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Comment by omikun | Hacker News Reader

No one told me. I'm still trying to figure it out. But mainstream gender equality says there should be a roughly equal split while the memo says the split should be something else and implied it should be more men than women by citing reasons for why there currently are more men than women.

Oh, am I not allowed to form an opinion on what should be? Please correct me if I am wrong but perhaps your opinion is no one should have an opinion on what should be and let things be status quo? Keep in mind the whole discussion is around what should be the goal of diversity measures.

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I didn't mean to be antagonistic. Apologize if I came off that way.

Part of the discussion around the memo indeed is having an open discussion about what things should be like. Of course I would like to see more women in tech and also make sure everyone is comfortable. My gf is also in tech.

My only qualm is that many people seem to axiomatically take the position that a 50/50 split should be the case. I just don't see why. Why not 70/30 or 30/70 or maybe exactly match the gender ratio in the US? What about trans or third gender ?

You're right that the memo similarly makes "should " claims. I am not acquitting it of that issue. Just trying to understand where people are coming up with this idea that 50/50 is the right split and that we should use that as an optimisation function in hiring as opposed to pure, blind meritocracy.

I should apologize too. I was just a bit flustered.

50/50 split might be naive. It assumes men and women should be equally represented and that makes liberally minded folks feel good. But what's the alternative? Status quo? A different and arbitrary split? I don't see any good arguments against equal representation.

The current diversity initiative is biasing towards 50/50 and the memo guy didn't like it but didn't suggest what it should be, only that it should be less because biology. You can see why some people might read that as a first step back to status quo.

Personally, I feel 50/50 is a good first approximation. Maybe it's really 70/30, but no one knows and there aren't any studies to back any up.

Oh wait there is: Bear, Julia B., and Anita Williams Woolley. "The role of gender in team collaboration and performance." Interdisciplinary science reviews 36.2 (2011): 146-153.

(following are purely my own opinions, nothing more )

I think it's good to do humanities studies but naive to latch on to one or two. Humanities is a messy field from a scientific perspective. But nevertheless there is plenty of signal there.

The issue I have is starting with something like 50/50 and then trying to optimize for that. This is invariably what happens. This leads to all kinds of weird, bizzare practices like being discriminatory in hiring based on (largely) immutable attributes like race and gender. The concept of gender itself is so in flux these days that it seems premature to start with 50/50.

This above approach I think is known as equality of outcome. I am not a big fan of that.

I personally think a better system is based on equality of opportunity where the optimization function should be trying to improve people's starting points. This is much harder but much better for the long term health of the society (in my opinion ).

In equality of opportunity, the hiring will be blind to gender. But work will be done to encourage more girls to participate in the sciences from an early age. Liberals wont be able to pat themselves on their backs immediately as they won't be fulfilling quotas quickly to show faux diversity. Corporations won't be able to bandage bad PR events quickly (like Google's gender paygap thing ) but this is in my opinion alot healthier over time.

Now, over time, I would expect the ratio to improve, but then settle at whatever is natural without any top down pressure to fulfill prescribed quotas. It might be the case that the mean of the distribution of women is closer to things like raising families or educating kids as teachers (the most important job in the world in my opinion ) instead of toiling away in front of a screen for crap money to make more money for a big corporation (compared to men).

In the first case (equality of outcome) we take two different distributions, men and women, and push them into a 50 50 split. In the second case (equality of opportunity), we try to move the means closer bottom up. I prefer the second approach. Slower, harder but much better for the long term health of society.

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