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Comment by DarkKomunalec | Hacker News Reader

> that's not how evidence works

It kind of is. He provided evidence for his claims (not your misrepresentation of them), and you get to provide counter-evidence.

> the argument was that his coworkers were biologically inferior for the job of programming

Could you point out where exactly he said that? I had trouble finding it.

Because from what I gathered, his argument was that, due to biological differences between groups of people, not all groups are on average equally suited and/or interested in all tasks, so expecting equal representation is foolish.

With the full, and, rather short, text of his available, I expect we'll clear up this difference in belief about what he said quickly.

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> expecting equal representation is foolish.

That's the part I don't really get. Google clearly desires equal representation (take this as exogenous), and believes it won't happen on its own, so puts these initiatives in place to dig up qualified candidates from currently-underrepresented groups. This doesn't mean that the chosen candidates will be worse at their jobs, just that Google needs to work harder to find them.

Say you have 10 job openings for which there are 5 qualified men and 1000 qualified women. But, you want your employee base to be 50/50. Is that desire "foolish", just because it s unlikely to happen naturally?

I guess you could say that the resources of the business should not be spent on recruiting to hit that 50/50 target when it will be difficult to do so. Or that, given human frailties, maybe the recruiters would be tempted to dip into the much larger pool of slightly-underqualified candidates to hit the target. I think both objections can be answered with: well, it's a business that is free to make its own choices, and the market will decide whether they are good ones in the long run.

> Say you have 10 job openings for which there are 5 qualified men and 1000 qualified women.

Notice how you already constrained the number of men so that it has to be 50/50 representation, because you only have 5 qualified mean in your example. In reality, there are a lot more than 5 qualified men. There may be as many qualified men as women. There may be more qualified men than women. There may be fewer qualified men than women.

The proportion of qualified men to women is irrelevant. It's illegal to make hiring decisions based on gender because gender is a protected class. You can't discriminate against women and you can't discriminate against men. You need to choose the most qualified candidates for those 10 position. It may be 50/50, it may not be. You don't know the distribution of the 10 most qualified candidates.

If the company wants to spend more money on outreach to increase the pool of applicants from a certain group, that's legal. However once, they are in the hiring funnel and competing with other candidates for a position, you legally cannot make hiring decisions based on gender.

How much the company spends on outreach to recruit under-represented groups is up to debate. I personally think that budget should be decided like any other budget. It should be evaluated as an investment. What are estimated benefits relative to the amount of money invested worth it relative to other ways that money could be spent?

I had a whole thing written out here, but I don't really think you'll understand it. summed up, this isn't an academic debate about logic and evidence. this conversation has real world consequences for real people. if you want to discuss biology there's forums for that. what this was, was not an evidence based debate. it was an employee sabotaging his employer, sobataging his colleagues, and utterly failing to understand the consequences of his actions.

there are places to discuss the sometimes uncomfortable facts an earnest pursuit of the truth may sometimes unearth. a circulated memo about how unfair you think your company's employment policies are is not the proper forum.

every political point of contention has real world consequences for real people. The whole point is that we try to approach fairness from a rational standpoint so that people aren't being treated badly based on their gender, sex or the colour of their skin - and this whole debate centers around whether diversity initiatives are fair because they counteract inherent systemic sexism or if they're actually countering natural gender predispositions and thus being unfair by giving one gender a leg-up over the other.

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