6 ms·

I'm trying to figure out on what side of the debate I fall on this one. On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years,

I'm trying to figure out on what side of the debate I fall on this one. On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years, which is wrong. The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender. On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either. Frankly, it seems likely that anyone who applies to lambda school (either gender), probably lean towards the more advantaged end than the less advantaged end. So it seems likely this is going to result in women with plenty of advantages already, receiving $9000 worth of education for free, while explicitly denying this opportunity to men, and continuing to disadvantage members of both groups. So, I guess my question is, why is this morally OK? If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people, or disadvantaged women, or if it was a non-profit, it seems like this would be an easier call for me.

creaghpatr 8y ago
It's ethical as long as they don't target journalists.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender. Is there any evidence that this is happening, though? I've never seen anybody, even anecdotally claim "I'm a woman (who is qualified) and I've been unable to find employment". Mostly what I see is people trying to work backwards and say, "if group X makes up Y% of the population and only Z% of programmers, that in itself must be evidence of discrimination".
- nck4222 8y ago
  It doesn't have to be overt, or even knowingly done. Children are frequently subtly pushed towards different careers because of their gender, many times by their devoted parents. It's a societal problem. EDIT: Here's one paper that talks about how "widely shared cultural beliefs about gender" affect early decisions people make wrt to their careers https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9501/f/publications/gender_and_the_career_choice_process-_the_role_of_biased_self-assessments.pdf https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9501/f/pu... "The results of this study show that males assess their own mathematical competence higher than their otherwise equal female counterparts" "self-assessments of task competence were found to influence career-relevant decisions, even when controlling for commonly accepted measures of ability. For males and females, the higher they rate their mathematical competence, the greater the odds that they will continue on the path leading to careers in the quantitative professions. However, since males tend to overestimate their mathematical competence relative to females, males are also more likely to pursue activities leading down a path toward a career in science, math, and engineering."
  - r_smart 8y ago
    My GF demonstrated an aptitude for STEM at an early age. She received an enormous amount of pressure to continue down that track despite not being interested in it as a career. Your claim may have been true at one time, but I don't think it has been for awhile now. *Edit: In response to your paper: It looks like it's a research paper, not a study, written almost 20 years ago, referencing material that was ~10 years old at the time of its publication. It well may have been true, but the time the original research was collected (in the 90s) is about the time I'd argue a major cultural shift happened.
    - nck4222 8y ago
      I mean I'm not arguing that all women are discouraged from STEM, and I agree attitudes are changing, which is a good thing. I wouldn't say that the problem is solved and it doesn't happen anymore though. I provided one study above, feel free to look up more, there are plenty. Something like 80% of STEM jobs are still held by men, and obviously that's not totally a result of discouragement, but seems likely to me that part of it is.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  Hi I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in engineering be denied opportunities for internships because the employer only wanted to hire pretty girls- a standard not extended to men. I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in software engineering be discouraged from learning software engineering at the undergraduate level, often from TAs/Professors. I can also point to other reported anecdotes, such as the big Riot Games article, several blogs/tweets confirming the article, the Uber NYT article, etc. The literal quote 'unable to find employment' does not coincide with the quoted portion 'discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied'. Employment is one of the last opportunities that can be denied or discouraged towards women- we have a wealth of educational, internship, volunteering, etc. opportunities that can serve to winnow the pipeline of appropriate female candidates before discussing employment. Note: I'm not arguing that this is universal to all women in the engineering field, merely providing some response to "I have never even heard of this phenomenon anecdotally".
