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> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.
Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can't be d
> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.
Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can't be discussed without complete agreement.
Take for example, "Women in Tech", personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage women in STEM. There are hundreds of Women in Tech meetups, scholarships, Womens only courses... yet the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years. Personally, it looks like in aggregate it will be difficult to get 50/50 representation of women and men in tech. To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50/50 isn't going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.
At the last place I worked that opinion was flat out branded "sexist", and if you didn't vocally agree with every women in tech initiative people asked why.
So I would say the ability to speak openly about politics was shut down long ago, and not by the people you think.
>To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50/50 isn't going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.
Not worth the huge money sink to whom? The companies involved? Because the ideologues of identity politics capitalizing on this "shame"-induced economy are making a fortune from it and while they continue to do so, you can expect more of the same.
It will stop of course when the bubble pops, lucrative front-end JS jobs requiring a 3 month "bootcamp" to get into disappear and every remaining IC is stack ranked based on that which is quantitative.
Women were barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years and are still fighting biases that have existed for millennia. Fixing the lack of women in tech is a multi-century process, not something that's just knocked out in as little as 15 years. We'd be lucky to start seeing the needle move in such a short amount of time.
Interestingly, the rates of women in tech were higher 50 years ago than they are today. Reduction in inequality between men and women has an inverse relationship with rates of women in engineering. The countries with large inequality between men and women like Indonesia and India have some of the highest rates of women on tech. Egalitarian countries like those in Scandinavia have the lowest rates. The idea that low rates of women in tech is a product of inequality and discrimination is hard to justify in practice.
My response to bluntfang, HN is rate limiting my office IP:
> Who's to say there's a reduction?
Anyone who studied gender relations over the last half century will say so, unambiguously, Trump notwithstanding. Women didn't have the right to abortion 50 years ago. They earned college degrees at half the rate of men (today, 3 women earn a degree for every 2 men). Workforce participation was much lower. Many states did not allow women to initiate divorces except under specific circumstances. Explicit denial of employment on the basis of sex was socially acceptable.
I'm willing to claim that women are better off today than they were in 1969 is a fact. I suppose "equality" is fundamentally subjective, and there might be people who genuinely believe that women getting the right to abortion, divorce, protection from discrimination, etc. somehow harmed them. But I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most women see such changes as beneficial.
>Reduction in inequality between men and women has an inverse relationship with rates of women in engineering.
Who's to say there's a reduction? Have you been paying attention? There's a reason people are upset about this. Look who our president is and how many outstanding sexual assault allegations he has against him.
I think those are interesting data points, but it's hard to take that data and clearly conclude there is a non-problem.
For one, 50 years ago in America, women were unintentionally at the frontline of computers perhaps because high numbers of women were the "computers" before machine computers were introduced. And when the machine computers were introduced, the departments of women "computers" got exposure to them perhaps because of a high overlap in the departmental "compute" functions.
Similarly if you look at high level women in computing from 50 years ago, they often got chances to apply their extraordinary skills because they happened across extraordinary opportunities - in some part because no-one else was above them for unique job, nor was there a formal role to hire for and choose between a woman or man. Another contributing factor might be the nature of war as well as the newness of the tech that created a temporary gender-blind vacuum.
When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc.
Too many women choose to leave not because they didn't like the work, but because they didn't like all the bullshit they were implicitly asked to put up with, in order to do the work.
If very few women expressed these sentiments; if the tech workforce pipeline was a safe and fulfilling place for everyone, then at that point, I think it's fair to question whether 50/50 should be the goal. But we're not nearly at that point, and IMO it is counterproductive to talk like we are. For now, the numbers imbalance is a simple and obvious way to measure and talk about the cultural factors that exclude women (or certain ethnicities, or backgrounds) from equal participation in this industry.
One reason 50/50 makes a fine straw goal is that there is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry. It's not like the NFL, where well-understood human sexual dimorphism is relevant. Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.
Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with "friends" (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).
Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50/50 will "lower the bar". So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.
