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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way.

Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait?

Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?

To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.

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There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible.

Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks.

I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.

Note: the word "neoliberal" has nothing to do with social justice or even modern left wing movements and activism. It describes an economic policy that discourages regulation and government oversight.

> Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?

No, it is more like giving them separate awards, like the mens 400m and the womens 400m.

Your analogy breaks down due to the lack of a "men's 400m" event in technology.

We don't. We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession, and are happy to acknowledge anything that might suggest a countervailing trend.

Do you have any evidence to suggest women are encouraged into our industry by this kind of tokenisation? And not discouraged by it?

I don't accept the premise of your question, that noting female founders in the tech industry is "tokenization". A token is someone selected in order to represent a cohort of people. But that's not what this list is: presumably any successful female founder would be on it.

> But that's not what this list is: presumably any successful female founder would be on it.

Is your premise is that female founders are a fundamentally separate group from founders in general?

His question is still valid if you remove that word and replace it with something more accurate.

FWIW, I think it's a great idea and a good way to encourage women to join a field that they perceive as not being welcoming to them but I don't have any hard data to support this (and don't think I need any)

So would you say sexism is the only thing that differentiates technology professions from other "cognitive non-routine professions", or is that criterion ("cognitive non-routine") perhaps handpicked to frame tech as anti-women?

"Cognitive non-routine" isn't a term I made up. It's one of four broad classes of labor, one way economists use to divide up the working world.

It's so broad a classification I'd have trouble seeing how it created biased framing. It's just a more precise way of saying "the professions" (in the traditional sense of medicine, the law, accounting, and engineering).

If it is such a broad classification, maybe it is not very meaningful then to say "tech has less women than any other non-routine cognitive profession".

Why use the classification at all, if it so broad? If you use "all professions", you get perhaps things like garbage men and miners who are worse than tech? So you can always select a filter that makes tech look worst.

I don't understand the premise of your objection. The point of the comparison is that tech is uniquely unbalanced among the professions. I'm also disinclined to try to rebut an argument that seesaws like yours now is --- first the comparison is so idiosyncratic that it must be biased, then so broad as to be meaningless. If you object to the classification of labor as "cognitive" or "manual" and "routine" or "nonroutine", you should probably take that argument up with r/badeconomics.

My question is/was: do you think sexism is the main thing that differentiates tech from other non-routine cognitive professions? That economists created such a classification is pretty irrelevant. The point about the broadness was that if it is so broad, you might as well take all professions and get a different result.

I think your original argument was worded "only thing" not "main thing". It feels like you've changed your argument slightly.

Are you sure you can not decipher the argument I am making? Feel free to either replace "only thing" with "main thing" in my first comment, or "main thing" with "only thing" in the later comment, to make it consistent enough for you to parse.

"Only" and "main" have two significantly different meanings so you actually stated two different arguments.

Sorry then my English isn't good enough for such nuances. Maybe replace all instances of "main" and "only" with "significant" or something like that?

I think with some goodwill, you could see the point I was trying to make.

Since Sweden has this handy institution that provide statistics, I have taken a nice look at different professions (recorded as part of tax collections) and their gender distribution.

How do you support the rather extraordinary claim that the technology professions have markedly larger gender imbalance compared to other cognitive non-routine professions? From the data I saw, 2014 numbers placed technology professions around the 70%-30% gender distribution which puts it directly into the majority of professions of any kind.

The two extremes: Fair distribution (40%-60% or closer to 50%/50%) has as group a rather poor 10% of all employed people. Unsurprising, it has about the same number of women and men that works in those professions.

The second extreme are those with 90%-10% or higher, and if I remember right about the top professions in that list, it was topping with midwife nurse (99.7%), nurse with dentist specialization (99.4%) and carpenters that construct floors (99%). Going down from that you got several other specializations of nurses, mechanics, midwifes, construction workers, and kindergarten teachers (94%). You have to travel really far into the list to reach professions with as high gender equality as 70%-30%. To name a few cognitive non-routine professions at the 80%-20%, we got professions like veterinarian, psychologist, librarian, and teacher, all with worse gender distribution than technology professions.

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