Hacker News Reader

That's not a counter argument because women DIDN'T actually start companies and still doesn't. So what do you want to do? Force them to? According to you, that's what we need.

The reason why people get board seats is again one of those misunderstood discussions. It has absolutely nothing to do with qualification as in non-at-all. What it has to do with is the board members access to network, political power, special experience etc.

So as long as you and other keep insisting qualification is somehow important in this discussion, you are actually the ones making the noise.

Qualification has nothing to do with this.

In your numerous replies, two things are clear. You're annoyed that older coders can struggle to get jobs and you think women can start their own companies and programming clubs and seem to be insinuating that they should leave ours alone.

If you're having a problem getting a job 'cause you're old in SV, I'm sorry. I have no such age discrimination problem in the UK, loads of jobs here but not any where as well paid as the US. I might point out that you had 20 years to make a ton of bank. If you want to fix age discrimination, campaign for it, but leave it out of this thread.

As for companies being boys clubs, to me that's clearly unacceptable, it's simply wrong to say that a "company culture" can be male only as that's clear discrimination.

If you think that discrimination's ok, it feels as if you want to take it out on women because you want to go back to living in a man-cave, replete with pizzas and then a late night coding sessions followed by a game of Quake, where women don't fit because they spurned us at high school. And if they want to join in, they better start their own company.

Do that with your mates, that view doesn't belong in a company, shouldn't belong in a company. It's not a male-only social club.

But if you agree that's wrong, you and I caused this problem, and we're the ones who have to fix it, have the opportunity to fix it. Perhaps our Dads and Grandads told us computers are for men only, but they aren't and we don't have to wait until your kids are growing up to fix this. We can fix this now, and positive discrimination is a way that works.

Tech is growing up and we need to fix the gender imbalance we helped cause.

I am not a coder, I have no issues getting work as I run my own company.

But it's now clear that without strawmen you have no arguments just insults and claims about my person you can't back up. But I guess that's kind of symptomatic for this discussion isn't it?

These are your arguments, it's not a strawman when you're saying these things. These are direct quotes, of you, in this thread:

Old white male coders in SV, which it now turns out you have no personal experience of and just making stuff up about:

Try being +40 in Silicon Valley

Try and get a job in SV after you turn 45.

Examples of you saying women can't be part of our club, because they didn't play with the right toys when they were 12:

Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact

men also takes the most high paying jobs because more of them were interested in technology early on and are better at selling themselves

is that less women start companies or get into tech early on

Examples of you saying women can't be a part of existing tech companies, they should form their own:

get more women to start a tech company

More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women

Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks

In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards

You are the gift that keeps giving huh. More strawmen.

Those are not arguments they are facts you can educate yourself about them which is obviously not in your interest.

Furthermore I would suggest you learn the language of the country you live in. None of those quotes mean what you claim they mean.

A friend works at the European Commission, where there is a strict 50/50 male/female requirement for all hires and all positions. Apparently it is causing problems because too many women refuse to be promoted in management. So they don't have enough managers to start new projects.

Is this true, what citations do you have?

You've just cited an anecdote to try and counter mountains of scientific research.

There could be all sorts of nefarious stuff going on. Could he have been refused a promotion and now blames women? What's the back story? Has he gone on record? Is there a real problem or is a misogynistic manager using it as an excuse to him to cover his own incompetence?

Apparently the matter came when some women started to complain that they had been pressured into accepting management positions, didn't like the added stress, but had no possibility to move to other positions due to manager shortages.

And yes it is an anecdote, so no there's no citations, but most posts in this discussion don't cite citations either.

What if they're not just as good? What if they could be as good, but aren't interested? That part isn't fact, it's an assumption - one that it's time to reexamine given that things have turned out differently from how we expected.

Listen to yourself, substitute the words you just used with the words any reasonable woman hears:

What if women are just not as intelligent? What if they could be as intelligent, but are lazy?

I appreciate you think you're being rational and reasonable. You're not.

Well, what if that's so? Are we really so fragile that we dare not even ask that question? Could it be that we're scared of the answer? There are plenty of posts in this thread expressing stronger and more negative generalisations about men, how is it that we're not so scared of those?

The only way to reach truth is to be willing to look for it.

It's not being afraid of asking a question, it's not a question.

