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Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All".

Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Or that 10% are black women? Or that 35% of women are in a leadership role? Like who cares? Are their roles assigned based on their gender and/or skin color?

Jesus, even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things. Let people build their career based on how they work and not their ethnicity nor gender, otherwise you will be incentivizing more racism and more sexism.

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> The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people.

It's not "just to please other people"; it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country.

Studies have shown[1] that, for example, people with "White-sounding" names get more responses from job applications than people with "Black-sounding" names, even when the resumes sent in are identical.

[1]: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...

> it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country.

No. The reason companies hire in this way is to defend against discrimination lawsuits. The Supreme Court already decided against the principle you're describing in the ruling of the Bakke case.

> The reason companies hire in this way is to defend against discrimination lawsuits.

That sounds like maybe a broader statement that you intended... Certainly not every company has that plan. Are you talking about a specific kind of company?

Perhaps "protect against potential lawsuits" is a better phrasing. Fear of accusations of disparate impact hiring is very real for HR, not to mention the negative press even if you beat the charges. In the specific case of Github, fallout from the Horvath fiasco. Better to spend some resources preventatively to make sure your employee composition can reasonably help fend off attacks.

I understand the kind of company you are talking about, I was just asking if you really intended to say that all companies are like that, or if you are talking about a specific kind of company. In my experience people don't generally think about potential lawsuits all that much. I'm only curious because you must have experience in a different kind of company than me.

I'm gently trying to encourage you to narrow your statement because it is too broad to make sense to me.

I am not privy to what goes on inside secret meetings of the C suite, but as a tech employee who also owns a side business (non tech) with a couple of partners who've run other businesses, protecting yourself from lawsuits is always a concern. My guess is, if you ever find yourself in a casual conversation with someone in HR you will get an affirmative answer as to whether candidates' diversity in their non-necessary attributes (e.g. sex, ethnicity, country of origin, religion) are considered assets to the company beyond their relevance to qualifications to do the job for the sake of EEOC. No, I won't narrow the statement any further, but I will disclose that I work in a major and "politically liberal" metropolitan area in the USA. Granted, it may be less so in areas with a more homogeneous population, but I'd wager there's still even a concern even with regards to ageism.

thank you, that is really helpful context for me!

I'd agree with that. When I've been a hiring manager, I've definitely gone to a lot of trouble to "attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities". Lawsuits were never my worry.

"Institutional racism,"(has it undergone re-branding as "institutionalized discrimination"?) is this vague, boogey-man term used as an explanation of last resort to explain the "achievement gap," among other divergences between the races.

The thing is, there is tenuous evidence at best for "institutional racism," and in nowhere near the quantity that would be needed to account for all of its supposed effects. Indeed to the contrary we've had decades of policies seeking parity between between certain segments of society on various measures, and yet the gaps remain virtually unchanged.

There are other exceedingly more plausible explanations for the "achievement gap" and the other divergences. But people in certain segments of polite society have a nasty habit of trying to ruin the lives of anyone who so much as mutters these other explanations.

For the "institutional racism" proponents...

Has anyone attempted to explain why all this "institutional racism" seems to be working to such great benefit for north-east Asians in the US, who consistently rank above the supposed "evil white oppressors" in various socio-economic metrics?

Or why we see common patterns of achievement and behavior between races across societies with wildly different institutional histories?

"Institutional racism,” also “Systemic racism,” is not a vague, bogeyman term, it has a specific and objective meaning. It can be measured and has been measured, repeatedly.

In almost every area of American life, there are measurable effects. Blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crimes. They are more likely to be sent to prison and to get longer prison sentences given the same criminal records and the same circumstances.

As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names.

These are facts, and on Hacker News we prize facts. As it is so often put when talking about things like creationism, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.”

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What I am finding more and more is a certain type of rhetoric, I will call it “Racism Denial.” It works just like Creationism Denial and Climate Change Denial. The denialist does not approach these discussions with any good faith attempt to discuss the issues or to weigh the factors on display.

The denialist has an agenda, and the agenda is to derail progress, to disrupt any and all attempts to fix what ails the system.

This is because the denialist fears that change will hurt them personally. The creationist denies evolution, because accepting evolution means turning away from the creationist God, which means letting go of the religious fervour that they have adopted as a core part of their identity.

The climate change denier denies climate change because accepting climate change means another step towards ending certain industries and jobs. They fear the loss of their income, the dissolution and decay of their coal mining town, the loss of jobs making gasoline-powered cars and a transfer of economic wealth to places like California where they make clean electric cars.

