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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I am not certain whether this is sarcasm or whether you are just a troll trying to provoke a reaction, but in case it is neither: How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation?

You can try strawman arguments like "they are not equally qualified" or "reverse sexism" or "they are doing it to themselves by not negotiating", but a cursory look at any reproducible social sciences review disproves those (laziness to not use google or google scholar is a tiresome excuse).

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Two engineers placed side by side are never "equally qualified." Their competence will differ. If you look solely at their degrees and work history alone, you'd be ignoring the individual abilities of the engineers.

The parent comment to yours was poorly worded and snarky, so you have a right to be upset. But still, I think your reasoning is flawed. People are generally promoted by their competence and their negotiating/office politics skills, and you can't claim that those are the same across all genders. Why would women, who are fundamentally different than men, have the exact same competence and negotiating abilities as men? There's no reason the two genders should be equal.

If you really have two equally skilled engineers, one male, one female, and only the male is promoted, that's sexism. But two engineers are never the same, so you can't make that argument.

Equally qualified is generally taken to mean they have comparable skills accross a broad spectrum of criteria. Maybe Al knows a bit more about vue.js but Marcy knows react. If I'm doing a project in Vue and I give Al more to do that's fine.

But say I'm doing a project in Java and they are about equal, I keep giving Al the meaty work then use it justify a promotion, which I can't justify for Marcy. It's not that she's that much worse, I just never gave her the chance to prove it (blah blah peter principle, perform at next level, etc...). That just might be a bit sexist.

Comparable skills is not the same as equally skilled. You provide an example of sexism but that's not what happens in the real world - In that scenario, Al is pissed because he has to do all the work when he knows full well Marcy can do half of it. He offloads it to the bored Marcy and tells his manager during standup.

Delegation, sign he deserves a promotion.

Have you really never worked on a project where the golden boy was the face of everything and everyone else was ignored?

Yes, I've been in this type of situation for 9 months. My reaction to it is that, yes, the golden boy is much better than me and he knows what he's doing. I respect his competence.

>How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation?

"equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised.

These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..

> social sciences

You aren't allowed to reference social science studies because their aren't enough conservatives to make those fields "fair".

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