8 ms·

At the same time, we should avoid using specific cases as proof that there is institutional bias, just as we should avoid using specific storms as proof of clim

At the same time, we should avoid using specific cases as proof that there is institutional bias, just as we should avoid using specific storms as proof of climate change. Of course, then all we have to work with is overwhelming statistical evidence for both issues, and that never convinces anyone.

nostromo 12y ago
Do we have statistical evidence of this bias? I'm not doubting we do, I would just like to explore it. There are many professions that are dominated by a single gender or a single ethnicity. That's not necessarily evidence of bias. There are lots of ways to explore this. For example, sending identical resumes with female and male names for engineering jobs and measuring requests for interviews.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- et1337 12y ago
  More data would be nice to have. In lieu of that, I enjoyed Scott Adams' verdict on gender bias: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gender-bias-in-the-workplace http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gend...
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    I'm not sure I'd trust the guy who wrote "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently" on gender issues.
    - shkkmo 12y ago
      I read a bit of his stuff and he seems reasonably cogent (with perhaps a bias towards ignoring the cultural basis of gender roles), but with a tendency for poorly considered word choices that get him into trouble. The full context for your quote is here: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881506316/im-a-what http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881506316/im-a-what He addresses your direct quote explicitly lower down the page: "I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar."
      - Chinjut 12y ago
        Is there not still something condescending in proclaiming that a man's best strategy for dealing with women is to deal with them in the same way one would deal with children or the mentally handicapped? It sure seems condescending to me...
        cbd1984 12y ago
        Sadly, assholes can be right, too. Having a good asshole filter doesn't mean you have a good 'this person is right' filter, or vice-versa.
      - untog 12y ago
        "I’m not saying women are similar to either group" I'm just lumping them together in the same group. Uh huh.
      - ossreality 12y ago
        Jesus Christ help you if you think that helps his case at all. Christ some men are hopeless.
    - tomp 12y ago
      And he continues: > You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles. Which is kind of a good point. I definitely don't argue with Christians about evolution because it's clearly a waste of time and I have more important things to do.
      - untog 12y ago
        ...a good point, horribly argued. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy because he is mentally handicapped and is not responsible for what he is doing. How does that relate to a woman only making 80 cents on the dollar? It's an awful, awful analogy. The implication is that a mentally handicapped man shouldn't do what he does but can't be blamed because he isn't responsible. But women should complain about earning 80c on the dollar.
        ossreality 12y ago
        How the flying fuck are you being downvoted. Just fucking kill me. I knew I should've never read this hread.
        Scarfleece 12y ago
        You probably think you're doing women a favour with this nitpicky attitude, but it only trivializes the focus of the issues to the wording choice of a single fucking person. Let the little things slide.
        untog 12y ago
        I'm not arrogant enough to think that "women" care one bit about what I'm doing. it only trivializes the focus of the issues to the wording choice of a single fucking person Have you been on Hacker News before?
        tsotha 12y ago
        >How does that relate to a woman only making 80 cents on the dollar? Because women don't make 80 cents on the dollar, unless you think brain surgeons and hairdressers ought to make the same amount of money.
    - Chinjut 12y ago
      I'm not sure why anyone gives Scott Adams credence as an expert on anything other than creating a fairly successful comic strip.
      - feybay 12y ago
        He seems to think things through and come to a lot of his conclusions logically. The parent comment illustrates this well. Just as PG is respected for opinions that aren't directly related to VC, people can be knowledgeable about things outside their main field of work. Also, nobody said Adams was an expert about feminism and the wage gap.
- brighteyes 12y ago
  There is enough evidence to be suggestive. Much of it comes not directly from tech - for example, there were studies done with identical resumes, as you suggest, which showed bias, but not in tech. Still, there is enough of that, as well as enough anecdotal data, to debate about. However, there is nowhere enough data to arrive at a solid conclusion either way. Regardless, all this is offtopic for this article. This was a lawsuit between two parties, not an attempt to prove sexism exists or does not exist among VC firms (much less tech in general).
- haberman 12y ago
  In general it's very hard to control for all factors. The most compelling analysis with robust controls that I have seen is: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 The paper shows that adding a screen to orchestra auditions significantly increased the number of women who were chosen for symphony positions. The study is very compelling because the cause/effect relationship of gender-blinding the auditions can be observed very directly. A musical audition is somewhat unique in that you can conduct the "interview" in a way that the "interviewer" remains blind to gender/race/etc.
  - joshuapants 12y ago
    One problem with this is that orchestral music is a very traditional, opinionated industry. There could be biases specific to that setting that don't show up in others.
    - eevilspock 12y ago
      Are you suggesting that the software tech industry isn't in its own way at least as traditional and opinionated?
      - joshuapants 12y ago
        The software industry is at most, what? 100 years old? 55 years old if you want to start from the beginning of the rise of business computing? It's an industry created in the midst of massive social changes that has been chasing moving targets from the beginning. Orchestral music (as we know it, an argument could be made for orchestra-like organizations going back another few millennia) has been around since the 16th century or so. That is a much longer time for exclusive traditions to develop. I'm sure they're both traditional and opinionated, but I would expect that the scale at which they manifest them will be very different.