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  I was once sitting on a plane wearing a shirt branded with a major tech company. The person next to me asked if I was a software engineer and I said yes. They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech. This person also had a similarly aged daughter and he was doing none of this for her. Perhaps the son really did love this stuff and perhaps the daughter was given the opportunity to do other things. Perhaps this was a one-off coincidence. But my experience is littered with this stuff. It happened even to me. I've got two parents who were both software engineers and I was given toys as a child that were designed to develop technical skills and my sister wasn't. The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias.
  - tomp 8y ago
    > They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech. Does this actually work though? My whole life, I've been weakly encouraged, mainly by my parents, to study economics and/or law, and discouraged (weakly by my parents, and strongly by society and bullies) from being a geek / programmer / mathematician... But in the end, I picked the latter.
    - UncleMeat 8y ago
      At an individual level it probably fails more often than it succeeds. But a small effect across a broad population can lead to real distribution differences.
  - Pyxl101 8y ago
    > The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women tend to be more interested in "people". Here is a journal article from Frontiers in Psychology that investigates how these differences-in-interest impact STEM field participation: "All STEM fields are not created equal: People and things interests explain gender disparities across STEM fields" (1): > In the current study, we investigated the gender differences in interests as an explanation for the differential distribution of women across sub-disciplines of STEM as well as the overall underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. (...) We found gender differences in interests to vary largely by STEM field, with the largest gender differences in interests favoring men observed in engineering disciplines (d = 0.83–1.21), and in contrast, gender differences in interests favoring women in social sciences and medical services (d = −0.33 and −0.40, respectively). > Importantly, the gender composition (percentages of women) in STEM fields reflects these gender differences in interests. The patterns of gender differences in interests and the actual gender composition in STEM fields were explained by the people-orientation and things-orientation of work environments, and were not associated with the level of quantitative ability required. (...) Some studies show that these things-vs-people differences begin to manifest extremely early in life, before humans could be influenced by social factors. One famous study of this phenomenon is "Sex differences in human neonatal social perception" (2): > Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or sociocultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin. It is also known that testosterone levels affect decision-making and career choices, and that women tend to be more financially risk-averse than men. Since men's testosterone levels tend to be much higher than women's, and since men are less risk-averse, that results in demographic differences. For an investigation of this, see the article "Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone" (3). For another study on sex and brain differences see (4). There is a lot of research out there exploring the differences between men and women, and how those differences play out in our lives. Every person should be supported in choosing whatever career interests them, and should not be judged based on demographics. I'm not advocating for any kind of discrimination. I am just observing that even with total equality of opportunity, if there are biological trends in interest differences, then we will see differences in overall job demographics. (1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... (2) https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf (3) https://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full https://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full (4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
- QualityReboot 8y ago
  I've observed the same thing. Personally, I've been pressured to hire less qualified women candidates to make the team more diverse. I've never been pressured not to hire a woman because she's a woman.
rhcom2 8y ago
> On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years, which is wrong. > If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people You already accepted women have been disadvantaged though.
- nck4222 8y ago
  Just because women as a group have been disadvantaged, doesn't mean the women receiving this particular advantage deserve it more than other women, or other men. There's nothing in this release saying they want to offer this to disadvantaged women, they simply want to offer it to women.
  - rhcom2 8y ago
    > they simply want to offer it to women. But you've said they have been disadvantaged as a group, so they are offering it to a disadvantaged group. I think you're saying they should be disadvantaged in a way besides their gender?
    - jrs95 8y ago
