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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent discussion.

I especially love this comment:

> I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.

Because arguably that's where gender differences highlighted in Damore's memo point :)

I'm reminded of Richard Morgan's Black Man aka 13. He argues that men basically don't play well in groups ;)

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I'll take up that challenge with https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670 which provides quantitative data indicating that male abilities vary more than female ones, and this fact is sufficient to explain why men should be overrepresented in CEO boardrooms and prisons.

Mother nature does seem to roll the dice more when it comes to men. People then look at the outliers to the right and scream sexism while completely ignoring all the outliers to the left. There are many more profoundly stupid men than women. Men are incarcerated at a higher rate. Men kill themselves at 3x the rate of women. Yet this is quietly accepted.

This implies suicide and homicide are done primarily by stupid people by rhetoric?

Yes. Committing homicide is an irrational and maladaptive (i.e. stupid) thing to do in a peaceful 21st century society. Committing suicide is an irrational and maladaptive thing to do in almost all situations in history.

Maybe one has a temporary problem (depression) that pushes them to commit suicide. That doesn't mean they're stupid. Robin Williams was definitely not stupid, yet he commited suicide. Terry Pratchett was also diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and had contemplated the idea of assisted suicide in a country where this is legal (Switzerland).

Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia [0], which almost certainly contributed to his choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_with_Lewy_bodies

Alternative reading: being stupid, getting incarcerated and committing suicide are all consequences of being an outlier at the negative end of the bell curve, where men are overrepresented due to higher variance of the respective trait.

Women have a much higher level of attempted suicide, possibly 3x as often as men. [1] I once heard a theory that women don't die from suicide as often because they tend to use less violent means of suicide. For example, if you swallow a bottle of pills you could survive or change your mind a few minutes later and get your stomach pumped, but this rarely applies to shooting yourself in the head.

1. https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

"While males are 4 times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide 3 times as often as males."

So a suicide attempt by a man is 12x more likely to succeed than one by a woman.

That is sexist! Are you suggesting that women are less skilled than men ??!!??

(/s, obviously. Sorry I have to point it out.)

I get /s :) And maybe they're more skilled. In that they get the message across without actually dying.

I suspect that many "suicide attempts" are more like emphatic communication ("See! I really care about this!") than intention to die.

When I've felt suicidal, it's always helped to imagine how one does it reliably. Then I've thought about how irreversible that would be. And then I've realized that I don't really want to die.

funny, I have no idea if this is true, but this was the "common knowledge" among hunting/truffle dogs breeders when I was a kid.

Something like "if you want a good nosed dog get a female pup, if you get a male it might be a champion, or terrible". It would be fun if this was true, and also applied to people.

If it based on the genes because of the chromosome X and Y then I think there is no reason why it wouldn't apply to any specie with chromosomes X Y.

Birds have the opposite arrangement of sex chromosomes - in birds the sex chromosome is carried by the female. I guess if we were all ostriches it would be the females that would be the CEO's.

I think this is related with the XY chromosome. Because you have the Y instead of the X you have a part where you don't have 2 genes to encode a feature. So there is not gen dominant and recessive. This leads a more variation when the Y is passed to the offspring. This is the example I read when I was reading about this: if the parents are X5X7 X6Y (where the number represents a feature that is not in the Y chromosome). The offspring could be X5Y X5X6 X7Y X7X6, but the feature is expressed as the average of the numbers: X5Y=5 X5X6=5,5 X7Y=7 X7X6=6,5. The women are more close to the average (6) than the men.

Why is the feature expressed as the average? If one gene is recessive and another dominant only one matters. So it could be expressed like this: X5Y=5 X5X6=5 X7Y=7 X7X6= 7 where there are no differences between genders.

I'm actually curious because I would think that even at higher levels, assuming the majority of women are stable performers and a minority of men are top producers there should only be a slight bump in the male representation in areas where "female" skills are paramount like CEO boardrooms, with the few men being he outlier performances. It would be the reverse problem of why it's unreasonable to say "we should go for 50/50 when the population representation is 20/80".

How much of a bump there should be will depend on how elite a slice you are carving. If you're carving a large slightly above average slice, then the mean matters more. If you're slicing off a thin slice from the very top, then variation matters more.

An example of a large slice is recent college graduates. Women in fact dominate this slice. But CEOs are presumably a thin slice of very capable people. So it would be no surprise for their ranks to be dominated by men.

Well, some would argue that many CEOs ought to be in prison ;)

That might explain the situation if board/C-suite presence was due to performance, merit, or other individual characteristic rather than a couple of centuries worth of old boys' clubs.

How do you get on a board? By being known to people on the board. They know who you are, what your history is, how you think.

Feel free to work towards changing "bias" towards the distribution you think is more proper and see if it indeed proves the point of "the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women". You'll need a concrete way to measure and quantify "bias". No, workforce representation is not a measure of "bias". That is the unproven hypothesis and using it is merely circular reasoning.

Meanwhile, consider that "diversity" programs are institutionalized discrimination.

Institutional discrimination programs aimed at countering the effects of institutionalized discrimination.

* institutionalized discrimination: Policies that explicitly favor one group over another based on phenotype differences. For example, Jim Crow laws or "diversity" hiring policies.

* "institutionalized discrimination": The hypothesis that society is skewed by the vast conspiracy of "bias". For example, for the past 10 years, computer science graduation rates skew under 20% / 80% for female / male graduates [0]. Presumably females are kept down by "bias".

[0] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor.... Does anyone have more recent data than 2012? I've remember skimming a link recently...

We're talking "institutionalized discrimination" in the sense of the past few millennia.

This seems overly broad. many societies aren't even a millennia old and derive from events that would indicate some quantity of disdain for their previous governors. Unless the argument is that people, regardless of culture, are behaviorally the same then there isn't much to gain by simply going by such a large time frame.

