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In my opinion one should be seeking to hire the best person for the job every single time regardless of the person's race or gender. But I also believe that con

In my opinion one should be seeking to hire the best person for the job every single time regardless of the person's race or gender. But I also believe that considering diversity needs is fair when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
I think implicit in the parent's question is that a team might be better without you, even if you're the best person for the specific activities a candidate is being sought for. That is: you want your team to succeed, but you'll accept a little less productivity if the team is fun, or there's less drama, or you feel happy being with your co-workers. >considering diversity needs // What are these needs? I've struggled with this issue recently - in my kids school all the teaching staff are female. All the appointed governors are female too. So the people choosing the staff are females used to working in a female-only environment. There's no [visible or reported] effort to bias towards employing any men. I think not having any men in teaching roles, only the janitor is a man, is a bad thing for all the kids in the school. But, I don't really agree with "positive discrimination" as it's just discrimination and a woman who fails to get the job solely because of her sex would, IMO, be being unfairly discriminated against. My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me. To my mind this is the same sort of consideration, choosing a worse candidate because on a broader perspective, considering characteristics of the system rather than only the character, there's a benefit. tl;dr systemic optimisation rather than local optimisation.
- marvin 7y ago
  A curious side note: Norway, often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, has a law from 1978 called "the law of gender equality". The first section of the law states that the law is particularly intended to strengthen the position of women. The systematic interpretation of this law is that it is legal to moderately discriminate in the favor of women when they apply for a position (school, work) that has a male majority, while it is illegal to discriminate in the favor of men when they apply for a position that has a female majority. Examples of male-majority situations where this is applied is CEO or board positions in publicly-owned companies or engineering school, while examples of female-majority situations where this cannot be applied is veterinarian or medical school.
  - Udik 7y ago
    It's funny to think how these positive discriminations and the constant praise of the qualities intrinsic in being female, might stem from nothing else than the traditional sexist "gentleman" attitude towards the "weaker sex".
- atoav 7y ago
  Isn’t it also a way to allow your team to get their own team culture instead of beeing steamrolled by the predominant culture? I know this from film sets: I happend to be in crews, that were so diverse, that the only overlap in the end was that all of us somehow liked film. These were incredibly interesting and motivating crews, with a ton of creative ideas, willingness to go the extra length etc. The worst crews I saw, were the ones where you had departments that had creepily aligned departments, that defined themselves by drawing a border to other departments. E.g. a light crew consisting completely out of white “dudes” all with the same ideas, jokes and taste, similar age etc. They did good work, but once they outnumbered the rest, the open discourse/exchange of ideas on set suffered.
- tomp 7y ago
  > My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me. But there are other ways to approach, and possibly fix, this problem. One would be increasing the reach, e.g. you could investigate if your job ads reach mostly women and instead advertise on some male-heavy media as well. Another would be fixing the underlying biases and misconceptions of the job (e.g. that teaching is a female job or that men that want to spend time with children are likely pedophiles) - though that one is obviously harder to do, you need society-wide influence. Or maybe you'd figure out that it's just the way it is, and there is a huge gender (or some other characteristic) imbalance in the whole pipeline (i.e. not just the applicants for the job, but already when people are applying to universities for the appropriate field of study) (in which case positive discrimination would mean you'd have to lower the bar to an unacceptable degree), which might be OK as well.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Everyone is familiar with bro culture, but it seems odd and unrealistic to assume there's no female equivalent. It's also odd that talk about the value of different perspectives and diversity can disappear as soon as some women create women-only workspaces for themselves. It's examples like this that make me unfriendly to feminism. Equality of opportunity is a worthy goal, but either you support genuine diversity or you don't.
bufferoverflow 7y ago
I've worked in IT for many years, and I've never even met two "equally qualified" people. How would you even determine such thing? Everyone has different amount of experience, different achievements, different grades in school, different skillsets.
- replyguy912 7y ago
  It's hard enough to identify good or bad, let alone assess to the degree that I can say 2 candidates are comparable. When that happens it really means I've got an equally poor measure of both.
- mort96 7y ago
  You're exactly right, the exact level of qualification is impossible to quantify. Therefore, we can really only go with rough approximations; this person has experience in the field before, or has relevant education, or has done a lot of similar work before in hobby projects, or whatever. From what I understand, the suggestion is that if one person is obviously more qualified than another, you pick the most qualified person regardless of other factors, but if there are multiple people where it's unclear who is better, you pick the person who's from a marginalized group. If we had some kind of ultra-precise scientific way to measure a person's level of qualification, the point would be moot; it would be highly unlikely that two people would measure exactly the same, so we would never be in a situation where we choose based on other factors than qualifications. It's precisely because it's impossible to determine exactly how qualified someone is (probably by the very nature of what we mean by "qualified") that the idea has any merit at all.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bachmeier 7y ago
Let's pretend there is a human somewhere able "to hire the best person for the job every single time". Presumably the best person for the job would be the one that maximizes the company's profit. Suppose it's easier to hire the female candidate that's better than all male candidates (hard as that might be to imagine for many on this site) if you currently have a woman working on the team. The existing team of eight high-performing men just isn't as appealing as a team of seven high-performing men and one not quite as high-performing woman.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