I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren't talking about math problem here and that they don't want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.
After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a "talk" from my manager.
This parallels my experience. I have repeatedly feigned support for denying employment to white and Asian men to increase our proportional representation of demographics categorized as diverse. The company has set an outcome based goal to have 33% women in tech roles. When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination. But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.
>But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.
Nor should they. The pursuit of equality has been replaced with a demand for equity and the talking heads espousing this demand have become sufficiently skilled at publicly shaming companies and individuals that leaders have decided that acquiescing and silently taking on the bill involved in prioritizing in-office demographic makeup over all else rather than ending up on Vox & co. and being publicly tainted forever.
On an individual level, it is career suicide to go against the corporate narrative supporting the above, particularly when you consider that the most ardent supporters of the narrative are empowered to also have some of the most significant impact on your career (HR).
One org’s discrimination is another org’s curation, semantically-speaking. The subjectivity usually depends on which side of the dividing line the perceiver finds themselves.
>personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'
I say the below not as an attempt to criticize you for this viewpoint, but as a way to try to explain why this viewpoint is often interpreted as sexist.
The question is why do you believe this? The possible explanations for why women are underrepresented in tech basically comes down to either nature or nurture. Either there is something in the way we as a society and industry educate, hire, manage, and promote women or there is something fundamentally different about women that prevents them from participating in this industry at the same rate as men. The former is fixable and you say this isn't fixable so we can assume this isn't your viewpoint. That would seem to mean your explanation relies on the idea that there is something fundamentally different about women that leads to them not going into tech. Do you see how that could easily be interpreted as sexist? It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this". You need to be able to articulate why you belong in that first camp or else everyone will just write you off as being in the second.
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> the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years
What are you talking about? The numbers have varied wildly in the last 50 years. In the US it was almost 40% women in CS in 1984. Now it’s 18%. Why? The numbers also vary wildly from country to country, and in India some years have seen greater than 50% women in CS. Why?
Cherry picking numbers to make it seem like it’s not changing and make it seem like today’s numbers are the natural order of things, when that’s very very far from the truth, is a way to ensure people who think will interpret your argument as sexist.
> When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc.
That "many" sounds anecdotal. Since we're doing that: In my experience woman don't go into tech because they enjoy other, more social, jobs more.
> One reason 50/50 makes a fine straw goal is that there is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry. It's not like the NFL, where well-understood human sexual dimorphism is relevant. Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.
There is an obvious reason. Autism-like traits are more prevalent in men.
Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.
There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.
I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.
I would want any analysis theorizing a difference rooted in biological dimorphism to work with sex as a multidimensional distribution, as that's what it is.
If you want to do one on gender, you would go in for self-reported gender, and have 3+ selection options (m/f/o).
If you're going to talk about natural selection resulting in career preference, you should talk sex, not gender.
I agree gender is irrelevant here. I'd even go so far as to agree that there may be more than two sex states on individual bases (multiple X or Y chromosomes, different levels of testosterone, hermaphordism, chimerism etc). But these are neither particularly common nor genetically transmissible and thus do not exert pressure on the nature of sexual dimorphism. Sex can be modelled quite accurately with a single binary bit even in individual cases, and entirely accurately for species in evolutionary terms. Distributions and multiple dimensions have not shown themselves to be useful. If you disagree I'd like to see references to the relevant research papers.
I don't mind recognizing any individuals uniqueness or their socially less-privileged situation for social or political purposes, but it shouldn't have any affect on the science of sexuality which should just reflect nature as it is.
Sexual dimorphism in animals can be dramatic. The male angler fish is a tiny parasite, the dramatically larger female does all the angling work. And we aren't seeing non-binary angler fishes. If none of the other species are coming up with non-binary specimens, why should we assume humans are any different?
> I agree gender is irrelevant here
Ah, if that's what you're getting from what I'm saying, then I don't think you getting what I'm saying.
