9 ms·

Pushing for more women/minorities in STEM/leadership positions = you're fixing the global problem, doing the opposite = you're making the global problem worse.

newsclues 4y ago
Both are discriminatory, but one is virtuous and the other is bad?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Drakim 4y ago
  It can be a bad thing and still the best option you got, a lesser of two evils. I don't think anybody should lose out on a opportunity because some minority quota needs to be filled, but I also don't think minorities and discriminated groups should live in a perpetual self-reinforcing unhirability loop either.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    What is the assumption here? Marginalized groups will be hired even if they aren't the better candidate? Doesn't that Peter-Principle them right out of the gate? Are we sure that this leads to better long term outcomes?
    - azangru 4y ago
      > What is the assumption here? Marginalized groups will be hired even if they aren't the better candidate? If a person making hiring decisions says that the next candidate for such-and-such role should be a person from such-and-such group (a woman, a person of color, etc.), then the criterion of being the better candidate doesn't apply. Or, rather, it gets adjusted such that belonging in the desired group is included in the list of what makes a candidate better.
      - peteradio 4y ago
        That is in interesting way to define "better candidate" being that it does not tie to the bottom line except unless there are explicit business incentives to discriminate.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        azangru 4y ago
        > it does not tie to the bottom line I completely agree with you, which is what makes all these recent trends in hiring all the more fascinating to me. If the only concern of a company were the bottom line (which I would expect it should be), then there wouldn't have been any conversation about marginalised groups etc., because, for companies, a candidate's demographics would have been irrelevant. The only thing that would have mattered is which candidate is expected to be the best fit for a given position. That it doesn't work like that suggests that companies are also political creatures, and are concerned about their public image and, possibly, about things like ESG scores. It may even be that the public image and things like ESG scores are a strong contributor to the bottom line.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      I am always amazed by this assumption that firms hire "the better candidate", absent DEI initiatives or such. In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves. Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill. It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.
      - jfim 4y ago
        That really depends on the industry. If your idea of tech is web apps and mobile apps, then yeah, most candidates would do the job. If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        Sure, and I have been in both positions. But the reality is that the vast majority of tech jobs are in the first category. There are far more people building web sites than kernel network stack hackers.
      - dalyons 4y ago
        Specifically in software, hiring is still not particularly objective, despite a decade+ of trying now. We still aren’t good at making truly objective interviews - it’s really hard, I’ve been involved in hiring at many companies and it’s just not an exact science. Ironically, the most objective hiring practices are the most hated(including by me) - lowest-common-denominator leetcode style formulaic questions with defined answers with little interpretation required by the interviewer
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Is there any evidence at all that women or minorities are in "unhirability loops"? Something like 80% of the managers I've had in my career have been Indians, and the majority of them were women. Every company I've worked at has many Indian employees, and I strongly suspect the male/female ratio was at least at parity with the hiring pipeline. Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it by hiring a different woman in some other job because humans aren't fungible.
    - mattmanser 4y ago
