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Comment by Absentinsomniac | Hacker News Reader

OK, but like 63% of the U.S consists of whites. If it were an even distribution it would be disproportionate. Whites are somewhat over represented based on your numbers, but not as much as you seem to imply.

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It sounds small when you put it that way, but try looking at the same stats from the other side: 37% of Americans aren't white, but only 21% of editors aren't. Or to put it another way, white people are twice as likely to become editors as non-white people. That's not a small difference.

> 37% of Americans aren't white, but only 21% of editors aren't.

how many chinese restaurants are run by non-chinese?

these stats don't make any sense, if you just look at them that way. maybe whites like being editors more… if you don't find the reason, you won't find the solution.

And men are how much more likely to become firemen? And women are how much more likely to be flight attendants? And men or how less likely to be in marketing?

For the life of me I can't understand why people insist on having equal representation in every industry. It'd be on thing if there were numbers proving a massive backlog of people of a certain race/gender wanting positions in a field but unable to get them. It's another entirely when there's no demand, and we insist on artificially generating it to make people feel warm and fuzzy that every job on the planet has equal representation across race/age/gender.

Furthermore, the distribution of race is not equal across the US and very very few people move further than 500 miles away from where their parents lived. The racial makeup you should expect in a company (or geographically focused industry) should be approximate that of the state and neighboring states in which that company is located (or that industry is concentrated).

US Census Quick Facts Data Sheet by State: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

Sure, but we're talking about white women, which make up about 33% of the population of the US. Are you arguing that it's ok that 79% of the publishing industry is white and 78% is female?

I'm not really trying to make a judgement on the moral aspects, I'm just a fan of accurately representing the situation. What if a disproportionate amount of the applications are from women? That'd be a societal thing and not necessarily the direct fault of hiring managers. There are a lot of important factors that need sussed out to make good decisions here.

There are plenty of women of color applying for editor positions. Yet you go to the National Book Awards and the audience is predominantly white women and Daniel Handler makes jokes about watermelon on stage [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/21/365707391/...

Ya, but we don't even know if the racial disparity and gender disparity are affected by the same factors. I'm not arguing they don't exist I'm arguing for comprehensive evaluation instead of assumptions based on incomplete information. We can do better than a survey.

It's not necessarily okay or not okay. You first need to determine what you believe the correct percentage to be and justify why you believe that that percentage is "correct" or "okay".

I'm inclined to believe that there is no correct percentage and that even trying to simplify as you have is disingenuous and leads to simple but wrong explanations that ignore all sorts of contributory factors.

I'm a cis-male that identifies as agender, but I haven't seen any evidence that I'm under-represented in the publishing industry because my gender is discriminated against. That's an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

Furthermore, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on base rates and how they contribute to measurements of diversity?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

This is what really confused me. "33% is barely enough to change culture" To me that strikes the perfect balance. You don't get diversity by only pushing on one side.

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