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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Great study. I think this perfectly underscores the concept of what "privilege" is, in a scientifically robust way.

I have a worry about one of the implied conclusions, though. The high-status women were clearly discriminated against based solely on gender. However (and trying to tread carefully here), it is at least possible that a high status woman would be more likely to leave for family reasons than a high status man. That doesn't make the discrimination any better, but it also means the employers aren't necessarily acting economically irrationally (of course, there is also the chicken-and-egg problem, in that these high-status women might be more likely to take up a domestic role because they're being discriminated against in the first place). I say this not to give the employers a pass, but to suggest that any real, durable solution to the discrimination shouldn't automatically assume those social factors are imaginary.

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It also underscores why there's backlash against the concept of privilege. Lower-class men received the fewest job interviews of all four quadrants. Not only do they not get the job, they also get put in the same analytical bucket as the higher-class men.

Just wanted to say I agree with you, and that's why I think this is such a well done and fascinating study. Privilege does clearly exist in this study, but not necessarily in the patterns that are assumed.

I think this is really important to acknowledge. Intersectionality (i.e. subtlety and hollistic thinking) is actually a great way to think about inequity. But a lot of people who are interested in intersectionality are blind to many struggles specific to poor white males (I say this as a relatively privileged person Far removed from that demographic). Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist, but that is largely in response to upbringing, poor education, and poor economic opportunities. It is a big blind spot in many otherwise very liberal people's thinking to exclude poor white males, and that exclusion breeds resentment from a potential ally in addressing problems of inequity (and it contributes to a vicious cycle of racism/sexism leading to exclusion leading to more racism/sexism).

Not saying this is an easy fix, but many other liberal people I know seem shockingly uninterested in even treating this as a problem.

I think it goes even deeper than that. I think for many people poor white men are one the category of people who it's still acceptable to hate.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

>There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time

Damn that hits close to home

> calling American football “sportsball”

who does this, and why?

Those who wish to signal their disinterest - American football is often construed as nonintellectual and skews lower socioeconomically than, say, the "Hamilton" audience. So to feign a complete lack of familiarity with it puts you above those people who understand and enjoy it.

Interesting. I'm not much of a football fan myself, as I'm apparently missing whatever part of the brain is required to enjoy watching team sports.

However, I'd certainly encourage any sports fans who specifically dislike football to read what Hunter S. Thompson wrote on the subject. His passion has sold me on the merits of the game - even if it's still not my personal cup of tea.

> feign a complete lack of familiarity with it

Believe it or not, some of us are actually completely unfamiliar with it. I watched the Superbowl once about ten years ago, and that's literally the extent of my lifetime exposure to football.

I heard John Hodgman use it on his podcast and thought it was a funny way to communicate that I'm just not interested in that category of entertainment. I find it works for all televised sporting leagues in the US. I use it mostly when people try to talk with me about sports at work.

"Did you see last night's game?"

"Were they playing sportsball again last night?"

"Oh yeah, you don't watch sports"

This conversation works without me having to know which sport is in season.

I have never referred to American Football as "sportsball" specifically, but I have used the term "sportsball" as a catch-all term for "sports that I am not interested in". E.g., "Oh, you think it's annoying when I talk about video games? Well, I think it's annoying when you talk about sportsball."

This is a pretty good article to read in case you have the time.

Started reading this, and already it makes you reflect on some assumptions and clearly exposes some very interesting ideas. Brilliant writing.

"Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist.."

[citation needed]

Not a native English speaker but I would take "might" in this setting to signal "this might or might not be true and I am not necessarily endorsing this view but..." or "one might argue that".

I read this as "lets throw a "might" in to be less blatant, but this is what i believe".

Do you agree then with GGP that personal beliefs require citation?

Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist, but that is largely in response to upbringing, poor education, and poor economic opportunities.

Might in that context is, a substitute for 'while it is true that' not a weasel word like probably.

"White males" might skew more "sexist and racist", I can't believe this is still stated without a hint of irony. It was a blatant the first time I heard it, and it's still blatant today.

It's not the lack of citation that bothers me - try this:

"Poor black males might skew more criminal and violent.."

Suddenly the problem isn't how reliable a citation might be. There are few groups you're allowed criticize with statistics.

My experience is that sociologists are all like the woman who wrote this article: totally aware of the issues involved in dealing with multiple binary variables and a little embarrassed by the overly fancy and political word "intersectionality." Maybe you are right about other liberal people, but you will never meet a sociologist with this blindspot.

It's decidedly harder to be intelectually lazy when your job depends on understanding nuance. I find that people who actually use these terms as part of their job (unsurprisingly) tend to have a much better understanding of them than laypeople who mainly want to sound like they have the correct political opinions for their social demographic.

There is a note underneath the chart that the difference between lower class women and men is not statistically significant - so we don't know if there is a difference between men and women there.

You can do the math here, https://abtestguide.com/calc/, and in any case it is at least very close to "statistical significance", depending on how you define it, that lower class men got fewer callbacks than lower class women.

