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While looking for a job in my country I saw a company EXPLICITLY advertise they wanted to hire a woman for a coder job, and men shouldn't apply. This is outrig

While looking for a job in my country I saw a company EXPLICITLY advertise they wanted to hire a woman for a coder job, and men shouldn't apply. This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine. Thing is... it is still illegal (in fact companies here that really need a specific gender, for example when hiring female airport security so they can deal with female passengers and whatnot, companies go through crazy legal hoops, because our gender discrimination law has no exception, no loophole, nothing).

nbardy 5y ago
A scarey thing about cultural movements is how they take the law with them. A system of law is only as just as its layers judges and juries.
- pxc 5y ago
  This is actually a good thing. Laws that are unresponsive to unwritten cultural norms (and their changes over time) are extremely inflexible, and the position that they should be so inflexible is a radically conservative one. Responsiveness to cultural norms is in part a function of courts having to maintain some minimum level of perceived legitimacy with the public.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    If laws can just change without a new law modifing it then you will never know if you are following the law.
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      Or if people in power are following the law.
    - pxc 5y ago
      You can't ever just read the law and know what it means, because law, unlike a formal system, is written in natural language (a semantically open system) and interacts with the real world, so it requires non-trivial interpretation. To make the law more predictable, a notion of 'precedent' is used to help make future interpretations adhere to past ones, lending some continuity to all this. But this means that an interpretation of a law in a new context can partially determine what that law means without modifying the text of the law. Abandoning the notion of precedent might avoid that, but it just makes the law unpredictable in other ways.
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
        I guess if that is what you mean than I would generally agree with you. The way I interpreted your post was that you were saying a law should just be changed by the whims of the populace without a proper process in place.
        pxc 5y ago
        In our case, the whims of the populace are mediated by judges, whose consideration for popular feeling is often limited to something like 'will there be uncontrollable riots if I rule a certain way', and balanced against their ideological views (about how to interpret law) and the content of the law. But I think that element of consideration of popular feeling or shifting cultural norms is important. It's what lets judges do things like pass over laws banning women from wearing pants as a form of crossdressing instead of requiring, or to reinterpret language about equality as extending to wider groups of people than originally intended.
  - djbebs 5y ago
    On the contrary it is a terrible awful thing, and a fantastic indicator of a poorly designed law. Laws should not impose morality.
    - simonh 5y ago
      All laws are about morality (except for those in science and maths). We often pretend they are different, or draw a distinction between behaviour constrained by laws and that constrained by personal morals, however the question of what laws to create and how they should be formulated are moral questions.
      - pxc 5y ago
        Some laws are about settling convention where the specific content of the convention has no normative component, e.g., which side of the road cars drive on
        simonh 5y ago
        Some of the specific content of the law is arbitrary yes, but the fact we have a law about which side people should drive on at all is motivated by a moral imperative. Although actually neither the right or left hand side rules are arbitrary. They were each intended to better serve a moral objective. https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Why-do-the-British-drive-on-the-left/ https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Why-do-the-British-dri...
        pxc 5y ago
        They do serve a normative aim, i.e., 'we should have drivable two-way roads', yes. I'm not sure we need to reduce all norms to 'morality'. But if we think of morality in a really broad way, like 'humans (or other sapient creatures) seeking to satisfy preferences or impose additional structure on nature or society for their own purposes in a universalizable/principled (i.e., fair) way', then definitely: laws should always be motivated in some way by morality. That's different from the claim (which I'm not saying you've made) that this relationship means that laws should always simply 'encode' moral norms in some direct sense, which imo is a common (and mistaken) simplification. But yeah I think we're on the same page.
LegitShady 5y ago
you take the reply you got back from a the judge and send it to sympathetic media to get public eyes on a judge abusing the law for their social goals. There’s no other way to fight against corrupt officials when the system is corrupt.
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  What if the only sympathetic media is decried as bigoted or [insert-your-favorite-whatever-ist] as a result (or is already known as such)? Then it stops being "corruption" and is seen as heroic.
  - evv555 5y ago
    Contact https://www.fairforall.org https://www.fairforall.org and let them handle the PR component.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    If your case is that the judicial system and the media as a whole won't touch your issue (and the outlets that will are decried by society as being bigoted) maybe, just maybe, you're the one who is wrong and the entire rest of society is correct.
    - username90 5y ago
      It isn't the entire rest of society, it is a very small privileged group pushing this. A majority of men strongly disagrees with these things, but their voices aren't allowed to be heard.
- native_samples 5y ago
  What sympathetic media? There are none, except maybe for Breitbart? Look at what happened with James Damore. His memo didn't contain the incriminating ideas or language the people who wanted to get rid of him would have needed, so they simply invented it, claiming his memo said women programmers are worse at it than men when it said no such thing. Media blanketed the news with this false claim even though the document was public and anyone could download and read it for themselves. The only news outlet I saw cover this story correctly was Breitbart, who also ended up as a result with lots of leaked screenshots from disaffected Googlers talking about internal racial and sexual discrimination against "white" (+Asian) men.
pyuser583 5y ago
Which country?
hn21 5y ago
> The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine. Literally millions of men have died to save women and children from Titanic times, or in wars, if not still (just look at all the construction, electrical, mining jobs where there's no regard for "diversity" or lost lives)... Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? :eyeroll:
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? As we speak (July 2021), young women are being added to the US Selective Service (the draft), so that should elicit some conversations. :) Note that the US is currently a volunteer army (nobody is drafted), but there's always that option. The history so far is there have been problems with the initial female fighter pilots despite what the generals said (their poor training records are public) and a very high washout rate in Rangers (see Youtube videos), but hopefully they can be assigned to roles like equipment and missile operators. It was very sad seeing the foto of Kara Hultgreen's mom at her funeral, especially since it was a peacetime mishap, avoidable if she had remained a cargo pilot instead of flying an F-14. Also, the US military can look at how the Israelis assign women to learn what works for them. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/legislation-require-women-men-sign-potential-draft/story?id=79013594 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/legislation-require-women-me...
908B64B197 5y ago
> This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine. I hope this comes up when she's up for reelection.

