a fair system that rewards hard productive work. I mean, there's a reason men as a class tend to earn more money and die on the job more often than women - most of my model weight is on "men tend to be more willing to make tradeoffs in exchange for higher paychecks".
- geofft 9y ago
  > men as a class tend to earn more money and die on the job more often than women Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury.... (Also, there are no shortage of barriers against women participating in high-mortality jobs - take the rules against women in combat for a particularly obvious example.)
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury.... Just intuitively, longer working hours (which may correlate with higher pay) and later average retirement age (which may correlate with higher paid jobs, especially with less physical demands), may contribute to greater probability of death from non-work causes, including age-related causes, happening while at work.
  - tomp 9y ago
    Probably; for equivalently capable/educated people, dangerous jobs like construction, mining, oil rigs are paid much more than "office" jobs such as clerk, waiter, warehouse worker.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    >Are these correlated? Yeah. For one small-scale example, the pay differential between the pizza delivery drivers and the in-store workers who make the pizzas. Roughly equivalent difficulty, drivers make $10-$15 an hour more due to tips and the risk of getting involved in a car accident or robbery. IIRC the gender ratio is more skewed towards men for delivery drivers than for in-store food service workers.
    - geofft 9y ago
      That's a good point (and I think I've also seen a very strong gender bias in taxi drivers, a little less strong in Lyft drivers, and weakest in bus drivers), but also, I think this sort of thing applies pretty firmly to relatively low-wage jobs. Certainly these aren't minimum-wage, but they're also not, like, mid-six-figures. (I think! Given the risks I'd be happy to know that these jobs do actually get to mid-six-figure wages.) I suspect that white-collar senior management jobs contribute a lot more than pizza delivery jobs to the fact that men make more money than women in total. (But probably this is also true for median or first-decile wage?)
tomp 9y ago
Two reasons. Women want children earlier (because menopause) and are more affected by them (because giving birth) than equally family-minded men. As a result, women are more motivated to prioritise having children/family. In addition, men derive more advantage from more money/power than women, so they're more motivated to climb the corporate ladder (or take risks and fund companies) than women. I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.
- lurr 9y ago
  > Women want children earlier (because menopause) women need to have children earlier. I don't see 70 year old men eagerly having kids all that often. Most people want to live to see their grandchildren. > I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere. "I have black friends"

friedButter 9y ago

The general opinion online is that women being promoted slower than men is a problem, and in high paying white collar professions, women being underrepresented at any level is a "bad thing". Make sure you dont use your real identity to question that, you might get blacklisted from ever working at Google :P

krastanov 9y ago
I am not certain whether this is sarcasm or whether you are just a troll trying to provoke a reaction, but in case it is neither: How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation? You can try strawman arguments like "they are not equally qualified" or "reverse sexism" or "they are doing it to themselves by not negotiating", but a cursory look at any reproducible social sciences review disproves those (laziness to not use google or google scholar is a tiresome excuse).
- friedButter 9y ago
  >How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation? "equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised. These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..
- hi-im-mi-ih 9y ago
  Two engineers placed side by side are never "equally qualified." Their competence will differ. If you look solely at their degrees and work history alone, you'd be ignoring the individual abilities of the engineers. The parent comment to yours was poorly worded and snarky, so you have a right to be upset. But still, I think your reasoning is flawed. People are generally promoted by their competence and their negotiating/office politics skills, and you can't claim that those are the same across all genders. Why would women, who are fundamentally different than men, have the exact same competence and negotiating abilities as men? There's no reason the two genders should be equal. If you really have two equally skilled engineers, one male, one female, and only the male is promoted, that's sexism. But two engineers are never the same, so you can't make that argument.

krastanov 9y ago

First of all, discriminating against the currently dominant demographic is indeed a stupid way to "fix" anything. But "reality" does not seem to be sexist, rather our biases and tribalism is sexist (and racist and plenty of other -ist). When high-quality reproducible research has observed phenomena like "stereotype threat" and "implicit bias" it is worthwhile to spend some of our idle time on thinking how to address this unfairness. Even if we do it simply so that we have a wider applicant pool from which to pick high-quality employees.

tomp 9y ago
Links to high-quality reproducible research on "implicit bias"? Last I heard, it was more-or-less debunked.
- krastanov 9y ago
  If you just want a big list: https://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html https://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html For more digestible information look around their website. I guess it is my turn: What debunking are you talking about besides the more extremist men's rights advocates (which are different from the moderates that have very valid concerns)? "Implicit bias" is indeed only the start of a discussion, as one needs to consider its predictive value in non-test conditions, but if you are sincerely interested in pursuing this conversation, the website above is a good starting point.
  - tomp 9y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843167 This was a discussion a month ago. I'm mostly basing my opinion on it.
    - krastanov 9y ago
      That is a good point, but as I mentioned, this is only the start of the conversation. Implicit bias is an easy thing to measure, but it has predictive issues in non-test situations. However, as it is always in science, it is the flawed experiment that led to better experiments (I am picking up the "popsci" stars, for this conversation to be rigorous we have to include actual meta studies, but you will have to contact the professionals for that): - the John/Jennifer study http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-battle-of-the-sexes/ http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat... - the chairs study http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.3298&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465... - the police shooting armed people in VR study http://www.washington.edu/news/2003/07/08/blacks-more-likely-to-be-shot-than-whites-even-when-holding-harmless-objects/ http://www.washington.edu/news/2003/07/08/blacks-more-likely... - the general idea of "stereotype threat" (which becomes unrelated, not as much of an offshoot) I am not expecting you to spend the time to vet every single of those links (and admittedly I used google, so some of the links might be overly editorialized), however I do believe these are good resources to consider for inclusion in your intellectual toolkit when you have the time.

geofft 9y ago

My post assumes that because there's no good evidence that, as you put it, "reality is sexist" in the relevant ways and that we should reject the null hypothesis. There are plenty of plausible alternative hypotheses (the Damore memo vaguely alludes to them), but I have not seen strong reasons to accept them, just post-hoc rationalizations like "the average woman scores worse/better on $metric, so here's a story for why the job requires more/less $metric". Tellingly, those rationalizations have changed as programming went from a low-status to high-status position: there was folklore several decades back about how programming was obviously women's work because it was like dinner planning. If you do find a scientific reason to reject the null hypothesis, hopefully such an analysis will come with some specific number other than 50/50 - and we can see if Google's processes match those numbers.