  - Niten 12y ago
    Well it wouldn't be that outlandish to do truly blind programming interviews. Just use a collaborative editor and possibly wacom stylus (can't be any more cumbersome than the traditional whiteboard), plus a text chat interface to conduct the interview. The interviewer interacts with the candidate in real time but doesn't see him or her. Where cheating is a concern you can have a different employee (who does not provide interview feedback) monitoring the candidate over a camera to ensure they're only using the approved terminal, not phoning a friend. Any medium to large-sized software company should be able to pull this off, and it would eliminate the possibility of gender bias in the interview results.
- shkkmo 12y ago
  It's not necessarily evidence, but I imagine the correlation is quite strong. I can't think of a single counter example, where a profession is dominated not as the result of bias.
  - brighteyes 12y ago
    I don't think clinical psychology is dominated by women due to bias.
    - shkkmo 12y ago
      That's a pretty good example, but I wouldn't completely discount the role of cultural bias in amplifying the gender imbalance in that field.
    - oh_sigh 12y ago
      Why not? Or rather, why do you think technology is but clinical psychology is not?
    - klipt 12y ago
      Women are historically associated with being more "nurturing". Don't you think people would prefer to see a nurturing therapist over a non-nurturing one?
  - omonra 12y ago
    I can think of two off the top of my head: 1. Professional sports 2. Trading
    - shkkmo 12y ago
      Really? I feel like those are horrible examples. Professional Sports is one where we have gender segregation that directly leads to very different cultural and monetary values for careers in that field. Trading is a field where I would expect to find a large amount of bias and outright gender discrimination, but the evidence I have for that is anecdotal.
- onislandtime 12y ago
  My experience working for good technology companies is that most engineers truly want to hire good engineers. I was lucky to work in groups where there was no gender bias. Female colleagues or bosses where recognized and respected based on merit. Obviously this is just my experience. On the other hand bias based on age seems to be much more common. Perhaps this is part of people wanting to hire people with similar cultural background. What happens in the world of VCs and top executives has no relation to what happens in the real world. I suspect that the top 1% is dominated by jerks and males. We shouldn't extrapolate what happens there to the rest of us. Let them sue each other.
- joycey 12y ago
  I haven't been able to find an academic study specifically looking at software engineering or tech jobs, but there are other studies I've seen that send out identical resumes (with just the name changed) suggesting that men are generally perceived to be more competent. Science faculty reading resumes for a "laboratory manager" position prefer the male candidate http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract Academic psychologists are more likely to suggest hiring the male candidate http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf
untog 12y ago
At the same time, we should avoid using specific cases as proof that there is institutional bias Which isn't what the OP did. I don't know that statistical evidence is all we have - we (hopefully) have the experiences and opinions of the women we work with, know or are related to. Listening to them would be a positive thing to do.
pron 12y ago
I think the most important thing to realize -- before we look at statistics, which we definitely should -- is that if a number of people, our coworkers, feel uncomfortable at our workplaces -- and it doesn't matter whether that number is large or small -- then we should feel terrible and do something about it. Those experiences can be so horrible, that even if the number of cases is small, our sin is bad enough. Having said that, I don't believe that number is small at all. Women have been fleeing the software industry for the past few decades, showing decreasing participation and an opposite trend to that in most other industries[1], and I don't think that software is so inherently different from other technical professions. And, as an outsider who visits Silicon Valley a few times a year, I can report that my own personal, probably biased feeling, is one of being overwhelmed by a thick, palpable atmosphere of sexism that I have seen in few if any other places. I should add that I have learned to see sexism only over the past few years; before, I was completely blind to it. [1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...
- tsotha 12y ago
  >I think the most important thing to realize -- before we look at statistics, which we definitely should -- is that if a number of people, our coworkers, feel uncomfortable at our workplaces -- and it doesn't matter whether that number is large or small -- then we should feel terrible and do something about it. Or maybe they should. The legitimacy of their reasoning matters. I don't mind making changes for people who have a legitimate issue, but work is for adults.
  - pron 12y ago
    So what you're saying is, you don't mind causing other people -- your coworkers -- severe distress if their "reasoning" is faulty according to you? But, of course, that's not really what's happening. As you can see in the data, "adults" is actually "men" only when "work" is "software". I can assure you that medicine and law are no less stressful work environments than software, yet for some reason women seem to want to work in those professions more and more (as well as in science in academia and other fields of engineering) while they're fleeing software in droves. I think you should consider the possibility that you're contributing to a hostile environment that you simply can't feel because you haven't tried really putting yourself in other people's shoes. Because if that's what's happening and you're wrong, then you've just been part of something really terrible. If, on the other hand, you're right, then all you did was to "unjustifiably" adjust your behavior to relieve the suffering of some of your fellow humans. Even if you're not convinced that this big difference in ethical outcome merits changing your behavior right away, I think it at least justifies truly listening to what women are saying, and trying really, really, really hard to examine whether you just might be doing something wrong.

