There already are off-the-record quotas. Who in management hasn't heard discussion at least eluding the the need for a diversity hire? Probably very few people at this point.
I believe a distinction must be made: Equality of opportunity is good. Equality of outcome will lead us to the world of Harrison Bergeron's.
Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region.
But then, when I listen to the stories women in tech (for example) tell, and they do tell a LOT of the same stories, it's clear we're pretty far from equality of opportunity.
And I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names... guess who doesn't get called in for an interview.
So I just don't buy that most people even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).
Discriminatory hiring practices are but one of many symptoms of the disease.
Is the social problem that the discriminated are pushed to 'over achieve' while the rest have no expectations placed on them and are more likely to fall into whatever work is available? I think this definitely holds true for the tech profession where for many of us the jobs appeared as extension to hobbies, not something we actually sat down to plan to do.
If we were pressured to go to school and get a good, well respected, job above all else – which I think we can say certain segments of the population are – the path into tech would have been far less obvious. Especially when you go back several years ago, before tech was 'cool', but even now doctor or lawyer sounds better than programmer.
Palantir got sued for hiring Asians at a ratio of 20%. 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool.
What if they were actually the better candidates?
Bias in hiring may well reflect bias in talent.
That is a drastic oversimplification.
The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the pool of people who have the right education and experience.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who graduated with the appropriate degree for which they're hiring (in most cases).
Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who got accepted into those schools.
Which can only hope to be reflective of those who chose that education/career path to begin with.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the population that sought out things like math and science when in secondary school.
Which only then can only hope to be reflective of the general population.
At each step there is filtration. It's affected by people's upbringing, their role models, what advertising they were heavily exposed to as impressionable children, who their friends are, who their teachers were, whether computers were popular when they were going through school, the list goes on and on.
The problem of under and over-representation in tech is a real one, but pretending that companies just need to somehow make up for all of this filtration, at the very very end of a literal lifetime-sized pipeline, is folly. Outreach needs to happen much, much, much sooner than that. At the end of the day, companies are at the mercy of who's in their hiring pool.
You're right, it's not just on some tech company to fix societal racism.
What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!"
I mean, jesus, the status quo does not need any defense. It's already winning by default.
Because the problem actually does lie elsewhere. Being a corporation is not evidence of guilt.
It's because we've been in roles in companies like these, dealt with diversity and hiring policies that seemed ineffective, counter-intuitive, and bureaucratic, yet there still always seems to be this cloud over us that assumes we're all secretly just racist.
It feels like we already bend over backwards to try to hire diverse candidates and comply with policies that suggest / require that. I'm sure Google, Oracle, and Palantir certainly have them. Yet these lawsuits have these big bold headlines basically implying the companies' policies are racist based on (if you think other factors are much bigger causes) unreasonable assessments. When we see it happen to them, we know it can happen to us, and it's easy to get defensive.
Everyone is carrying around unconscious biases in them. It's built into being human, so bullshit if you're about to say you're somehow immune.
We're also all biased to think the status quo is the way things ought to be, so when we see a company that's mostly white folks hiring a few more minorities, suddenly MINORITIES ARE EVERYWHERE.
Look, the problem isn't that you or I have unconscious biases. That's normal. That's human.
The problem is that we insist we don't, we're doing everything right already, and there's nothing wrong. That's where the problem is. That's how this shitty status quo that has effectively locked minorities into a second-class life gets perpetuated.
> Everyone is carrying around unconscious biases in them. It's built into being human, so bullshit if you're about to say you're somehow immune.
> Look, the problem isn't that you or I have unconscious biases. That's normal. That's human.
Agreed, and I don't think I am (or anyone else is) immune.
> The problem is that we insist we don't, we're doing everything right already, and there's nothing wrong. That's where the problem is. That's how this shitty status quo that has effectively locked minorities into a second-class life gets perpetuated.
I'm not insisting we don't. My point is that it's easy to get defensive when it's implied that you're racist over and over again regardless of the truthfulness.
It's not even good for the people allegedly being discriminated against. When focus and resources are put on the wrong area (e.g. tech company employee racial proportions), it just frustrates those of us in the industry and ignores the actual reasons for the issue (mostly cultural). We could be spending that money and resources toward getting girls into tech at a young age, or getting more computers into inner-city schools. Something that might actually affect the hiring pool.
