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Comment by rotw | Hacker News Reader

The entire point of diversity initiatives is that the meritocracy in theory doest not translate into a meritocracy in practice, due to unconscious bias: https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#... as well as other factors.

You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.

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This sentence seems like an oxymoron to me:

>> True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.

If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy. Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.

The best way to promote meritocracy is to base your decisions on merit and nothing else. To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.

> If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy.

Well, no. The point is that due to inherent unconscious biases (see my link for scientific papers documenting this), it's impossible to only take merit into account without social norms biased towards white men skewing the process. Diversity initiatives seek to eradicate this bias, in order to truly measure merit and compensate for the interfering factors.

> Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.

I really don't see what that's got to do with anything here.

> To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.

Presumably you mean "you haven't met"? Well exactly. Hence, diversity initiatives that seek to compensate in practical ways.

How about a "blind" hiring process? For software engineers, it's easy to imagine tools that could help evaluate skills without revealing that person's race or gender.

Isn't the problem that the majority of the pool of qualified applicants is mostly white/Asian males. Hiring initiatives aren't going to fix the pipeline problem.

If you work at a truly diverse tech company you can assume discriminatory hiring practices are in order.

except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person. by changing the culture they are increasing a bias that may have been less prevalent or even non existent in such a work culture.

Trying to apply normal social dynamics to a play where you have a completely async environment(meaning they don't even see each other), is a little bit of a stretch.

A lot of interviews in tech don't even involve voice or face to face communication. If you take away looks, sound and name, what else is there besides quality of work?

see my comment below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11050965

> except that because of the original remote nature of Github the first thing you saw was their work and then the person.

Unless their name is in their username. Or they have a profile picture of themselves. Or they have their real name on their commits. Or their username or picture is something stereotypically masculine/feminine.

I searched for 'things' on Github and looked at the most recent committer of the first 20 responses (easiest way I could think of to get a random sample of users). For 16 of them, I could easily see that they were male. 2 of them had their names, but I wasn't sure if the names were feminine or masculine. 2 had no hints whatsoever.

Because everything name people use online must match their govt issued ID.

I can still remember the first time I uploaded a masculine avatar I had to get a medical exam to prove I was the same gender people seeing my picture assume I am.

Its a hard world, if only we could communicate online with a total identity of our choosing! We could all pick fake names, like a pen name, or a 'pseudo' name thay wasn't real. Wjat a crazy world THAT would be @sanctus.

For bonus points, consider the gender and racial connotations entrenched within your own username - sanctus - based on the language (latin) I'm guessing you're a white roman from antiquity!

So what you're saying is that if a woman wants to avoid unconscious bias, she should avoid indicating her gender or pretend to be masculine?

What if there are other ways to overcome those biases other than stuffing the office full of people from every kind of (oppressed) minority?

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