nostromo 12y ago

Do we have statistical evidence of this bias? I'm not doubting we do, I would just like to explore it. There are many professions that are dominated by a single gender or a single ethnicity. That's not necessarily evidence of bias. There are lots of ways to explore this. For example, sending identical resumes with female and male names for engineering jobs and measuring requests for interviews.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
et1337 12y ago
More data would be nice to have. In lieu of that, I enjoyed Scott Adams' verdict on gender bias: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gender-bias-in-the-workplace http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gend...
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  I'm not sure I'd trust the guy who wrote "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently" on gender issues.
  - shkkmo 12y ago
    I read a bit of his stuff and he seems reasonably cogent (with perhaps a bias towards ignoring the cultural basis of gender roles), but with a tendency for poorly considered word choices that get him into trouble. The full context for your quote is here: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881506316/im-a-what http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881506316/im-a-what He addresses your direct quote explicitly lower down the page: "I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar."
    - Chinjut 12y ago
      Is there not still something condescending in proclaiming that a man's best strategy for dealing with women is to deal with them in the same way one would deal with children or the mentally handicapped? It sure seems condescending to me...
      - cbd1984 12y ago
        Sadly, assholes can be right, too. Having a good asshole filter doesn't mean you have a good 'this person is right' filter, or vice-versa.
    - untog 12y ago
      "I’m not saying women are similar to either group" I'm just lumping them together in the same group. Uh huh.
    - ossreality 12y ago
      Jesus Christ help you if you think that helps his case at all. Christ some men are hopeless.
  - tomp 12y ago
    And he continues: > You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles. Which is kind of a good point. I definitely don't argue with Christians about evolution because it's clearly a waste of time and I have more important things to do.
    - untog 12y ago
      ...a good point, horribly argued. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy because he is mentally handicapped and is not responsible for what he is doing. How does that relate to a woman only making 80 cents on the dollar? It's an awful, awful analogy. The implication is that a mentally handicapped man shouldn't do what he does but can't be blamed because he isn't responsible. But women should complain about earning 80c on the dollar.
      - ossreality 12y ago
        How the flying fuck are you being downvoted. Just fucking kill me. I knew I should've never read this hread.
      - Scarfleece 12y ago
        You probably think you're doing women a favour with this nitpicky attitude, but it only trivializes the focus of the issues to the wording choice of a single fucking person. Let the little things slide.
        untog 12y ago
        I'm not arrogant enough to think that "women" care one bit about what I'm doing. it only trivializes the focus of the issues to the wording choice of a single fucking person Have you been on Hacker News before?
      - tsotha 12y ago
        >How does that relate to a woman only making 80 cents on the dollar? Because women don't make 80 cents on the dollar, unless you think brain surgeons and hairdressers ought to make the same amount of money.
  - Chinjut 12y ago
    I'm not sure why anyone gives Scott Adams credence as an expert on anything other than creating a fairly successful comic strip.
    - feybay 12y ago
      He seems to think things through and come to a lot of his conclusions logically. The parent comment illustrates this well. Just as PG is respected for opinions that aren't directly related to VC, people can be knowledgeable about things outside their main field of work. Also, nobody said Adams was an expert about feminism and the wage gap.
brighteyes 12y ago
There is enough evidence to be suggestive. Much of it comes not directly from tech - for example, there were studies done with identical resumes, as you suggest, which showed bias, but not in tech. Still, there is enough of that, as well as enough anecdotal data, to debate about. However, there is nowhere enough data to arrive at a solid conclusion either way. Regardless, all this is offtopic for this article. This was a lawsuit between two parties, not an attempt to prove sexism exists or does not exist among VC firms (much less tech in general).