But the point is that lower class men DID receive a lot fewer callbacks than higher class men, so clearly it is a mistake to attribute "male privilege" equally to both groups.

"close to statistical significance" is one of those phrases I dislike because it's almost designed to deceive. To the trained statistician it means "not statistically significant" but to the average reader it suggests there's something more there than there should be.

What we can safely say is that this study did NOT support the hypothesis that there is gender privilige for men within the lower classes in landing top law jobs, and that it would be interesting to repeat this study with a larger sample size.

While I agree with your conclusion, I have a problem that people think "statistically significant" is some sort of golden, binary rule, instead of "statistically significant at X% confidence level". It's not like 95% confidence level was ordained by God, and it leads to p-value hacking. I'd argue that if you come out at 94% or 96%, both of these warrant further study.

Note that it does not ever say that the difference between upper class women and upper class men was statistically significant.

> The differences in callback rates for higher-class women, lower-class men and lower-class women were not statistically significant, but higher-class men received significantly more callbacks than all other categories

It is very suspicious that the wording was "significantly more" instead of "statistically significant", especially when she specifically called out statistical significance for the other groups right before it.

If the difference was not statistically significant, that fact is intentionally and malevolently obfuscated.

This is not an ambiguous phrasing; this is a standard way of writing the summary in prose. There is nothing remotely “suspicious” or “malevolent” here.

It clearly expresses that the only one of four categories whose callback rate rises to the level of statistical significance (presumably something like p < 0.05 of null hypothesis that all rates are the same) was the rate for high-class men. The reason the sentence doesn’t include the word “statistically” in the second half is that it would sound incredibly awkward, and is not necessary to repeat.

This isn't an academic journal. But, of course, you can go read their actually published piece. What they say there is:

"The higher-class male applicant had a callback rate of 16.25 percent, more than four times as high as the average callback rate for the other three applicants, who collectively generated just nine interview invitations from 235 applications, a callback rate of 3.83 percent. This fourfold difference is significant not only statistically (p < .001) but also substantively, and its magnitude is especially striking when considering the fact that applicants’ entire law school records and all academic and professional experiences were identical".

So no need for conspiracy theories.

There's no need for snark.

My point still stands. Statistical significance for upper class men vs. upper class women is never mentioned.

The statistics in this instance are cooked and very misleading. It does not prove the author's point. The major claim in this article is that upper class men did much better than upper class women:

> Why did the higher-class man do so much better than the higher-class woman?

Yet the statistic only compares upper class men to everyone else.

Why did the authors choose to only mention the p-value for one category vs. everyone else? Why not other data slices?

The authors clearly calculated the p-value between individual groups (from their "not statistically significant" comment). Why did they not list these values?

It's a choice between negligent data analysis or intentional omission.

It sounds like if you slice the "everyone else" further you're only going to get more significant differences.

What is your beef? The study's N and the raw evaluation numbers are even stated in the layman's article, you can even calculate statistical significance yourself if you don't trust the author's statements.

And they stated that UM is significantly different from the other three, but that LM, UF and LF are not significantly different from each other. What more do you want?

> Why did the authors choose to only mention the p-value for one category vs. everyone else? Why not other data slices?

Because that's the only part that I quoted - go read the academic article yourself if you want the full analysis.

Let's just do the p-value comparison of upper-class men to upper-class women for you just to settle this. The null-hypothesis is that both categories are equally interviewed. Total of 18 people interview (13 of 80 men, 3 of 79 women). If all null-hypothesis is true, the 16 interviews would be randomly distributed into the men and women categories. The chance of getting at least 13 men would then be sum_(i=13)^16 (16 choose i) * (80/159)^i * (79/159)^(16-i) which equals p = 0.011. So much for malevolent omission!

I 100% agree and wish I could retweet this.

I largely agree with you regarding the popular view, but I wanted to point out that this article focuses on the gender "twist" because that is what is new in the research. The author of the article cites near the beginning an acclaimed book she previously wrote apparently focusing solely on class (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10457.html).

Not only do they not get the job, they also get put in the same analytical bucket as the higher-class men.

That really is the elephant in the corner: the variations in privilege by gender for the white university-educated middle and upper-middle classes are barely a rounding error compared to the gulf in privilege between them and the working class, or the non-whites even of the middle class, which the framework of analysis used by their article glosses over. That is why, outside of their bubble, cries of "male privilege!" ring so hollow. Nobody likes to be lectured by someone who spends more on a coffee, than they earn in an hour. Or who drops a quarter-million dollars on a degree of no vocational use.

I don't agree with most of Marx's conclusions, but he was absolutely right in that class is the lens through which to understand societies.

But it's not a rounding error, is it? In the study, the difference between upper class men and upper class women was greater than the difference between upper class men and lower class applicants generally.

Why do you say that? If you look at the graph in the article, that's not true at all.

