7 ms·
"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job." That looks like sexi
by victorhn 14y ago
"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job."
That looks like sexism to me.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- arrrg 14y agoIf the qualification is equal I would very much hope that the person that increases diversity is hired. Why would you do anything else?
- abduhl 14y agoI would probably pick the person that meshes with the team best rather than the one that panders to my internal sense of injustice.
- Evbn 14y agoI would pick the person who would broaden my team's perspective and not reinforce our biases.
- enraged_camel 14y agoI don't understand why the decision has to be based on only one criteria.
- arrrg 14y agoIf you think someone doesn’t fir your team because of their gender there is something seriously wrong with you.
- moistgorilla 14y agoHe didn't say he would...
- arrrg 14y agoAnd I didn’t say he or she would.
- robwgibbons 14y agoActually, it makes more business sense to hire the person who fits in best with the current team. If sexual diversity is the goal, kudos for sexism, hire the female. Where all other qualifications are equal, companies should hire the person who best fits the team strictly on a personality basis. If a man were hired over a woman at a mostly-female company because of diversification policies, I would still consider that sexism.
- sahat 14y ago"That looks like sexism to me." That's reality.
- jlarocco 14y agoSo are "brogrammers". Being reality doesn't make it right, and doesn't mean it should be tolerated.
- arbuge 14y agoToo hypothetical anyway. Skill level, or more precisely the interviewers' opinion of it, is never precisely equal between candidates. It includes soft skills besides programming.
- seabornlee 14y agoBut I think it mostly depends on how the woman looks like, do you agree?
- electrozoic 14y agoI sincerely hope that I've never been a pity/diversity hire. I want to be evaluated on my qualifications as a well-rounded developer and compensated appropriately for my work.
- hdragomir 14y agoI'm sure you weren't. Why would you even think that, since you're doing great work, most probably.
- legitsource 14y agoWhat's even more troublesome than being a diversity/affirmative action hire is when you aren't one and other people assume you were one. When a group is artificially bumped up in the rankings (or is perceived to have been), everyone assumes they are not as skilled as they really are.
- vacri 14y agoIn order to test it, we'll need at least two thousand developers (in matched skill pairs) going for one thousand jobs. It might take a little while to perform that experiment...
- reso 14y agoRealistically, this choice would never happen, because any decent software shop would hire both if they were identically qualified.
- booop 14y agoNot if they have the resources to hire only one.
- jamesmcn 14y agoA decent software shop is more constrained by headcount than funds to pay them.
- CrankyPants 14y agoFor your definition of "decent."
- CrankyPants 14y agoIt's only sexism if it uses sex as a criteria to disadvantage someone who isn't male, in the same way that it's only racism if it uses race as a criteria to disadvantage someone who isn't caucasian.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rmc 14y agoThere used to be many caucasian-on-caucasian racism. Many places would still count it as breaking anti-discrimination law. After all, "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs". That's racist for 2 reasons.
- EliRivers 14y ago"That looks like sexism to me." You say that as if letting someone's gender affect your decisions is somehow, magically, inherently always ALWAYS wrong. It isn't. Some situations it is. Some situations it is not.
- jrogers65 14y agoI'd just like to express my astonishment and disgust at the fact that there are people who defend sexism and prejudice in this day and age. People like you make me ashamed to be human.
- kalkin 14y agoJeez, as far as I can tell the person you're replying to is just defending affirmative action.
- jrogers65 14y agoMany people argue that affirmative action is institutionalized racism.
- kalkin 14y agoMany people ... who don't know what institutional racism looks like. (One requirement would probably be that the discriminated-against group actually ends up with worse outcomes. Compare to say, Black people in the criminal justice system.) I mean, seriously, even if you oppose affirmative action, do you really want to say that its advocates are morally equivalent to racial oppressors and make you ashamed of humanity? Martin Luther King, Jr. makes you ashamed of humanity?
- jrogers65 14y agoPerhaps our definitions of institutional racism differ but I'm going by the dictionary definition: >Accepted social arrangements that exclude on the basis of race. Source: http://dictionary.babylon.com/institutional_racism/ http://dictionary.babylon.com/institutional_racism/ As such, affirmative action fits the bill. Martin Luther King Jr preached that since whites had actively harmed blacks through the practice of slavery, they should do something special to fix it. I agree with that. However, the whites who are coming of age at this point in time have done nothing of the sort - why should they have to apologise for the actions of their predecessors? Why should a young white woman be punished for things that happened before she was even born? Is she responsible for the actions of all the whites who have ever lived just because she is also white? Do you really think that MLK was talking about future generations who are disconnected from those actions or the people who were right in front of him and still actively encouraging prejudice and racism back in those days? My personal opinion is that if someone participated in those practices, they should make good on them, say sorry, and help the person up, which includes paying what's owed and making room for them.
- rmc 14y agoThere are several definitions of sexism, one is essentially "taking someone's sex or gender into account when making a decision". This appears to be the definition you're using. It's a very simple, easy to understand, easy to identify definiton. It also means that in many cases (e.g. hiring in an IT company), men can be the victims of sexism. There's another definition, which is actions that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among sexist. Right now, if modern UK life was a video game, "male" would be an easier difficulty level than "female". There are statistically less problems for the "male" group. Sexist actions are actions that re-enforced that imbalance. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means you can't just do s/female/male/g and make it just as sexist. (There are some cases where there's an inbalance in favour of women, any men here ever took up knitting & crochet? Try getting involved in that, you'll see things from the other side)
- yummyfajitas 14y agoif modern UK life was a video game, "male" would be an easier difficulty level than "female". Can you explain this in concrete terms? This meme is repeated often, but few people actually explain what it means. Taking it literally, it would suggest that monsters receive +20% elemental resistance when women attack them with an ice-infused mace. But that's probably not what you mean. There are statistically less problems for the "male" group. If we are discussing statistical incidence of problems, why choose "male" and "female" as your reference classes? Why not simply choose incidence of problems as the variable to slice on? This definition is harder for some people to accept... It's not the definition that is hard to accept. If this was a definitional problem, we'd quickly find ourselves here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/ Your "definition" contains implicit claims about the world which you haven't justified (i.e., it's a definition + assertions).
- kalkin 14y agoCan you explain this in concrete terms? Women still make 77 cents to the male dollar. Women have much higher incidences of anxiety and depression disorders. Women are substantially more likely to be the victims of domestic violence, and 1 in 5 are raped. Etc etc. These statistics don't guarantee that every woman is worse off than every man - clearly that's not true - but they do mean that women have, on average, more difficult problems to deal with in their lives. If we are discussing statistical incidence of problems, why choose "male" and "female" as your reference classes? Why not simply choose incidence of problems as the variable to slice on? There are statistically significant differences in various problems between men and women, which are correlated, and which we have good reason to believe are causally related - because if you're paying any attention at all, you know that men and women are treated differently in our society. (And if you investigate further, you find you can explain what you see with a historical and social analysis that looks at things like the subordination of women in the family and the social division of labor with the development of class society, the hegemony of oppressive political and cultural ideologies, and so on.) Usually, if you're trying to fix something, it's worth trying to figure out what the root causes are.