I think implicit in the parent's question is that a team might be better without you, even if you're the best person for the specific activities a candidate is being sought for. That is: you want your team to succeed, but you'll accept a little less productivity if the team is fun, or there's less drama, or you feel happy being with your co-workers. >considering diversity needs // What are these needs? I've struggled with this issue recently - in my kids school all the teaching staff are female. All the appointed governors are female too. So the people choosing the staff are females used to working in a female-only environment. There's no [visible or reported] effort to bias towards employing any men. I think not having any men in teaching roles, only the janitor is a man, is a bad thing for all the kids in the school. But, I don't really agree with "positive discrimination" as it's just discrimination and a woman who fails to get the job solely because of her sex would, IMO, be being unfairly discriminated against. My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me. To my mind this is the same sort of consideration, choosing a worse candidate because on a broader perspective, considering characteristics of the system rather than only the character, there's a benefit. tl;dr systemic optimisation rather than local optimisation.

marvin 7y ago
A curious side note: Norway, often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, has a law from 1978 called "the law of gender equality". The first section of the law states that the law is particularly intended to strengthen the position of women. The systematic interpretation of this law is that it is legal to moderately discriminate in the favor of women when they apply for a position (school, work) that has a male majority, while it is illegal to discriminate in the favor of men when they apply for a position that has a female majority. Examples of male-majority situations where this is applied is CEO or board positions in publicly-owned companies or engineering school, while examples of female-majority situations where this cannot be applied is veterinarian or medical school.
- Udik 7y ago
  It's funny to think how these positive discriminations and the constant praise of the qualities intrinsic in being female, might stem from nothing else than the traditional sexist "gentleman" attitude towards the "weaker sex".
atoav 7y ago
Isn’t it also a way to allow your team to get their own team culture instead of beeing steamrolled by the predominant culture? I know this from film sets: I happend to be in crews, that were so diverse, that the only overlap in the end was that all of us somehow liked film. These were incredibly interesting and motivating crews, with a ton of creative ideas, willingness to go the extra length etc. The worst crews I saw, were the ones where you had departments that had creepily aligned departments, that defined themselves by drawing a border to other departments. E.g. a light crew consisting completely out of white “dudes” all with the same ideas, jokes and taste, similar age etc. They did good work, but once they outnumbered the rest, the open discourse/exchange of ideas on set suffered.
tomp 7y ago
> My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me. But there are other ways to approach, and possibly fix, this problem. One would be increasing the reach, e.g. you could investigate if your job ads reach mostly women and instead advertise on some male-heavy media as well. Another would be fixing the underlying biases and misconceptions of the job (e.g. that teaching is a female job or that men that want to spend time with children are likely pedophiles) - though that one is obviously harder to do, you need society-wide influence. Or maybe you'd figure out that it's just the way it is, and there is a huge gender (or some other characteristic) imbalance in the whole pipeline (i.e. not just the applicants for the job, but already when people are applying to universities for the appropriate field of study) (in which case positive discrimination would mean you'd have to lower the bar to an unacceptable degree), which might be OK as well.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Everyone is familiar with bro culture, but it seems odd and unrealistic to assume there's no female equivalent. It's also odd that talk about the value of different perspectives and diversity can disappear as soon as some women create women-only workspaces for themselves. It's examples like this that make me unfriendly to feminism. Equality of opportunity is a worthy goal, but either you support genuine diversity or you don't.

bufferoverflow 7y ago

I've worked in IT for many years, and I've never even met two "equally qualified" people. How would you even determine such thing? Everyone has different amount of experience, different achievements, different grades in school, different skillsets.

replyguy912 7y ago
It's hard enough to identify good or bad, let alone assess to the degree that I can say 2 candidates are comparable. When that happens it really means I've got an equally poor measure of both.
mort96 7y ago
You're exactly right, the exact level of qualification is impossible to quantify. Therefore, we can really only go with rough approximations; this person has experience in the field before, or has relevant education, or has done a lot of similar work before in hobby projects, or whatever. From what I understand, the suggestion is that if one person is obviously more qualified than another, you pick the most qualified person regardless of other factors, but if there are multiple people where it's unclear who is better, you pick the person who's from a marginalized group. If we had some kind of ultra-precise scientific way to measure a person's level of qualification, the point would be moot; it would be highly unlikely that two people would measure exactly the same, so we would never be in a situation where we choose based on other factors than qualifications. It's precisely because it's impossible to determine exactly how qualified someone is (probably by the very nature of what we mean by "qualified") that the idea has any merit at all.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bachmeier 7y ago

Let's pretend there is a human somewhere able "to hire the best person for the job every single time". Presumably the best person for the job would be the one that maximizes the company's profit. Suppose it's easier to hire the female candidate that's better than all male candidates (hard as that might be to imagine for many on this site) if you currently have a woman working on the team. The existing team of eight high-performing men just isn't as appealing as a team of seven high-performing men and one not quite as high-performing woman.