You're just "ask"-ing if women are as "not good/stupid", or that perhaps they "aren't interested/are lazy".

It's just a gender stereotype dressed up as a question. It's an insult dressed in an insinuation.

Why do you have to make up something which wasn't said to have an argument?

Women do make different choices we know that for a fact. Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact. Women start far fewer companies than men we know that for a fact.

We also know that women score way higher grades in school which we also know for a fact doesn't matter in real life.

So maybe women (in general) are just prioritizing life differently. That doesn't mean they aren't as intelligent, smart etc.

If you can't make your argument without pushing for strawmen then you don't have one yourself.

It was said, that's the point. Claim that women aren't as good, is claiming they're stupid. Claiming they don't want it is claiming they're lazy.

It's just trying being polite about it. It's still an irrational bias, no matter how you dress it up.

No it's the same and if you believe that you are wrong.

There is a world of difference between someone having spent their entire life coding and someone only starting at university. Or someone having learned to draw from the age of 5 and someone who starts way later in life. That applies to men as to women.

Being not as good is about experience and knowledge having put in the hours. It is not about intelligence.

That is preposterous. What if they're just more interested in other things? Why do you assume a priori that men and women share the same interests internally? What evidence do you have which suggests this? OR are you just making an assumption because it seems "unsexist"?

Women make up 75% of pediatricians. If I say that this is because men aren't as good at pediatrics, am I saying that men are stupid?

No, you're stupid because you're using an example that's a biological function primarily to do with women.

Then consider a different intellectual profession dominated by women. 78% of publishers in the U.S. are women.[1] If I say that this is due to an innate differences rather than sexism against men in the publishing industry, am I saying that men are bad readers and stupid?

[1] http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-...

Also, can you clarify what you mean when you state that pediatrics is "an example that's a biological function primarily to do with women." Are you stating that women are innately (in other words, due to their gender) better suited to administering healthcare to minors as compared to men?

Just because women are the ones who birth children doesn't mean that I brought up "an example that's a biological function primarily to do with women".

64% of practicing gynecologists are men, but only women have vaginas.

You don't have to give birth to children to be a pediatrician or a gynecologist.

What's irrational is blindly assuming performance and interests must be equal across the sexes, in defiance of all evidence or reason. Every factor we're able to objectively measure - height, weight, life expectancy, test scores - shows significant differences (in terms of distribution and averages) between men and women. It's absurd to assume that somehow we're magically equally suitable (again, on a large, statistical scale) for all jobs.

> Because gender discrimination is rife

Please stop making these unqualified statements on very touchy subjects

It's not unqualified, we know that's the cause.

It's like claiming climate change isn't real.

I realize you're very busy and can't be bothered to support your claims, but you should actually try to demonstrate some knowledge rather than countering with the equivalent of, "but I'm really really certain."

Let's qualify it by posting a link which demonstrates gender bias when people read the same resume with a different name.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...

This is hardly the only study. There are many more.

My favorite was the law students from second tier schools where males who signaled coming from middle class backgrounds had a huge statistically disadvantage from males signalling wealth.

The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...

Bias and prejudice are real and evaluating people is hard. To make things worse, your brain likes to save energy by substitution rigorous evaluation with heuristic evaluation and then convince itself it did the rigorous work.

The problem isn't gender discrimination is rife, it's that thousands of forms of discrimination is rife because heuristic-based discrimination is what we excel at, not rigorous evaluation.

I hope that didn't make it more touchy.

If you add middle eastern sounding names the same result happens.

Yes we have biases all of us but they are certainly not by any metrics confined to only women. Try being +40 in Silicon Valley, try being black or latino male on WallStreet, try making it as a hip-hop artist as a black guy. Try being fat in the fashion industry, try being a nerd in high-school.

The world is rife with bias and prejudice against all sorts of "these are not like me" but the solution is not and have never been to force quotas through whether in board rooms or on the job market.

If you want to change things changes them at their root cause. Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks so that they are less depending on existing ones. Teach them not to excel at school as that doesn't really matter but to learn how to sell themselves. Teach them that if a job posting names 10 skills and they have all but two it's still a job for them.

These are the real barriers to entry not modern day companies light biases.

> The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.

Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed. It used male hobbies for both males and females. Rich females don't generally sail. I think their stereotypical activity would be humanitarian efforts.