      Yes, for example even after decades of saying there should be more women and minority people on corporate boards, it's all still dominated by white men. California brought in a law banning all male boards in 2018 because the problem is so endemic. Not 1988, 2018. A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.[1] So this is still happening now, and for decades most boards just had a token woman at best. For me personally, when I found out about how unrepresentative corporate boardrooms were, that changed my mind about positive discrimination. It showed me clear evidence that network effects were too strong, meritocracy is a farce and it had to be broken by forcing a cultural change, i.e. positive discrimination was the right solution. If you go back far enough in my comment history here you'll probably find me arguing against it. But I learnt about the persistent gender and minority inequality on boards a decade or two ago and changed my mind. You should too. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requires-women-board-of-directors/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requi...
      - Stupulous 4y ago
        The average age of a corporate board member is ~60. If they joined the workforce at 22, it would have been in 1984. That makes it a very poor measure of present-day discrimination, because it has up to a 40 year lag on top of whatever delay exists between legislation and effect. Also, this: >A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC. is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).
- padolsey 4y ago
  Yes. Not to mince words, as others frequently do, but that's basically what's happening. The alterntive, so-called "pure meritocracy", is a farce because the implied implicit "merit" is, by the very nature of the systemic inequalities that exist, unequally distributed. And merit is transferred down the generations. Privilege begets privilege. Etc. This is the issue that we are rightfully trying to counter. It is right to try to take systemic steps to equalize access to opportunity across the board. The best (but imho still incredibly flawed) way of doing this is to use "anti-biased" hueristics to increase representation of certain people. In school admissions, for example, this might mean prioritizing applications from poorer areas. In other places this means having minimum quotas for hiring certain genders or ethnicities. Yes, to be utterly semantic, it is discriminatory. I don't know how this sits with me, but it is technically true. But, whether it sits well or not, it is virtually impossible to fiddle ourselves out of this quagmire of inequality without taking proactive _opposite_ steps. We need to somehow equalise the playing field, thus equalising access to merit, thus equalising the soundness of the so-hailed "pure meritocracy" that so many seem to uphold as the ideal.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    Are you going to complain when other people seize power and run the same game against your side, or will you say well played? Rather than fight to make the system equal and fair, you favour tilting it in your direction assuming it will never tilt the other way?
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    People shit on meritocracy until the planes start falling out of the sky and we're murdering sparrows for being capitalist saboteurs.
    - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
      Like the Boeing 737 MAX?
    - manuelabeledo 4y ago
      I'm guessing that the Boeing fiasco was because they were trying to meet quotas, then /s
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  Some leftists support “corrective discrimination”, as they are not interested in equality of opportunity but instead equality of outcome.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Very specifically, I think they're interested in achieving parity between races, genders etc, and in their eyes, a totally valid approach is to give already privileged women, minorities etc even more privilege or to further disenfranchise already underprivileged whites, men, etc. Humans are merely fungible tokens of their identity categories. Identity groups are all-important; the individuals who comprise them are expendable. At least this is the impression one gets when looking at their rhetoric and the policies they advocate.
belorn 4y ago
The classical view about violence. It is good when its done against bad people, bad when its done against good people. The world has no place for pacifists.
- gruez 4y ago
  "the whole world must learn of our peaceful ways... by force!"
- mxkopy 4y ago
  If that's how it is, then that's how it is. And by most people's definition of good and bad, this can't be incorrect. Unless they don't believe in good or bad as truthful labels, which is fair but makes things more complicated.
- Bakary 4y ago
  This makes it sound like pacifism is in itself a stable and meaningful thing but it's an opinion that can only exist with the support of the non-pacifist. You need the context of a stable territory that is maintained by force to remain a pacifist over time.
