Hacker News Reader

Comment by Oxitendwe | Hacker News Reader

>The best way to improve the representation of women in the field is not to recruit them, important though that is, but to promote them. To create role models. To push them into positions of influence.

I find the idea that we should "push them into positions of influence" abhorrent. These are zero sum games, to give them a special advantage over any other demographic is to disadvantage another. This is antithetical to everything most people believe about fairness and equality. And what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap, pushed upwards beyond their skill by well-meaning but naive men? What sort of message will that send to them?

None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics? How do we even know that women as a demographic have an equal interest in computer science to men? If they don't, what do we get out of "correcting" the disparity by given them special treatment, handicaps, incentives, etc?

Pushing people into positions of influence based on their gender is nothing other than deeply sexist, discriminatory to people who don't need to be pushed, and should be absolutely unacceptable to anyone who actually cares about equality.

View on HN

If you disagree with Pike's implied priors, do so directly; don't huff about how logic that starts from a different set of premises to yours ends at a bad place when you swap the premises out from under it.

One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men, and thus the gender gap must itself be an indication that something other that merit is systematically advantaging men and disadvantaging women.

You're welcome to argue that point (or any other), but don't pretend that you've beaten it by default.

This women think that tech would do itself very good if it stopped to constantly congratulate itself on being best meritocracy in the world and attempted to make itself meritocracy.

To tell it flat out, tech to me seems to be signalintocracy much more then meritocracy. We don't even talk about what merit is - like ever. We don\t know. If you broadcast the right set of signals and are confident, then you go up. If you are humble or fail at whatever signals are in fashion that time, you go down. I remember quite a few dudes (whether in school or work) who were total respected geniuses doing completely difficult things - until I had to do the same thing and it turned out to be easy. It would be also super awesome if the best argued for ideas would win instead of most confidently and aggressively pronounced ideas.

I also think that lack of women in tech has more to do with how strongly little kids learn to associate being boy with anything tech related. It has nothing to do with math abilities, at least here boys who go to engineering and rarely really good in math (compared to pool of people who go to college). However, it is a good job for a boy that wants a job and does not have any special interest or hobby. It is not seen as good job for girl that dont really are.

> However, it is a good job for a boy that wants a job and does not have any special interest or hobby.

This seems slightly absurd. Tech is one of the few jobs which people move into after taking it up as a hobby, and for which doing it as a hobby is almost seen as a requirement. This is not generally what happens for doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, teachers or surveyors. Other jobs for which this applies are generally very poorly paid for the vast majority e.g. actor, footballer, musician, etc. Although many people do go into IT because they have no specific interests, moreso admin roles at big companies, which tend to be have a higher proportion of women than programming roles at startups.

I wonder why would someone downvote this.

To expand on the idea: in meritocracy, networking would matter much less then it matters in tech. Meritocracy would not see "culture fit" as so important as tech have it. Ability to work with others would matter, but there would be no beer test and crap like that. In meritocracy, your ability to socialize after work would matter less. Ability to organize own work would matter more then ability to sit there 80 hour a week being ineffective.

I also think meritocracy would lead to less fads nobody criticize until they are out of fashion at which point everyone criticizes.

So yeah, I stand by tech is not meritocratic and if it stopped being so self-confident about it, it could move closer to that ideal.

I don't know. I found the comment hard to parse (but didn't vote it). But in general, remarking on downvotes on HN is an almost certain way to generate a cascade of downvotes.

> I remember quite a few dudes (whether in school or work) who were total respected geniuses doing completely difficult things - until I had to do the same thing and it turned out to be easy.

Of course I don't know you, but that might have more to do with your self esteem, or lack thereof, than anything else. Some people's reaction would be pleasure at their accomplishment.

>very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men

There are a bunch of other professions where women are under/over-represented. CS is one of them. Others include:

    Mechanical Engineering
    Construction
    Electrical Engineering
    Physics
    Aerospace Engi
    Geography
    Finance

On the other hand, in Biology things are a lot more balanced. So maybe it is the field of interest as opposed to discrimination since the scientific culture in universities is about the same in Biology as it is in Physics.

