7 ms·

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome. This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people

• latch 9y ago
  I'm not sure I'd say the headline is clickbait. It's describing a correlation from a new paper. Seems pretty non opinionated to me. There's a couple places within the article that's more superficial though.
• platz 9y ago
  Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference
  • RyanZAG 9y ago
    Most studies on this seem to show that gender based preferences can be at least partially explained from birth before any environmental factors play a part in it. People have been doing these studies for a long time now, but they get ignored because we don't like the results. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.
    • TuringTest 9y ago
      Biological preferences don't explain why careers preferred by women have less average pay than careers preferred by men.
      • LambdaAlmighty 9y ago
        They don't? AFAIK explanation of one of the factors is not even that complicated: lower physical strength (on average) => more focus on social skills (on average) => higher agreeableness (one of the Big-5 traits) and preference for avoiding conflict (on average) => less risk but also less upside (on average) => less extreme career choices but also less extreme rewards (on average)
      • mpweiher 9y ago
        No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do. The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially. So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential. See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-letter-to-my-wife-who-wont-get-a-job-while-i-work-myself-to-death https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...
        • TuringTest 9y ago
          What makes you think this is explained by biological preferences alone, or that those preferences scale to society-wide differences in salary?
          • mpweiher 9y ago
            (1) Actually, I didn't even mention biology. I just wrote "preferences". (2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured. See also: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-and-job-satisfaction/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-a... "...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it." "Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way." So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.
      • RyanZAG 9y ago
        I'm not entirely sure on which angle you're trying to discuss here. That biological preferences don't impact on the free market choice of employee-employer contracts? Or that biological preferences aren't overridden by a desire to earn higher wages? For free market choice on which jobs pay more -- I think this one is pretty clear. Do you think differently? As for biological preference, I don't think it takes into account the average pay at all. Career path is usually chosen at a younger and more idealistic age, and probably more importantly - poorer countries have women overriding their preferences and going into higher paid lines of work, while richer countries let women do what they want. As per this very study. In the case where money doesn't matter because your family is rich, biological preferences become more important and people stop choosing based on average pay. So the biological differences seem to explain it really well.
  • cm2187 9y ago
    But it is also possible that the biology is affecting our inclinations, temper, or skills. After all modern psychiatry is attempting to look at the brain mechanically or to influence it with drugs. And intuitively, I find it hard to believe that our genes that affect so much of our physical abilities, likelyhood of illness, etc would stop at the brain and our behavior would be completely independent of our nature and purely a function of our environment.
  • mpweiher 9y ago
    Sure, and the study quoted in the article shows that. Environment is a factor, it just points in the other direction. So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction. This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).
• rdiddly 9y ago
  They're confused because they're starting from the end (the outcome) and working backward.
• ajuc 9y ago
  > Why are still people still confused about this? Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?
• throwawaye4j 9y ago
  Personally the reason I'm hesitant to entertain this argument is that code is so awesome - you can reach a billion (1,000,000,000) people practically overnight if your idea is good enough. While women traditionally are more interested in the design/social impact of what they're doing, if the engineering environment is easy enough there's no reason they can't code it themselves. And they are highly incentivized to do so. I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome. One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.) This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles. By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth. In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.
• cm2187 9y ago
  One of the many simplifications in this debate. Another one: if someone is arguing that there is a difference in the distribution of a particular character between men and women. Immediatly I read comments jumping to the conclusion “my god it says women are more/less [whatever] than men”, as in “all women”. Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.
  • smackay 9y ago
    Therein lie the dangers of categorical thinking, https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categorical-thinking https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categori.... Gender is probably the most loaded category there is (except for the other one). There is some movement on this front with acceptance of different gender identities but until society (in all its forms) can ditch categorical thinking and accept that all things in nature exist in distributions, I don't think there will be much progress on this - there's simply too capital to be made by perpetuating strict divisions which everybody must be crammed into in order to simplify the debate and upset everyone in the process. Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
  • ajuc 9y ago
    In such discussions "most" is implied. Interpreting it as "all" is just a rhetoric trick to weaken the opponent's position.
  • YouAreGreat 9y ago
    > Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion. Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions. For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means. Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions. That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment. This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
• rectang 9y ago
  Women get paid less than men for doing the same work, across all industries. Pay them the same and the "confusion" will diminish.
  • mpweiher 9y ago
    This is a common talking point of the dominant narrative but simply not true. When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.
    • TuringTest 9y ago
      Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears? Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not. Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-pay-gap/?utm_term=.ff49a7159e26 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...
      • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
        If women choose to take less lucrative careers, make less lucrative family roles, and negotiate their salaries less than men, than that's fine with me. Personal freedom and equal opportunity will not always mean equality of outcome, especially in richer countries where women are free to live the life and career they want instead of the life and career they need to survive.
• dalbasal 9y ago
  Let's assume we're not all disingenious a----les, trying for clickbait and gotchas, but still disagree on some points. I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity. But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept. If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine... The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon. I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in. There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter. Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed? OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes. There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.
  • deleted 9y ago
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