throwaway894345 4y ago
People aren't fungible. Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. The goal should be to reduce injustice, not to incur more injustice as a mechanism to achieve parity between arbitrary identity groups.
- anon291 4y ago
  No person is a problem because of theyir sex or skin color. That is what you are insinuating.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Your remark is ambiguous, so to be perfectly clear, I'm decidedly not insinuating that anyone is a problem because of their sex or skin color.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
  The state I live in is 85% white and the goal is to hire much less than 85% whites. So the goal is to create a diverse community that doesn't exist.
  - k__ 4y ago
    Diversity can foster innovation.
    - ElCheapo 4y ago
      Didn't know skin pigment contributed to innovation. "Diversity" is empty HR speak, please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation.
      - aliqot 4y ago
        > please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation To keep an open mind I did a thought experiment and found a few: entertainment, fusion food, music, those things I'd imagine benefit greatly from diversity.
nailer 4y ago
People that are for race based hiring generally consider Indian and Asian people to be overrepresented in tech so they’re not considered minorities.
throw827474737 4y ago
Yeah, the motivation if this idea is honorable (if it would just work out to some degree).. but in the end it is a late workaround doomed for he issue to come back in another way (if the experience from 99.9% of issues is transferable here) and not tackling the root cause.
danmur 4y ago
I dunno what other industries are like but I've interviewed quite a few software engineers this year and only had a couple women apply. I don't have much of an opinion on hiring incentives but it seems like focusing on the education system would be more effective.
- elevaet 4y ago
  When I did my BSc in CompSci (2000ish) there were around 10% women at enrollment, and down to 4% at graduation. It was kind of sad to me (male), and part of the reason I delayed joining the industry. It seemed like a cultural issue to me, like it was just too boyish and bro-ish for women to want to enter the programme. Sausage party effect. Judging from the department photos of graduates from past years, you could see that there were way more women in CompSci the 70s and 80s.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  How about we acknowledge that men and women are different and that includes our interests? Maybe women in general are not as interested in stem in such numbers as men are (of course, bell curves, etc.) I know it's monkeys, not people, but experiments have been done: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ > We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization.
  - dmix 4y ago
    Indeed, there's a million places where gender differences exist in personal interests that would naturally translate to the workplace. You can look at who buys military history books vs romance novels on amazon (something that's a far more voluntary, personal choice than a job which has financial and local incentives). From that you wouldn't be surprised men are far more likely to want to be in the military. It's funny what society selectively decides to deem controversial and important to change, while ignoring the million other ways that same phenomenon exists uncontroversially everywhere else in society. I don't think people care that women aren't interested in technology, they just want to see more women with x popular good paying jobs, then blame the industry for it as if there's some giant conspiracy to not hire them.
phpisthebest 4y ago
You fix the issue of Women / Minorities in STEM and leadership in primary schools if you wait until adulthood to shoe horn a equity solution using discriminatory policies you end up making everything worse I wish people would understand that.
germandiago 4y ago
what global problem? I think the way to fix a problem is to discriminate individuals just becaise we wish the composition of hires is different.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dmix 4y ago
Indians not getting hired by global tech companies isn’t a global problem and women not joining tech isn’t usually for lack of hiring policies. That starts way before in University or even high school.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
seer-zig 4y ago
Discrimination is discrimination

