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Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

[edited for typos and grammer] Anecdotally, I've run a couple of tech conferences and know others who have as well fairly recently. We've made a point to hold workshops for under represented groups, had the Codes of Conduct, make a lot of extra effort to reach out to women as speakers etc..

In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning down higher quality talks from men) trying to get diversity numbers and have a much higher cancellation rate form the women for various reasons, especially money. If we were lucky we would get 20-30% women speakers when all of that was done. I've also been told by some diversity activists that, in order to get women to speak and to get higher percentages of women as speakers etc., unlike most of the men, you need to pay for their travel etc., offer free tickets for women attendees, consider offering stipends for women who speak etc..

Others, organizing other conferences have shared similar experiences. It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.

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I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here.

It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men.

This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step

Kantian second stage

For those who slept through the philosophy class, what these stages are?

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

Kant and Hegel are... different.

And the Marxian dialectic is supposed to be different still.

> Kant and Hegel are... different

Hegel, when discussing his dialectic, ascribed it to Kant. Presumably to keep philosophy majors on their toes.

> This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

People throw this accusation around all the time, but it doesn't make much sense. Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity.

If you're seeing one group getting lesser outcomes, there are only two possibilities: Their opportunities are being artificially limited somewhere, or one of the groups is simply better than the other. So if you really believe this is a meaningful distinction to draw — that measuring outcomes can't tell us about opportunity — what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."

There's a third possibility: men and women really do have different interests. Further evidence for this comes from the observation that:

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

That doesn't seem like a third possibility — it sounds like the same thing as "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."

It's theoretically possible that women just generally suck at computers, but if that's someone's argument, I'd prefer they come out and actually make the argument instead of throwing around smokescreens about "equality of outcomes vs. equality of opportunity."

Capable isn't the same thing as interested. I know many smart people who have no interest in programming (and wonder why I enjoy it). As The Atlantic said:

> Then again, it could just be that, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions, rather than whatever labor economists recommend. And those passions don’t always lie within science [or technology].

It is when we're talking about outcomes within a field. Either you think women deserve to be paid less or not — there isn't really a third possibility there. If they do deserve worse outcomes, then either they suck innately or they suck because they're not interested, but either way you're saying they suck.

Don't try to put words in my mouth with that false dichotomy.

If someone isn't interested in programming, they don't "suck" at it. They just don't do it.

I'm talking about outcomes for female programmers here. You're saying that female programmers don't program, and therefore they deserve to be paid less than male programmers, who presumably do program? Or what? Who are these female programmers who don't program that you're apparently so interested in talking about?

You're saying that female programmers don't program, and therefore they deserve to be paid less

This is weird. That's not how I read what leereeves wrote at all. Yet you repeatedly insist that's what he's saying. Are you perhaps projecting an opinion onto leereeves? Preferences can very much influence the outcomes of a training pipeline for a field. (I say this as someone who taught a class attended by Chic Tech students.) That's just common sense.

I'm trying to get leereeves to actually explain what he means. What sort of difference do people think exists between men and women that makes them deserve to, for example, be paid less for the same work (i.e. worse outcome) without being worse at the job?

You're asking me to explain something that may not even be true. According to the article, your scenario is not reality:

> When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

Women who achieve the same things as men deserve the same compensation. I don't think anyone on this thread disagrees with that.

This article is about a comprehensive review of salaries at Google that concluded that overall, women who achieved the same job levels as men were being paid more.

The opportunity vs. outcome question is applied to the question of representation. How many women should we expect to see at Google, across job levels, if the process for selecting and promoting people is fair?

My room mate works fewer hours than me and doesn't have oncall rotations. He makes less money accordingly.

Are you willing to walk up to his face and tell him that he "sucks" because he doesn't work as hard and doesn't have the same TC as I do?

To be frank, your posts are pretty denigrating to people who choose to have better work life balance. Not everyone sees their self worth in terms of dollars.

I know many smart people who have no interest in programming (and wonder why I enjoy it)

I had an ex-girlfriend who could code, but had no interest in doing that for a job. I'm currently married to a woman with 3 degrees, one of which is a PhD, and she also can code, but says she feels sorry for me, because it's my job.

It's interesting that you still don't understand the third possibility. I wonder if it has something to do with why many hard-leaning leftists also only consider the first two as possibilities.

OK, let me give you an example outcome and maybe you can explain to me how the third possibility applies in a way that is meaningfully distinct from the first two.

Outcome: The women working as programmers at FooSoft make on average 10% less than the men working there.

Possible reasons:

1. Lack of opportunity (e.g. people in power at FooSoft have bias against them makes it harder for them to have their contributions valued)

2. They just aren't as good as the men

3. They...have different interests in some way that apparently doesn't make them worse but does make them deserve to be paid less?