Neuroscience, molecular biology, chem, stat, even pure math all have saner gender balance than computer science; some, like molecular biology, even have slightly more women than men.

I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.

The nature of the work in all of these fields is different. My point is that women are not less qualified, but just less interested in a career of doing the kind of work software engineers do. It is very very different from applied math and statistics.

Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part.

women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different.

stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced.

pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.

There was no set of comparable fields I could give where you wouldn't be able to provide some kind of distinction as if it was determinative, but at some point the argument gets so finicky that it becomes tautological. Science, but nothing biological, even if it requires organic chem and computational models. And not astronomy. Only physics, even though only a tiny minority of CS practitioners have physics training. Math, sure, but not abstract maths, or statistics, even though stat is the most important math for programming.

One suspects that if there was some subfield of programming, like distributed systems, that had 45/65 female/male, there'd be an elaborate justification for how that programming discipline was so different from the rest of programming that any comparisons to it were invalid (and, in fact, I've noticed at academic crypto conferences that women are much more common than in the rest of CS, so maybe that's an example).

Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons.

> Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons.

On the contrary, if you look at lists of the representation gap between professions, computer programmers fit right into their surroundings. It requires special pleading to explain why programming is systematically discriminating against women, and not civil engineers, sound technicians, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers, professionally active mathematicians, chemical engineers etc...

Something like 35% of mathematics PhDs produced annually are women, and that number is increasing --- it's up from 32% a few years ago. And math is one of the more male-dominated STEM fields.

Computer science, physics, and engineering are the three male bastions of STEM. Nothing else in STEM compares. Moreover, the rest of STEM is significantly and increasingly dependent on computer science, so a very large number of practicing scientists in non-CS, non-engineering fields are spending much of their working time programming computers. Somehow, we've led ourselves to believe that plugging form fields into database columns is serious men's only business, but working with computational models of molecular biology isn't.

It would not challenge my intuitions to find that women in STEM are doing more significant CS work than the overwhelming majority of professional computer programmers.

> It would not challenge my intuitions to find that women in STEM are doing more significant CS work than the overwhelming majority of professional computer programmers.

I would tend to agree. I think that women are not interested in staring at a computer screen and making CRUD apps all day, they do something more interesting or rewarding that require technical skills. That is, the lower aptitude men stick it out, while the lower aptitude women quit and become nurses or whatever. It's just a theory, but plausible right? You seem stuck on a false choice between it there being some simple super-cause or else sexism. It's probably a bunch of things. I mean why else would the most gener-equal societies show the most segregation between professions?

Do you believe the following statements are true?

1) Men & women have differently structured brains.

2) Different brains result in different behaviour.

Loggers, refuse collectors, meatpackers, miners etc etc are also disproportionately male.

You were told three years ago about the programmes that exist to correct the gender balance in each of those industries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275

Women in mining: http://internationalwim.org/

http://www.womeninmining.org/

Women in construction:

http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp

(some editing to tone it down a bit.)

One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea...

By accept, you mean assume, and assuming is what Oxitendwe was warning against.

I'm pretty sure either you misread my comment, or I'm misreading yours, because this seems like a non sequitur.

Oxitendwe didn't start with a different set of premises, he took Pike's conclusion and showed how it would lead to some bad consequences.

You haven't stated anything to rebut any of the points made by Oxitendwe.

Instead, you demonstrated your ignorance of basic argumentation skills and your proclivity for self-righteousness.

You would do well to drop the sanctimonious tone ("don't huff about", "don't pretend") during discussions.

If anybody here is huffing, it is you.

Why is it very unlikely that computer technology is uniquely suited to men? Speaking from personal experience, my twin sister had perfectly equal opportunity to learn to program as me, and slightly higer mathematical aptitude, but she utterly lacked interest. Same story with my cousins. It's not an uncommon story. Why do you find it so unconvincing an explanation?

Because it's difficult to identify aspects of computer technology that are unique to the field and not present in other fields in which women have far better representation. It's simply difficult to come up with a simple explanation for why women would be just fine with graduate-level math, molecular biology, astronomy, or statistics work, but not with computers --- especially given the fact that computer work dominates most of those fields, too.