The comment I was responding to said that "the variations in privilege by gender for the white university-educated middle and upper-middle classes are barely a rounding error compared to the gulf in privilege between them and the working class."

But that's not true. Men got 1.8x as many callbacks as women, and upper class candidates got 2.6x as many callbacks as lower class candidates. Even if the class divide as a somewhat greater impact, the gender divide is not a "rounding error."

The other way to look at it is that the callback rate for upper class women was the same as the average callback rate for lower class applicants, and both rates are much lower than for upper class males.

The whole point of breaking the results down by class is that your statement of "Men got 1.8x as many callbacks as women", while true, is very misleading, because the sex difference only benefitted upper class men. Lower class men got the fewest callbacks of any group.

It's equally wrong to say that it's about class and not gender, because the class difference only benefited upper class men. Upper class women did not get a statistically significant number more callbacks than lower class applicants.

Again, I'm responding to a comment that called the gender discrimination a "rounding error." It clearly is not--there is both gender and class discrimination happening and upper class women aren't better positioned than lower class applicants.

By choosing to group the data in male/female as you do and omitting the class variable, consciously or not, you can reach wrong conclusions about the interpretation of the data. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

I didn't, I grouped it both by class and by gender.

Sometimes I think the real purpose of all this talk about gender is to hide the real discrimination, which is mostly about class, and nepotism among the elite.

> Not only do they not get the job, they also get put in the same analytical bucket as the higher-class men.

What the study shows is that upper class men have a clear advantage, and everyone else is roughly in the same boat. (The callback rate among upper class women was the same as the callback rate among lower class applicants.)

There is no reason that the concept of "privilege" cannot embrace economic privilege as well as gender and racial privilege (and it should, because discrimination is happening along all those dimensions). However, at a certain point the theory comes into conflict with political reality. The current trend in American politics is various marginalized groups (women, LGBT folks, racial and religious minorities) all congregating under the same tent, even though they otherwise don't have all that much in common. The notable exception is lower class white men, who (as a generalization) are very resistant to the idea of being a part of that tent. And they disproportionately vote against the interests of the other folks in that tent.

So it appears to me that the exclusion is at least in part self-imposed.

I got mono last year, and was out for longer than some of my female coworkers who had a child were. Same observation for one of my coworker who got in a snowboarding accident. I've also had several male coworkers leave because they wanted to devote themselves fully to their family.

This kind of observation ("high status women are more likely to leave for family reasons therefore it is an economically rational choice to prefer men, given equal skills") seems logical on the surface, but when you start looking into the nuances of real life it just doesn't hold.

I once had a CEO say directly to me: "honestly if one of my female employees got pregnant, i would take it personally. We're a startup, we can't afford people who do that". He had no problem pushing several great engineers to burnout and firing them when their productivity tanked though.

I'm a little wary of this kind of argument. Let's just accept the OP's premise for a second. If he's right that upper class women really are more likely to leave the workforce, would it make the discrimination acceptable? Personally I don't feel it would.

Sure, I get your objection from an epistemological perspective; I don't disagree. The thing is that then you wouldn't be comparing "upper class women" vs the rest of the workforce. You should be comparing upper class women in their 30s vs upper class women in their 50s vs men who smoke vs single men in their 20s vs ...

In that case you might find that upper class women in their 30s are indeed more likely to leave the workforce than single men in their 20s, but less likely than men in their 50s. At that point, the "economically rational" argument becomes to only hire single men in their 20s, which I guess is what Silicon Valley does.

If corporations want to be prejudiced (because it serves their rational economic interests), you can't just stand there and say "well, they shouldn't want that then!" and expect the world to change. You've got to come up with a system or context in which being prejudiced isn't useful, so that (as rational actors) corporations stop wanting to be prejudiced.

And to do that, we first have to come to agreement, in the clear light of day, whether corporations do want that (potentially unacceptable) thing or not. Which seems to be a large problem in discussions like this: trying to talk about the way the world is butts up against people who want to talk only about the way the world should be, and don't want to acknowledge that you have to talk about both "before" and "after" if you want to get from one to the other.

Yeah, no kidding. The obvious one, which has a precedent, is making companies subject to legal penalties for discrimination.

> You've got to come up with a system or context in which being prejudiced isn't useful

That's usually regulation. Child labor is useful, no vacation time is useful and 16-hour days until your workers literally start dying is extremely useful. You would make a ton of money that way. There is no way you can spin the argument such that the company would always derive higher profits by taking the moral choice.

>There is no way you can spin the argument such that the company would always derive higher profits by taking the moral choice.

No, because it's nearly impossible to get even two people to always agree what the moral choice even is.

But your examples are fairly easy: all of them are clearly net negatives for society, and would only be profitable for companies if they don't pay the true costs of their behavior.

Child labour carries a huge opportunity cost for the child: it can't get proper education, potentially costing it millions in lifetime earnings. Given a lack of immediate financial pressure, the economically rational decision for a child would be to demand far higher pay than an equally skilled adult because the salary has to offset the labor cost.