newsclues 4y ago

Both are discriminatory, but one is virtuous and the other is bad?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Drakim 4y ago
It can be a bad thing and still the best option you got, a lesser of two evils. I don't think anybody should lose out on a opportunity because some minority quota needs to be filled, but I also don't think minorities and discriminated groups should live in a perpetual self-reinforcing unhirability loop either.
- peteradio 4y ago
  What is the assumption here? Marginalized groups will be hired even if they aren't the better candidate? Doesn't that Peter-Principle them right out of the gate? Are we sure that this leads to better long term outcomes?
  - azangru 4y ago
    > What is the assumption here? Marginalized groups will be hired even if they aren't the better candidate? If a person making hiring decisions says that the next candidate for such-and-such role should be a person from such-and-such group (a woman, a person of color, etc.), then the criterion of being the better candidate doesn't apply. Or, rather, it gets adjusted such that belonging in the desired group is included in the list of what makes a candidate better.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      That is in interesting way to define "better candidate" being that it does not tie to the bottom line except unless there are explicit business incentives to discriminate.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - azangru 4y ago
        > it does not tie to the bottom line I completely agree with you, which is what makes all these recent trends in hiring all the more fascinating to me. If the only concern of a company were the bottom line (which I would expect it should be), then there wouldn't have been any conversation about marginalised groups etc., because, for companies, a candidate's demographics would have been irrelevant. The only thing that would have mattered is which candidate is expected to be the best fit for a given position. That it doesn't work like that suggests that companies are also political creatures, and are concerned about their public image and, possibly, about things like ESG scores. It may even be that the public image and things like ESG scores are a strong contributor to the bottom line.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    I am always amazed by this assumption that firms hire "the better candidate", absent DEI initiatives or such. In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves. Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill. It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.
    - jfim 4y ago
      That really depends on the industry. If your idea of tech is web apps and mobile apps, then yeah, most candidates would do the job. If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        Sure, and I have been in both positions. But the reality is that the vast majority of tech jobs are in the first category. There are far more people building web sites than kernel network stack hackers.
    - dalyons 4y ago
      Specifically in software, hiring is still not particularly objective, despite a decade+ of trying now. We still aren’t good at making truly objective interviews - it’s really hard, I’ve been involved in hiring at many companies and it’s just not an exact science. Ironically, the most objective hiring practices are the most hated(including by me) - lowest-common-denominator leetcode style formulaic questions with defined answers with little interpretation required by the interviewer
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Is there any evidence at all that women or minorities are in "unhirability loops"? Something like 80% of the managers I've had in my career have been Indians, and the majority of them were women. Every company I've worked at has many Indian employees, and I strongly suspect the male/female ratio was at least at parity with the hiring pipeline. Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it by hiring a different woman in some other job because humans aren't fungible.
  - mattmanser 4y ago
    Yes, for example even after decades of saying there should be more women and minority people on corporate boards, it's all still dominated by white men. California brought in a law banning all male boards in 2018 because the problem is so endemic. Not 1988, 2018. A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.[1] So this is still happening now, and for decades most boards just had a token woman at best. For me personally, when I found out about how unrepresentative corporate boardrooms were, that changed my mind about positive discrimination. It showed me clear evidence that network effects were too strong, meritocracy is a farce and it had to be broken by forcing a cultural change, i.e. positive discrimination was the right solution. If you go back far enough in my comment history here you'll probably find me arguing against it. But I learnt about the persistent gender and minority inequality on boards a decade or two ago and changed my mind. You should too. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requires-women-board-of-directors/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requi...
    - Stupulous 4y ago
      The average age of a corporate board member is ~60. If they joined the workforce at 22, it would have been in 1984. That makes it a very poor measure of present-day discrimination, because it has up to a 40 year lag on top of whatever delay exists between legislation and effect. Also, this: >A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC. is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).
padolsey 4y ago
Yes. Not to mince words, as others frequently do, but that's basically what's happening. The alterntive, so-called "pure meritocracy", is a farce because the implied implicit "merit" is, by the very nature of the systemic inequalities that exist, unequally distributed. And merit is transferred down the generations. Privilege begets privilege. Etc. This is the issue that we are rightfully trying to counter. It is right to try to take systemic steps to equalize access to opportunity across the board. The best (but imho still incredibly flawed) way of doing this is to use "anti-biased" hueristics to increase representation of certain people. In school admissions, for example, this might mean prioritizing applications from poorer areas. In other places this means having minimum quotas for hiring certain genders or ethnicities. Yes, to be utterly semantic, it is discriminatory. I don't know how this sits with me, but it is technically true. But, whether it sits well or not, it is virtually impossible to fiddle ourselves out of this quagmire of inequality without taking proactive _opposite_ steps. We need to somehow equalise the playing field, thus equalising access to merit, thus equalising the soundness of the so-hailed "pure meritocracy" that so many seem to uphold as the ideal.
- newsclues 4y ago
  Are you going to complain when other people seize power and run the same game against your side, or will you say well played? Rather than fight to make the system equal and fair, you favour tilting it in your direction assuming it will never tilt the other way?
- thrown_22 4y ago
  People shit on meritocracy until the planes start falling out of the sky and we're murdering sparrows for being capitalist saboteurs.
  - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
    Like the Boeing 737 MAX?
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    I'm guessing that the Boeing fiasco was because they were trying to meet quotas, then /s
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
newZWhoDis 4y ago
Some leftists support “corrective discrimination”, as they are not interested in equality of opportunity but instead equality of outcome.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Very specifically, I think they're interested in achieving parity between races, genders etc, and in their eyes, a totally valid approach is to give already privileged women, minorities etc even more privilege or to further disenfranchise already underprivileged whites, men, etc. Humans are merely fungible tokens of their identity categories. Identity groups are all-important; the individuals who comprise them are expendable. At least this is the impression one gets when looking at their rhetoric and the policies they advocate.