But we don't have that discussion because the lawsuits imply the problem is with tech companies. Whether it is or not isn't even a discussion because it appears to be rampant if you've never been in a hiring role in the tech industry. If you have, you know what the hiring pool looks like, and you know you (and other companies) are being held to an unreachable standard if you're expected to align with racial proportions that don't apply to tech.
I guess because as people who are likely to be subject to those hiring practices, they like them as they currently are.
Maybe my defensiveness comes from the fact that I'm in a hiring position in one of these big companies, and I'm fully accustomed to how hard it is to find candidates outside the typical racial and gender mix you tend to see in tech.
Not that it isn't worth it to try, but I just think we should be careful about placing too much blame in any one place... because it's so easy to refute (since it's not 100% the company or hiring manager's fault) and then real subtleties can be lost in the discussion.
I even had a chance to ask a well known SV entrepreneur/investor about what VCs look for, and he said one of the things is "people who look like him." I appreciated his honesty, but it certainly seems like there is a lot of talent that is ignored because people and companies are using poor hueristics.
So if companies are rejecting someone that means as whole (read net), they are expecting more bang for the buck.
At least that's what I was told at the talk about diversity and inclusion during my orientation at one of those big tech companies.
Apparently it's because we benefited from being able to make quick judgments before civilized society was a thing.
If there is a strong shortage of supply, you can be sure a lot of people will get over their prejudice -- but in labor markets, there often tend to be more offer than demand, so companies can choose whoever they want, without hurting the business whatsoever.
Unless your model accounts for such things, it's too simplified. Particularly when it comes to human factors. And if your model is that deficient, it's not really providing useful insights.
Modeling complex phenomena well is tough. But you need to have enough humility to understand when your toy model might be deceiving you.
If the shoe fits....
As to why they do it? I'm guessing that they either don't know not to bring up race or they don't care about discriminating based on race because they probably won't have any consequences.
I've seen plenty of casual workplace sexism and racism in my life. It happens.
At my previous employer, there were some positions with salaries so low that the only people who applied were foreigners who were so desperate that they were willing to take it. White Americans (and American-born Indian Americans for that matter) with computer science degrees simply had more options than to take such a terrible role at such a terrible salary. It had nothing to do with the company discriminating.
None of what I've said has happened at large companies I've interviewed with like Google or Uber, but small startups definitely have some "interesting" practices.
Which I guess would be a question about race? in a way?
I wouldn't ask a white person who spoke swedish and had a very swedish name as I'd assume they are swedish by birth.
Race is orthogonal to nationality and citizenship. Especially in countries of immigrants like the US and Canada.
However, asking in the interviews is unheard of, at least in shudder retail. And while outright denyig someone for their race isn't as common as you might think, people do instinctively like people who look like them, and they also have this bad habit of not questioning it when they like something...
I seem to be lucky in that I haven't directly seen any racist hiring policies. But, then again, I've only worked hourly retail jobs; for all I know, the higher you go, the less likely a hispanic man is to be hired. And it doesn't help that there's so many variables to control for--as other comments stated, it's filters all the way down. As an example ffrom the entertainment industry, I have never owned a computer powerful enough to handle both running a recently released game and recording footage of the gameplay, which means that my dreams of becoming a Youtube Star are rather limited. And don't even get me started on capture cards. The rich kid down the block can afford it because his parents buy it for him; my parents don't, and the reason for that could extend as far back as the lessons my grandmother learned when she had to work her way to the top of the Georgia Pacific packaging plant where she made her living.
False (as stated in a sibling comment)
> because race is always included in the job application
I have not once ever been asked my race. Perhaps because they'll be able to tell at the interview? But it's not "always included"
> and always under the same header as questions for, say, disabled or veteran status.
I've only ever been asked about disabled or veteran status after employment.
This is a weak assumption to base the rest of your chain on. It falsely posits that the company isn't in control of who seeks employment there. In reality, the company controls where and how it advertises job openings and how it markets itself towards potential employees. When a startup advertises a hackathon with incentives of "hot women to serve you beverages", they can't claim to be helpless victims of an applicant pool devoid of female engineers. And while most examples of encouraging or discouraging certain demographics aren't as blatant as this egregious-and-yet-actually-happened example, there are plenty of subtler but very strong ways companies discourage women and minorities from applying.
Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described:
>most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).
The fact is we already have things like state-sponsored racist entrance policies to our most prestigious educational programs. In law school, it can be several standard deviations worth of LSAT points-- that is a VERY big deal. Even pointing this out, though, means someone is going to flip this on its head and misconstrue it, calling me the evil monster you described.
As I said in another comment, you're never going to see equality of outcome. The NBA will never be dominated by people of Asian descent. Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs. Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men. Men will always have more statistical outliers existing in the "fat tails" of male distributions relative to distributions of women. People are different. It doesn't mean better, or worse. For example, I'm not that exceptionally good at maths, but my friend is -- he's not any better of a person than I, though, and no sane person would make that argument. There's nothing wrong with being different. Demanding that everyone be the same will end up with us in Harrison Bergeron's world, and in that long-run scenario everyone ends up losing except those who take joy in ruling over others.
I believe it important to ensure everyone has equal outcome with respect to human rights, civil rights, and human dignity. There is no good reason why we cannot provide everyone with these. I believe that's where attention should be focused, and we're getting off track by pretending everyone is the same and demanding that the only reason for anything else is that the NBA is racist against Asians! (or coding companies are racist/sexists against whomever it is that doesn't have coding jobs).
Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.
Every single person should be given every opportunity as every other, but we shouldn't continue this state-forced results based on people's personal politics about how they believe the world works.
Why do we have issues with providing everyone with healthcare, clean water, and safety... We're bombing seven countries, funding jihadists in Syria, creating a surveillance police state. Some US cities have murder rates higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East. We can't provide everyone with housing, and we can't successfully protect our environment. Give me a break. This issue is not about human welfare, dignity or equality. This is about people's personal politics and lawyers finding a way to cash in on laws that may have been well intentioned but since gone out of control.
The social ladder and ranking is also attached to the same incentives. A mans ranking is (mostly) based on his ability to support a family. A womans ranking is (mostly) based on her ability to raise a family. As sad and depressing that is, the message it sends on a cultural level is that no one wants to be near a poor male or infertile female. On the flip side, women are not punished by society for not focusing on maximizing earning potentials, and men aren't punished by society for not focusing self care and longer lifespans.
Going even darker when looking at incentives for earning and lifespans, we can look at the link between low income for men and suicide. About a factor of about 1000% according to some studies when comparing high vs low income. Suicide is also the most common cause of death for men at ages 15-50. The negative impact from unemployment (and low income jobs) effects men more, and a natural conclusion would be that the incentives to avoid it is thus stronger.
So yeah, sure, if you look at the scenario in simple isolation, then you could argue that there is a "greater opposing force".
Does the CEO have the highest IQ in the company? Is the president the most intelligent person in the country?
http://www.warrensiurek.com/blog/2015/04/5-women-claim-gende...
>The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a claim on behalf of five women against an oil drilling company in another state. According to the complaint, the women applied for jobs to work as floor hands on the oil rigs, but they were turned down. The women allegedly all had the proper qualifications to be able to perform the functions of the job.
>The women were allegedly told that females were not hired on the rig because it was populated by all men and that women would not fit into the company's "man camp" mentality. The women also claim they were turned down because they were too attractive. If they were hired, they were purportedly told they would be a distraction to the men, who would be unable to get their work done.
"Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs."
QED
I will not be engaging you further.
OK, so convince me you're right. Ignoring your condescending, short-termpered, dismissive remark based on attacking some minutiae in what I said (that we can both agree doesn't change anything), we now have an example of one very American, money-making lawsuit, representing 5 people. Alright, so what substantial movement can you source to convince me that you are right that women are seeking equal representation working on oil rigs in the north sea? What about auto mechanics? Plubming? There's many entrepreneurial businesses such as those that require no hiring decision. Why are women so underrepresented there? The work is much less physically demanding or as dangerous as working on off shore oil rigs.
But if they win their case and help to integrate oil rigs, it seems the next 5 women to seek a job on an oil rig will be easier to find. Fields that are not diverse are less attractive to diversity candidates, but that doesn't mean that diversity candidates wouldn't be interested in working in a more integrated environment.
The joke is that everybody does that. Most people are just totally blind to their own side's issues.
Now watch as people begin commenting to say that their side isn't like that..,
There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this.
