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Comment by Kluny | Hacker News Reader

> Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.

This sentence is a little garbled so not quite sure what you're going for, but I like to point people to the example of the Danish parliament. A gender quota was established some decades ago to ensure that female members could get the job, because obviously half the population is female and so they need to be represented. Now that they have an equal number of men and women, they're getting ready to remove the quota because it served its purpose, and it's not needed anymore. There are enough qualified and experienced women with strong reputations available that they don't need the help anymore.

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Norway has had "gender points" in relation to acceptance at university for several studies, especially in the STEM related ones. The gender gap has closed a great deal in most of the STEM studies, but not that much in CS related ones. Some of the studies have become nearly 50/50, and an interesting event is when they tried to remove the "gender points" from one of the studies, and the female acceptance rates fell to almost zero. Females in Norway generally have better grades, so one could make the argument that the difference is because of interest.

Do you have a reference for the case mentioned? - student in Norway

I did remember it partially wrong. As stated in the article [1] it was reduced by about half, and not to zero.

[1] http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/arbeidsliv/fortsatt-behov-...

There is a documentary called Hjernevask from Norway that had a lot of controversy because of the topic. It is good to see different opinions of experts and what happened there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs

That is a fantastic outcome, and the sort of end goal that affirmative action should seek. But it doesn't always end that well.

In India, affirmative action has basically served to deepen the lines between castes/religions etc. More and more sections of society demand that they be included in quotas. The people who do get in using such programs rarely succeed in suppressing the nagging question of whether they earned it (and that questioning stays with you all your life). Meanwhile, people forge identity documents to make it through such programmes, and the abuse of the system means that no one trusts that it is doing any good overall. In fact, by now, it has become a tool for politicians to appease fractious sections of society.

That's really too bad. Maybe something like the blind auditions they now use for orchestra positions could help. All applications done blindly or over text, using knowledge tests, something like that.

In fact, I agree with your original post wholeheartedly.

You start with an "end date" (say two decades). And you make that date difficult to change, so that the "let's kick the can down the road" option is not easy.

The "end date" will never arrive. If you told a set of people they can get seats at plum places doing 1/4th work the remainder of the population, and you did this with 4-5 generations of their populace, its impossible to do away with this sort of entitlement after a while.

And not to forget there will be enough politicians to fight for them as long as they vote for them.

These sort of things are pretty much one direction. Once done are irreversible. Its impossible to roll back what people think is a right they were born with.

> Maybe something like the blind auditions

Exactly! If you want to remove gender, race or some other aspect from the decision making process you have to actually remove it. You can't just try to fix discrimination one direction by creating discrimination in a different direction.

That is an excellent idea. The only trouble is, the people who make this policies do not see the problem that you and I do. Their problem is to get more votes, and ocassionally to appease violent hooligans. What they have been doing fixes their problems perfectly well. SNAFU.

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