6 ms·

Discriminatory behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) often persists, in my experience, because the perpetrators don't realize what they are doing. It's not that they

Discriminatory behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) often persists, in my experience, because the perpetrators don't realize what they are doing. It's not that they think, 'I want to exclude women from tech jobs'; they blindly follow old patterns of hiring and other behavior. Humans naturally are very egocentric and have to work to see things from others' perspectives. When they do, they change; most people don't want to be sexist. So of course many think it's meritocratic; they don't see the obstacles because they never experienced them. And of course some think they are victims of persecution; they don't see what they are perpetrating. Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our society, if a system is truly meritocratic then why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)? [1] U.S. population is 77% white, so I estimate 38% white male. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html [2] Wild guess at the % of SV tech workers that are white male. EDIT: Minor rewording for emphasis

swatow 12y ago
>Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our society, in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)? That is actually the least intellectual way you could approach the issue. You are relying on people self-censoring (and we may see some downvotes to provide some real censorship). But I will give you the uncensored answer. There are, in fact, a number of possible reasons apart from the one you have in mind. Here are some. 1) Tech is meritocratic so it attracts men who are less physically attractive or socially capable, because they mainly need technical skill. This in turn makes the field less attractive to women. 2) Tech is a monotonous job with low social status, and so it attracts people driven by ambition and desire for money, who tend to be male. 3) Women are fundamentally less interested in technology because they prefer fields with human interest (though this doesn't explain the gap between programming and, for example, math or physics). I have only really addressed the gender issue above, but I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- sago 12y ago
  "I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem." Then I don't think much of your thinking. Making up scenarios that are trivially refuted by a moment's thought is silly. How about 4) Aliens come down every night and surgically remove the bits of women's brains that are used in programming tasks. There, now I've really addressed the issue. See why 'making stuff up' isn't actually some mark of intellectual superiority? Or how about 1) How many jobs that are known for attracting socially adjusted, good looking men can you name where most of the winners are women? 2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women? 3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses. You've addressed nothing. You've made up some nonsense and pretended to be smarter than the person you're responding to, but you've directly avoided addressing the actual point.
  - swatow 12y ago
    1) How many jobs that are known for attracting socially adjusted, good looking men can you name where most of the winners are women? 2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women? Law is both high status and favors people who are attractive and have good social skills. According to [1], women are 34% of the law industry compared with 12.33% of software engineers [2]. 3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses. Not really, because there is still a gender gap in math and physics, and so this just means (3) does not explain all of the gender gap in CS. EDIT: I'm not going to reply to any comment that isn't a reply to this. You don't have to agree with the way that the delay before you can respond to a post grows exponentially as thread depth increases, but threads are unreadable if you try to circumvent it. [1] http://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/statistics.html http://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/statistics... [2] http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statistics-show-its-worse-than-you-think/ http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statis...
  - sago 12y ago
    Right, so even in fields you've been able to pick, you've not been able to show that women are the majority of the winners. You can say they're a little less frequently trumped by men. But you still have minorities in both cases. Where are all these competent women who are eschewing tech because of the lack of hot guys? Which fields are they dominating?
yummyfajitas 12y ago
I wasn't defending any particular practice as being perfectly meritocratic. If you want to argue that a blind code test (or whatever) is more meritocratic than github code review, be my guest. The point I'm making is somewhat different. The pretty people and the social justice types oppose the idea of meritocracy itself. ...in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth... Using google/twitter's easily googleable demographic numbers as representative, white males only make up about 42% of the "winners". Google/twitter are 60% white and 70% male, 70% of 60% is 42%. White males are only marginally overrepresented. It's actually Asian males who are wildly overrepresented - they make up 21% of google/twitter (70% of 30%) and 2.5% of the population. Are Asian males 8x more privileged than whites? An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops.
- sago 12y ago
  > But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist Not at all. There is little doubt that 'merit' defined as an capability or skill of an individual is not uniform. The point is that 'merit' is systemically produced. It is a function of money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors. Another way to phrase this is 'privilege', though that word is considered some kind of anathema by people who don't like to see their elevated status and capabilities as somehow a function of their environment. Absolutely Asian males are more privileged in terms of their ability to access tech jobs. Immigrant populations can have privileges in this way. Hindu families that are second or third generation immigrants to the UK from the Indian subcontinent are over-represented in medicine, for example. Is that because Indian people just make better doctors? Or is it because children of Indian descent are cultured and supported and mentored into medicine? Anyone who actually understands the last 20 years of social science, far from 'stopping intellectual discussion' are more likely to recognize that you've simply not found out or understood the issue. Which can, of course, be a sign of racism or sexism, if one is willingly ignorant. But can just be naivete or a Dunning Kruger effect.
littletimmy 12y ago
Do you want to take this percentage game further? Let's talk about Jews. If a system is truly meritocratic, how is it that 0.2% of the population of a particular demographic has 20% of the Nobel prizes? Do you think, by your standards, there is some sort of a Jewish "discriminatory behavior" at play here? I'm sure you see by now that playing this percentage game quickly gets very discriminatory itself. I think a certain percentage of a population (may that be white nerds or jews) can be over-represented not because of discrimination but because of other factors like affinity to particular subjects or being unwanted in other places (e.g white nerds might not have the social savvy to do banker schmooze jobs).
- sago 12y ago
  > Do you think, by your standards, there is some > sort of a Jewish "discriminatory behavior" at > play here? Yes. No doubt. Jewish men have certain forms of privilege, which makes it easier for some of them to access elite scientific institutions. They also have several axes in which they lack privilege. Those axes are less significant in the earning of a Nobel prize. You seem to think you've discovered intersectionality and it is a huge surprise. Or that people who are interested in a more just society would somehow recoil from identifying power differentials favouring groups that also suffer forms of oppression. That is the opposite of my experience dealing with the people who actually write and research on this topic.
  - jqm 12y ago
    It could be less privilege and more a long cultural history of intellectual activity and thus, being raised in an environment that encourages these kind of endeavors.
    - sago 12y ago
      When 'privilege' is used in these topics, it is often rather broadly defined to mean any feature of the accident of your birth that is beneficial compared to others who lack it. So yes, a long history of intellectual achievement is a privilege in that sense: the prevalence of expectation (you can do this), of value (it is worth doing this), of role-models (so and so, who is similar to you, did this), mentorship (so and so, who your uncle knows, knows people who do this), and so on. So yes, a long history of achieving X in a group tends to act as a privilege for children born in to that group, because there is a well-worn and understood path to going in that direction. I get why people hate the word 'privilege' so much, but that is basically the hegemonic term of art.
zby 12y ago
Are you sure that all internal traits needed for "winning" (what ever that means for you) have identical distribution across every possible divide of the society (by sex, race, social class, etc)? Consider this: "The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction, although the variability of male scores has been found to be greater than that of females, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence) We don't have any stats about the most failed business ideas - but I bet that males would also be overrepresented there - and this is because males are crazy risk takers. As to the other part "And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?" - I believe that this might be a tautology in a capitalistic system - those that 'win the business race' are those that also gain power in this kind of society. And I don't really mean that there is no discrimination - this is only to show that "why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners" can have answers other than discrimination. I do think there is discrimination and we should fight it, I even believe that even if there was no discrimination then still we would be better off if we had more diversity in many places - so it might make sense to do the 'reverse' discrimination (but you'd need to be very careful with that). I only want to say that to do anything positive you need to start with a good understanding of the mechanisms at play.