And the explanation would need to be simple, because it competes with another explanation, which is that computer technology is systemically biased against women, the way every other profession was before those professions took explicit steps to correct disparity.

> accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men

To be fair, the gender gap is present in many engineering professions, computer science is in no way unique here.

The article we're talking about opens with an observation about better gender parity in another hard science field, so it's hard to see how computer science can somehow exempt itself from the observation without special pleading.

No. Your parent comment was talking about engineering.

So engineering is different both from science and from actuaries (a math-intensive field with much better gender parity than computer technology), and from all the other lucrative professions.

The pleading here seems to me to get more and more special with each iteration of the argument.

Yeah engineering is different from science. There's a reason people came up with a whole different word for it.

> a math-intensive field with much better gender parity than computer technology

Stop saying this. It's not better, it's different.

> The pleading here seems to me to get more and more special with each iteration of the argument.

It's not special. Look at the tables, practically all engineering professions are 80ish% male. If you want to damn computer programming as discriminatory just because lots of women take Maths for their GCSEs, are 35% of chemists and 50% of biologists, you have to do the same for ALL engineers.

Ok? And? It's also problematic that so few men working in nursing. What's your point?

> It's also problematic that so few men working in nursing.

I don't agree that it is, necessarily. But you're working from the premise that it is inherently discriminatory.

They're not the same. So, yes, they're different.

> The pleading here seems to me to get more and more special with each iteration of the argument.

Really? Because you ignored what the parent comment said. I.e. special pleading!

How do you know that all hard science fields are equally interesting to women?

* Molecular biology

* Chemistry

* Math

* Evolutionary biology

* Biochemistry

* Statistics

* Astronomy

All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women.

It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it would also need to account for the fact that women are also far better represented in the rest of the professions).

I don't think it's a non-factual claim that there is a significant degree of horizontal occupational gender segregation in pretty much every advanced economy. A random search using terms similar to those above yields the following: http://imgur.com/a/lcHPU

The segregation seems to follow a pretty stereotypical pattern: men cluster is occupations concerned with abstract, impersonal systems or that revolve around physical labour and women cluster in professions that involve a relatively greater degree of social interaction. I am not making any claim as to why this is the case, merely that it is.

A good paper (IMHO) that does a thorough analysis of the data on vertical and horizontal segregation can be found here: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0038038511435063

One finding I thought particularly interesting was that the countries with the highest levels of horizontal segregation are Finland, Denmark and Sweden. This seems counter-intuitive to me, though I cannot explain why...

Three responses.

1. I'm not sure it's surprising, let alone a rebuttal, to observe that there's significant gender disparity in most industrialized economies. In fact, it can be the case that the US leads the world in gender parity (in fact: I think this might be likely) and still simultaneously be the case that there are structural biases against women. Why would we expect to see wildly diverging outcomes in different countries? All these countries (note the exclusion of China!) employ essentially the same pipeline of children to the same set of Professions.

2. As has been repeatedly stated here and in the post we're responding to (which is premised on this observation): pretty much all the other high-status Professions have markedly better gender parity than technology. It may be the case that gender disparity in compensation is broadly the same in societies and that men and women generally cluster into similar compensation bands and occupations, but that could also primarily be a phenomenon of the (majority) of people who don't work in high-status Professions --- because in medicine, law, accounting, actuary, even sales, we have 40-55% female participation.

3. The notion that a study like this rebuts the argument I just made is a sort of flight to abstraction. We can look at women in science (where there is broadly equal representation between men and women in awarded degrees, and markedly better parity among postgraduates and practitioners) and see that CS (and EE) are outliers. I don't need to look at GINI coefficients and treat pay equity as a vector in R^2 to observe the problem, nor does it make sense for me to concede that the debate should shift into this mathematical abstraction. We have the actual facts here; no need for the models.

Addressing your responses:

1. Unless I've misunderstood, the original assertion was that the gender gap is present in many engineering professions. I'm not clear on what facts you are relying on, but the data I've seen (and linked to) seems to bear this observation out. Such an observation is not at odds with your assertion that there are 'structural biases' against women.