So let me ask you: What do you personally fear from people nodding and saying “Yes, there is systemic racism in America?” What do you think you will lose? What bad things will happen to you and to America if people stop pretending there is a problem and stop blaming blacks for everything that happens to them?

Why are you trying so hard to pretend there’s nothing going on?

As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names.

That is an oft-cited conclusion from an old study that has not been reproduced in the tech industry (the classic one is http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873, a 2003 study in Boston and Chicago where they submitted resumes based on newspaper ads), where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates.

Someone should repro this in tech, though, it would be quite useful to know how things look here and now!

> where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates

My guess is that if this is true at all, it's true only for a relatively small number of prominent companies, and that it has only recently become true. There's certainly a lot of public discussion, but I suspect it only weakly correlates with private discussion at most tech companies, and that in turn weakly correlates with actual action.

Like you, I'd like to see it reproduced. A few years back, when bias-denial was more entrenched, I paid a researcher a few thousand dollars to look at reproducing it. It's certainly doable, but there are a number of challenges, and ultimately I decided it wouldn't move the discussion forward as much as I hoped; the denialists and the foot-draggers would just pick nits or find something else to use as a shield. And the people who understand the problem don't really need more proof.

But if you (or anybody (or a coalition of anybodies)) would like to drop $20-50k on doing a tech-specific version of this, drop me a line and I can put you in touch with researchers and share my notes.

Another interesting parallel, is the people who turn up on articles about renewable energy to tell you that wind power doesn't work, that it kills birds, that it uses more carbon than it saves etc. And then it becomes clear they don't believe in climate change, and that is what drives their involvement in the conversation. This then makes their opinions on how best to solve climate change a bit suspect at best.

Similarly, if you believe that racism doesn't exist or (subtly different) that some races are simply inferior and thus deserve a lowly place in society, then your list of talking points on the horrors of affirmative action ring very hollow.

> What I am finding more and more is a certain type of rhetoric, I will call it “Racism Denial.”

That's an excellent name for it. What I find especially frustrating about it is how it's dressed up in a search for objective truth. However, the only kind of evidence they want is the kind that proves racism. They never appear to search for evidence for the opposite proposition, that racism does not exist. That's always their given, their ground, their unquestioned assumption.

In the broader historical context, that's ridiculous. The US's history is enormously racist. We fought an entire civil war over whether black people were actually people. The racism denialists are in effect claiming that on some unspecified date in history, all of that racism evaporated and left no trace in heart, mind, or law. That's the proposition I think we should be demanding evidence for.

The US's history is enormously racist. We fought an entire civil war over whether black people were actually people. The racism denialists are in effect claiming that on some unspecified date in history, all of that racism evaporated and left no trace in heart, mind, or law. That's the proposition I think we should be demanding evidence for.

What explains the similarity in crime rates, test scores, achievement, SES, between Africans in the US, England, and Sweden? 2 of the 3 having no history of enslaving Africans.

Yes, that's exactly the sort of racism-denialist burden-shifting that I am talking about. Thank you for demonstrating it so neatly.

You're taking observations(one of them isn't even a factual observation[0]) and then a priori assigning a cause, "systemic racism," to those observations. That is not how facts, or rational, coherent reasoning works.

[0] Races aren't arrested at different rates for the same crimes, race percentage in victim reports match race percentage in arrests.

Drug arrest rate appear to vary as the result of compound charges, i.e. while being arrested for another crime, blacks happen to have drugs on them. Because blacks commit some crimes at a much higher rate than whites the drug numbers look biased without this context.

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Reread the questions and arguments I posed, then if you want to respond to them, ok, but otherwise don't waste my time.

Your entire argument is based on a false dichotomy. You say “There is no racism, everything can be explained by black people” and then try to demonstrate that black people have some problem or other.

But this is like saying that a road cannot be unsafe, look, here are statistics showing that some of the people who drive are drunk.

You trying to demonstrate that black people this or black people that in aggregate does not in any way invalidate the proposition that there is systemic racism.

Racism is, quite simply, when individuals are not judged on their merits, but on their membership in a class. If you say to me that statistically this or that or the other thing about American Blacks, that does not in any way say that individuals are not being judged and incurring negative opportunities because of their being black.

If anything, the message you are putting out is, “Yes, there is racism, but look, here is why it is justified.” I have debunked this argument before, and I won’t waste my time retyping the entire thing out.