If your theory is that biological factors drive differences in behavioral outcomes, then I'm saying you should measure those biological factors, and you should do so on a more detailed level than genitals. I'm not arguing that sexual dimorphism isn't a thing. I'm arguing that a simple m/f measurement of it is insufficient, particularly if you're trying to correlate it to behavioral outcomes. As for your science paper request, I'll just go with this, instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism_measures
If your theory is that gender (how society treats you) affects this, then measure /that/; which itself is more complicated than a simple binary. A masculine woman and a feminine man are treated very differently by society than a feminine woman and a masculine man. Although it's a lot more reasonable to go with a binary here, since basically all of society will put people into that binary, I'd definitely want some measure as to how well or poorly that category fits the person in question. It would make for a much more compelling case to see that the outcome isn't affected by that second measure.
I've heard this hypothesis a lot, but there's something that bothers me about it.
If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing? I mean, being a programmer is not exactly a high status thing for white males either. If I tell people I'm a programmer, I generally am competing with the perception that I am socially awkward. People assume I'm like some Big Bang Theory character until I prove otherwise. I don't like that stereotype, but it never stopped me from learning to code, or even was a thought that crossed my mind.
Also, how many other industries are or have been actively hostile towards women and still have plenty of females in it? Show business is an obvious example.
I'm not saying that things can't or shouldn't be improved, but I feel like the argument that goes "well the nerds are making women uncomfortable" is just a cartoon with very little evidence other than anecdotes.
I think “microagressions” is a bit of an understatement. Also not sure that being stereotyped as “socially awkward” is comparable to experiencing or even just witnessing sexual harassment.
Women in tech report more mistreatment than in many other male-dominated industries. See: https://www.axios.com/tech-sexual-harassment-women-silicon-valley-1fa55b9c-2997-49cc-a869-d3cb7334a543.html https://www.axios.com/tech-sexual-harassment-women-silicon-v...
In this survey the finding is exactly the opposite: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/17/ssc-survey-results-sexual-harassment-levels-by-field/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/17/ssc-survey-results-sex...
All I see in that link is a VERY vague assertion that some women have received “unwanted physical contact”, which doesnt really mean anything without specifics. That could mean something creepy, or it could mean someone tapping them on the shoulder, or a saleswomans obnoxious insistence on high fiving all the time. And then some persons quoted opinion.
If someone touched me in any physical way at work I'd say it would be unwanted. It's pretty reasonable to not want other people to touch you, no matter the specific "kind" of touch it is.
It quite often means something creepy. You shouldn't assume that actual aggression aren't happening just because you have the privilege of not experiencing them.
>If I tell people I'm a programmer, I generally am competing with the perception that I am socially awkward. People assume I'm like some Big Bang Theory character until I prove otherwise. I don't like that stereotype, but it never stopped me from learning to code, or even was a thought that crossed my mind.
People thinking you're socially awkward is different from people sexually harassing you at work.
> If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing?
Yes, actually, people do this all the time. They find new things to be passionate about if being passionate about something is too painful.
> When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination.
This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.
The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)
The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.
We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.
So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?
Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?
Look at other previously male dominated positions like doctors and law where you now in Sweden have more women graduating those fields than men. Something changed there. I doubt software development has been more hostile and conservative than for example law.
The thing is that women are studying at university at a larger degree than men in Sweden but they are not selecting STEM fields, especially not computer science.
Maybe it will change with role models, culture and different initiatives but I suspect that most young women right now think it is a boring as fuck career (at least those I talk to).
It would be like someone asking me if I would like to study to teach kindergarten. Maybe I as a male have been conditioned not to see that as an option and maybe many more would choose that career if we were raised differently but for me it just sounds like something I would really really not like. I respect the work but for me taking care of tons of kids all day sounds incredibly boring and rough. The idea that there is discrimination (which there is and some men suffer from) is not near my mind.
Most women I talk to express similar thoughts about software development.
> Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?
Why do you think those two things are mutually exclusive? What if women are choosing to leave computer science because it's somewhere between subtly discriminatory and outright hostile?
