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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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