“Racism is Socially Engineered Injustice:” http://braythwayt.com/2016/03/30/racism-is-injustice.html

And you are definitely attempting to socially engineer injustice. Witness the fact that in this alleged rebuttal, you ignored the major accusation I made: That you are denying racism exists.

What you did id completely ignore that and go back to trying to prattle on about how bad black people are. So I charge you again: Why are you so invested in getting people to believe that there is no racism?

What are you working so hard to prevent?

When riding a bike, I think it is wise to judge the class "car drivers on Saturday night," different than the class "car drivers on Tuesday afternoon," because "car drivers on Saturday night" are more likely to be drunk.

I ignored all the stuff where you went off the rails and started making wacky accusations, or whatever, it wasn't particularly clear...

My only mention of blacks was in showing how the talking point of "arrested more often for the same crimes(drug possession)" doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you consider how often those drug crimes are occurring in combination with other more serious crimes. In that case it is perfectly reasonable to talk in aggregate, since that is what you were doing in relaying that faulty stat.

that does not in any way say that individuals are not being judged and incurring negative opportunities because of their being black.

Whether that is occurring and to what degree cannot be said. Even if it could, what do you want to do about it? You can't just re-education camp everyone until they meet your standards.

Human nature doesn't work that way. But maybe you can take solace in knowing that biases may present themselves not just about racial groups. Saturday night drivers may be judged differently than other days, men may be judged more suspiciously around small children than women, investments more likely to return money may be judged as more favorable places to put money.

This is clearly a personal issue for you. I think we agree that we both want the best for all people.

My feeling is that for a harmonious society with integrity, we need to ascribe to phenomena, causes for which there is clear evidence for a causal relationship.

If you want to ascribe "institutional racism" as the cause to certain phenomena, but the observation can be made that those same phenomena exist in environments without the institutions you are blaming, Mexican performance in Mexico vs the USA for example, then the "institutional racism" theory doesn't hold water.

But even without that avenue to negate, you would still need significant evidence to validate the "institutional racism" theory. You can't just say, "I've observed Phenomenon B, and I've theorized Cause A, so A must cause B."

Decrying "institutional racism" as this kind of ambiguous, universal menace doesn't help anybody. First you would need clear evidence of it. Then it wouldn't be ambiguous, then you could solve the problem. You can't solve ambiguous problems, they need to be specific.

If you can't even lay out clear unambiguous evidence for the problem you are trying solve, then how will you know when it is solved? What are you fighting for?

>Has anyone attempted to explain why all this "institutional racism" seems to be working to such great benefit for north-east Asians in the US, who consistently rank above the supposed "evil white oppressors" in various socio-economic metrics?

Since others are picking apart your argument in the large, I'll just add this. Institutional racism, though it continues to manifest in the present, can only be fully understood through history: the extremely racist practices and policies of past generations of Americans have had compounding effects through time on the populations subjected to them. Regarding Asian American immigrants, the vast majority of them have only arrived since the 1960s[0], so they've had much less time to be dragged down by systemic racism. And additionally, the fact that they are lighter of skin tone tends to make them a less targeted group by racist actors.

>Or why we see common patterns of achievement and behavior between races across societies with wildly different institutional histories?

Who is 'we' and what exactly do 'we see'??? I'm dying to know.

[0]http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/asian-immigrants-unit...

Since others are picking apart your argument in the large

Ha! No one else has even evidenced reading the post, I applaud you for seeming to have at least read it.

so they've had much less time to be dragged down by systemic racism.

They're not being "dragged down" at all, they're being "pushed up." There is no reason to think that given enough time they will eventually be dragged down.

There is not some race in the US conspiring to keep other races down given enough time. I'd imagine any race accussed of such a thing would find it highly offensive.

Far be it from me to make the accusation, but there is precedent to say that Asians and Jews are oppressing everyone else in the US because of their greater average income, and because they hold "high prestige" positions in proportionally greater numbers.

There is no evidence for societal wide mechanisms keeping particular races down. People looks at measurements, see differences, then try to blame the measuring stick, i.e. society for the differences.

the fact that they are lighter of skin tone tends to make them a less targeted group by racist actors.

That doesn't even sound like the way people like to imagine "institutional racism." I thought the whole point was that there is no conscious targetting and not anyone particular actor but society as a whole in some fuzzy, unspecified way is to blame.

Who is 'we' and what exactly do 'we see'??? I'm dying to know.

I don't get this tone here.