You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players.
You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice.
Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.
The NBA is much smaller than entire industries: there are more CEOs than NBA players.
He's saying that within the Black community, there are fewer people who (for whatever reason) have the skills necessary to be a CRUD developer.
Reasons may include, but are not limited to:
- poverty and access to education
- cultural factors pertaining to the value of higher education
- cultural factors pertaining to the types of jobs that are valued (e.g.: perhaps Blacks take jobs that confer a certain status or that are seen as directly giving back to the community)
If this is true -- and I personally find it plausible -- then we would indeed expect blacks to be under-represented in software design.
tl;dr: Perhaps the bias in hiring is a reflection of a bias in competence. Perhaps Blacks are, on the whole, poorer candidates? If that's true, then the correct approach is to focus on education rather than punishing employers.
Whether it was intended or not, OP was dog-whistling the genetics argument, which I do not buy.
Again, no it wasn't, and even if it were it does not change the veracity of my (more nuanced) rendition.
For what it's worth - I do not disagree with your argument, but I do not think it adequately explains the situation.
OT: it's somewhat surreal for me to experience HN going all out for the status quo (regardless of subject). I just wanted to get that off my chest - carry on.
There is no polite way to put it, but I would be surprised if among black applicants having a "black" name did not predict worse actual performance than having a "white" name. The same goes for white applicants with "white trash" names. If there are Asian equivalents, same for them.
I mean honestly imagine a resume that says: graduated from Yale 2011 with a BS in Computer Science. Worked for Qualcomm for 2 years before taking a job as a PM at Google. Currently looking for a new job to move back to the east coast to be nearer to their family.
And you're telling me you can predict this person's future job performance based on whether their last name is Park, Lewis, or Johnson?
But we don't have equality of education, equality of upbringing, etc. so it's natural that given the equality of opportunity we get unequal results.
So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time.
The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.
For instance, if we play the game 1000 times, heads might come up 505 times and tails might come up 495 times. Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0.
Therefore, over time, we'll both stay at $1 million.
That doesn't preclude arbitrarily-large variances in between that could add up to a Head/Tail difference > 10^6.
It seems to me the Dept of Labor is trying to solve a problem at the hiring level that exists at a much higher level, beyond the scope of any one company.
Additionally, in that context I'm not even convinced it's a problem in itself that needs solving via state intervention. Unless there is some abstract benefit to diversity of the people behind the code in software development that I'm not seeing. Other than the fact engineers make better money than other industries and it's in demand - but that should be a sufficient incentive by itself.
I agree the state should be acting at a much higher level to solve these problems. This could take the form of education incentives to get a more diverse workforce or do something about income inequality that prevents some demographics from pursuing certain career paths.
Anecdotally, a friend who was interviewing with Oracle was given a lowball offer by a Oracle recruiter of the same ethnicity and told that it was "a very good offer for a person like you". At the time I believed it was just a rogue interviewer, but it sounds like this may have been more widespread.
If I see a large software company located in an area where a lot of Asians reside and there aren't many Asians there? Then something funny is going on.
People have been trying to hammer that distinction for a long time. For certain people, it just doesn't "stick". They believe there is a boogey man, and by golly they will make sure to get the state to punish any scenario that hints to its existence.
If anything, I'd argue that they are creating a boogey man. E.g. You push an agenda that promotes certain groups or genders above actual merit, and pretty soon I'd argue that people will develop a subconscious bias against individuals in those groups. I.e. They will compensate and they will discriminate in order to fix the bias that they are seeing unfold in front of their eyes. And they will probably apply it to everyone, just like a stereotype.
Most of the problems I've seen with diversity hires being "less capable" has been because they've had to work with people who are poor communicators and can't get past the idea that not everyone has the same shared background they do.
That means your co-worker from Taiwan doesn't recognize your carefully constructed metaphors based arounds star wars quotes, and they will likely try their best to understand what you meant, but you should have just communicated like an adult instead of an excited teenager.
Most people don't care about anything. But apathy isn't inequality unless it's applied unequally.
> Most of the problems I've seen with diversity hires being "less capable" has been because they've had to work with people who are poor communicators and can't get past the idea that not everyone has the same shared background they do.
