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Comment by mjbh7k | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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