We is anyone who looks, what we see is similarity in crime rates, test scores, achievement, SES, income, etc. anything people in the US try to ascribe to "institutional racism." Yet we see similar metrics and behavior in countries with different institutional histories, and in the countries where these US minorities originate.

If you're going to call out people for not reading your post, at least have the courage to answer my response to your initial post.

Please enlighten the rest of us with what the more plausible explanations are.

> It's not "just to please other people"; it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country.

Your counterpoint to that quote can itself be reduced to "just to please other people," for what it's worth; it just slightly changes who the "people" are and what "pleasing" means, if you really think about it. Perhaps you and GP don't entirely disagree, depending on how one interprets things.

Important: I am not stating an opinion on this because I know better in these threads. That is an merely an observation on the observation.

Given the widespread use of pro-black affirmative-action (practiced by GitHub, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft; nearly every major university; many government contractors; and probably the majority of F500 companies), isn't it only logical to view black resumes with more suspicion? Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites.

On a side note, affirmative action policies ultimately help middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites. The upper-class whites who push for affirmative action are not affected by it, and neither are their children.

Helping middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites is a prime example of virtue signaling gone awry.

> Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites.

The scientific consensus is that the opposite is true, that black people need to display higher competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites, which is precisely why affirmative action is hoped to be valuable. See "Social Justice for the Highly-Demanding of Rigor" for a meta-analysis of over a dozen separate scientific studies: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-...

That article does not refute what I'm saying.

By the 1990s, affirmative action was already in full swing. Universities and large companies were already on board, as was the federal government and many state and local governments.

Additionally, by the 1990s, the national media had been very sympathetic to affirmative action policies for at least 20 years—you would have been hard-pressed to find a single American who didn't know those policies existed. So it was already perfectly reasonable (and expected) for a profit-seeking non-racist [1] to view black resumes with more suspicion.

[1]: And indeed, the studies mentioned in the article showed that blacks and whites exhibited the same bias toward black resumes.

Furthermore, regarding the studies mentioned in the article, there are some important question that need answering (by someone who has access):

1. To which employers did the subjects apply?

2. How were those employers selected?

3. Did any of those employers have pro-black affirmative action policies?

4. If the studies did include employers with pro-black affirmative action policies, how heavily were those employers represented in terms of applications? This is important: even if only 2% of employers have pro-black affirmative action policies (a number far too low), those employers might employ (directly or indirectly) 60% of Americans.

It's a direct counterargument to what you're saying.

You're saying that due to 20 years of affirmative action policies where a black person who is less competent than a white person is able to put an identical item on their resume, it's reasonable to expect that a black person with an identical resume as a white person is less competent. Is that a mischaracterization?

I said that the scientific consensus is that the opposite is true, that a black person has to be more competent to be able to put an identical item on their resume. Therefore affirmative action when considering resumes is reasonable.

> ... non-racist [1] ... [1]: And indeed, the studies mentioned in the article showed that blacks and whites exhibited the same bias toward black resumes.

This is generally taken to mean that black people are just as racist as white people, just like women can be just as sexist as men. I'm not sure why you're concluding that non-racists can be racially biased (which seems to me like a contradiction in terms).

> Furthermore, regarding the studies mentioned in the article, there are some important question that need answering

What answers to those questions would change your mind, and what answers do you believe should change my mind?

> On a side note, affirmative action policies ultimately help middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites. The upper-class whites who push for affirmative action are not affected by it, and neither are their children.

Data to back that up?

> isn't it only logical to view black resumes with more suspicion? Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites.

No, that's against the law (in the US).

Affirmative action, as commonly practiced for university admissions, don't hurt whites at all. They primarily hurt Asian-American applicants.

> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

That is not true.

Racism (and other forms of discrimination) exist in South/Latin America. It's just very well hidden. It does not exist in discourse, but profiling is blatant and in many ways even accepted. I'd argue that it's so culturally entrenched that even discussing it is crazy talk. People just like to assume it's not there, and even minorities seem to assume it's a given that they're mistreated. But it exists in very acute ways.

It's complete BS. Even anti-semitism in South America is through the roof.

"A 2011 poll conducted by the Gino Germani Research Institute of the University of Buenos Aires on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League and Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas showed that a majority of Argentines held anti-semitic sentiments or prejudices. Of the 1,510 Argentines surveyed, 82% agreed with statements "that Jews are preoccupied with making money," 49% said that they "talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust", 68% said that they have "too much power in the business world", and 22% said that the Jews killed Jesus. The majority of people interviewed also expressed belief that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their country of birth"[0]

[0] http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Study-reve...