Similar arguments can be made for working people to death and giving them no vacation, but the payment schemes become complicated. Luckily they are even easier to solve: if unemployment is an acceptable condition (little stigma, decent unemployment benefits, etc), then the pool of people willing to work such jobs vanishes.

Of course regulation also works. Sometimes it's the sensible option (much easier to outlaw child labour than to teach economics and long term thinking to small children). But it is always valuable to first check if we can fix the root causes of a complex problem before we start with medicating the symptoms.

I kind of feel it'd be dishonest for me to start arguing against discrimination with the rationale that diversity is good for companies because the fact is that I'd oppose it even if it were bad for them; the economic soundness or unsoundness is not the reason I oppose it.

Also, I'd point out that, in fact, market mechanisms did not work to stop abuses like child labor.

Child labor is probably better solved by paying kids for good grades in school. The ones getting an education would be less likely to divert effort to jobs that might take away from study time, even after they turn 18, while the ones who aren't getting an education anyway could at least gain some work experience and bring value to their families. This would also greatly reduce classroom disruption by "students" who are not actually learning.

For example: $1000/year for a D, $2000/year for a C, $4000/year for a B, $8000/year for an A. (probably better to use national test score percentile though)

The point isn't that discrimination being rational makes it ok. The point is that if discrimination is irrational, the best way to fix it is different from the best solution if it were rational. It's an important factor in deciding how to best work towards equality.

If it's irrational, educating employers may be a great option. If it's rational, we probably need to level the playing field somehow (e.g. make it just as ok for dads to stay home as it is for moms or something).

Sweden tried that. They gave out 330 days of maternity + paternity leave. Women used 94% of it. So they had to make some of it "use it or lose it" for men only. Men started taking the bare minimum, so Sweden is planning to increase the "use it or lose it" portion.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/08/snack...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/28/swedish-father...

Consider the possibility that maybe men just don't want to stay home as much as women, even if it's acceptable.

"Legally allowed" != "acceptable". I can't speak to Sweden directly, but Canada has (almost) gender-neutral parental leave laws and many industries/companies still consider it very unusual if a father wants to take more than three or four weeks off at the birth of a child. I have friends that explicitly told me they would have liked to stay home more, but weren't able to because they feared what would happen at work.

According to the slate article it's normal and socially accepted. Men still don't do it much.

If men don't do it then how is it normal for men to do it?

Most men don't deadlift much, but it isn't considered abnormal that I do so on a regular basis.

Most men don't sleep with other men, but that is again not considered abnormal or socialhttp unacceptable.

> I have friends that explicitly told me they would have liked to stay home more, but weren't able to because they feared what would happen at work.

For anyone in a competitive work environment who wants to get ahead, though, it's not surprising that someone would feel pressure to take less time off even if they had a very supportive employer. It seems kind of obvious to me that I would feel less "behind" in work if I took 4 weeks off instead of 8.

I think you're jumping to several conclusions that could use additional research.

Presently the best we can say from the data is that men seem to take close to the bare minimum of required time off, so it makes sense to increase that time if the goal is men spending more time with the newborn and/or supporting their partner.

Another conclusion may be that while it it /legally/ acceptable, it is not yet socially acceptable.

Finally, maybe an alternative to that approach would be better. Something like a year where both parents are /required/ to be home taking care of the baby.

If you believe that only enlightened bureaucrats can properly make family decisions, and parents are incapable of doing so, that may indeed be good policy.

It may not surprise you that I would prefer to make my own choices.

Plenty of people want to make their own choices, but corporate culture imposes choices on them.

That does indeed make parents incapable of making family decisions.

Your mistake is in assuming that the legislation targets individuals.

It doesn't. It targets corporations that take advantage of individuals.

Corporate culture merely provides a choice. You can always quit your job if you dislike the choice offered.

Legislation does target individuals; it forbids me from choosing money over time. As a person with no desire to stay home for long periods, this directly harms me.

How does it forbid you? The law doesn't force you to take that time; it merely doesn't allow your partner to take it on your behalf.

I am not permitted to enter into a "more money, less leave" contract with a willing employer.

Right, but that's unrelated to the efforts to get men to take up more leave (increasing the "use it or lose it" for men), since even if the time was all usable by the mother, you couldn't enter into a contract renouncing it either. So I don't see how it's germane to the point you introduced earlier.

Women (fortunately or unfortunately) are not permitted these contracts either. It's not possible to promise chastity or childlessness or plead hysterectomy and get more money; the actual condition of one's reproductive equipment or desires is ignored and instead a broad bias ("she might leave!") is applied to all.

Yes, but fundamentally you don't understand the premises your interlocutors are starting from. Essentially, the view you're encountering is that a certain amount of vacation, parental leave, and related benefits are an intrinsic good and that nobody should be forced to choose between their career and, for instance, taking paternity leave. To someone with that view talking about losing the "choice" to forego these benefits for the sake of your career is pointless in much the same way it'd be pointless for me to appeal to the Bible in an ethical debate with an atheist.

