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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There is a difference between superficial equality and structural equality. Consider a society where 50% of tech CEOs and programmers were women, but it was socially acceptable to deny any given woman or man a job based on his or her gender. Such a society would have structural equality but not superficial equality.

What you're talking about is superficial equality. Your point is correct within that narrow context, but I don't think superficial equality is all that interesting.

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That's equality of outcome though, which is often terrible.

I want a society where everybody gets an even shot, at which point I find it highly unlikely we'd end up at 50/50 - given programming has been both male-majority and female-majority over time I'm damned if I know in which direction it'd fall, but 50/50 usually means "you have forced people to be here who would've been better/happier somewhere else" and my feminism involves the radical notion that women have agency too.

Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?

Because it is ambiguous goal which under any reasonable interpretation has massive consequences and major unintended side-effects. My favorite sport is basketball. What is the 'equality of outcome' in the context of the NBA? Is it that players are evenly distributed across gender lines? Across economic lines? Across national lines? Across racial or ethnic or religious lines? In our society, it would probably be understood that NBA should be proportionally represented by each identity group. So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

The other point is that in a free society, you cannot guarantee equality of outcome because people are going to make personal choices that will be magnified and influenced by whatever sub-culture they are immersed in. Professional basketball in the early days was over-represented by Jews, because it just so happened that interest in the game went viral in that sub-culture.

Tech has an over-representation of men because it grew out of a particular nerd sub-culture. There's nothing wrong with doing outreach to get non-traditional sub-groups developing an interest in programming, just like there's nothing wrong with the NBA running clinics in China to get Chinese kids into basketball. But it's not racism that the demographics are the way they are! In a free society you should expect that!

> So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.

>Arguably yes.

What do you mean "arguably yes"? What are we losing by having blacks be over-represented in the NBA?

>But there is a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.

BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.

Professional Hockey is dominated by White Canadians and Russians. Baseball is over-represented by Latino/Hispanic players. Asians, who are 5% of the US population, account for almost 25% of all Physicians. Which industry has this perfect ratio of races that should serve as a model for us all. And you conveniently side-stepped the issue of 1) why it is race/ethnicity where proportionality should be prioritized over (for example) religion, and 2) is it even reasonable to expect that such a ratio to be achievable in a society where people are free to choose and 3) what the heck is the actual gain to society if it is versus the cost of brainwashing people to want things they don't actually want.

> BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.

How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?

>How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?

How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia.

What is your point?

My point was based on personal experience. You're the one who said you don't know anyone encouraging black kids to pursue success through sports. How is that opinion supposed to carry any weight if you wouldn't be in a position to know about it even if it were happening?

This thinking is exactly the problem. "There are a lot of people with dark skin in basketball, your skin color is looking like theirs, therefore your path to success must be basketball". But the solution you seem to be implying is even worse - "ok, we succeeded in convincing you your skin color determines your path in life. Congrats to us. But now we'll close this path for you because we already have too many people looking like you there, so no success for you, sorry". Both ways of thinking are idiotic and both if followed can ruin people's lives. We need less of that, not more.

Great. Now convince all the black teenagers living in the same segregated neighborhoods black people lived in a century ago (because it was illegal for them to live in the other side of this or that road) that skin color doesn't determine their path in life.

I can't, of course. But it's not about me, is it? It's about how to fix it. And I think getting out of "race determines everything" mentality is part of fixing it, regardless of what I personally can or can't do. Yes, there was a lot of harm and injustice done to black people in the US in the past, and some of it continues even to this day. It must be fixed. I haven't seen an instance of concentrating on racial quotas fixing it though. I don't think racism can be fixed with racial quotas.

Would you support 50% gender equality of speakers at a conference?

Would you support limiting professional teams from hiring black people to allow for a certain number of Asians?

Would you support universities reducing their intake of Jewish students to stop over-representation?

Would you support hospitals hiring a maximum 5% Asian doctors?

> But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem?

It's a symptom of one.

> And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

Deal with the problems that deny so many black youth any better opportunities than the lottery-ticket of aiming for success in sports.

Because it reduces people to a set of identity classes that fill respective identity checkboxes. I.e. if it happens that on conference there is 10 good presentation submitted from class X but only 2 from class Y, and the quota is half-half, you would either reject 8 good presentations or add 8 crappy ones, just to fill identity checkboxes and achieve equality of outcome. Or cancel the conference altogether.

The true equality would be when the conference organizers see 12 good presentations, and don't even think to dig into what identity class they represent (unless the conference is specifically organized to represent identity classes). When did you last seen statistics about hair color or eye color of conference presenters? How about blood type? Maybe AB- people are underrepresented? You get the idea.

If green eyed people had been systematically oppressed until recently and still made a fraction of the money brown eyed people do as a result, you'd see statistics about eye color at conference presentations.

Define "recently. Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime, or yours, or most of the potential presenters. If you are conservative about it you can claim discrimination up until the 1960s - which is 50 years ago, hardly "recently".

> Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime

If you are ever so slightly open-minded about it you could consider black Americans to still be systematically oppressed by the criminal justice system. Read a bit about the criminalisation of marajuana, sentencing procedures, the industrial prison complex etc..

Equality of outcome as a goal is terrible because it's the enemy of equality of opportunity. "Everybody is denied their agency" would be equal, perhaps, but isn't part of any feminist vision I choose to align myself with.

The equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity distinction is a cop-out. If you have real equality of opportunity then you should expect equality of outcome,[1] unless there is biological reason why women/black people/etc want to be left out of well-paying secure careers, or can't hack it in those careers. Maybe that's true, but it's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

The fact that programming has been both male-majority and female-majority at different times proves my point, and undermines yours. There is nothing inherent about it that makes women select into or out of it. Society pushed women into it back when it was a low status profession and now pushes women out of it now that it's a high status profession.

[1] When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that. Equality of opportunity means that's if you take a sample of say 1,000 kids, they should experience extrinsic forces over their lifetime that aren't correlated with race/gender/etc. I.e. some kids might have it easier because they have rich parents and some kids might have it harder because they have poor parents, but there shouldn't be a systematic pattern to those forces. But when people invoke "equality of opportunity" I am skeptical they mean doing something about the fact that statistically a random black kid is going to grow up in a household that only makes 60% as much as the one a random white kid would grow up in.

Please tell me how society "pushes women out" of programming. I've only seen women being pushed toward programming. It's up to the individual woman to choose programming - just like it's up to the individual man to want a degree in, say, clinical psychology. The only pressure I've seen is that of the gender majority. Men and women tend to overlook careers where there is a majority consisting of the opposite sex. It's not society's job to equalize gender ratios and yes there are real differences between men and women. It's not true that if there's a majority gender in a field it must be because of discrimination.

> When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that

I don't.

What is the "structural inequality" in this case? That there are more men than women in tech? If so, what is the 'structure' that causes this inequality?

Turtles, all the way down.

----

Or to be less glib, that's a great question, and like many, not simple to answer well.

Mostly, it seems like a lack of positive reinforcement and role models (leading to self selection out at early ages), mixed with sexism in a a variety of forms (leading to lack of opportunities, or hostile environment and self selection out at later ages).

But that's an oversimplification.

If women don't choose to go into tech, that's their own choice.

It's not as if men went into tech because of positive social reinforcement for being a nerd.

There's still a social stigma attached to it, which I'd love to see change, but it affects both men and women.

There is not a stigma against "in tech". There was never a stigma against it, really.

And yes, men largely do get into stem fields because there is huge positive reinforcement and many positive role models.

>There is not a stigma against "in tech". There was never a stigma against it, really.

Yeah. Traditionally all the cool kids were the math and computer whizes with glasses and pocket protectors - not the star football player. Yeah. Got it.

>And yes, men largely do get into stem fields because there is huge positive reinforcement and many positive role models.

Uh huh. Can you quantify that? Or did you just sit down and think really really really hard about it so it must be true.

>and many positive role models

Is that actually a real problem? Are you saying a white kid will be dissuaded from playing basketball, or even being an NBA fan because the best players are black?

In similar spirit, are you really trying to argue that a young girl will not be able to be inspired by Woz, or Jobs, or Elon Musk because they are men? What dystopian, ugly world are you living in?

I'm pretty sure the cool kids in my school did individual sports (golf, tennis, track), were in 2-3 AP classes, and aced their SATs. So that'd depend on where and when you are.

There's absolutely a stigma against not confirming to prevailing norms, which is a bit of a different discussion. Also the mess that is putting hundreds or even thousands of adolescents in a confined space with minimal oversight.

>Uh huh. Can you quantify that? Or did you just sit down and think really really really hard about it so it must be true.

Why did you get into it?

>Is that actually a real problem?

Yes. Though, representation generally is probably a better way to have said it. Though availability of role models and mentors with similar life experience is a factor as well.

>Are you saying a white kid will be dissuaded from playing basketball, or even being an NBA fan because the best players are black?

Fandom and participation aren't the same things, and while there's some overlap between former participation and later fandom in sports, it's far from 1 to 1.

I'm not sure if white kids would be discouraged due to lack of representation in the NBA. All other things being equal, yes, that's a likely outcome. But all other things are not equal. Race and sports in the US is an interesting topic in its own right.

>In similar spirit, are you really trying to argue that a young girl will not be able to be inspired by Woz, or Jobs, or Elon Musk because they are men?

Not at all. But a lack of representation has a few different impacts. At the personal level, individuals find it easier to identify with folks who they see as being like them. What exactly like them means varies, but the younger the child, the less abstract they tend to be. Second, parents and teachers are influenced by lack of representation, so it feeds back into a loop of lack of community encouragement, which doesn't help.

>What dystopian, ugly world are you living in?

The same one as you, of course.

It's a choice, but it's not the same choice. When a woman signs up to be an engineer, she's signing up for long hours debugging segfaults, just like a man. But unlike a man, she's signing up to spend four years in school being one of the handful of women in her class, then entering a workforce with the likes of Uber, etc. There signing up for a life of awkward encounters with coworkers, supervisors who try to date female employees, limited support networks, etc.