I've known a number of people from various Latin American countries, and am married to one of them, and they've pretty consistently report that racism is a feature of society there, though the particular forms vary. Anti-black racism is apparently significant in many parts of Latin America, as is (though not separate in the same places) anti-indigenous racism.

Just the other day I read a comment on HN, I think, about how in Mexico there is racial stratification between light and dark-skinned people, and how they even have different ways of speaking. The point was that people can tell immediately which class you are in and act accordingly.

So, yeah, I think this is a (bad) feature of humans everywhere, not just the US.

An Indian colleague of mine told me that she felt it was the same in India with respect to the caste system (she was born a Brahmin). She said she could tell from the way people spoke what caste they were from.

When I hear folks from India talk about the caste system, it sounds very similar to how people in the US talk about racism against blacks.

No, you cannot tell what caste a person is by the way they talk. There are 800+ languages and thousand of dialects in India. On an average the dialect changes every 7 kilometer is any direction. You cannot also visually tell the difference between high/low caste.

The best indicator is last name and hence social strata (centuries of exploitation has left them 'backward'). There are plenty of 'backward caste' people in high position and extremely rich.

Though racism and casteism have similar effects they are not the same

> No, you cannot tell what caste a person is by the way they talk.

That is your belief and experience. I was trying to point out that some people from India feel that the opposite is true.

I have no knowledge of the caste system other than what people have told me from their own experience of being Indian.

Skin whitening products are sold in India and advertised on television. https://www.fairandlovely.in/

Yep, just like in the US.

> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

Are you aware that Brazil, the largest South American country, imported more slaves than anyone else? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil

I find it extremely hard to believe that racism does not exist in Latin or South America.

I am originally from Peru and yeah, people over there are very racist against the mountain/native people so much that people try to get away from their native heritage very often. A white skinned person with a European name and/or complexion has way more opportunities and an easier life.

That said, GP may not feel this way because racism in those countries (well, mine at least) is not called out often like it's in the US, so it doesn't feel like it's a problem because no one gets in trouble or protests it.

I'm an American born to a Brazilian father and American mother and I can confirm that racism is more than alive and well down there.

At least where the paternal half of my family is from (the northeast)

Companies want to be in a possition where if a talented candidate is african american, female, gay, transgender, ect. that they wouldn't turn down the offer simply because they didn't feel comfortable working there/there is another company that is more diverse that makes this kind of person more comfortable there.

The talent war is so competitive that companies are doing everything they can to keep up, including diversity blog posts.

I still find the whole "talent war is so competitive" statement a bit of a hype. Is there any data on this? There are millions of Engineers in the US.

But the flip side of that is that talent not in the coddled identity class of the day will feel that they should find companies with actual important shit to focus on to work for.

I love the "too busy doing important things" argument for why nobody should spend any time thinking about diversity. Of course, deciding what is important in life is an entirely subjective matter. But just to aid in my understanding of this argument, I would be interested to hear some examples of which companies and activities constitute actual important shit.

Important things: producing a good or service that is valuable to some market and that supports the livelihoods of employees/stakeholders in an equitable way.

Not important things: disfavoring groups of people that it is currently stylish to consider as "oppressive", "problematic", or "triggering" in favor of other groups of people that are currently deemed to be "diverse", "oppressed", "modern".

Real life isn't handing out stickers to preschoolers.

So obviously there is quite a lot of overlap between companies doing important things (by that incredibly broad definition) and companies that devote some of their resources to diversity. It's almost as if working on important things and caring about diversity are not mutually exclusive, that people/companies can care about multiple things...

I don't get why it is so irksome to you that a company would make a diversity effort. It should be irrelevant to the question of whether they are working on important things.

I would guess that you're straight, white, and male, and just don't care how achieving one's goals might be significantly more difficult for other people in the US, because you "don't have time" to consider things that don't affect your own life. Which is all well and good, really, I'm pretty much in the same boat, but I just don't understand what's so bothersome about people that do care about those things.

The words you've chosen to put in quotes are telling...the diversity effort is not a personal crusade against you. It's not about "problematic" groups of people. It's about elevating groups of people who may actually have been systemically disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Do you assert that that doesn't happen? Or just that nobody should care about it?

"Real life isn't handing out stickers to preschoolers." I don't even know what that means. Where is the Code of Real Life written? If people want to hand out stickers, why does that upset you?

"Do you assert that that doesn't happen?" Yes.