      There is a difference between a disadvantaged person and a disadvantaged group. In my opinion that is the primary issue with prioritizing the needs of disadvantaged groups over the needs of disadvantaged individuals.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    'disadvantaged women' in your phrase seems ambiguous. From the lens of intersectionality, I could interpret 'disadvantaged women' to mean women who are also part of another marginalized group (e.g. trans women, women of color, women with disabilities, etc.) But I could also read your comment as just asking them to be explicit and emphasize that they are making an offering for "women, a group of people at a disadvantage".
lixtra 8y ago
> On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either. Because it’s a for profit organization it makes total sense for them. It has marginal cost but acts as huge marketing factor.
rubicon33 8y ago
> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender. I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech? Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture? Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY. Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.
- andonisus 8y ago
  What if the underlying reason is that women, as a whole, are less interested in Science/Engineering than men are?
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    We'd know that once we level the playing field?
  - manfredo 8y ago
    This is a socially unacceptable explanation in many areas with large tech industries.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    Is this actually true? How do we verify this? (Certain portions of engineering have higher women participation rates than men- can we identify a biological cause for this disparity, or that many of the sciences have women on parity or overrepresentation?) I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point.
    - 8y ago
criddell 8y ago
Should you only help some people if you are willing to help all people? It's a partial solution to a small part of a big problem.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  So "only whites may apply for this scholarship" is fine then? Clearly not IMO, there needs to be a morally defensible reason for restricting the field by physical characteristics; sex and skin colour/race are not good reasons in general.
  - criddell 8y ago
    You don't think women are underrepresented in the software sector?
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Underrepresented is a funny phrase, it's a job, not a debating chamber. There are less women in some sectors, less men in others. Provided boys and girls aren't being unnecessarily inhibited from any career options then I don't see a problem -- if we stop discriminating in unrelated characteristics then ratios of the sexes in particular roles will find an appropriate level. That level will not be 50:50 in any sector I'd warrant.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jpfed 8y ago
Think of it like this. Linear models in statistics break out the prediction for a given case in terms of main effects and interactions. All women get hit by the main effect of being a woman; it just so happens that some women are buoyed by other main effects like wealth, whiteness, etc. Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by level-of-disadvantage and apply that first. But that method may be brittle; if you choose the relative weighting of various forms of disadvantage wrong, then you're applying your benefit in a way that deviates from the "true" perfect-information order anyway. One way of resolving this is to say "we're not going to attempt to apply this benefit in a perfectly Rawlsian order; we're just going to pick a main effect to attack and, while doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.".
- rudedogg 8y ago
  > doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm. This thread, and past threads on this subject turn into an absolute shit-show and cause tribalism/division. I feel like that is evidence enough that these policies are harmful. When you do/don't get a job there's uncertainty around the reason. Was it my experience/skill-set, or race/gender/sexual orientation/religion? It feels like we're trying to fix discrimination by forcing everyone to feel like they might be experiencing it.
  - jpfed 8y ago
    It doesn't show that they're harmful; it shows that they have a cost. The question is whether the benefit exceeds the cost, which depends on making some sort of quantifiable conversion rate between "acrimony and uncertainty" versus "more women getting coding jobs".
qntty 8y ago
Why would giving any group of people money ever be immoral? It wouldn't be immoral even if she said that it was only open to white, Christian men.
black-tea 8y ago
> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. Why should it be fixed? Is there any evidence to suggest it's because of discrimination? There's been special treatment for women (such as this one) for so long now. Have you ever considered that maybe women just don't want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end writing software? Also, I walked past a building site the other day. Full of men. They work through the night for not much money. Where's all the special programs to get women in to back-breaking overnight construction work?