You can always quit your job if you dislike the choice offered.

Right, and find a job with completely different terms, which, uh, very likely doesn't exist.

This kind of "everything's a choice" BS really bugs me. There are plenty of situations where regulation is the only solution, and I suspect this is one of them. Since employers use willingness to work long hours as a signal of commitment/productivity, very few people get the choice to work shorter hours, even if almost everybody would be happier that way.

And you can always get another job during the time you are on leave.

>Something like a year where both parents are /required/ to be home taking care of the baby.

That solves the problem (?) that men spend less time with the newborn, but I have my doubts that it solves discrimination problems. Employers would just start hiring people who are less likely to have children (big data will make that even easier) and discourage their employees from getting families and thus children. Now the discrimination is just shifted around instead of removed, and on top of that it decreases the already low birth rate.

Maybe I phrased it poorly. Being ok or acceptable isn't exactly what I meant re: leveling the playing field. Maybe it needs to be expected or something. I wouldn't expect something so cultural to balance out in under a generation anyways. Culture takes time (and sometimes it just takes new people).

The point wasn't the example of paternity leave anyhow. The point is that some kind of leveling would need to happen if we want to equalize on some rational form of discrimination.

It's strange, I don't recognize that Sweden.

In computer-type jobs it's normal for men to take plenty of parental leave, and no stigma. Many work reduced work weeks too, right up until the youngest kid is 8 years old.

I know builders and such who do the same. And I've seen a few young female builders around too.

So I'm racking my brains trying to think what type of people in what type of job can be skewing the statistics.

Sweden is not a prejudice free country, but it's way better than Britian and, from the awful impression I've got from many short visits, the US.

If its so irrational, why do non-irrational companys not wipe irrational companys from the face of the earth?

Has any company ever tried being non-irrational?

I highly recommend Misbehaving by Richard Thaler, particularly the chapter of the American football draft in this instance.

If it's irrational but companies are inherently irrational then the result is the same as if it's rational and companies are rational, right? Either way you need something beside the Invisible Hand if you hope to solve the problem.

'Rational' has a specific meaning in economics; on the weak end, it means an oddly strong knowledge of probability and game theory, while at the strong end it means completely prescient.

Outside of some limited cases, such as small groups of economists, there is no evidence that anyone, anywhere, had behaved 'rationally'.

What I'm saying is that question isn't even really material to the discussion at hand. Either discrimination is rational and rational economic actors are discriminating, or else it's irrational and irrational economic actors are discriminating (or else maybe it's rational and irrational economic actors are acting rationally for irrational reasons, or whatever combination of the two you like). Either way the market will not fix the problem without intervention.

This reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805665

I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws. They probably worked better for manual labor and other commodity jobs. A compromise would be to limit them to these kinds of jobs.

Do you have any data/studies besides an anecdote to show that this kind of observation does not hold in real life? All the data I've seen show that women do work part-time more often, work fewer hours (for example, for doctors: http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016...), take more vacations (http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2013/04/25/vacation-tra...), and take more sick days (http://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-do-women-take-more-si...).

Someone posts a comment explicitly stating it's an observation from personal experience. Why on earth would that commenter have a study on hand?

Well, what the OP said is not as clear as you make to be.

He did give an anecdote as evidence, but the claim he was justifying was that:

> This kind of observation ("high status women are more likely to leave for family reasons therefore it is an economically rational choice to prefer men, given equal skills") seems logical on the surface, but when you start looking into the nuances of real life it just doesn't hold.

This is too strong a statement to be described as merely "stating it's an observation from personal experience".

Anyway, what's nice is that this is a forum and another commenter might answer with the data if such data/argument exists.

It's funny they you're getting downvoted while above you are there are several anecdotes that apparently do prove the plight of the poor white man.

The stats I've seen at a large diverse org doesn't agree. Women take more leaves, birth for maternity and elder care. They also have a higher rate of voluntary work schedule reduction.

I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a disincentive for people to move up. Modern workplaces have unnatural expectations for employee availability.

For white shoe law firms, I don't necessarily disagree that hiring wealthy candidates doesn't make sense to the business. If your client is some Rockefeller heir, being able to chat about squash, sailing and modern art has a value.

> For white shoe law firms, I don't necessarily disagree that hiring wealthy candidates doesn't make sense to the business. If your client is some Rockefeller heir, being able to chat about squash, sailing and modern art has a value.

When the industry as a whole makes a conscious effort to be more diverse in hiring, the short term incentive to put a thumb on the scale for the preferred background gradually disappears. For example, a third of all GCs and CLOs at F500 companies are now women. It makes little sense to put a thumb on the scale for men in that environment.

"I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a disincentive for people to move up. Modern workplaces have unnatural expectations for employee availability."

Is it a cause or is it an effect?

"I think that's a good thing"

"I might agree that hiring wealthy candidates makes sense to the business"

Just parsing out those double negatives for reference.