Lack of shared background is a type of being less capable. People use Star Wars metaphors because when everybody gets them, the metaphor is more engaging and takes less explaining than the non-metaphor version.
And you're making this out to be a problem, but it's really only an advantage of cultural assimilation. Hang around coders for a while and you'll decide it's time to see Star Wars. Which you can do even if you're originally from Taiwan.
Are you attempting to assert causation in the absence of correlation?
Suppose that for University X, the minimal SAT requirement for white applicants was 700/700, and for black applicants was 400/400.
Suppose that the SAT scores of all white students at X are uniformly distributed over (700-800/700-800), and those of the black students are uniformly distributed over (400-800/400-800).
Now randomly pick one white student, and one black student.
Which of them is likely to have the higher SAT score?
And which do you want performing heart surgery on your child?
It's a whole lot more "obvious" here in South Africa. There are actual quotas, rather than "score" enhancements and juggling like there is in America.
With the assumption that the "range" of ability is equal in both groups. The simple fact that you take a smaller quantity of one, rather than the other, implies that you're taking a different ability range of one group over the other.
So if you have 100 black, 100 white students, and both their group scores range using a normal distribution from 500-1000. But you enforce that only 10 whites can be taken, and 40 blacks should be taken. Then you're guaranteeing that only the "top" 10 of the white students get picked, while with the blacks the top 40 get picked. This means you're going down the distribution and selecting black individuals that have lower scores.
As for your question about which number drawn at random from two differently distributed populations would be higher on average - yes, in this hypothetical college that admits black students with SAT scores below the black population's average but only takes white students who are 1+ STD above the white population's average, I would expect the white students to have higher SAT scores.
What I would interrogate is why you seem to be defining the worthiness of students by their SAT scores, which most elite colleges now essentially disregard, since studies have shown that it correlates alarmingly well with parents' income.
I also don't understand why so many people, when discussing the merits of college or job applicants, are so focused on the exact point of application, to the point of refusing to consider earlier opportunities and environmental effects.
Wouldn't you consider a 500 SAT score from a low-income family's student more impressive than a 500 SAT score from a high-income family's student, based on the relative availability of SAT prep classes to the two students? Shouldn't such contextual information be considered when evaluating candidates? Wouldn't you say that the candidate from the less advantageous background who has achieved identical "on paper" results is more deserving of selection, considering what they must've overcome to achieve such results? If the candidate from the less advantageous background is more deserving, why do studies find that, when presented with identical applicants, hirers will choose the one with the whiter name? [0] http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
Perhaps my use of SAT scores in particular was a mistake, but hopefully you came away with a better understanding of garanduss's original post.
Secondly, many elite schools pride themselves on "need-blind" admissions, meaning they do not know the applicant's financial situation when deciding whether or not to admit him/her. This is to protect poor kids from being discriminated against (since they would need extra financial aid from the school), but it also means they can't give a leg-up to poor students.
Given that family income is highly correlated with SAT performance, it's pretty perverse that the best way for a poor student to gain admission into an elite university is to ace their SAT's and masquerade as a rich kid on their application.
The concept itself perpetuates the boogey man.
We see these lawsuits and each one subconsciously implies, "Yep, racism is still a big problem in the industry. Here's another big company being sued for it. It's a good thing we have the Dept of Labor watching out for stuff like this. Who knows what these companies would be getting away with without it."
But it's the lawsuit itself that makes you think that, regardless of how much actual racism in the industry plays into it. It's self-perpetuating.
2) Don't you see how taking steps to correct towards equality of outcome leads towards equality of opportunity (by increasing the networking / financial / inspiration opportunities for disadvantaged groups)? If you think that such correction has social disadvantages, why do they outweigh that social benefit?
2) We can use words until the end of time to weigh the merits of state-forced equality. Same could be said about anything else that is non-scientific in nature: i.e. we could also argue about the relative merits of state-forced equality in communism vs capitalism in the same way. You can never prove anything this way in non-scientific fields, and at best all that can be done is hope to convince the other person that your reasoning is superior. However, before we got to that point, I'd even reject it on moral principle: it is immoral for government to enforce racist or sexist policies that discriminate against certain groups of people. Yes, it's in the name of moral outrage (equality), but note government-sanctioned use of force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if it is almost undeniably immoral, i.e: (America funding Jihadists in the Syrian War, Vietnam, Nazi Germany, the Opening of Japan, the Inquisition, etc., etc.).