haberman 12y ago
In general it's very hard to control for all factors. The most compelling analysis with robust controls that I have seen is: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 The paper shows that adding a screen to orchestra auditions significantly increased the number of women who were chosen for symphony positions. The study is very compelling because the cause/effect relationship of gender-blinding the auditions can be observed very directly. A musical audition is somewhat unique in that you can conduct the "interview" in a way that the "interviewer" remains blind to gender/race/etc.
- joshuapants 12y ago
  One problem with this is that orchestral music is a very traditional, opinionated industry. There could be biases specific to that setting that don't show up in others.
  - eevilspock 12y ago
    Are you suggesting that the software tech industry isn't in its own way at least as traditional and opinionated?
    - joshuapants 12y ago
      The software industry is at most, what? 100 years old? 55 years old if you want to start from the beginning of the rise of business computing? It's an industry created in the midst of massive social changes that has been chasing moving targets from the beginning. Orchestral music (as we know it, an argument could be made for orchestra-like organizations going back another few millennia) has been around since the 16th century or so. That is a much longer time for exclusive traditions to develop. I'm sure they're both traditional and opinionated, but I would expect that the scale at which they manifest them will be very different.
- Niten 12y ago
  Well it wouldn't be that outlandish to do truly blind programming interviews. Just use a collaborative editor and possibly wacom stylus (can't be any more cumbersome than the traditional whiteboard), plus a text chat interface to conduct the interview. The interviewer interacts with the candidate in real time but doesn't see him or her. Where cheating is a concern you can have a different employee (who does not provide interview feedback) monitoring the candidate over a camera to ensure they're only using the approved terminal, not phoning a friend. Any medium to large-sized software company should be able to pull this off, and it would eliminate the possibility of gender bias in the interview results.
shkkmo 12y ago
It's not necessarily evidence, but I imagine the correlation is quite strong. I can't think of a single counter example, where a profession is dominated not as the result of bias.
- brighteyes 12y ago
  I don't think clinical psychology is dominated by women due to bias.
  - shkkmo 12y ago
    That's a pretty good example, but I wouldn't completely discount the role of cultural bias in amplifying the gender imbalance in that field.
  - oh_sigh 12y ago
    Why not? Or rather, why do you think technology is but clinical psychology is not?
  - klipt 12y ago
    Women are historically associated with being more "nurturing". Don't you think people would prefer to see a nurturing therapist over a non-nurturing one?
- omonra 12y ago
  I can think of two off the top of my head: 1. Professional sports 2. Trading
  - shkkmo 12y ago
    Really? I feel like those are horrible examples. Professional Sports is one where we have gender segregation that directly leads to very different cultural and monetary values for careers in that field. Trading is a field where I would expect to find a large amount of bias and outright gender discrimination, but the evidence I have for that is anecdotal.
onislandtime 12y ago
My experience working for good technology companies is that most engineers truly want to hire good engineers. I was lucky to work in groups where there was no gender bias. Female colleagues or bosses where recognized and respected based on merit. Obviously this is just my experience. On the other hand bias based on age seems to be much more common. Perhaps this is part of people wanting to hire people with similar cultural background. What happens in the world of VCs and top executives has no relation to what happens in the real world. I suspect that the top 1% is dominated by jerks and males. We shouldn't extrapolate what happens there to the rest of us. Let them sue each other.
joycey 12y ago
I haven't been able to find an academic study specifically looking at software engineering or tech jobs, but there are other studies I've seen that send out identical resumes (with just the name changed) suggesting that men are generally perceived to be more competent. Science faculty reading resumes for a "laboratory manager" position prefer the male candidate http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract Academic psychologists are more likely to suggest hiring the male candidate http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