swatow 12y ago

>Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our society, in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)? That is actually the least intellectual way you could approach the issue. You are relying on people self-censoring (and we may see some downvotes to provide some real censorship). But I will give you the uncensored answer. There are, in fact, a number of possible reasons apart from the one you have in mind. Here are some. 1) Tech is meritocratic so it attracts men who are less physically attractive or socially capable, because they mainly need technical skill. This in turn makes the field less attractive to women. 2) Tech is a monotonous job with low social status, and so it attracts people driven by ambition and desire for money, who tend to be male. 3) Women are fundamentally less interested in technology because they prefer fields with human interest (though this doesn't explain the gap between programming and, for example, math or physics). I have only really addressed the gender issue above, but I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sago 12y ago
"I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem." Then I don't think much of your thinking. Making up scenarios that are trivially refuted by a moment's thought is silly. How about 4) Aliens come down every night and surgically remove the bits of women's brains that are used in programming tasks. There, now I've really addressed the issue. See why 'making stuff up' isn't actually some mark of intellectual superiority? Or how about 1) How many jobs that are known for attracting socially adjusted, good looking men can you name where most of the winners are women? 2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women? 3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses. You've addressed nothing. You've made up some nonsense and pretended to be smarter than the person you're responding to, but you've directly avoided addressing the actual point.
- swatow 12y ago
  1) How many jobs that are known for attracting socially adjusted, good looking men can you name where most of the winners are women? 2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women? Law is both high status and favors people who are attractive and have good social skills. According to [1], women are 34% of the law industry compared with 12.33% of software engineers [2]. 3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses. Not really, because there is still a gender gap in math and physics, and so this just means (3) does not explain all of the gender gap in CS. EDIT: I'm not going to reply to any comment that isn't a reply to this. You don't have to agree with the way that the delay before you can respond to a post grows exponentially as thread depth increases, but threads are unreadable if you try to circumvent it. [1] http://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/statistics.html http://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/statistics... [2] http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statistics-show-its-worse-than-you-think/ http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statis...
- sago 12y ago
  Right, so even in fields you've been able to pick, you've not been able to show that women are the majority of the winners. You can say they're a little less frequently trumped by men. But you still have minorities in both cases. Where are all these competent women who are eschewing tech because of the lack of hot guys? Which fields are they dominating?