belorn 4y ago

The classical view about violence. It is good when its done against bad people, bad when its done against good people. The world has no place for pacifists.

gruez 4y ago
"the whole world must learn of our peaceful ways... by force!"
mxkopy 4y ago
If that's how it is, then that's how it is. And by most people's definition of good and bad, this can't be incorrect. Unless they don't believe in good or bad as truthful labels, which is fair but makes things more complicated.
Bakary 4y ago
This makes it sound like pacifism is in itself a stable and meaningful thing but it's an opinion that can only exist with the support of the non-pacifist. You need the context of a stable territory that is maintained by force to remain a pacifist over time.

throwaway894345 4y ago

People aren't fungible. Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. The goal should be to reduce injustice, not to incur more injustice as a mechanism to achieve parity between arbitrary identity groups.

anon291 4y ago
No person is a problem because of theyir sex or skin color. That is what you are insinuating.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Your remark is ambiguous, so to be perfectly clear, I'm decidedly not insinuating that anyone is a problem because of their sex or skin color.
dr-detroit 4y ago
The state I live in is 85% white and the goal is to hire much less than 85% whites. So the goal is to create a diverse community that doesn't exist.
- k__ 4y ago
  Diversity can foster innovation.
  - ElCheapo 4y ago
    Didn't know skin pigment contributed to innovation. "Diversity" is empty HR speak, please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      > please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation To keep an open mind I did a thought experiment and found a few: entertainment, fusion food, music, those things I'd imagine benefit greatly from diversity.

nailer 4y ago

People that are for race based hiring generally consider Indian and Asian people to be overrepresented in tech so they’re not considered minorities.

throw827474737 4y ago

Yeah, the motivation if this idea is honorable (if it would just work out to some degree).. but in the end it is a late workaround doomed for he issue to come back in another way (if the experience from 99.9% of issues is transferable here) and not tackling the root cause.

danmur 4y ago

I dunno what other industries are like but I've interviewed quite a few software engineers this year and only had a couple women apply. I don't have much of an opinion on hiring incentives but it seems like focusing on the education system would be more effective.

elevaet 4y ago
When I did my BSc in CompSci (2000ish) there were around 10% women at enrollment, and down to 4% at graduation. It was kind of sad to me (male), and part of the reason I delayed joining the industry. It seemed like a cultural issue to me, like it was just too boyish and bro-ish for women to want to enter the programme. Sausage party effect. Judging from the department photos of graduates from past years, you could see that there were way more women in CompSci the 70s and 80s.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
How about we acknowledge that men and women are different and that includes our interests? Maybe women in general are not as interested in stem in such numbers as men are (of course, bell curves, etc.) I know it's monkeys, not people, but experiments have been done: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ > We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization.
- dmix 4y ago
  Indeed, there's a million places where gender differences exist in personal interests that would naturally translate to the workplace. You can look at who buys military history books vs romance novels on amazon (something that's a far more voluntary, personal choice than a job which has financial and local incentives). From that you wouldn't be surprised men are far more likely to want to be in the military. It's funny what society selectively decides to deem controversial and important to change, while ignoring the million other ways that same phenomenon exists uncontroversially everywhere else in society. I don't think people care that women aren't interested in technology, they just want to see more women with x popular good paying jobs, then blame the industry for it as if there's some giant conspiracy to not hire them.

phpisthebest 4y ago

You fix the issue of Women / Minorities in STEM and leadership in primary schools if you wait until adulthood to shoe horn a equity solution using discriminatory policies you end up making everything worse I wish people would understand that.

germandiago 4y ago

what global problem? I think the way to fix a problem is to discriminate individuals just becaise we wish the composition of hires is different.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dmix 4y ago

Indians not getting hired by global tech companies isn’t a global problem and women not joining tech isn’t usually for lack of hiring policies. That starts way before in University or even high school.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

seer-zig 4y ago

Discrimination is discrimination