I'm sure it's cultural because: in the US women in CS was ~37%, today it's 18%. Why the huge swing? There have been times in recent history when many many more women chose computer science. In India, there have been years when the participation rate was above 50%. There are places on earth today where many many more women chose STEM.
So, it's obvious based on the data we already have that today's low participation rates by women in the US and Europe is not an intrinsic property of women, rates are neither fixed nor the natural state of things.
All the rest of what you said is that maybe it's attitudes, and sure, maybe it is. Maybe that's the problem?
I've spoken with women too, and anecdotally, most women say the exact same thing as most men when they say computer programming sounds super boring. Some women I know confirm that discrimination and hostile behavior exists and is alive and well, especially the higher you go in an organization.
I don't think the problem is that they are leaving computer science, it is that they are not choosing it.
Participation used to be higher but now it is less; despite women getting more agency, doing better at school and getting high education than men. If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.
It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is. And that more choice and more opportunities just makes other career paths more alluring.
Of course there can still be sexism and discrimination in certain cases but it is also very possible that it does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.
Yes, "leaving computer science" means that participation rates are going down, that fewer women are choosing it now versus in the recent past. The phrase always meant women as a group are leaving, it never meant that lots of individual women were starting CS careers and then quitting.
> If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.
That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.
You're trying to suggest that women as a group don't want computer science, by their nature as women, but to make that claim you have to deny history and ignore facts.
> It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is.
The numbers changed a lot, and there is a reason. What you're saying is you don't know the reason, and I agree with you.
> it is also very possible that it [discrimination] does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.
I think it's extremely, extremely unlikely. It's demonstrated that the choices are cultural and not intrinsic to gender. So, your job then is to show that cultural attitudes are not affected by cultural discrimination. You're setting yourself up for an impossible task.
> The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women
This is a very bold assumption on your part. For one, representation of women in technology was actually higher when discrimination against women was more prevalent, during the 1970s and 80s. This inverse relationship between gender equality and representation of women in technology is reproduced today. Countries with less gender equality actually see higher rates of women in tech as compared to countries with more gender equality.
The notion that discriminating against men will somehow end discrimination against women is similarly naive. When discrimination in the workplace occurs, employees are aware of it. Putting women in a situation where the majority of their coworkers know that they are being held to a different standard is an exceedingly easy way to foster a toxic workplace.
> So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?
Rethink whether there's anything that needs to be fixed. We should see women as individuals capable of making their own career choices, instead of as objects to be herded into one field or another.
> So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all.
This is one of the problems a lot of engineers have, and I make this mistake too more often than I want to admit.
Cultural discrimination isn't a math problem, and however you modeled it, your logic doesn't map well to history at all. When you double down on a math argument, what it sounds like to other people is that you're not open to the possibility that you made a logic or modeling mistake, that you've decided men are better than women, and that you're trying to confuse the argument with a technicality.
FWIW, there might be math problem with your suggestion that 50/50 would lower the bar. The ratio is not absolute, and this isn't zero sum. More women participating doesn't mean fewer men, it means more people. When there are more people, in general, the absolute number of excellent people goes up.
I don't know what you mean by "the bar". What does it mean to lower the bar? Are you talking about how hard it is to get a job, get promoted, be in the top 10%? I don't understand your argument.
No matter what math/logic you used, the layman translation of saying the bar goes down with inclusion of more women is that you believe women to be inferior. That may not be your intent, but that's what people are hearing you say.
"Either there is something in the way we as a society and industry educate, hire, manage, and promote women".
I would add raise and socialize as kids to the list, but to me that's clearly part of it.
The entire evolution of a person from baby to adult is moulded by society, which makes it pretty ridiculous when the enlightened techies want to solve the lack of women in tech by only "fixing" hiring and promoting. And management, if we're feeling generous.
> On the one had you have permanent negative cultural discrimination that is keeping some people down who don't deserve it, and on the other you have an attempt to counter that with visible positive visible/out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against.
