11 ms·

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 ran

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.

manfredo 7y ago
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.
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago
  >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).
- alchemism 7y ago
  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.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    It’s discrimination either way. The subjectivity is just about whether or not it is deserved. Some people think certain races or sexes deserve it, which is deplorable but technically subjective.
    - alchemism 7y ago
      Right. When the new executive is tasked with “cleaning up the misogyny problem at Uber” (as an example) it can only be be accomplished by discriminating against misogynists, by removing them and especially through not-hiring new ones.
      - weberc2 7y ago
        I genuinely can’t tell if “misogyny” means “sexual harassment” or “men having mildly nonconforming political views” a la Damore. If the former, no one would object to said “cleanup”, so that’s pretty clearly not what we’re discussing.
        alchemism 7y ago
        It is indeed the former. No one [of high value to society] would object to the discrimination, but it is still a discrimination occurring if the outright harassers are rejected for the benefit of the whole organization.
    - dahart 7y ago
      This isn’t about races or sexes deserving it, this is about fixing an existing imbalance that happened via cultural discrimination. The idea is to get closer to balance and then as soon as we’re closer, stop discriminating in either direction. When you call people trying to fix this deplorable, let’s just be clear, you’re judging negatively the people hoping to end cultural discrimination. If your proposed solution is to not do anything, we already know what will happen, because it already did: more cultural discrimination.
- cloverich 7y ago
  Why would it requiring discrimination be a problem?
  - will4274 7y ago
    Well, employment discrimination by gender is illegal in my country.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Because employers in the US are legally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex and race. At least in theory, enforcement seems to be lax in Silicon Valley. Also, it creates a situation where people are aware that non-diverse employees are held to a more selective standard. This can increase impostor syndrome among diverse employees who may feel that they would not have been employed if they weren't of a specific gender or ethnicity.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    You're asking why race and gender discrimination might be a problem?
    - cloverich 7y ago
      I am asking why using discrimination (favoring women) to reverse a discrimination trend is a problem. Not why discrimination in general is a problem, which it obviously is.
      - BurningFrog 7y ago
        Thanks. I have two thoughts. 1. The position that it's OK to fight discrimination with more discrimination is very different from the idea that discrimination is inherently bad. 2. The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven. If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.
- dahart 7y ago
  > 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?
  - cc81 7y ago
    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.
iikoolpp 7y ago
Calculating empirically that women are stupid
wonnage 7y ago
You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group is not 50/50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar. The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance. You can't brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.
- jariel 7y ago
  You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'. If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity. Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist. Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture. This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many. Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.
- unscrupulous_sw 7y ago
  Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards. Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with. I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid. Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask. The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.
bloody-crow 7y ago
I've once engaged in a similar discussion with a female colleague and it escalated into a shit-show with manager & HR being involved and colleague being in tears claiming I'm "sexist" despite my aggressive attempts to de-escalate and walk away from continuing the conversation. The HR did an investigation and came to a conclusion that I didn't do anything wrong, but strongly suggested not talking about anything like that in future. The colleague made a claim that she wouldn't be able to work with me in the same company and quit.
- dsmk 7y ago
  "aggressive attempts to de-escalate"
  - bloody-crow 7y ago
    She initiated the conversation in the first place and I was trying to backpedal pretty much the whole time, but she just kept pushing.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
I don't support or discourage your argument in this case. I'll just make a very important point that many young folks take (and my younger self took) a while to grasp… There are a number of sensitive issues where stark logic and "inconvenient" facts are very much not appreciated. Best to avoid them in polite discussion. Given that most social issues are not cut and dry, there is difficulty in finding the logical answer anyway. Rarely do we have all the facts available, even if a correct decision could be made with them. Rather we have mostly personal anecdotes which are not sufficient. So the unpopular technical point of view is rarely worth giving, while also potentially a CLM (career limiting move).
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  For an example, see the results of RMS' recent pedantic take on the Epstein case.
dahart 7y ago
> 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.