creaghpatr 8y ago

It's ethical as long as they don't target journalists.

commandlinefan 8y ago

> discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender. Is there any evidence that this is happening, though? I've never seen anybody, even anecdotally claim "I'm a woman (who is qualified) and I've been unable to find employment". Mostly what I see is people trying to work backwards and say, "if group X makes up Y% of the population and only Z% of programmers, that in itself must be evidence of discrimination".

nck4222 8y ago
It doesn't have to be overt, or even knowingly done. Children are frequently subtly pushed towards different careers because of their gender, many times by their devoted parents. It's a societal problem. EDIT: Here's one paper that talks about how "widely shared cultural beliefs about gender" affect early decisions people make wrt to their careers https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9501/f/publications/gender_and_the_career_choice_process-_the_role_of_biased_self-assessments.pdf https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9501/f/pu... "The results of this study show that males assess their own mathematical competence higher than their otherwise equal female counterparts" "self-assessments of task competence were found to influence career-relevant decisions, even when controlling for commonly accepted measures of ability. For males and females, the higher they rate their mathematical competence, the greater the odds that they will continue on the path leading to careers in the quantitative professions. However, since males tend to overestimate their mathematical competence relative to females, males are also more likely to pursue activities leading down a path toward a career in science, math, and engineering."
- r_smart 8y ago
  My GF demonstrated an aptitude for STEM at an early age. She received an enormous amount of pressure to continue down that track despite not being interested in it as a career. Your claim may have been true at one time, but I don't think it has been for awhile now. *Edit: In response to your paper: It looks like it's a research paper, not a study, written almost 20 years ago, referencing material that was ~10 years old at the time of its publication. It well may have been true, but the time the original research was collected (in the 90s) is about the time I'd argue a major cultural shift happened.
  - nck4222 8y ago
    I mean I'm not arguing that all women are discouraged from STEM, and I agree attitudes are changing, which is a good thing. I wouldn't say that the problem is solved and it doesn't happen anymore though. I provided one study above, feel free to look up more, there are plenty. Something like 80% of STEM jobs are still held by men, and obviously that's not totally a result of discouragement, but seems likely to me that part of it is.
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
Hi I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in engineering be denied opportunities for internships because the employer only wanted to hire pretty girls- a standard not extended to men. I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in software engineering be discouraged from learning software engineering at the undergraduate level, often from TAs/Professors. I can also point to other reported anecdotes, such as the big Riot Games article, several blogs/tweets confirming the article, the Uber NYT article, etc. The literal quote 'unable to find employment' does not coincide with the quoted portion 'discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied'. Employment is one of the last opportunities that can be denied or discouraged towards women- we have a wealth of educational, internship, volunteering, etc. opportunities that can serve to winnow the pipeline of appropriate female candidates before discussing employment. Note: I'm not arguing that this is universal to all women in the engineering field, merely providing some response to "I have never even heard of this phenomenon anecdotally".
UncleMeat 8y ago
I was once sitting on a plane wearing a shirt branded with a major tech company. The person next to me asked if I was a software engineer and I said yes. They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech. This person also had a similarly aged daughter and he was doing none of this for her. Perhaps the son really did love this stuff and perhaps the daughter was given the opportunity to do other things. Perhaps this was a one-off coincidence. But my experience is littered with this stuff. It happened even to me. I've got two parents who were both software engineers and I was given toys as a child that were designed to develop technical skills and my sister wasn't. The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias.
- tomp 8y ago
  > They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech. Does this actually work though? My whole life, I've been weakly encouraged, mainly by my parents, to study economics and/or law, and discouraged (weakly by my parents, and strongly by society and bullies) from being a geek / programmer / mathematician... But in the end, I picked the latter.
  - UncleMeat 8y ago
    At an individual level it probably fails more often than it succeeds. But a small effect across a broad population can lead to real distribution differences.
- Pyxl101 8y ago
  > The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women tend to be more interested in "people". Here is a journal article from Frontiers in Psychology that investigates how these differences-in-interest impact STEM field participation: "All STEM fields are not created equal: People and things interests explain gender disparities across STEM fields" (1): > In the current study, we investigated the gender differences in interests as an explanation for the differential distribution of women across sub-disciplines of STEM as well as the overall underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. (...) We found gender differences in interests to vary largely by STEM field, with the largest gender differences in interests favoring men observed in engineering disciplines (d = 0.83–1.21), and in contrast, gender differences in interests favoring women in social sciences and medical services (d = −0.33 and −0.40, respectively). > Importantly, the gender composition (percentages of women) in STEM fields reflects these gender differences in interests. The patterns of gender differences in interests and the actual gender composition in STEM fields were explained by the people-orientation and things-orientation of work environments, and were not associated with the level of quantitative ability required. (...) Some studies show that these things-vs-people differences begin to manifest extremely early in life, before humans could be influenced by social factors. One famous study of this phenomenon is "Sex differences in human neonatal social perception" (2): > Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or sociocultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin. It is also known that testosterone levels affect decision-making and career choices, and that women tend to be more financially risk-averse than men. Since men's testosterone levels tend to be much higher than women's, and since men are less risk-averse, that results in demographic differences. For an investigation of this, see the article "Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone" (3). For another study on sex and brain differences see (4). There is a lot of research out there exploring the differences between men and women, and how those differences play out in our lives. Every person should be supported in choosing whatever career interests them, and should not be judged based on demographics. I'm not advocating for any kind of discrimination. I am just observing that even with total equality of opportunity, if there are biological trends in interest differences, then we will see differences in overall job demographics. (1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... (2) https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf (3) https://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full https://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full (4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
QualityReboot 8y ago
I've observed the same thing. Personally, I've been pressured to hire less qualified women candidates to make the team more diverse. I've never been pressured not to hire a woman because she's a woman.

rhcom2 8y ago

> On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years, which is wrong. > If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people You already accepted women have been disadvantaged though.