And if I has to guess, to put it bluntly, I suspect China was not included as their official statistics on any remotely economic matter are highly suspect. Additionally, there are quite disparate outcomes among countries. On no measure of gender workforce equality is the US in the lead, at least according to the data in the linked study. The US is better than most on vertical inequality (i.e. wage gaps within the same occupational groups) but roughly average on horizontal inequality (i.e. occupational gender segregation). The US is closest to South Africa in these respects.

2. I don't have much to say here really. I guess part of this might come down to what one subjectively defines as a 'high status' profession. I don't really have an opinion here, so I defer to yours.

3. I don't recall saying that that study I linked to rebuts your point of view. I linked to the study because it's fairly comprehensive, informative, and seems to have a sound methodology. The data analysed is fairly credible too: large cross country social surveys and Census data. I'm not sure where R^2 comes into this, as the authors are not constructing a predictive model. Rather, they're simply calculating observational statistics.

And I'm not asking you to concede that the debate should shift into some kind of weird, abstract mathematical exercise. But if you refuse to even glance at some of the data put forward (or any data really), preferring some nebulous facts that you haven't actually presented, then I'm afraid you're likely to have a hard time convincing people who don't already agree with you.

So I'll preface my opinion with the fact that we're both putting words into some dudes mouth.

When he or anyone else says that we should promote women, it's not saying that we should promote incompetent women. It's saying we should promote women who deserve it by challenging our biases. Take as an example orchestra auditions; when orchestras move to blind auditions the gender ratios for top positions suddenly become much more representative of the actual population. Since we do not have the luxury of blind auditions, we have to challenge ourselves to lean more on objective measures, as well as questioning our subjective measures that (unknowingly) take gender into account.

And maybe you're right; maybe women have less interest in science than men. The problem is we'll never actually know because society tells children, teens, and adults that women don't like math and men don't like nursing. So the best mechanism we have is encouraging women and men that the status quo is arbitrary, which involves having events focused on women in tech and working to promote women who deserve to be promoted so that there is an alternate narrative. Because that narrative has just as much validity (and in my opinion much more so) as the narrative that women just don't like science.

I see where you're coming from, and I think we reach different conclusions because you see merit as a much more readily judged quantity than I do.

I wholeheartedly agree, elevating people above the level of responsibility/work they can handle is a bad idea, as is taking away responsibility from more qualified people.

Where you run into trouble is the people judging qualifications. Human judgment is an insanely noisy tool that heavily weights a bunch of stuff with no actual effect. For a stupid example, look at the earning difference between tall men and taller men -- it's about $800/yr/inch [1]. The effects of gender, race, and apparent country of origin (eg "foreign sounding" names) are all larger and equally useless in actually predicting job performance.

I'm not saying hire dim women over bright men. As I see it, the claim is that there are often many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error, and in those situations it's wise to pick the disadvantaged candidate because A) your flawed human judgement's probably lying to you ie they're more qualified than you think and B) if they are truly equal, elevating them will help encourage the next generation of candidates with their background, as TFA suggests. We can argue whether such a strategy will discourage the advantaged group's next generation in an equal and opposite manner, but I suspect the effect is strongly net positive on the size / quality of the labor pool.

Lastly, I realize I've made this comment quite narrowly focused on a hypothetical "hiring" scenario with a single human arbiter, but I hope HN can extrapolate the ideas to other choices we make as a society.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...

I think what you said about height might be a bit off since you're dismissing the possibility that tall people actually are better at their jobs.

E.g. looks and facial symmetry both correlate with fertility and IQ, probably through the mechanism of mutational load. So you could say, "good looking people make more money" as an example here, but the effect could be from IQ because they actually do go together.

The same could be happening for height. This may be the reason people instinctively are attracted to tall people.

I haven't looked at that literature myself, but I would be surprised if it completely disarms my point.