nbardy 5y ago

A scarey thing about cultural movements is how they take the law with them. A system of law is only as just as its layers judges and juries.

pxc 5y ago
This is actually a good thing. Laws that are unresponsive to unwritten cultural norms (and their changes over time) are extremely inflexible, and the position that they should be so inflexible is a radically conservative one. Responsiveness to cultural norms is in part a function of courts having to maintain some minimum level of perceived legitimacy with the public.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  If laws can just change without a new law modifing it then you will never know if you are following the law.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    Or if people in power are following the law.
  - pxc 5y ago
    You can't ever just read the law and know what it means, because law, unlike a formal system, is written in natural language (a semantically open system) and interacts with the real world, so it requires non-trivial interpretation. To make the law more predictable, a notion of 'precedent' is used to help make future interpretations adhere to past ones, lending some continuity to all this. But this means that an interpretation of a law in a new context can partially determine what that law means without modifying the text of the law. Abandoning the notion of precedent might avoid that, but it just makes the law unpredictable in other ways.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      I guess if that is what you mean than I would generally agree with you. The way I interpreted your post was that you were saying a law should just be changed by the whims of the populace without a proper process in place.
      - pxc 5y ago
        In our case, the whims of the populace are mediated by judges, whose consideration for popular feeling is often limited to something like 'will there be uncontrollable riots if I rule a certain way', and balanced against their ideological views (about how to interpret law) and the content of the law. But I think that element of consideration of popular feeling or shifting cultural norms is important. It's what lets judges do things like pass over laws banning women from wearing pants as a form of crossdressing instead of requiring, or to reinterpret language about equality as extending to wider groups of people than originally intended.
- djbebs 5y ago
  On the contrary it is a terrible awful thing, and a fantastic indicator of a poorly designed law. Laws should not impose morality.
  - simonh 5y ago
    All laws are about morality (except for those in science and maths). We often pretend they are different, or draw a distinction between behaviour constrained by laws and that constrained by personal morals, however the question of what laws to create and how they should be formulated are moral questions.
    - pxc 5y ago
      Some laws are about settling convention where the specific content of the convention has no normative component, e.g., which side of the road cars drive on
      - simonh 5y ago
        Some of the specific content of the law is arbitrary yes, but the fact we have a law about which side people should drive on at all is motivated by a moral imperative. Although actually neither the right or left hand side rules are arbitrary. They were each intended to better serve a moral objective. https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Why-do-the-British-drive-on-the-left/ https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Why-do-the-British-dri...
        pxc 5y ago
        They do serve a normative aim, i.e., 'we should have drivable two-way roads', yes. I'm not sure we need to reduce all norms to 'morality'. But if we think of morality in a really broad way, like 'humans (or other sapient creatures) seeking to satisfy preferences or impose additional structure on nature or society for their own purposes in a universalizable/principled (i.e., fair) way', then definitely: laws should always be motivated in some way by morality. That's different from the claim (which I'm not saying you've made) that this relationship means that laws should always simply 'encode' moral norms in some direct sense, which imo is a common (and mistaken) simplification. But yeah I think we're on the same page.