Many (most?) ethnic minorities are significantly more successful than whites in the US. Whites represent the largest group of people in the US living in poverty. Whites must face the entire ideology of diversity which is that they must be replaced by non-whites due to inherent moral inferiority. Wait you're right I think systematic disadvantage does happen..

Citation needed.

I've been directly involved in hiring/interviewing under these circumstances and the idea of lowering technical standards just to meet a quota was never entertained. We simply recruited through diverse avenues. Mostly the diversity statement itself was sufficient to let potential candidates know they could apply without fear of rejection for not being "like us".

I've never actually seen evidence of active discrimination against a more qualified white candidate. Maybe it happens but it certainly isn't a result of diversity policies.

Citation: law/med school admissions in US.

So active discrimination against an equally qualified white candidate is ok?

Whites represent the largest body of every class. That's kind of how numbers work.

Not as undergraduates at Harvard. Or children under 5 in the US. Or residents of London, England.

There are literally countries that have laws mandating gender representation in government. Since you don't seem invested in the topic, why not assume that GitHub has benefitted in the way that they say they have in this post?

I have never heard a good argument explaining how affirmative action is good for a company or society outside of college.

I personally question the legitimacy / usefulness of affirmative action, but the best argument in support of it which I have heard is that people bound their career prospects based on the individuals they observe to be occupying those roles in society. For example, if a person is female and all the software developers they see are male, perhaps they believe that software development is inherently a male job and not for them. This could then lead to a negative feedback loop where females are afraid to make the first step into the industry because no one has done it before them, and the industry misses out on people who could turn out to be very qualified workers. Affirmative seeks to break this loop.

It forces a company to try multiple approaches to hiring. E.g. having many criteria for what the company considers a good candidate.

For example, a tech company that requires college degrees for all candidates might want to loosen that, and figure out other signals that indicate strong candidates without a degree.

There's a strong tendency to hire what you know (e.g. people like you, and to interview how you've been interviewed).

It's not good as a general practice. It's probably a sensible imposition against companies that persistently get in relevant legal trouble.

If South Africa hadn't mandated that companies have a certain percentage of blacks in senior positions, then the economic and political power still would have been heavily lopsided towards the white minority after apartheid ended. Things aren't golden and fantastic there now, but it's still more equitable than it would have been without that affirmative action.

Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States. For example:

> Despite similar rates of drug use, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use,⁴ and black males are often given longer sentences for crimes than their white peers.⁵

[ from https://medium.com/@dan_nott/what-is-mass-incarceration-ff73... ]

Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

So called 'affirmative action' movements and diversity pledges are a direct response to the acknowledgement of our unconscious biases. If you know that you're 20% more likely to judge a candidate as unfit just because of the colour of their skin or the sound of their name, then that means that, over time, you're losing out on a lot of talented candidates.

Likewise, if you're less likely to fairly evaluate a woman's performance or contributions, then you're going to promote talent to positions of leadership or management less often, meaning you're not going to put your best people in those positions.

Lastly, diversity is important. You don't get anywhere by looking at only one viewpoint. Look at the state of American media right now: you have tons of content on Fox News that repeats the same few lines as facts, and they've all convinced themselves that it's true because they hear it everywhere. With that environment, why would anyone consider a different fact? When you're surrounded by people who have the same experiences with you, the same viewpoints as you, the same background as you, the same friends as you, you're never going to learn anything.

It's when we surround ourselves with people different to us that we grow and learn. We start to see things from other points of view, we learn about new experiences that we didn't have growing up. We create new collaborations that build on our different backgrounds to produce something that feels new, and not just a retreading of existing works.

In other words, the reason for forcing diversity is to both counter our own (and others') conscious and subconscious biases, as well as to ensure that you're exposing people to as many new and differing viewpoints as possible (and, in turn, taking those viewpoints seriously), so that you have more resources to build from, which makes for a more robust environment.

> Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

I see this everywhere, and yet no citations (and when asked, I usually get referred to someones blog - not from a respected scientist completely unaffiliated with the feminist movement). Either that or I get linked to 4 or 5 default papers which have little reference to the claim.

People need to accept that bold statements like this are absolutely not excluded from burden of proof - and what's more if you live in the UK (I expect much of Europe) it's time to speak up, it's illegal to pay less based on gender.

The usual problem with this is, that the actual fact is that women earn less than men on average. That's kind of a crazy comparison - software developers earn less on average to CEOs, on average sewage workers earn less than those in hedge funds and so on.