It's very believable that intelligence and height correlate, but the question then becomes "Do we overweight height in decision making, relative to its predictive power for success/intelligence?" If height very weakly predicts increased intelligence and we weight it strongly, that's still far from optimal decision making.

The correlation with intelligence isn't even necessary to ask that question. Hiring taller people also has upside in that other people (eg, your customers!) are biased toward them as well. However, and I admit this is conjecture, I still suspect allowing your own biases to influence decision making is a net negative.

> many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error

Too many acceptable candidates? Nobody I've ever worked for had this problem. If you meet the bar, you're getting an offer, even if Chuck Norris and Jeff Dean carpooled to the next session.

I think I'm discussing the upper end of the funnel while you're pointing toward the bottom.

At the level of phone screens and first interviews, there should be many potentially acceptable candidates. If there aren't it's indicative of a flaw at the very top of the funnel (ie, the opening needs to be better publicized, or the org. may have a public image problem).

Our phone screen takes anyone who isn't blatantly clueless; another candidate doing better never hurts you. We'd rather interview too much than triage the top N and then start bouncing viable candidates, because we aren't going to stop wanting to hire anytime soon.

I think it might be valuable to reflect on why your immediate reaction to "push them into positions of influence" is to think that women are unqualified to be there and they must be receiving "special advantage" if they are.

Was it not his entire point that these people should be given an advantage? What else do you think it means to be "pushed into positions of influence"?

I think his post was that we should challenge our cognitive biases and the male-oriented geek culture.

For example, after some members of the team have interviewed a potential candidate for hire, we get together to discuss our observations on him/her. We were choosing between two people and the female, IMO, wrote much cleaner code. The team decided to go with the guy because "he fit the culture better".

What this meant was he and 2 of the other interviewers talked about League of Legends for 10 minutes and he wore a "hilarious" graphic t-shirt.

Even if the two applicants were guys, that decision process is still wrong and has nothing to do with "meritocracy".

> has nothing to do with "meritocracy".

My point exactly. This is very common in hiring practices where "culture" fit is most important.

I think it means that due to existing biases, the role models, promoted people, etc. are biased towards men and women, and therefore by definition include some number of men less qualified than women who could potentially have those roles. We need to push back on these biases, which means that we need to push women into roles where they are qualified, and push out unqualified men as a result.

It's harsh, but if we want a meritocracy, it's the right thing to do.

Do you believe the vast physical differences between men and women end at the brainstem? Do you believe the flood of sex hormones during puberty don't result in different mental tendencies, including tolerances to rejection? Do you believe the different ratios of neurotransmitters between men and women across all cultures and haplogroups are a result of culture?

Before we explicitly institutionalize discrimination against men and boys to correct nebulous discrimination against women and girls, we must really make sure:

1. We aren't ignoring potential opportunity costs

2. We are okay with the fact that our policies will hurt disadvantaged men and boys the most

I certainly believe there are physical differences between (biological) men and women, in aggregate across men and women. I do think that the standard deviation is very high, though; I don't think that the vast physical differences make all men more suited to a task than all women, any more than all men are taller than all women.

And I think that defining particular "mental tendencies" as favorable or unfavorable to success in computing is a very difficult task. I do a lot of things at work; I figure out how to do a dynamic library upgrade smoothly, I work with other people to figure out what sort of capacity requirements their application needs, I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I report a bug when nobody else seems to have done so, I respond to a page and figure out what broke as quickly as possible, and I enter flow state and work on some algorithmic thing for an hour or so. It seems unlikely to me that I'm good at all these things, let alone that everyone of a certain gender is.

To say that men are better at programming because of some male-genetic-linked mental tendency seems as ill-reasoned as saying that men are better at cooking because we're taller and can reach the top shelf.

For 1, I believe in other people's agency. If someone says "I want to be part of this industry, but these are the reasons I'm being pushed out," I'm inclined to believe them on both fronts. If they say "I would rather join this other industry," I'm not going to try particularly hard to convince them they're wrong.

For 2, that doesn't seem plausible to me; won't it hurt disadvantaged women and girls even more?

Let's compare this to height as you did.

Because of how gaussian distributions work, the differences at the outlying values are huge even for small differences in the average.