Further on #2, one of the insights of modern economic theory has been that it can many times be actually better to make adjustments to free market outcomes ex post rather than use heavy handed regulation to force an arbitrary result ex ante. If I were king, I'd much rather see everyone with free access to healthcare, housing, transportation, and education than focus on how many women are working in male-dominated roles like offshore oil drilling in the north sea (or coding, whatever arbitrary field it happens to be).
2) Just so we're clear, you literally just compared affirmative action to Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition. I would call this "false equivalence", but I suppose it's useless to try to "use words until the end of time" (unless, apparently, those words are "moral principle").
No, I didn't. That's your misunderstanding. Go back and read what I wrote. No one is saying they're equivalent. What I did say is that government sanctioned force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if what they are doing is undeniably immoral.
I should expect more of these straw man, incorrect, borderline-troll-bait attacks. It's easy to just agree with what's politically correct. It's hard to fight for what's right and this is what you run into when you do.
First, you said that moral outrage is the motivation for "racist" policies such as Affirmative Action. Next, you said that moral outrage also motivates state-sponsored violence. (I suppose this does not constitute a comparison per se.)
I'm sorry, but I really don't see the point of bringing up the Nazis, if not to tar "state-forced equality" programs with the same brush of "moral outrage leading to moral impropriety". Can you help clear up my misunderstanding?
>I'd even reject it on moral principle: it is immoral for government to enforce racist or sexist policies that discriminate against certain groups of people. Yes, it's in the name of moral outrage (equality), but note government-sanctioned use of force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if it is almost undeniably immoral, i.e: (America funding Jihadists in the Syrian War, Vietnam, Nazi Germany, the Opening of Japan, the Inquisition, etc., etc.).
This is not about doing what's right. This is about lawyers and political correctness. There are plenty of opportunities to make the world a better place and I don't see that many Glenn Greenwalds, Laura Poitras's, or Snowdens. In fact, the government has worked to undermine at least 2/3 of those people. We can't even provide everyone with healthcare or clean drinking water. We're funding jihadists in Syria. We have cities with murder rates higher than any country in Africa. The CIA has been caught distributing crack cocaine and the reporter who revealed it "died of suicide by 2 gunshot wounds to the head." The political correctness around equality all sounds and feels great, but the reality is that it's textbook Harrison Bergeron stuff leading us closer to that kind of dystopian future. It's hard to see that, harder yet to have the guts to say it, and much easier to just be politically correct and ignore reality.
That made up example is especially bizarre because I can't think of a reason why women, as a group, wouldn't want to work on an oil rig, other than concern about possible sexual harassment.
Women want, and have fought (and won) to have equal opportunity in even combat positions.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/24/do-military-women-want-...
Your worldview does not match the facts.
Just citing a single lawsuit as your evidence that the opposite is true, and extrapolating that to say "the facts don't match your worldview" is an assault on logic and reason.
Let's not do this here, please. Also, you're discrediting yourself and your arguments before I even get to the substance of your comment.
1.http://www.warrensiurek.com/blog/2015/04/5-women-claim-gende...
What about as auto mechanics, or plumbers? Those businesses can be very entrepreneurial, requiring no hiring decision, yet women are still underrepresented. Would you still say there are not more men than women prefer those jobs?
Why should it? This reflects a very strong a priori position that people are exactly the same and don't systematically vary in their interests, cultural values, etc.
Where's the positive evidence for this (latent, implicit) positive claim?
Sorry, sorry, too easy :P . To more seriously and substantively address your point, variance in cultural values in part constitutes inequality of opportunity, no? A culture that values such-and-such Silicon Valley principle less offers less opportunity for development of Silicon-Valley-hirable skills. And variance in interests is caused in part by inequality of opportunity, no? I might not have been interested in computer science if my scientist parents had not encouraged me at a young age.
So in response to my asking "wouldn't equality of opportunity lead to equality of outcome?", you have challenged me to defend the assertion that equality of opportunity exists. Which is not my assertion.
I will also note that it's very easy to call someone else's claim positive and Russell's Teapot them to death. The assertion that variation in the skills that make a good Oracle employee correlates with heritage could also be called a strong positive claim. (In fact, I see that poster sidlls has done just this, about twenty posts further down.)
