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Comment by TheLilHipster | Hacker News Reader

> Why is [Insert location of choice] So Awful to Male Babysitters?

Culture and everything else that comes along with gender minority work environments. You adapt, like everyone else.

The push for institutionally enforced advantages is just insane:

> “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,”

Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Giving a minority share an unfair advantage in the market just because "they're a minority" is not progress. I'm so disappointed at how manipulative these sorts of ideals are in reality. Their proponent's hearts are in the right place, but the outcomes are just so backwards.

Regardless of your gender, if you're in an environment and you're discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it. Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.

/rant

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If there is not equality of outcome, then either: (1) no equality of opportunity exists; or (2) there is some confounding factor.

Ironically, you identify the thing that creates unequal opportunity: the "culture" that "comes along with gender minority work environments." Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.

Acknowledging that the existence of a gender disparity in and of itself creates a hostile culture for the minority gets you halfway to understanding why attempts at eliminating the disparity directly are justified. And such measures are inherently temporary: once you eliminate then disparity that creates the hostile culture, you eliminate the need to take any affirmative measures to keep the new ratio.

You also precisely identify why you can't fix past institutional discrimination simply by no longer doing it. The past discrimination creates a culture that's hostile to the minority gender. That culture is self-perpetuating without active intervention (the "policing" you complain of).

> Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.

Depends where you define the line between opportunity and outcome. You could take a step back and argue that equal opportunity exists in the education space for both women and men to thrive in said field. The fact that this doesn't result in a 50/50 split in gender in the market is an indicator to me that the cause isn't institutional, it's cultural.

You can't police culture and you shouldn't be trying to police the outcomes of a "free market". I appreciate your perspective, but I think you've honed in on symptoms, not the cause.

If the cause is institutional, fix it 100%. All hands on board, sign me up.

If its cultural - adapt. Cultures will also adapt in-time to the individuals that make up said culture.

You could take a step back and argue that equal opportunity exists in the education space for both women and men to thrive in said field.

What would that argument look like?

To me, equality of opportunity means "substitution equality." I.e. you should be able to swap someone's gender and the way the external world treats them should be identical at every step.

> I.e. you should be able to swap someone's gender and the way the external world treats them should be identical at every step.

This is equal outcome in my eyes, not equal opportunity. It's a stance of absolutes, a "perfect-world" scenario - a practical impossibility.

You've got to align your goals and perspectives to the reality of the world. Men and women are genetically and physically different which manifests in many different ways culturally. There are so many variables here that I'd be writing an essay if I wanted to list everything that shapes my bias - but the point I'm getting at here is; as individuals we're all different in varying ways and this is a great thing (I'd rather not be genderless, featureless clones).

Focusing on eliminating negative bias is great, sure. But its not a gender issue and should never be institutionally enforced as such. Hell, cultural issues and differences should never be institutionally enforced in my eyes. It's just trading in negative discrimination for positive discrimination.

> Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't.

Correct for the US, incorrect for China, Romania, India or Ukraine. So it doesn't seem to be a universal global phenomenon, Silicon Valley can always import people (and women specifically) from programming-friendlier cultures, so there's little incentive to treat it as a problem.

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think you know the problems of the people affected. I take that just from "discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it".

What are the legal channels for suspecting you're denied a position because of being part of minority X. Sure, the company is all non-X, but does it prove anything? Where do you go when your opinion is being ignored every day - what's the legal channel for that? How much effort and money do you want to spend just to be treated as a normal person. You're not going to crush it. You'll be left on your own.

> Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.

Sure, there's got to be a balance. You can't police everything and force anyone to think anything. But promoting going away from the status quo is a positive thing.

Except culture begets the discrimination. The immediate fix is to go through legality. If you want to change things on the long-term to make it a better place for people of all genders, races and religions to work, you have to change the culture. Otherwise it's a problem that will never, ever go away.

For many minorities, by the time they get to work, they're so sick of discrimination that they prefer to quit, as opposed to going through the pain of official channels that are just as discriminatory as the perpetrators that they were going to report.

What you said is like saying "You burnt yourself because the house is on fire? Have you tried applying burn cream? Don't waste your time putting out the fire, just apply burn cream and live with it"

Or childcare workers. Or personal carers. Or etc...

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