For example, men are taller than women in general, but of course some men are taller than some women.

But at the extreme heights, the ratio between men and women becomes stagger. At 6 feet tall, men outnumber women 30:1. At 6'3", 2000:1.

Now apply this to tech. If we imagine a relatively elite job, like being a professional programmer with significant responsibility, that is the kind of thing only someone at the extreme end of the bell curve of tech-proclivity is going to do. But because of the way gaussians work at extreme values, even if women on average have similar tech-proclivity to men, at that high level the ratio of men:women could be huge.

All this could just be due to a simple misunderstanding of the math of a bell curve distribution and how it works at the ends of the spectrum.

Sure. But the point of the height analogy was that, first, you don't need to be 6'3" to reach the top shelf of a kitchen, and second, there are so many skills required to cook, not just reaching the top shelf.

In the same way, even if we assume that women have a lower bell curve than men for, say, ability to focus on some algorithmic problem, first, you don't need to be the equivalent of 6'3" at algorithms to do a good job as a professional programmer, and two, algorithms is only a very small part of what you do.

For the bell-curve hypothesis to work for cooking, women would also have to be weaker at using knives, worse at visually comparing the volume of liquids, worse at keeping track of time, worse at tasting things for flavor balance, etc. etc. - every single one of these axes would need to have a bell curve lower for women than for men. That's just implausible. Same with programming.

Of course, if you set up your hiring / recognition processes to look for the 6'3" algorithmists and not for the 5'10" algorithmists or the people who do any of the other work than algorithms, you'll see a 2000:1 ratio. But I think that's a sign of the hiring and recognition process failing to find truly qualified candidates of any gender, and just using the easiest metrics instead of the best ones.

It's not giving people an advantage, it about giving people equal opportunities to succeed.

"It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely."

Can you tell me what is equal about hiring a woman over a man, "just because"?

The premise of your argument is that people are hired (or promoted) based on concrete, analytical evaluations of their abilities. Nobody who works in this industry believes that happens.

We enjoy discussing how warped industry hiring processes are when it's just shop talk, but introduce gender parity to the discussion and all the sudden it's like someone proposed to round pi down to 3.

If such a problem exists, then its solution does not involve institutionalizing discrimination.

"If" such a problem exists?

That's the exact opposite of what Pike is saying.

I was speaking more about the use of the term advantage by OP. When these types of discussions arise people often talk about how it's unfair about giving someone an advantage over others.

The problem is it doesn't go any deeper than the surface, about the underlying advantage that some parts of society have that others don't. It simplifies the discussion into an almost child like argument about who gets the sweets and assumes that it's a zero sum game.

I am a strong believer in meritocracy, but I also am aware of the actually reality of society means that it doesn't perfectly exist. I feel that if people feel strongly about meritocracy they should be open to increasing the funnel of people that can participate.

As other have said this problem doesn't seem to be self correcting in the tech industry, and if promoting someone just because they are female is something people try I don't really have a problem with it. I have seen many people in my career in this industry promoted for worse reasons.

Doesn't the original text imply just that?

No.

>I find the idea that we should "push them into positions of influence" abhorrent. These are zero sum games, to give them a special advantage over any other demographic is to disadvantage another.

You're assuming women aren't currently at a disadvantage in that selection process. Which, evidence indicates they are. So...leveling the playing field is not disadvantaging others at the expense of women. It is recognizing that our current culture has biases that need to be corrected for.

Your argument is essentially that there are almost no women talented enough to be in leadership roles in tech, if they were chosen fairly; because that's the situation we are currently in. I'm not suggesting quotas here, and I don't think Pike is either, but there's clearly a bunch of broken segments in the path to advancement for women in tech. We're chasing off talented people because they're women (and minorities), whether we mean to or not. Acknowledging that deficit (on our part, as members of the tech community who aren't subject to those biases) is not unfair or a zero sum game.

>Your argument is essentially that there are almost no women talented enough to be in leadership roles in tech

This is wrong. There are plenty. My point is that these people should not be given special treatment and more opportunities if they come at the expense of other demographics.