No, I most definitely have not.
I challenge you to demonstrate that interests, cultural values, and other factors that influence professional qualification to be evenly distributed.
This is a sine qua non condition for the claim that "equal opportunity begets equal success" to be true.
If you want to define "equality of opportunity" as all groups being identical in:
- their culture
- their values
- their intellectual interests
- their views on education
...then I ask you: is this really what you want to argue?
Do you really want to deny the existence and legitimacy of these idiosyncrasies that minorities quite vocally cherish? If I were mean-spirited, I might even ask you why you 'hate diversity', but I won't stoop to your level.
If you're instead arguing that the hiring process should be less concerned with competence, and more concerned other things (like skin color, gender and national origin), expect people to disagree with you.
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Edit: some empirical evidence for you to chew on [0]. It points to systematic differences in the professional interests of men and women. I suggest you dismount from your high horse and start looking at cultural differences in professional orientation, as well. Literature abounds.
[0] http://psycnet.apa.org.sci-hub.ac/journals/bul/135/6/859/
Edit: perhaps you caught one of my earlier versions. I did indeed edit for tone. I'm quite happy with it now.
To respond to your newly edited (four times! ack! I am scrambling to keep up) comment: I do not want to argue that all groups of people are the same. You have already challenged me to prove the nonexistence of such difference. I have already refused. Your new phrasing has not made your challenge any more reasonable or relevant to my original post.
I'm honestly not even sure what you want me to say here...? "Yes, there are differences between ethnic/religious/cultural/racial groups. These differences contribute to inequality of opportunity, which... exists." Does that somehow nullify the question that I asked wallace_f?
EDIT: On something like your third or fourth edit, you took out the ad hominem attack at the end of your post. I will leave my response in brackets after this note, if only so that comment-readers don't feel like they are losing their minds. [You seem very touchy about this topic. Why do you feel compelled to say such mean things about my posts? What part of them made you feel accused of being a bigot? I don't understand, but I would like to.]
You can't have it both ways.
Either all groups are (statistically) the same in their values, preferences, etc, or the claim "equal opportunity => equal representation" does not hold.
Again, this latent assumption in your reasoning is the object of my criticism.
>You seem very touchy about this topic. Why do you feel compelled to say such mean things about my posts?
I apologize if I came off as mean. I did indeed edit my text to remain as civil as possible. The informational content has not changed significantly (it's mostly formatting and tone).
I am, indeed, touchy because it's all too easy you to insinuate bigotry where there is none. It's perfectly normal to be upset when baseless, unfair and dishonest insinuations are used to attack one's character.
But let's be honest: you know this. Frankly I find it disingenuous to act surprised at such a reaction.
With that, let's return to the matter at hand: can you demonstrate that the aforementioned factors are homogeneously distributed between, say, ethnic groups?
Here is where I think we differ: we are using "opportunity" to mean two different things. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that when I'm saying "equal opportunity", you're hearing "at the point of hiring, equally qualified candidates are equally likely to be hired". I am taking a much longer view of "opportunity" - one that considers cultural context, childhood exposure, and socialized gender differences like the ones represented in the paper you linked. To me, if one candidate went to engineering camps growing up, and another did not, they did not have "equal opportunities" to develop into equally strong engineering candidates, who would eventually reach the point of hiring. The "aforementioned factors" you're talking about (e.g. cultural values, income inequality across ethnicities) are baked into my understanding of "opportunity".
This is why I haven't believed you when you've told me that the existence of cultural difference proves me wrong. To express my position in propositional logic terms, I'm saying that I believe A ("equal opportunity") implies B ("equal outcomes"). From my point of view, with how I'm meaning "opportunity" - which I don't think is how you're understanding it - you're trying to get me to admit that in the real world, "equal opportunity" is False. I have admitted that repeatedly. A is False. This does not contradict A -> B. [edited to hopefully clear up this confusing analogy]
You've told me I'm "playing with words to insinuate bigotry", but this is what I've meant by "unequal opportunity" the entire time. Because this is what I think "opportunity" means, in terms of becoming an employed engineer. I tried to explain that in my very first reply to you. I'm sorry if I didn't explain it clearly.
I can't control what you feel is disingenuous, so I won't try, but I really think our disagreement here is just a matter of verbiage.