LegitShady 5y ago

you take the reply you got back from a the judge and send it to sympathetic media to get public eyes on a judge abusing the law for their social goals. There’s no other way to fight against corrupt officials when the system is corrupt.

jimmygrapes 5y ago
What if the only sympathetic media is decried as bigoted or [insert-your-favorite-whatever-ist] as a result (or is already known as such)? Then it stops being "corruption" and is seen as heroic.
- evv555 5y ago
  Contact https://www.fairforall.org https://www.fairforall.org and let them handle the PR component.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  If your case is that the judicial system and the media as a whole won't touch your issue (and the outlets that will are decried by society as being bigoted) maybe, just maybe, you're the one who is wrong and the entire rest of society is correct.
  - username90 5y ago
    It isn't the entire rest of society, it is a very small privileged group pushing this. A majority of men strongly disagrees with these things, but their voices aren't allowed to be heard.
native_samples 5y ago
What sympathetic media? There are none, except maybe for Breitbart? Look at what happened with James Damore. His memo didn't contain the incriminating ideas or language the people who wanted to get rid of him would have needed, so they simply invented it, claiming his memo said women programmers are worse at it than men when it said no such thing. Media blanketed the news with this false claim even though the document was public and anyone could download and read it for themselves. The only news outlet I saw cover this story correctly was Breitbart, who also ended up as a result with lots of leaked screenshots from disaffected Googlers talking about internal racial and sexual discrimination against "white" (+Asian) men.

pyuser583 5y ago

Which country?

hn21 5y ago

> The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine. Literally millions of men have died to save women and children from Titanic times, or in wars, if not still (just look at all the construction, electrical, mining jobs where there's no regard for "diversity" or lost lives)... Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? :eyeroll:

redis_mlc 5y ago
> Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? As we speak (July 2021), young women are being added to the US Selective Service (the draft), so that should elicit some conversations. :) Note that the US is currently a volunteer army (nobody is drafted), but there's always that option. The history so far is there have been problems with the initial female fighter pilots despite what the generals said (their poor training records are public) and a very high washout rate in Rangers (see Youtube videos), but hopefully they can be assigned to roles like equipment and missile operators. It was very sad seeing the foto of Kara Hultgreen's mom at her funeral, especially since it was a peacetime mishap, avoidable if she had remained a cargo pilot instead of flying an F-14. Also, the US military can look at how the Israelis assign women to learn what works for them. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/legislation-require-women-men-sign-potential-draft/story?id=79013594 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/legislation-require-women-me...

908B64B197 5y ago

> This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine. I hope this comes up when she's up for reelection.