>I'm not suggesting quotas here, and I don't think Pike is either

He didn't mention quotas, but he did mention preferential hiring.

"It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely."

How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman? Would that not be unfair? Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people? I can only imagine most people would not want to stick around in a situation like that.

Given the current bias our industry holds toward men, it will require people to give women (and people of color) the benefit of the doubt more often when making hiring or promoting decisions. If our biases favor some kinds of people, our "objective" assessment of people's abilities will not actually be objective, and we have to self-correct in some way. Intentionally giving a female candidate another look, or giving her a chance in the role, is likely a necessary step toward correcting those biases.

How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman?

Probably not much different than women feel every day when passed over for a job they're similarly or better qualified for by a man. It sucks to lose an opportunity that you wanted, but the industry will be healthier for it.

Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people?

Our industry chases off, or under-utilizes by not promoting to their level of greatest impact, talented women every day. Evening that imbalance out is not unfair to men.

You're making the standard arguments in favor of affirmative action. Those are reasonable arguments. But the counter-arguments are valid, as well:

1. You are suggesting applying explicit, intentional action: "self-correction" as you said. This is meant to counter presumed implicit, unintentional action. The big difference is that the former is noticeable and measurable, while the latter is inferred indirectly. As a result, it is hard to know how much correction to apply. Over-correction has the obvious dangers and downsides.

2. Aside from having the right amount of correction, the intentional action will, by itself, strengthen the problem in that it makes us take gender into the hiring process more strongly. When what we want is to reduce the effect of gender. (Compare this, to, say, the screens that solved the gender problem in orchestras - they had no such risk or downside.) Now, you might argue that we need to make things worse in the short term for a long-term gain, and that's reasonable, but highly debatable.

3. As other posters mentioned, explicit action also has direct effects: women will know that they were preferred based on their gender. Yes, this is meant to counter implicit, unconscious bias, but you never know when the former exists, while the latter is right in front of you, so you can't ignore it. This can increase the existing self-confidence problem that many studies point to.

Medicine and the law both overtly "self-corrected" successfully, creating marked and durable improvements to gender parity that benefited the fields.

There is no way to measure (or even define?) "benefiting the field".

For example, women leave the workforce earlier and more often. So we now get less work years per education year in these fields. Benefit? Not from the POV of the person paying for all this education and these services.

It inevitably comes down to a choice between institutionalized discrimination and latent discrimination.

You could weigh it based on which drives more talent away, but I don't care if Silicon Valley can keep wages low for another five years. I care more about individual choices.

We can assume our behavior is wrong for reasons we can't understand and try to correct for effects we can't measure, but I see this as missing the point. The entire reason discriminating by sex or race is bad is because it creates unnecessary suffering. The bigot lets his emotions and gut feelings drive his decisions and the result is that all parties suffer. If racism is fueled by subjective feelings choking out objective truths, then why would we ignore our own judgement based on how we feel about ourselves? We should try to make better decisions, not give up on making good ones.

An essay that winds around to a similar point: https://status451.com/2016/11/06/exclusive-inclusivity/

This is antithetical to everything most people believe about fairness and equality

If you're going to make a wide-reaching claim like that, please back it up. Or narrow the claim by making it anecdotal. My experience is quite the opposite. I, my friends, and most of my co-workers can see the very clear disenfranchisement suffered by women and believe work must be done to counter it.

These are zero sum games

That's not clear at all. Let's take a small example. Imagine the Go community lacks influential thought leaders of the female gender (I have no clue if this is the case). Now imagine they seek to address this by urging respected but below-the-surface women to write more blog posts, attend more meetings. Who exactly suffers? You don't think we can find more chairs in the meeting room? Is the blog going to fill up?

None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics

He was pretty clear about that actually. He started with it. He said he felt, but could not prove, the high quality of his experience had to do with the diversity of the members of that community. It's fine to challenge that idea, but don't pretend like it wasn't discussed.

what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap

When I tell my kids to go out of their way to be friends with a kid who seems lonely, they fundamentally get why. They don't have these delusions that everyone starts at an equal footing and that the status quo reflects everyone getting what they deserve.