And if it wasn't flawed, what conclusions do you draw from the study? Lower class women did 5 times better than lower class men. The lower class is many times larger than the upper class, so only a tiny percent of men enjoy the the upper class privilege while most men are doing terribly.

Looking at the big picture by aggregating the lower and upper class, women do better than men.

> http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-....

I'll give this some legitimacy but it's one study and not completely convincing. It can't be generalized outside of science research positions.

One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.

Exactly. What most people forget that while men are in the top of society they are also in the bottom.

I think that there is a decent case that upper class men do enjoy gender based privileges. But then people use that as evidence that all males are privileged and it's just not true. I mean it would be great if there was a chance that I could become a CEO or an exec, but 99.99% of people won't so it doesn't matter to most males if all execs and CEOs are male.

On the disparate power dynamic, I doubt the males with power care about the wellbeing of the other 99.99% of males. They will look out for the interests of super high class males which may not overlap with the interests of lower class males.

I think that non high class females benefit much more than non high class males from the power of super high class males. The super high class males will spend time around females and make transfer payments in the services industry. Sugar babes, prostitutes, strippers, webcaming, regular waitresses, etc. They are more likely to enjoy the wealth of high power males and have a much easier time forming a relationship (romantic or platonic) with a super high class male.

Of course they do mostly for historical reasons which are changing and partly because of industry choices.

Most structural issues are gone today and those that are left benefit women as much as men. In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards.

> Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed.

Are you saying the study is flawed because women got more hires in this context and that doesn't reflect the larger aggregate trends? You realize this study doesn't reflect society as a whole, right? It reflects the resume screening habits of a sample of people from a cross section of law firms.

Rather than dismissing a study because it doesn't yield results that fit your worldview, how about you try understanding the context is was done in and reflecting on the culture where it happened? Don't give it a fleeting thought. Really consider the many possible stories it could be telling you, but don't settle on a favorite. Hold the many possible stories in your head instead, ask questions and try different stories.

People have all sorts of biases. I've known my share of bros who only hire pretty girls and other bros with common interests, taste and upbringing. If they were being studied, their numbers would probably yield similar results. Some of the bros I know would call in like-minded bros and then they'll call in the women for an interview to see if they're hot. If they were part of a similar study, their screening habits would definitely skew the numbers toward this trend. If it was up to me, I'd be counting how many of the pretty ones made into round two. (Let's just say they excel at recruiting and only hiring pretty girls.)

This is one small study that reflects an aggregate of biases of a sample of participants in one industry. It does not reflect the world. It doesn't reflect their industry. It doesn't reflect one bias. It is literally a snapshot in time of a sample of a cross section of society. We don't know how if those biases (there are many) were well-distributed or concentrated. Repeating the experiment may even yield very different results.

All that doesn't matter in the bigger picture, because for that slice of time & sample, we have enough evidence to suggest gross discrimination for that sample and time.

It's a reminder that the world is a complicated place and that there are all sorts of ways people discriminate against each other. What it reinforces is that superficial discrimination happens for all sorts of complex reasons, rather than simply saying everyone is guilty of one form of discrimination.

> One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.

Let's not be obtuse about accepting or dismissing these studies. People have a tendency to either overstate or discount their results when it serves their purpose. I gave you a very small sample and merely suggested that discrimination happens in the world and that discrimination can be complex and nonlinear. Take it with a grain of salt.

You forgot there's still a ridiculously small percentage of female coal miners

Yeah, I forgot the physicality of coal mining's just like programming and leadership.

So according to you it's ok that men takes the most dangerous jobs, the most demanding jobs because of their physicality and risk tolerance, but it's not ok that men also takes the most high paying jobs because more of them were interested in technology early on and are better at selling themselves?

Or how exactly what are you arguing?

What are you arguing?

Because some men do more dangerous jobs, totally different men should get all the high paying ones? Perhaps for each man in coal mining, oil rigs, the army or deep sea fishing, we get a plushy finance or tech job exclusively for men?

Or tech workers should be paid less than coal miners?

I don't follow you?

Please read your own postulate. Why is the mans physical abilities important?

What physicality ?!?! We're all born same and equal!

Didn't you hear? Differences in muscle tone are heteronormative. </s>