Just so you know, sometimes when women leave for "family reasons", it is because they are sick of putting up with the bullshit of discrimination while trying to balance a career with raising a family. This problem is more of a self fulfilling prophecy than chicken-and-egg.

> these high-status women might be more likely to take up a domestic role because they're being discriminated against in the first place

You almost quoted him.

Replacing 'might be' with 'are' is a significant difference.

I think it's generally better to propose hypotheses if you're not backing up your assertions with data.

> while trying to balance a career with raising a family.

As if men don't have this problem...

I suppose it's more socially acceptable that the men neglect the family. (Speculation:) Or men tend to neglect more ?

Define neglect. Ensuring the family is provided for is the very opposite of neglect.

I definitely think it's more socially acceptable. It's just another annoying gender stereotype.

But to me the problem is companies working employees too long. Salary before meant putting in your 9-5 and leaving early on Fridays. Now if I don't put in 12 hours a day I look bad. If I do I look average.

Life often gives you a series of small choices that amount to preferring your career or your family. Different people choose differently and it adds up over time.

This choice is not gender neutral, we can see clear differences - and this shows up in all kinds of places, choice of profession being one of them; taking time off for family - another.

> Just so you know, sometimes when women leave for "family reasons", it is because they are sick of putting up with the bullshit

No discrimination necessary. Every job has bullshit for everyone. An engineer friend got a new boss she doesnt like and her project manager job is stressful, and not what she likes (engineering), but the only way up the career ladder. She now thinks about getting kids as a way out.

I find it economically irrational to exclude or bias against half the talent pool on the frankly ridiculous basis that they might leave later. Everyone leaves later anyway and these events occur beyond the time horizon of anyone hiring at your startup and/or bigco.

And yet hiring managers (of all genders) continue to suffer from this bias. I've always just chalked it up to an excuse for sexism.

That's not the case for partner-track positions at white shoe law firms.

In fact this is a reason to be skeptical of this kind of discrimination argument.

If the wage gap is happening and is really so drastic, if women are being undervalued so hard, etc, then there should be a massive Moneyball-style opportunity for people to start companies that correct this error. With the advantages you'd gain by adjusting hiring, you'd completely trounce the competition.

This hasn't happened yet though. Either people are being slow to do it, or the wage situation is not as straightforward as it is being put in these arguments.

In Moneyball, if your team can play good baseball, you win.

If you hire an all-female sales staff, and each employee is technically better in every way than average men, but your customers simply do not want to be sold to by women, then it doesn't matter how good the women are, how many extra skills they have that aren't priced into the market, you will fail.

That's the thing with systematic bias: it's systematic.

That all said, there is still a way to capture the moneyball-style giant pile of cash (and yes, I do believe it is there. There's one for black people too, and every group we think is less employable for certain jobs than white men):

You have to create a feminist company and a feminist market and spin them up simultaneously.

The reason this doesn't happen all the time is it's much harder to create a 2-sided market than a 1-sided one.

And frankly, due to the systemic nature of sexism, a 2-sided market probably isnt enought. You really need to create an n-sided market. You need suppliers and partners and sister companies and clients all on the same page, at least to the extent that your interface with those organizations is human-rich enough to permit sexism.

This is the same reason why anarchist (property-free) businesses have been hard to create, even though the fundamentals should be more efficient than a capitalist company. For it to work you need to spin up n-anarchist companies at once so they can feed off each other. Instead people try to create them one by one, so they fail. They are chewed up by the fundamentally antagonistic world around them... Same as pro-women organizations are.

It's a hard startup problem, but we are getting good at solving those. I wouldn't bet against this being solved within 20 years, at least in proof of concept.

Most jobs are not in sales, so regardless of whether this is true, it only applies to a minority of positions. (Though I have no numbers, in my experience sales is the one area where there are lots of women in tech companies, as well as in some other industries like pharmaceuticals.)

I don't know that you can blame anything on "the fundamentally antagonistic world" since all businesses face a fundamentally antagonistic world and their goal is to overcome that.

Many non-sales jobs follow the same pattern, including law firms discussed in the original article.

One could certainly imagine a law firm matching their hiring practices to the prejudices of their clients, and having this actually be the rationally optimal strategy, i.e. the impact on customer relationships is larger than the inefficiency of rejecting many otherwise good candidates.

It would make sense if your lawyers roughly mirrored the demographics of your customers - having the same social values, regions, schools, hobbies, accents as your customers do. And customers of the expensive law firms are quite different from the general population.

The one example you chose (sales) was bad because competence in sales is only in the ability to sell. So if women are having trouble selling, then they are objectively worse at that that job, which is not the discrimination everyone is trying to stop.

Take software engineering instead as an example, you should be able to hire an all women team of top engineers by paying regular market salaries. There would be no downside and all upside if the gap between male and females of the same skill level is true.

Why do you think it hasn't happened? In the tech sector, I've anecdotally observed differential success for those that foster a hiring strategy offsetting bias w.r.t the talent pool.