It assumes fairly boldly that women and men operate in equal proportions in every industry (which is false).

In another note, just by writing this I'm opening myself to someone telling me to check my privilege, which is a codified way to tell me as a white male there's some secret sauce I can't possibly know about (so should be quiet on the issue). The deepest irony is that this behaviour is exactly what the movement was designed to disassemble.

>> Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

>I see this everywhere, and yet no citations

Because this is a myth based on the infamous "women earn 0.77$ for every 1$ a man earns" statistic. Wikipedia states that the "the gender pay gap is measured as the ratio of female to male median yearly earnings among full-time, year-round (FTYR) workers" - an utterly meaningless number that has no real value, but is great for pushing the myth the other poster has presented.

Why is it meaningless? It's because it seems that no one has the answer to the million dollar (or 0.23$, depending how you look at it) question: "can you name 10 companies that are the worst offenders in this regard". This is the 17th time I ask this question and I have yet to receive an answer. I don't think I'll ever will, though, since if it was actually as big of a problem as feminists like to claim the media wouldn't let such a juicy topic die so easily.

I'm going to tell you to check your privilege, which is a codified way of telling you that if you were really concerned about whether there was a gender pay gap, you'd look for the research yourself instead of waiting for somebody to hand it to you. If you were either familiar with the existing research and saw flaws in it, or were familiar with better evidence that contradicted the accepted wisdom, your statements about the burden of proof would be a lot more interesting and sound a lot less like whining.

It's not the world's duty to convince you of anything. I'm not even going to refer you to a blog - go to scholar.google.com and search for "gender pay gap." Follow the citations. You should also do that if you're not sure if racism exists, or if other planets exist. Then instead of trying to one-up people on message boards when they won't do your research for you, you can lead in whatever direction your research takes you.

Also, nobody knows you're a white male on the internet until you broadcast it.

>if you were really concerned about whether there was a gender pay gap, you'd look for the research yourself instead of waiting for somebody to hand it to you.

Are you seriously expecting people to fact-check every single broad statement they come across and then come to the exact same conclusions you did?

>It's not the world's duty to convince you of anything.

It's not my duty to find arguments supporting your cause. The gender pay gap is a myth anyway. I'm not going to tell you why - go to scholar.google.com and search for "gender pay gap myth debunked." Follow the citations. You should also do that if you're not sure if racism exists, or if other planets exist. Then instead of trying to one-up people on message boards when they won't do your research for you, you can lead in whatever direction your research takes you.

> Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States

O_o

There's plenty of ingrained racism in Europe. From constant and persistent jokes about the French in the UK, to the French hamlet called "Death to Jews" that only recently changed it's name, to the consistently poor treatment of Romany people in most places, right up to the ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia in recent memory, there's plenty of ingrained racism in Europe.

>Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States.

Who's throwing bananas at their black soccer players?

It's called football

Europe has plenty of ingrained racism. I was born there and I can tell you for a fact that racism is alive and well in Europe.

Despite similar rates of drug use, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use

This can be pretty obviously understood as the result of compound charges, of which the drug charge is a minor component.

Bear with me, facts incoming...

Black people, particularly young black males commit crimes at a much higher rate than other groups. In committing these other crimes and then being arrested, a certain percentage of them happen to have a bag of weed in their pocket, which then gets tacked on as an accessory charge.

Before anyone wants to argue about the objective and carefully tabulated crime rates. No, whites don't just get away with more of the petty, street, and violent crime we are discussing, race ratios of victim reports match those of arrests.

women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

No, because of intentionally faulty statistics to calculate such things.

The gender wage gap uses bogus statistics - Christina Hoff Sommers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58arQIr882w

https://www.google.com/search?q=milo+wage+gap

If women are doing the same work as men and accepting significantly lower pay to do so, why aren't companies tripping over themselves in trying to hire all women staffs and significantly reduce costs?

diversity is important.

"Diversity" in the sense it is used in social policy(for some reason only in the west, no one is harping on Japan, or Saudi Arabia, or Angola about diversity) is harmful and destructive to otherwise healthy societies.

We show that ethnic diversity or fractionalization and values diversity are distinct and while the former has a negative effect on innovation, the latter contributes positively. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2015.11...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

Diversity DESTROYS Social Cohesion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTROCGb5qj8

"Diversity is our Strength" ^ watch that

as well as to ensure that you're exposing people to as many new and differing viewpoints as possible (and, in turn, taking those viewpoints seriously)

Actually, historically successful societies have pretty refined heuristics for what to take seriously and it has served them well.