untog 12y ago

At the same time, we should avoid using specific cases as proof that there is institutional bias Which isn't what the OP did. I don't know that statistical evidence is all we have - we (hopefully) have the experiences and opinions of the women we work with, know or are related to. Listening to them would be a positive thing to do.

pron 12y ago

I think the most important thing to realize -- before we look at statistics, which we definitely should -- is that if a number of people, our coworkers, feel uncomfortable at our workplaces -- and it doesn't matter whether that number is large or small -- then we should feel terrible and do something about it. Those experiences can be so horrible, that even if the number of cases is small, our sin is bad enough. Having said that, I don't believe that number is small at all. Women have been fleeing the software industry for the past few decades, showing decreasing participation and an opposite trend to that in most other industries[1], and I don't think that software is so inherently different from other technical professions. And, as an outsider who visits Silicon Valley a few times a year, I can report that my own personal, probably biased feeling, is one of being overwhelmed by a thick, palpable atmosphere of sexism that I have seen in few if any other places. I should add that I have learned to see sexism only over the past few years; before, I was completely blind to it. [1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

tsotha 12y ago
>I think the most important thing to realize -- before we look at statistics, which we definitely should -- is that if a number of people, our coworkers, feel uncomfortable at our workplaces -- and it doesn't matter whether that number is large or small -- then we should feel terrible and do something about it. Or maybe they should. The legitimacy of their reasoning matters. I don't mind making changes for people who have a legitimate issue, but work is for adults.
- pron 12y ago
  So what you're saying is, you don't mind causing other people -- your coworkers -- severe distress if their "reasoning" is faulty according to you? But, of course, that's not really what's happening. As you can see in the data, "adults" is actually "men" only when "work" is "software". I can assure you that medicine and law are no less stressful work environments than software, yet for some reason women seem to want to work in those professions more and more (as well as in science in academia and other fields of engineering) while they're fleeing software in droves. I think you should consider the possibility that you're contributing to a hostile environment that you simply can't feel because you haven't tried really putting yourself in other people's shoes. Because if that's what's happening and you're wrong, then you've just been part of something really terrible. If, on the other hand, you're right, then all you did was to "unjustifiably" adjust your behavior to relieve the suffering of some of your fellow humans. Even if you're not convinced that this big difference in ethical outcome merits changing your behavior right away, I think it at least justifies truly listening to what women are saying, and trying really, really, really hard to examine whether you just might be doing something wrong.