None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc.

Tech isn't new. Why haven't women chosen to enter tech in the same numbers they've chosen other male-dominated fields?

> None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc.

As to law, it didn't happen by magic. After openly excluding women into the 1970s, law schools and law firms made concerted efforts to increase the representation of women. Large law firms not only track demographic information for hiring and promotions, they disclose it to legal publications who report on it. These days much of it has become self reinforcing. Frat culture has a hard time surviving in an environment where a big chunk of the clients are women (a quarter of existing Fortune 500 CLOs and a third of new ones are women).

That's all true of tech as well. People should seriously ask why women aren't choosing tech careers, because the "old boys club" or "frat culture" explanation isn't at all unique to tech.

Really what I'm getting at, there is no 'structural racism' in this case. You cannot point at a law, or mandate, or policy that actively discriminates against an ethnicity, race, or gender. The best you can do is give some hand-wavy argument that 'unconscious biases' are driving racist actions without knowledge of the person - but what is a person supposed to do with that? They are racist in such a secret way that even they are unaware of it? Total garbage.

What is your explanation for the underrepresentation of black people and women in engineering besides structural racism and sexism? If the answer is "self selection," explain to me what could possibly cause women and black people to self-select out of high paying interesting jobs?

>What is your explanation for the underrepresentation of black people and women in engineering besides structural racism and sexism?

Null hypothesis. YOU are making an unsubstantiated claim. What is YOUR proof of this structural racism. And feel free to define your terms, because I have no effin clue what 'structural racism' is.

Here's an alternative explanation, people are influenced by the sub-cultures they are in and ideas that go viral in one sub-culture, may not go viral in another. In the early 1900s professional basketball was dominated by Jews. Why basketball? I don't know. It just happened to strike a chord with that specific population, in that specific time.

I'm not saying this is the reason, but what it is, is an example that YOU have to dismiss or account for to prove YOUR claim.

>If the answer is "self selection," explain to me what could possibly cause women and black people to self-select out of high paying interesting jobs?

An average salary for a radiologist is $350,000/year. Why aren't you a radiologist? I'll tell you why I'm not. I would rather shoot myself than spend the amount of time it takes to become a radiologist because I have no interest in it. I have no interest in memorizing massive amount of latin names and reading volumes of biology and anatomy text books. Similarly, if you don't love programming, programming is an insanely boring and tedious profession. You may sit in-front of a computer screen for days trying to find a bug that occurs sporadically under some very specific conditions. I find that fun, others who have no interest in it will want to shoot themselves too.

So to answer your question: "I don't know" but if your criteria is human irrationality, I can go on and on and on and on... Why are middle-class kids borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to private liberal arts colleges with no real hope of landing a job that will provide them an income to pay of those loans? Come to think of it, why do humanities degrees even exist? Why do people buy lottery tickets when investing the equivalent money will net them a significantly higher return rate?

Humans are not rational agents. We're driven by emotion.

We known several things as fact. We know overt and open oppression of black people happened as recently as the 1970s and 1980s. (I'd say it's still happening, but the fact that it did happen in the recent past is indisputable.) And we know that black households make only 60% as much at the median as white households. All I'm doing is suggesting a causal relationship between the two.

Since you reject my hypothesis, I'm asking you to suggest an alternative. And your alternative appears to be, "I don't know why, but for some reason black people just don't like money." Which doesn't make any goddamn sense. Sure individuals are different, but why would we expect groups of people to have such distinct preferences? To me your theory smacks of rationalization.

That's surely a factor, but there are many other factors that have to be considered: the stigma against "acting white", Democratic benefit programs that breed dependency and make wealth building almost impossible, violence, fatherless families [1]. The opportunities for success exist; now, it's up to people to work for success.

1: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/...

>Since you reject my hypothesis

I reject your hypothesis on the basis that you have provided no evidence.

>I'm asking you to suggest an alternative

An alternative to what? Why there are less black people and women in tech than there are Asians and whites? I don't know. It could be any number of reasons and none of them may have to do anything with racism or misogyny. You can't just prove your assertion by saying "well i can't think of anything else it could be therefore racism must be the cause".

>And your alternative appears to be, "I don't know why, but for some reason black people just don't like money."

Your paraphrasing of a position I put forward is disgusting. It isn't at all what I said. At all.

You also missed my point. I'm not saying I believe my alternative. I have no evidence for it just like you don't have any for yours. I put it out there to demonstrate that there are potential alternatives that would need to be taken into account.

>Sure individuals are different, but why would we expect groups of people to have such distinct preferences

That's a good question. A type of question that one could study and get a Masters for or a PhD. Certainly there is plenty of precedent at least when it comes to tastes in movies, music and food. So why would you just dismiss it out of hand and blame racism?

> Mostly, it seems like a lack of positive reinforcement and role models

If one presupposes that men and women are literally just the same. As in they have the same distribution of proclivities and personality traits across their gender this would be the most logical conclusion to reach.

As an aside. Anyone ever heard of David Reimer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

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