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Comment by alainv | Hacker News Reader

You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort."

One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable.

Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech workforce is 83% male because A) there is "no causal influence, insidious or otherwise" and there is perfect freedom of choice or because B) there are systemic factors at play?

That is the only question.

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Not sure I am in a position to say it is or is not a straw man argument since I am the one who made it...but it is more or less a fairly well known "classical liberal"/libertarian[1] position:

https://youtu.be/QcDrE5YvqTs

[1] This description taken from the Wikipedia citaiton of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's characterization of Chirstina Hoff Sommers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers

oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline.

So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason

Given a multitude of other results showing that equalizing for pipeline problems shows women competing equally with men, the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving.

Oh and your claim that they're being filtered out by sexism doesn't qualify as handwaving?

Look, if women are being unfairly excluded from the pipeline then fight THAT. Don't blame Google or Facebook or X company for hiring the best they can. They have "diversity consultants" on their payroll for christs sake. This isn't an issue that is gonna magically be solved in a few years. Making the "pipeline" more diverse takes years of investment and education and encouragement. What I take an issue is with people blaming these companies when they're actually doing a reasonable job of trying to become more diverse. As if these companies are the ones really holding people back. and if only they could overcome their biases they'd have a perfect diversity ratio overnight.

We have voluminous statistical evidence that women are judged more harshly than men in all phases of hiring when the only differentiator is being perceived as a woman. That's not handwaving, that's decades of study. Handwaving is "for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason".

We know there's a pipeline problem, and we are fighting that. We don't think it's going to be solved overnight either, and critically, not just by addressing the pipeline because, as numerous stories from the tech industry have made clear recently, even when qualified women make it through that anemic pipeline, they still face individual and institutional sexism. Or have you forgotten that one of Uber's recent departures left Google after an internal sexual harassment scandal that was quietly handled?

Stick to your original point.

this is in regards to Google.

" the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving."

So you're alleging that Google is judging women more harshly than men, "at all phases of hiring".

Provide a source for THAT, please.

And they hate being doctors too. Except they don't. And deconstruction of what was a frankly pervasive culture of sexism in medicine and law has resulted in much higher participation of the second sex in these fields.

Willful blindness is what it is.

well there are definitely cultural and sexist factors holding women out of STEM, that I agree with. What's the solution then?

There's been plenty written about how "the pipeline problem" is a myth:

- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...

- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...

Is your claim that the pipeline is not completely fugged? Because there are very clear numbers indicating that it is, starting very early, at the K-12 level.

Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.

I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.

Sorry, in retrospect that was very unclear. I agree with your second statement. There are definitely fewer women and people of color even applying for STEM jobs, although there are so many other factors such as quality of education, harassment, visibility of role models, etc that I think calling it "the pipeline problem" is an oversimplification.

What I think the original comment I replied to was saying though (and what most people in the industry with hiring power that I've talked to about this have said) is that "the pipeline problem" is the main thing preventing them from hiring a diverse team. That's bullshit though; there have been a million and one studies showing implicit biases in the hiring process, for one. We definitely need to improve the pipeline — the "pipeline problem myth" I'm referring to is that that's the extent of the problem.

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