OK, what societies have been fundamentally gender neutral?

I'm not seeing the relevance of your rhetorical question here. My point was that it's weird to measure institutional discrimination over millennia since most institutions that matter in the modern era aren't that old. So you're either mashing multiple institutions together and ignoring their cultural differences or the premise needs to be refined more.

Well, "institutional" isn't limited to a particular institution. Here, it's extremely pervasive, reflected in virtually all institutions of virtually all known cultures, going back millennia. Based on archeological evidence, it's possible that gender roles and constraints were weaker maybe 20-30 kyr ago.

But that definition isn't particularly helpful unless I'm missing something you're getting at. Sure, a lot of ancient societies had men as hunters and women/meak as gatherers. None of the major world powers are hunter/gatherer societies though. And similar statements could be made about medieval homestead configurations. This is why I was pointing out that most modern institutions aren't a millennia old. Sure, thousands of years ago there were sexist policies, just like there are today. But if those policies were based on ideologies and environments that don't exist anymore then it doesn't seem like that's a particularly useful acknowledgement for correcting inequality as it exists today.

Cultures come and go, but sexism seems to stay the same. It could be biological. I suspect that it's mainly a game theoretical implication of the biology of human sexual reproduction. It's all about whether men want to know which kids are theirs, or not. And if they do, what systems get set up to make that possible. So there are two attractors aka stable states. One is what's typical historically: Men dominate women, manage access of other men to them, and so on. The other is where men don't care about knowing paternity. So women don't need to be controlled so much. Maybe some form of polyandry. Or maybe just less emphasis on family vs larger social group.

But those cultures come and go alongside there systems. And those systems that come and go each had unique points of equality and inequality. Just because modern American/European society produces sexist outcomes doesn't mean that the legal systems which govern those societies are fundamentally sexist in the way that ancient Rome could be considered sexist for example. I realize there's a certain amount of pedantry in my rebuttal but, at the same time, your argument reads to me like you feel as though equality hasn't progressed at all since in ancient times. Of course it hasn't progressed at all since ancient times if you're using such a broad, bordering on boolean, definition of sexist.

Here is a chart of the gender balance of over a hundred different professions. Few of them are near a 50/50 balance. Could you tell me which ones are suffering from institutionalized discrimination?

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

I have no idea what the cultures of other fields are like. I work in technology, so I can only speak for that.

>I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage.

This makes zero sense considering the reality that women are underrepresented. "Aiming at 50-50 representation" could at best lift the disadvantaged group closer to 50% representation. It could in no way cause an underrepresented group to dominate a field.

She means that aiming to 50-50 doesn't represent the skills set. As women are more skilled for that job they should have more representation (based on the biological theory). If it is a 50-50 you are promoting men in the positions when you shouldn't. (the disadvantaged group here are the men)

You're missing my point. If women would naturally have more representation and were disadvantaged by this policy, and the policy was 100% effective (unheard of), their representation would drop from >50% to 50% - it wouldn't somehow switch to women being significantly underrepresented. This assertion doesn't make sense based on the actual situation we have today.

I don't know if I understand you. We have the situation we have today because "biases and unequal opportunities".

I think the person you're responding to is assuming that we are already at a decently fair equilibrium, and that diversity and other concepts and goals are disrupting that equilibrium. I think the biggest failure of communication around these issues is that a lot of people arguing against these programs are coming at it from the just world hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

What if, hypothetically (I wouldn't want to get fired), the most qualified split was 55% male - 45% female. Wouldn't aiming for 50-50 be discriminatory towards males?

Since we have no way of knowing what the actual qualified split is, aiming at anything is discriminatory towards everyone.

The burden of proof is on him. You can't make a claim and then ask the other party to provide evidence against it.

> I'm reminded of Richard Morgan's Black Man aka 13. He argues that men basically don't play well in groups ;)

Damore would be a perfect example of that. There is a time and a place for your beliefs, but the workplace isn't that. ;)

Right. His 13s are basically super males. Engineered for combat. But too much blowback. Not all black, however.

Not even when the employer has asked?

I understand this was written in response to a request from someone else, probably HR.

The only time I was ever asked about politics by a potential employer I noped out of that situation.

Workplace = Professional, Personal Shit Stays Home.

Rest of Life = Do whatever the fuck you want as long as its legal and you don't mention your day job.

I'm not sure why this separation isn't standard practice for everyone.

It was, then the social justice movement decided that companies should be political and that they should take an active role in promoting their political positions. Some on the other side did as well (what sort of cakes they had to make). This is the obvious and predictable blowback that has come from companies becoming political.

> It was, then the social justice movement decided that companies should be political and that they should take an active role in promoting their political positions. Some on the other side did as well (what sort of cakes they had to make). This is the obvious and predictable blowback that has come from companies becoming political.

It isn't just the SJWs. Conservatives have called for being fired for offending them ever since talk radio was a thing. We got bought by a company HQ'd in the bible belt and the opposite chilling effect was pretty obvious as people who spoke their mind about a few issues that were politically sensitive got fired.

We are just more polarized now and people are less tolerant of any kind of difference.

Fair enough,I live in a pretty secular country so I haven't witnessed that personally, only the SJWs.

That's my practice, for sure. Enforced through compartmentalization and online anonymity.

Yup. Its not perfect tho, I'm sure I have enough cracks in my setup that people can find out if they really try but its enough people should understand its not related to my job and leave it alone I'd hope.

Yeah, that was my initial driver for getting into privacy/anonymity stuff decades ago. But then it became a hobby, and then a side career. That's been a typical pattern for me. And for many others here, I'm sure.

With 13s, it would have been much more dramatic :)

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