The issue isn't positive vs negative discrimination or else the "fight racism with racism" camp wouldn't cry foul when positive discrimination is applied toward whites or men (in those rare cases when it actually is) nor would there be so much overt negative discrimination toward men and whites (the use of "white men" as a slur, the accusation that men are rapists and need to be trained not to rape, the propensity to blame all problems on whites/men, the existence of work groups and meetups that specifically exclude whites/men, etc). It's pretty clearly that there is some notion that certain genders/races are more deserving of both negative and positive discrimination than others.
> This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
The confusion is understandable; I should have used a different term. I coined "postive racism" to mean discrimination (specifically negative discrimination, per your definition) toward some group that is perceived to deserve it--those who advocate for the discrimination see it as righteous, hence 'positive'--for the sake of a somewhat familiar, concrete example, Antifa advocates for negative discrimination toward whites, men, etc. I should have used different words since "positive racism" sounds too similar to "positive discrimination" which already has an established meaning (and perhaps "positive racism" also already has an established meaning as well). I also used "discrimination" a lot when I technically meant what you're referring to as "negative discrimination"; in general, my post was ignoring affirmative action or "positive discrimination" because I don't understand it to be even remotely central to the broader national debate on race and social justice.
I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism, although I think it's ill-considered and probably produces more racial tension, division, and strife than it alleviates. The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. And while there probably are some who support affirmative action to antagonize whites, the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.
> Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working?
It's been working very well. Racism has been declining since the civil rights movement by all indicators. Equality of opportunity is at an all-time high in the history of the US, the West, and the whole world. You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values. Chief among those values is individual liberty which naturally gives way to equality, and which is the antithesis to collectivist movements such as white supremacy, fascism/nationalism/national-socialism, communism, and so-called "anti-fascism" and "anti-racism" movements that are popular today.
> When has it worked better than affirmative actions?
I speculate (speculation is all we can do for this question) that it has always worked better (and far better) than affirmative action. As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.
> And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.
Depends on how the problem is defined and one's values (hence the "subjectivity" in my original comment).
If the problem is "too much racism", then most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem--racism is deplorable.
If the problem is "certain races and sexes deserve to be treated poorer than others" then of course racism will appear to be the solution. It's an inherently racist viewpoint, and people who espouse that viewpoint are (by definition) racists.
Women are now a small but growing majority of both law and medical students:
https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollment-2018.html https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollmen...
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/12/19/women-are-majority-new-medical-students https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/12/19/women-a...
Breaking down the medical fields by gender distribution also follows expected patterns:
https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profiles/these-medical-specialties-have-biggest-gender-imbalances https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profil...
I'm not saying these facts proves anything in particular, but they're good to be aware of.
> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better.
You are incorrect. Let's imagine a group of ten men and ten women: we want to hire four in total. Let's assume that we can reduce a potential employee's worth down to a single number from 1 to 10, in order to simplify the example. The men are rated [1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10]; the women are rated [3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10]. In this example the women are better on average (5.6) than the men (5.5) — but hiring the top four candidates results in hiring three men [9, 9 & 10] and one woman [10].
This is because while the mean woman is better than the mean man, the standard deviation of skills is more widely distributed across men than women in the example: more men are excellent, but also more men are terrible (in the example, the lowest three candidates are men!).
If we're going to contrive an instance that will result in a gender gap then why not just say we hire only 3 people? That would be a perfectly contrived example that would illustrate what you're trying to say.
Beyond your contrivances, I take issue with you suggesting that employees can (or should) be rated on a linear scale. Companies have very specific needs and maybe a candidate who is a "2" on your scale is a "10" at fulfilling what the company needs.
I'll say again too that the value of diversity doesn't need to manifest itself in every individual.
In this particular case it’s not just politics that could be equally right either way.
It’s politics where one of the options is wrong and science should be able to reveal which one.
And in that case challenging the popular opinion better come with actual scientific research, not lunch time napkin math pulled out of thin air.