manfredo 7y ago

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.

cmdshiftf4 7y ago
>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).
alchemism 7y ago
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.
- weberc2 7y ago
  It’s discrimination either way. The subjectivity is just about whether or not it is deserved. Some people think certain races or sexes deserve it, which is deplorable but technically subjective.
  - alchemism 7y ago
    Right. When the new executive is tasked with “cleaning up the misogyny problem at Uber” (as an example) it can only be be accomplished by discriminating against misogynists, by removing them and especially through not-hiring new ones.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      I genuinely can’t tell if “misogyny” means “sexual harassment” or “men having mildly nonconforming political views” a la Damore. If the former, no one would object to said “cleanup”, so that’s pretty clearly not what we’re discussing.
      - alchemism 7y ago
        It is indeed the former. No one [of high value to society] would object to the discrimination, but it is still a discrimination occurring if the outright harassers are rejected for the benefit of the whole organization.
  - dahart 7y ago
    This isn’t about races or sexes deserving it, this is about fixing an existing imbalance that happened via cultural discrimination. The idea is to get closer to balance and then as soon as we’re closer, stop discriminating in either direction. When you call people trying to fix this deplorable, let’s just be clear, you’re judging negatively the people hoping to end cultural discrimination. If your proposed solution is to not do anything, we already know what will happen, because it already did: more cultural discrimination.
cloverich 7y ago
Why would it requiring discrimination be a problem?
- will4274 7y ago
  Well, employment discrimination by gender is illegal in my country.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Because employers in the US are legally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex and race. At least in theory, enforcement seems to be lax in Silicon Valley. Also, it creates a situation where people are aware that non-diverse employees are held to a more selective standard. This can increase impostor syndrome among diverse employees who may feel that they would not have been employed if they weren't of a specific gender or ethnicity.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  You're asking why race and gender discrimination might be a problem?
  - cloverich 7y ago
    I am asking why using discrimination (favoring women) to reverse a discrimination trend is a problem. Not why discrimination in general is a problem, which it obviously is.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      Thanks. I have two thoughts. 1. The position that it's OK to fight discrimination with more discrimination is very different from the idea that discrimination is inherently bad. 2. The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven. If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.
dahart 7y ago
> 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?
- cc81 7y ago
  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.

iikoolpp 7y ago

Calculating empirically that women are stupid

wonnage 7y ago

You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group is not 50/50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar. The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance. You can't brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.

jariel 7y ago
You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'. If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity. Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist. Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture. This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many. Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.
unscrupulous_sw 7y ago
Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards. Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with. I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid. Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask. The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.

bloody-crow 7y ago

I've once engaged in a similar discussion with a female colleague and it escalated into a shit-show with manager & HR being involved and colleague being in tears claiming I'm "sexist" despite my aggressive attempts to de-escalate and walk away from continuing the conversation. The HR did an investigation and came to a conclusion that I didn't do anything wrong, but strongly suggested not talking about anything like that in future. The colleague made a claim that she wouldn't be able to work with me in the same company and quit.

dsmk 7y ago
"aggressive attempts to de-escalate"
- bloody-crow 7y ago
  She initiated the conversation in the first place and I was trying to backpedal pretty much the whole time, but she just kept pushing.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

I don't support or discourage your argument in this case. I'll just make a very important point that many young folks take (and my younger self took) a while to grasp… There are a number of sensitive issues where stark logic and "inconvenient" facts are very much not appreciated. Best to avoid them in polite discussion. Given that most social issues are not cut and dry, there is difficulty in finding the logical answer anyway. Rarely do we have all the facts available, even if a correct decision could be made with them. Rather we have mostly personal anecdotes which are not sufficient. So the unpopular technical point of view is rarely worth giving, while also potentially a CLM (career limiting move).

mixmastamyk 7y ago
For an example, see the results of RMS' recent pedantic take on the Epstein case.

dahart 7y ago

> 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.