yummyfajitas 12y ago

I wasn't defending any particular practice as being perfectly meritocratic. If you want to argue that a blind code test (or whatever) is more meritocratic than github code review, be my guest. The point I'm making is somewhat different. The pretty people and the social justice types oppose the idea of meritocracy itself. ...in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth... Using google/twitter's easily googleable demographic numbers as representative, white males only make up about 42% of the "winners". Google/twitter are 60% white and 70% male, 70% of 60% is 42%. White males are only marginally overrepresented. It's actually Asian males who are wildly overrepresented - they make up 21% of google/twitter (70% of 30%) and 2.5% of the population. Are Asian males 8x more privileged than whites? An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops.

sago 12y ago
> But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist Not at all. There is little doubt that 'merit' defined as an capability or skill of an individual is not uniform. The point is that 'merit' is systemically produced. It is a function of money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors. Another way to phrase this is 'privilege', though that word is considered some kind of anathema by people who don't like to see their elevated status and capabilities as somehow a function of their environment. Absolutely Asian males are more privileged in terms of their ability to access tech jobs. Immigrant populations can have privileges in this way. Hindu families that are second or third generation immigrants to the UK from the Indian subcontinent are over-represented in medicine, for example. Is that because Indian people just make better doctors? Or is it because children of Indian descent are cultured and supported and mentored into medicine? Anyone who actually understands the last 20 years of social science, far from 'stopping intellectual discussion' are more likely to recognize that you've simply not found out or understood the issue. Which can, of course, be a sign of racism or sexism, if one is willingly ignorant. But can just be naivete or a Dunning Kruger effect.

littletimmy 12y ago

Do you want to take this percentage game further? Let's talk about Jews. If a system is truly meritocratic, how is it that 0.2% of the population of a particular demographic has 20% of the Nobel prizes? Do you think, by your standards, there is some sort of a Jewish "discriminatory behavior" at play here? I'm sure you see by now that playing this percentage game quickly gets very discriminatory itself. I think a certain percentage of a population (may that be white nerds or jews) can be over-represented not because of discrimination but because of other factors like affinity to particular subjects or being unwanted in other places (e.g white nerds might not have the social savvy to do banker schmooze jobs).

sago 12y ago
> Do you think, by your standards, there is some > sort of a Jewish "discriminatory behavior" at > play here? Yes. No doubt. Jewish men have certain forms of privilege, which makes it easier for some of them to access elite scientific institutions. They also have several axes in which they lack privilege. Those axes are less significant in the earning of a Nobel prize. You seem to think you've discovered intersectionality and it is a huge surprise. Or that people who are interested in a more just society would somehow recoil from identifying power differentials favouring groups that also suffer forms of oppression. That is the opposite of my experience dealing with the people who actually write and research on this topic.
- jqm 12y ago
  It could be less privilege and more a long cultural history of intellectual activity and thus, being raised in an environment that encourages these kind of endeavors.
  - sago 12y ago
    When 'privilege' is used in these topics, it is often rather broadly defined to mean any feature of the accident of your birth that is beneficial compared to others who lack it. So yes, a long history of intellectual achievement is a privilege in that sense: the prevalence of expectation (you can do this), of value (it is worth doing this), of role-models (so and so, who is similar to you, did this), mentorship (so and so, who your uncle knows, knows people who do this), and so on. So yes, a long history of achieving X in a group tends to act as a privilege for children born in to that group, because there is a well-worn and understood path to going in that direction. I get why people hate the word 'privilege' so much, but that is basically the hegemonic term of art.

zby 12y ago

Are you sure that all internal traits needed for "winning" (what ever that means for you) have identical distribution across every possible divide of the society (by sex, race, social class, etc)? Consider this: "The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction, although the variability of male scores has been found to be greater than that of females, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence) We don't have any stats about the most failed business ideas - but I bet that males would also be overrepresented there - and this is because males are crazy risk takers. As to the other part "And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?" - I believe that this might be a tautology in a capitalistic system - those that 'win the business race' are those that also gain power in this kind of society. And I don't really mean that there is no discrimination - this is only to show that "why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners" can have answers other than discrimination. I do think there is discrimination and we should fight it, I even believe that even if there was no discrimination then still we would be better off if we had more diversity in many places - so it might make sense to do the 'reverse' discrimination (but you'd need to be very careful with that). I only want to say that to do anything positive you need to start with a good understanding of the mechanisms at play.