nck4222 8y ago
Just because women as a group have been disadvantaged, doesn't mean the women receiving this particular advantage deserve it more than other women, or other men. There's nothing in this release saying they want to offer this to disadvantaged women, they simply want to offer it to women.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  > they simply want to offer it to women. But you've said they have been disadvantaged as a group, so they are offering it to a disadvantaged group. I think you're saying they should be disadvantaged in a way besides their gender?
  - jrs95 8y ago
    There is a difference between a disadvantaged person and a disadvantaged group. In my opinion that is the primary issue with prioritizing the needs of disadvantaged groups over the needs of disadvantaged individuals.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  'disadvantaged women' in your phrase seems ambiguous. From the lens of intersectionality, I could interpret 'disadvantaged women' to mean women who are also part of another marginalized group (e.g. trans women, women of color, women with disabilities, etc.) But I could also read your comment as just asking them to be explicit and emphasize that they are making an offering for "women, a group of people at a disadvantage".

lixtra 8y ago

> On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either. Because it’s a for profit organization it makes total sense for them. It has marginal cost but acts as huge marketing factor.

rubicon33 8y ago

> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender. I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech? Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture? Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY. Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.

andonisus 8y ago
What if the underlying reason is that women, as a whole, are less interested in Science/Engineering than men are?
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  We'd know that once we level the playing field?
- manfredo 8y ago
  This is a socially unacceptable explanation in many areas with large tech industries.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  Is this actually true? How do we verify this? (Certain portions of engineering have higher women participation rates than men- can we identify a biological cause for this disparity, or that many of the sciences have women on parity or overrepresentation?) I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point.
  - 8y ago

criddell 8y ago

Should you only help some people if you are willing to help all people? It's a partial solution to a small part of a big problem.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
So "only whites may apply for this scholarship" is fine then? Clearly not IMO, there needs to be a morally defensible reason for restricting the field by physical characteristics; sex and skin colour/race are not good reasons in general.
- criddell 8y ago
  You don't think women are underrepresented in the software sector?
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Underrepresented is a funny phrase, it's a job, not a debating chamber. There are less women in some sectors, less men in others. Provided boys and girls aren't being unnecessarily inhibited from any career options then I don't see a problem -- if we stop discriminating in unrelated characteristics then ratios of the sexes in particular roles will find an appropriate level. That level will not be 50:50 in any sector I'd warrant.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jpfed 8y ago

Think of it like this. Linear models in statistics break out the prediction for a given case in terms of main effects and interactions. All women get hit by the main effect of being a woman; it just so happens that some women are buoyed by other main effects like wealth, whiteness, etc. Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by level-of-disadvantage and apply that first. But that method may be brittle; if you choose the relative weighting of various forms of disadvantage wrong, then you're applying your benefit in a way that deviates from the "true" perfect-information order anyway. One way of resolving this is to say "we're not going to attempt to apply this benefit in a perfectly Rawlsian order; we're just going to pick a main effect to attack and, while doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.".

rudedogg 8y ago
> doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm. This thread, and past threads on this subject turn into an absolute shit-show and cause tribalism/division. I feel like that is evidence enough that these policies are harmful. When you do/don't get a job there's uncertainty around the reason. Was it my experience/skill-set, or race/gender/sexual orientation/religion? It feels like we're trying to fix discrimination by forcing everyone to feel like they might be experiencing it.
- jpfed 8y ago
  It doesn't show that they're harmful; it shows that they have a cost. The question is whether the benefit exceeds the cost, which depends on making some sort of quantifiable conversion rate between "acrimony and uncertainty" versus "more women getting coding jobs".

qntty 8y ago

Why would giving any group of people money ever be immoral? It wouldn't be immoral even if she said that it was only open to white, Christian men.

black-tea 8y ago

> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. Why should it be fixed? Is there any evidence to suggest it's because of discrimination? There's been special treatment for women (such as this one) for so long now. Have you ever considered that maybe women just don't want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end writing software? Also, I walked past a building site the other day. Full of men. They work through the night for not much money. Where's all the special programs to get women in to back-breaking overnight construction work?