It is absurd to say we should take all viewpoints seriously.

How are you defining 'viewpoint', and 'seriously'?

What does it mean to take seriously the viewpoints common in Islam that --

gay people should be persecuted, to the point of being thrown off buildings, stoned to death, or beheaded?

family members should kill other family members in the name of 'honor'?

murdering non-believers is acceptable?

How seriously do you take these viewpoints?

Were NASA hindered in their mission to get to the moon in the 1960s because it was a bunch of white guys with viewpoints grounded in careful observation, excelling at math and science and a kind of boundary pushing audaciousness that seems quite particular to men of European descent?

> How are you defining 'viewpoint', and 'seriously'? What does it mean to take seriously the viewpoints common in Islam that -- gay people should be persecuted, to the point of being thrown off buildings, stoned to death, or beheaded? family members should kill other family members in the name of 'honor'?

Do you seriously (heh) think this is what they meant by 'viewpoint'? I have a hard time believing you didn't go out of your way to construct this monstrous strawman. It doesn't take a genius to realize that people who have had different experiences, upbringings, environments etc. will perceive the world differently. It takes a certain kind of immaturity to miss out on the value others provide in this way, though.

Europe has a different type of racism though. There's a reason why the Muslims there become extremists but stuff like that almost never happens in the USA.

Among the reasons, you can walk and hitchhike from Iraq and Syria to central Europe, but not to the USA; and you have a chance (only a chance) to reach Lampedusa or Pantelleria from Lybia in a dangerously overloaded disposable boat, but not to cross the Atlantic ocean.

Muslims in the USA typically got there by plane, with a visa; this is enough to filter, from the mass of generic Muslims, non-angry respectable middle class people instead of the mostly desperate, very poor and often illegal refugees and immigrants we get in Europe.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone - South Americas treatment of the aboriginal inhabitants is nothing to write home about.

> This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All".

This. It's just ridiculous. Just as racist as negative discrimination.

The United States has a unique history with race relations, and we still haven't figured this stuff out. I think part of it is geopolitical, and related to the histories of various ethnic groups in America, which is very different from the histories both in Europe and in South America. If it were in fact the case that nobody cared what color your skin was in America, nobody would care about consciously ending that caring, either.

Remember that Europe and I think South America managed to relatively-peacefully get rid of slavery in the early- to mid-1800s (in those countries that had slavery at all). The US had an extremely fractious war about it, because half the country's economy did not work unless you exploited people's lives for free, and that part of the country morally justified it to themselves by saying that some races were more like animals than humans.

> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

So the issue is: most companies are somewhat discriminatory by default. Left to their own devices, they'll hire people who are similar to the existing group. If you have a company made up of white men, you're going to wind up hiring more white men.

And the worst bit - when they do eventually hire someone different, they're going to keep all the little bits of culture which, while they worked as long as you all had much the same background, are harmful and distressing to people coming from other backgrounds.[0] After all, if it's one person complaining, and everyone else is OK with it, it must be that one person's fault, right?

The result of this is that once a member of a minority sees that a company is made up primarily of white men, well, it's probably not for them.

Now, at some point between anti-discrimination laws being written and now, some people decided this is not a particularly good state to be in, and a whole bunch of people spent a whole lot of effort trying to persuade society that this isn't a good thing. And hence, eventually we get to a situation where HR paper pushers and high-level managers are explicitly thinking about people's race, gender, and so on and so forth while hiring - although the law says that you have to avoid doing so.

The issue is that this really isn't what we want people to be doing, but as long as nobody's caught doing it, the law and society incentivises it. It's a better position than the one we were in - you can actually get employed in the sort of company I described above if you don't come from the same background, and you can complain if people misbehave in an egregious manner - but it's still not good enough.

What we want is for companies to signal that they're open to changing their culture to fit the needs of their employees - which of course is flipping the power dynamic on its head, but there you have it. We need companies to signal that when their employees raise an issue with how the company works on a social level, they'll actually be listened to. And then we need companies to actually follow through with that.

Until then, we'll have discrimination in hiring and in the workplace.

[0] I've worked for a company which regularly had the majority of its employees take clients out to strip clubs, and had a porn-sharing Friday, and this was a normal and expected part of business. And that's the really blatantly obvious things. We had one female employee who was not an office manager - and my boss specifically mentioned to me that she was tough as nails to be in our industry.

If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.

Mapuches you mean?

Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT:

-There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties.

-In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards".

These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle.