5 ms·

> arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'. You make it sound like there are people out there saying to themselves, "I know I shoul

> arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'. You make it sound like there are people out there saying to themselves, "I know I should stop discriminating against under-represented minorities, but I just can't seem to stop myself" as if discriminating were addictive like smoking. If somebody used to discriminate and wants to stop, the solution is to stop discriminating, not discriminate in the other direction. But this isn't somebody who used to reject people under vague euphemisms and needs this "nicotine patch" to help them kick the habit - this is somebody who's creating new euphemisms to discriminate in a way that's socially acceptable.

CydeWeys 8y ago
Unconscious bias is a real thing. You can easily have a situation in which no one is intentionally discriminating and yet end up with decidedly non-equal outcomes.
- rjayatilleka 8y ago
  One thing I learned in interview training about unconscious bias. "No one thinks they're immune to bias, but no one thinks in the moment that they're making a biased decision."
- elliekelly 8y ago
  One of my favorite examples from the Boston Symphony Orchestra[1]: > For the auditions, the musicians would be playing behind a screen, in an effort to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit based selection only - a selection that would hopefully increase the number of women in the orchestra. > To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male. > Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes. The reason? The sound of the women's heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators. Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50% of the women made it past the first audition. [1] https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-proves-bias-sneaks-in-when-you-least-expect-it https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-prov...
  - toadwaffen 8y ago
    Then the whole bus clapped....
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Results are not statistically significant. https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-gender-discrimination-a25a48e1d02 https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g... >> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round. The impact for all rounds [columns (5) and (6)] is about 1 percentage point, although the standard errors are large and thus the effect is not statistically significant. > So, in conclusion, this study presents no statistically significant evidence that blind auditions increase the chances of female applicants. In my reading, the unadjusted results seem to weakly indicate the opposite, that male applicants have a slightly increased chance in blind auditions; but this advantage disappears with controls.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- sisu2019 8y ago
  this unconcious bias stuff is unfalsifiable ideological garbage. > equal outcomes Equal outcomes is a truly horrible and disgusting goal.
  - lozenge 8y ago
    Have you missed the studies on blind auditions for orchestras and the CV name switching studies? Entirely falsifiable (as well as real)
    - sisu2019 8y ago
      The blind cv experiments so far got shutdown pretty quickly when it turned out that with those the wrong group had even better chances. https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-...
  - dang 8y ago
    Would you stop please stop posting unsubstantive comments and ideological flamebait to HN? Your comments in this thread have been well below the standard HN users are asked to stick to, and even well below the median comment in this pretty bad thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - sisu2019 8y ago
      No, I will speak the truth as I know it and so should everyone else, now more than ever.
      - dang 8y ago
        Any truth you have to offer can be expressed without violating the site guidelines.
        sisu2019 8y ago
jschwartzi 8y ago
That's not exactly what OP means. What's actually going on is that we have certain expectations around candidates' behavior and the wording they use on their resumes and the way that they respond to technical interviews. These are behaviors that are ingrained for most white men but tend to be less ingrained for women and non-white men. So our hiring processes are subtly biased against anyone who isn't like us. The interview process is all about being biased against certain candidates. But what often happens is that the biases we hold when interviewing and working with candidates don't matter to the job but happen to exclude people who would otherwise do quite well. It's not like interviewers are all twirling their waxed mustaches and snickering about how many women they've excluded. But what they do is listen to how someone describes a problem or how they behave during a whiteboard interview and interpret that negatively simply because it's different from what they were expecting. And so they don't hire the person because they're a "bad culture fit." Some women have been trained by our culture to use less assertive terms to avoid showing dominance in a discussion. And they tend to wait for you to finish before they talk. Or suppose that the people at the company tend to wear a certain gamut of colors because they're all white and blue-ish and grey-ish colors tend to look better on white guys. So when someone shows up with a redder shirt that person might be taken as "too flamboyant" when in reality they're just picking a good neutral color for their skin tone. It just happens to be a significantly different tone from the rest of the office. It could even be as subtle as discomfort with inexact or flowery speech. I had a lead who would get very uncomfortable when I would talk in metaphor and use metaphors and different words to describe things in terms that he wasn't used to. He would try to get me to tone it down. But everyone else on the team was perfectly okay with it so I kept doing it. That's another form of useless bias, because I was understood and could do my job but probably wouldn't have been as hire-able if I had talked like that during my interview. My point and OP's point is that discrimination is frequently not overt. We have to look past these superficial differences and really think about whether someone can do the job. And we also need to be exposed to more candidates who are not like this. So a program like this stuffs the pipeline and gets us more exposure, and it's now up to us to challenge our existing biases and try a more diverse array of people out.
- crumpets 8y ago
  >non-white men I assume Asian men are actually "white men" for the purposes of your example?
UncleMeat 8y ago
Rarely are people deliberately discriminating. Instead they have erected systems that, for one reason or another, lead to biases. You cannot stop discriminating while continuing to use these systems.
- Guthur 8y ago
  If they did exist they were accidental. But now there are overt discriminations being baked into various initiatives including recruiting.
  - astazangasta 8y ago
    Are you seriously suggesting no one intentionally discriminated against women or minorities? It was legally enshrined for centuries.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Not so much these days, but back in the day I came across plenty of very explicit, very deliberate gender and racial bias. Talking to my mother, her whole career as a teacher was shaped by it. The way I see it, there is very clear gender and racial and other minority under-representation in some areas of tech and employment. Some of the reasons for that might be benign, others might not. It makes sense to me to poke at this problem and explore it and push against it's boundaries, obviously in a non-damaging way. This seems to me to be a positive way to do this. If women going to coding camps typically find themselves in a small minority among a big room full of guys, that isn't necessarily ideal for them. It's not anybody's fault, it's not like anybody has done anything wrong, but it can be an obstacle for those women to overcome. So why not try to minimise that obstacle?