Yes. To phrase it differently, if we have trained a perfectly rational AI, it may make the same (biased) decisions against women based on past statistics (percentage of women leaving full-time jobs) and assumption in reasoning (family responsibility affecting career performance) as you described.

To change the decision would require changing either the statistics or the assumption in reasoning.

Reasoning that can also justify eugenics or other heinous stuff.

The opposite reasoning justifies "Harrison Bergeron".

https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Weapons_of_Math_Destr...

We are part of society, so I hope we don't "trained a perfectly rational AI" but train something that operates within constraints that we agree upon as a society.

A "perfectly rational AI" might also kill of disabled people as unproductive, but we as a society will need to introduce bounds and constraints and objectives in line with our human values.

No, assuming that the goal of your perfectly rational AI is to maximize profits, you can change the decision by adding a disincentive for choosing against women.

Which is what governments usually do.

The same rationale could be marshaled to argue that discrimination against the disabled and older workers should be allowed. Should it?

But no where in my comment did I argue that the discrimination should be allowed, and, on the contrary, I believe exactly the opposite.

My main point is that sometimes discrimination is not economically irrational. If that's true, but we as a society think that these forms of discrimination are still bad, we need to come up with better, stronger solutions to make sure discrimination of this sort doesn't happen.

Fair enough. When you put it that way I agree completely.

What you're really saying is that it's rational to be selfish and short-termist. In the long run, everyone benefits if women have the same employment opportunities as men. Women benefit, because duh, men benefit because their female relatives don't depend on them, employers benefit because they have a wider pool of talent to choose from, society benefits because unemployment falls and higher-quality employment rises, and so on, so forth.

The "rationality" you are talking about is false rationality. It's rationalisation- an excuse that people tell themselves to justify their inability to give up on the prejudice they've been taught.

> employers benefit because they have a wider pool of talent to choose from

The OP was arguing that women have a lower expected work output over their career at a company, which is why "economically rational" was used.

So the employers would technically be better off hiring a male over a female with the same skills.

Value investors might happily pay ~10-20% higher labor costs to have an inclusive culture that lasts rather than an on edge precarious culture.

Being a churn-and-burn testosterone fest is starting to look like it might have some negative long term consequences.

>> The OP was arguing that women have a lower expected work output over their career at a company, which is why "economically rational" was used.

I was disagreeing with that on the basis that only looking at your bottom line when trying to decide what is "economically rational" is short-termist and self-defeating, because everyone benefits from living in a society where women have the opportunity to be as productive as men- and that includes employers who don't have to look at the gender of candidates to make a decision.

The benefits may be harder to measure, but that's why rationality is required, rather than rationalisation of unjustifiable bias ("women have lower expected work output").

The genuinely rational thing to do is to try and ensure that both women and men are equally productive, as workers.

"Economically rational" refers to the benefits and drawbacks that apply to whoever is making the decision, not to the benefits and drawback that apply to society as a whole.

If you want law firms to make their hiring decisions differently, then you have to change the incentives and rules that apply to them, not make false claims that they're being irrational.

men benefit because their female relatives don't depend on them

This is true in a strictly material sense but it may not be true from a social/cultural/identity perspective. Traditional masculine identity at its very core is about being the root of the tree: the one your family depends on. Today, fewer and fewer men are in that situation. There are countless articles out there about men's withdrawal from the workforce. More and more women are getting college degrees and the gap over men is growing. Women with a college degree rarely date, let alone marry, men without a degree.

I'll be the first to say I don't automatically want life to go back to the way it was in the 50's. I just can't claim that everybody benefits equally from the new world order. Honestly, I don't know what we as a society ought to do about men who have checked out because they feel that life has left them behind.

>> Women with a college degree rarely date, let alone marry, men without a degree.

I have no idea to what extent that's true, but let's say it's 100% correct.

The obvious thing to do is to make sure as many men as women have degrees. Ideally, that would mean _all_ men (and therefore, all women).

Of course, we could equalise the numbers by making it so fewer women get degrees but that's retrograde and unproductive. Although it does seem to me that sometimes, that's what people are asking for, when they say "more and more women get degrees these days" like it was a bad thing.

>> Honestly, I don't know what we as a society ought to do about men who have checked out because they feel that life has left them behind.

Make sure they get an education every bit as good as that available to men from more privileged backgrounds and create the environment and the opportunities for them to have a fulfilling and rewarding working life.

The obvious thing to do is to make sure as many men as women have degrees. Ideally, that would mean _all_ men (and therefore, all women).

There are still quite a few very important jobs out there which do not need a degree (such as the trades). There are also lots of men who don't want to spend the time or the money on a degree, especially if they can get one of these jobs.

For various reasons, women aren't going for these jobs much at all. Women, moreso than men, seem to operate on the basis that a degree is the only path to a successful life.

Overall, it just seems like large numbers of women and men have inadvertently decided to go their separate ways. I don't know what the end result of this will be, but it sure seems lonely to me.