You're assuming the playing field is level. That men somehow don't inherently have advantages like having the proper "look"

consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers.

and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!"

nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics.

>consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers.

I am skeptical of the claim that anybody actually thinks this.

>and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!"

You don't think someone's height and musculature might affect how well they can play baseball? That their nice teeth will help their team's image and thus, their bottom line? That someone who is physically skilled but bad at the game can be taught to become better? These all feel like absolutely reasonable discrimination to me.

>nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics.

You're right, fair was perhaps not the right word to use. But what do we actually get out of this? How do we even know that these people have been overlooked? Does this "re-balancing" provide more value than what is expended to achieve it?

> And what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap, pushed upwards beyond their skill by well-meaning but naive men?

Proponents of affirmative-action policies argue that the handicap offsets disabilities from the glass ceiling, discrimination / stereotype threat in the workplace/education pipeline. The calculus of what "balances out inequality" is imperfect, but arguably better than just having the disability.

>proponents of affirmative-action policies argue that the handicap offsets disabilities from the glass ceiling, discrimination / stereotype threat in the workplace/education pipeline.

How do you know that the disparity in women in the general population versus women in computer science is caused by the things you mentioned? How do you know that they have an equal interest and potential in this field than demographics who do not need special treatment? Will the value that these people provide be greater than what is expended to advantage them over other demographics who do not need special treatment? These are very serious and important questions you should be asking yourself when you decide to advantage certain people over others. I don't believe they have been answered.

There are plenty of examples in other fields where we have implemented systems to counter bias against women, and then the demographics of that field have quickly shifted to match the population.

For example, before orchestras started doing blind auditions, there were far fewer women than men. After, the proportions are much closer to equal. Sports is a related example- there are clearly plenty of women interested in athletics, despite society pushing them out in the past. The article itself compares computing to astronomy- I find it unlikely that the differences between the two are wide enough to result in the difference we see demographics.

So at this point, it seems to me the burden of proof falls on the idea that women aren't discriminated against. Time and again society has tried to explain away a disparity by attributing it to intrinsic differences of biology, or whatever, and time and again that has proven false.

Thank you for your civil reply, and I agree that the question has not been put to rest, as evident by the ongoing debate regarding how diversity initiatives should be implemented, if at all. I also agree that all this should be taken with utmost seriousness and consideration of opposing points of view.

Since I do not have firsthand experience with being a woman, my information comes from talking to women computer scientists and engineers from my school CS program and my workplace, and listening to their firsthand experiences dealing with sexism in the industry. Their opinions are diverse, but generally are in support for more empowerment of women/minorities in the workplace, so I generally support their agenda. Personally, I enjoy working in a more diverse workplace, anyway (long explanation for another day).

In Soviet Russia during the Cold War, I believe boys and girls were both encouraged to study math and sciences, which resulted in a fairly even gender representation in the career, and neither gender was better than the other on average. Food for thought.

The Soviet pattern is reproduced today in places like Iran, where many more women study engineering.

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, the traditionally-female professions like nursing are even more female-dominated than in the USA.

The trend seems to be: The freer the society, the less women are entering the tech workforce and the more they choose traditionally feminine work.

This even applies in the time-trend in America, where women in tech has reduced significantly since the 80's, while feminism has only become more dominant and wealth has increased.

Food for thought.

The implication that women need "special treatment" in order to excel in tech is why there are so few women in tech. How do I know this? Because women who have excelled in tech have told me so, I've read their blogs, I've read their tweets, I believe them (because they're clearly competent, and they've clearly explained why tech has been an unfairly challenging career path for them).

At this point, the only way to be wholly convinced that tech doesn't discriminate against women (and some people of color) is to willfully ignore the huge array of evidence, and to assume that every woman who has spoken out about their experience is lying. I'm unwilling to ignore the evidence or to assume that a bunch of women I admire are lying (for what reason, I can't imagine, because the women who speak out face being doxxed, harassed for years, and otherwise making their life miserable with the only goal being to make things a little more fair in the future for other women).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com