CydeWeys 8y ago

Unconscious bias is a real thing. You can easily have a situation in which no one is intentionally discriminating and yet end up with decidedly non-equal outcomes.

rjayatilleka 8y ago
One thing I learned in interview training about unconscious bias. "No one thinks they're immune to bias, but no one thinks in the moment that they're making a biased decision."
elliekelly 8y ago
One of my favorite examples from the Boston Symphony Orchestra[1]: > For the auditions, the musicians would be playing behind a screen, in an effort to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit based selection only - a selection that would hopefully increase the number of women in the orchestra. > To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male. > Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes. The reason? The sound of the women's heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators. Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50% of the women made it past the first audition. [1] https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-proves-bias-sneaks-in-when-you-least-expect-it https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-prov...
- toadwaffen 8y ago
  Then the whole bus clapped....
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Results are not statistically significant. https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-gender-discrimination-a25a48e1d02 https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g... >> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round. The impact for all rounds [columns (5) and (6)] is about 1 percentage point, although the standard errors are large and thus the effect is not statistically significant. > So, in conclusion, this study presents no statistically significant evidence that blind auditions increase the chances of female applicants. In my reading, the unadjusted results seem to weakly indicate the opposite, that male applicants have a slightly increased chance in blind auditions; but this advantage disappears with controls.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
sisu2019 8y ago
this unconcious bias stuff is unfalsifiable ideological garbage. > equal outcomes Equal outcomes is a truly horrible and disgusting goal.
- lozenge 8y ago
  Have you missed the studies on blind auditions for orchestras and the CV name switching studies? Entirely falsifiable (as well as real)
  - sisu2019 8y ago
    The blind cv experiments so far got shutdown pretty quickly when it turned out that with those the wrong group had even better chances. https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-...
- dang 8y ago
  Would you stop please stop posting unsubstantive comments and ideological flamebait to HN? Your comments in this thread have been well below the standard HN users are asked to stick to, and even well below the median comment in this pretty bad thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - sisu2019 8y ago
    No, I will speak the truth as I know it and so should everyone else, now more than ever.
    - dang 8y ago
      Any truth you have to offer can be expressed without violating the site guidelines.
      - sisu2019 8y ago

jschwartzi 8y ago

That's not exactly what OP means. What's actually going on is that we have certain expectations around candidates' behavior and the wording they use on their resumes and the way that they respond to technical interviews. These are behaviors that are ingrained for most white men but tend to be less ingrained for women and non-white men. So our hiring processes are subtly biased against anyone who isn't like us. The interview process is all about being biased against certain candidates. But what often happens is that the biases we hold when interviewing and working with candidates don't matter to the job but happen to exclude people who would otherwise do quite well. It's not like interviewers are all twirling their waxed mustaches and snickering about how many women they've excluded. But what they do is listen to how someone describes a problem or how they behave during a whiteboard interview and interpret that negatively simply because it's different from what they were expecting. And so they don't hire the person because they're a "bad culture fit." Some women have been trained by our culture to use less assertive terms to avoid showing dominance in a discussion. And they tend to wait for you to finish before they talk. Or suppose that the people at the company tend to wear a certain gamut of colors because they're all white and blue-ish and grey-ish colors tend to look better on white guys. So when someone shows up with a redder shirt that person might be taken as "too flamboyant" when in reality they're just picking a good neutral color for their skin tone. It just happens to be a significantly different tone from the rest of the office. It could even be as subtle as discomfort with inexact or flowery speech. I had a lead who would get very uncomfortable when I would talk in metaphor and use metaphors and different words to describe things in terms that he wasn't used to. He would try to get me to tone it down. But everyone else on the team was perfectly okay with it so I kept doing it. That's another form of useless bias, because I was understood and could do my job but probably wouldn't have been as hire-able if I had talked like that during my interview. My point and OP's point is that discrimination is frequently not overt. We have to look past these superficial differences and really think about whether someone can do the job. And we also need to be exposed to more candidates who are not like this. So a program like this stuffs the pipeline and gets us more exposure, and it's now up to us to challenge our existing biases and try a more diverse array of people out.

crumpets 8y ago
>non-white men I assume Asian men are actually "white men" for the purposes of your example?

UncleMeat 8y ago

Rarely are people deliberately discriminating. Instead they have erected systems that, for one reason or another, lead to biases. You cannot stop discriminating while continuing to use these systems.

Guthur 8y ago
If they did exist they were accidental. But now there are overt discriminations being baked into various initiatives including recruiting.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  Are you seriously suggesting no one intentionally discriminated against women or minorities? It was legally enshrined for centuries.
- simonh 8y ago
  Not so much these days, but back in the day I came across plenty of very explicit, very deliberate gender and racial bias. Talking to my mother, her whole career as a teacher was shaped by it. The way I see it, there is very clear gender and racial and other minority under-representation in some areas of tech and employment. Some of the reasons for that might be benign, others might not. It makes sense to me to poke at this problem and explore it and push against it's boundaries, obviously in a non-damaging way. This seems to me to be a positive way to do this. If women going to coding camps typically find themselves in a small minority among a big room full of guys, that isn't necessarily ideal for them. It's not anybody's fault, it's not like anybody has done anything wrong, but it can be an obstacle for those women to overcome. So why not try to minimise that obstacle?