> It's rationalisation- an excuse that people tell themselves to justify their inability to give up on the prejudice they've been taught.

The fact that there was such a large, significant difference between high status men and low status men, but on the other hand low status women had 5 times the callbacks of low status men, strongly suggests you are incorrect.

I don't think that's really the case. Considering specifically maternity leave, a newborn just flat-out needs its mother in the first several months after birth. The father is helpful, but not essential. So if a company is making a hiring decision based on the need for family leave, it is neither short-term thinking nor irrational to choose the man.

We're finally deciding as a society that this sort of discrimination is bad, so we need to provide an economic incentive to make it a rational choice for the company to equally weigh a man and woman.

In the UK where I live and work, men get paternity leave and if I understand correctly it's meant to be as long as maternity leave, exactly so that there is no room for excuses about how women need to be away from work after having children whereas men don't.

Additionally, businesses get money from the state to pay the wages of their employers on maternity leave, and I think (hope) they do the same for fathers.

I believe other European countries also have similar arrangements in place.

We should also combat the meme that mothers are more essential than fathers. Babies benefit ("need" is a strong word here) from breastfeeding, but all other functions can be performed by fathers just as well. It's also important to note that mothers benefit from rest and support in the months following a delivery. So treating fatherhood as expendable is technically correct if you ignore a lot of practical realities, but we don't exactly treat mothers that use formula as expendable.

This is true for commodity jobs. It would be nice to have employers realize that sometime there is a better-qualified woman -- like, one who would do better work -- and that maternity leave is a very short part of a long career.

Not actually true since scientists invented this magical thing thing called formula decades ago that is by all accounts almost as good as the real thing.

>In the long run, everyone benefits if women have the same employment opportunities as men. Women benefit, because duh, men benefit because their female relatives don't depend on them, employers benefit because they have a wider pool of talent to choose from, society benefits because unemployment falls and higher-quality employment rises, and so on, so forth.

There is a lot of handwaving here.

>Women benefit, because duh,

Certainly on one specific variable it's an improvement, but is it a benefit, all things considered? One of the things I find interesting about this is: I don't want to work at a white shoe law firm! I have no desire for 90-hr weeks, suffering culture, etc. And in general, women don't either. Can you blame them?

"But I'm not talking about forcing them, just offering them the choice. They don't have to take it." Absolutely true, and in general they've decided: hell no. "But that's because of discrimination..." which occurs because of that choice. How do you impose economic equality and freedom of choice if people make different choices?

White shoe law firms aren't happy with this: they'd keep employees locked in forever if they could. Maybe they have some horrible nightmare good reason for this that makes it work for them, I'm not a white shoe law firm. But the way they function apparently requires high-class workaholics. As long as that that's true, you will find difference ("equity" is a retarded and reductive concept. Men and women will only ever be equal if you see them as income numbers rather than men and women. I weigh 165 pounds. Am I equal with a 165-lb weight? How about a 165-lb version of me that doesn't know how to program and went into sales instead?).

>men benefit because their female relatives don't depend on them,

Imagine a world where no one depends on Google. Does Google benefit? This obviously has some troubling connotations and it's a more complex situation, but that's exactly my point. You're handwaving like this is elementary arithmetic ("Does the number on one income statement match the other?"), and oh it's so obvious what the real rationality is, how do these sexists talk themselves into these contrived beliefs, when you're dealing with complex phenomena.

Not all is well at prestigious law firms. Not all is well in the tech sector. But they will only get worse if you add reductionist thinking to the mix.

This analysis isn't sound. Doubling the supply of labor has drastically driven down the price of labor. While that's good for employers, it's questionable whether or not things are better for employees with so much competition for good jobs.

Everyone is up in arms about female discrimination, when really it is the lower-class men who are discriminated against the most.

Does that criticism make sense given that the title of the article and opening paragraphs talk about the class disparity, and only get to the major gender disparity in the middle of the article?

I'm not the person you're replying to, so I can't say what they were thinking when they wrote their comment. I'm choosing though to read their comment as referring to the larger social context, rather than this specific article. I would note however that this article is classified under the category "Gender" in the Harvard Business Review.

I'm going to take the outre position that both gender and class discrimination are bad.

The differences in callback rates were not statistically different between the women and the lower class men. The only statistically significant different was higher class men and everyone else.

I didn't do the stats on it, but just looking at the graph in the article 5 times as many lower class women received callbacks than lower class men. What was the p-value on that?

Instead of "5 times as many" look as "a difference of 4 samples" - in an environment where the expected sampling noise is something like +/- 4.

"Statistically insignificant" means just that - this data is not sufficient to conclusively say if lower class women receive less callbacks than lower class men; maybe they do, maybe they don't.

The study really didn't get into a comparison of people that didn't put any extracurricular activities on their resume. We don't know if the extracurricular activities themselves hurt or helped the candidates compared to people that don't put any in.

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