Hacker News Reader

Comment by m0ck | Hacker News Reader

I don't deny that, but I believe the best way to stop it, is to stop giving so much attention to gender/race of people. That's why so-called "diversity" reports of companies make me sick. If you believe that all races/genders are equally capable to achieve greatness (as I do), then you should hire the best, give awards to the best and never spend a second thinking about their biological background. If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.

View on HN

That's been tried. The situation doesn't improve when you stop paying attention to it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/race-ec...

https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/64/2/219/3058571

> you should hire the best

That is hopelessly naive. Someone has to decide who is "the best", or, at the very least, someone has to decide on the quality metric that will be used to make this assessment. That inevitably leads to politics and gamesmanship.

Not at all naive. Asians used to face prejudice arguably as severe as that faced by blacks. Once discriminatory laws were lifted, they began a remarkable ascendancy--one that was in large part [1] due to the market re-pricing the value of Asian labor: " One explanation for rapid Asian upward mobility is, therefore, that earnings gaps driven by prejudice rather than productivity could not persist in a post-war labor market that eliminated most forms of legal discrimination against non-white workers"

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w22748

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-ramakrishnan-lee-...

You don't balance an unbalanced seesaw by putting the same amount of weight on both sides

Equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome.

Given how short your comment is, I am not quite certain what you are trying to say. However, in my experience, whenever somebody complains about "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome", they willfully overlook a lot of factors that would be playing into the "opportunity" part of the equation.

This is exactly the problem. You think in terms of "balancing a seesaw", but there is no reason to believe that in the complete absence of discrimination, the gender ratio will be 50:50.

Until we find any evidence that says there's something intrinsic in women that stops them from working and/or performing at the same level as men in physics research I think it's safe to assume the ratio will tend to that.

Considering the population is not 50:50 on gender... ;)

There's no need for arbitrary "balance". Let people do what they want, and make the process as fair as possible.

Anything else is just enforcing some ideaology or another.

If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.

What makes you think this?

Ignoring problems has not, historically, tended to make them go away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com