Let's be specific and replace FooSoft with Google.

A quick search suggests that only 20% of programmers in general are female, but 30% of Google programmers are female. I'm not certain these numbers are accurate, but if they are, female programmers are over represented at Google.

That would mean Google hired a greater percentage of female programmers than male programmers. That is, if Google hired the top 0.1% of male programmers, they hired the top 0.15% of female programmers.

If we assume two groups have identical distribution of qualifications, the female programmers hired would have lower qualifications, as an obvious consequence of a hiring policy that favors women. That's not saying women are less qualified, it's saying that Google hires women who are less qualified because they want to hire more women than the 20% that sex-blind hiring would result in.

Let me get this straight: When women are hired less, it's because they're simply not interested. But when men are hired less, it's because they're being discriminated against?

I think my hypothesis is simpler:

- Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole

- Google actively discriminates in favor of women

It's discrimination both times.

Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole

I would expect in 2019, that the industry as a whole discriminates in favor of women, but I'm just a layperson when it comes to that. Do you have citations?

- Google actively discriminates in favor of women

It's discrimination both times.

I agree.

It may be that it has changed very recently, but a few years ago there were quite a few studies that showed an anti-women bias in evaluating employees. For example, here's a quickly Googled cite that talks about a preference for resumes with male names over female: https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/

This could even still be true at Google, though I don't have insight into whether or not it is. It seems at least plausible that Google has put systemic biases in place to balance out more diffuse bias among individual humans, but has done too thorough a job.

When orchestras started using blinds for auditions, the population of women hired shot up. Have there been attempts to do blind hiring? If so, what were the results?

Excellent question. There was an article a few years ago about an interviewing platform that tried using voice modulation to play with the gender of candidates:

"Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data." http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

I'd had that study in my mental lexicon of "gender bias studies that aren't total bullshit" for a long time until recently. Seemed like a pretty black and white way to isolate gender discrimination. Turns out it - or rather the reporting on it - is also bullshit[1].

[1] https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g...

What makes you think women are hired less?

When Google (and other top tech companies) actively discriminate in favor of women, that causes the appearance of discrimination elsewhere in the industry, because the top tech companies have taken more of the best female programmers and those who weren't hired by Google et al are, on average, worse than the men who weren't hired by Google et al.

And when I spoke about interests, I was discussing why few women choose to study computer science.

Going by the "logic" of outcomes being the "only holistic measure" this would indicate that Google is biased against male programmers within the context of the pool of available candidates. Yet if we change the scope of our consideration to that of the general population, Google would be biased against females.

Seems like the "only holistic measure" has some kind of issue with logical consistency. One has to be careful with how the population sample relates to the specific pipeline of available candidates. If one isn't careful, then the interpretation of the numbers might as well be fiction. You can't just stop at, "Does it match the general population? No? Then BIAS!"

> Yet if we change the scope of our consideration to that of the general population, Google would be biased against females.

That would be expecting Google to hire untrained people as programmers, which would be absurd.

If we compare with the general population, any bias found wouldn't be at Google, but in the school system, children's entertainment, parenting, or some other group that influences people long before they apply to Google.

> A quick search suggests that only 20% of programmers in general are female, but 30% of Google programmers are female. I'm not certain these numbers are accurate, but if they are, female programmers are over represented at Google.

The pool of programmers "In general" is not relevant for Google. They don't hire programmers in general, but are focused on a specific subset (usually from some big universities).

What's the gender distribution of graduates from those big universities?

You've jumped into a discussion about the ratio of men to women in STEM and started talking about equal pay, when none of the parent comments were taking about pay, and the article we are discussing is a study that found women at Google get paid more than their male peers. I'm not sure what's going on here.

Yeah, this isn't what we're talking about at all.

Outcome: Women working as programmers at FooSoft comprise 10% less of the workforce than men working there.

Possible reasons

1. Hiring bias

2. Not as qualified

3. Less applicants due to disinterest in programming as a vocation

Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity.

I'm sorry, but that's "not even wrong" as Pauli would say.

what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."

Group cultures/subcultures can pass on knowledge, which can then provide advantages and then be transmitted to different groups. No racial or innate superiority or inferiority is needed for such an explanation. This is well corroborated by history. (See Thomas Sowell's Migrations And Cultures: A World View) An example of this is found in the German influences in Mexico, and the part of Monterrey one of my old hackerspace colleagues is from. He's quite proud of the progressive schooling he had and of the engineering culture there. (The story of German emigration has its stories of misfortune as well, including examples of German ethnic disadvantage as well.)

20th century hacker culture has its roots in the model railway building scene, which was largely a male space. There's nothing inherently male about model railway building or hacking itself, but there was something about the subculture which was. If we're to change this, then it shouldn't be done from the punitive and negative standpoint of blame, but from a positive view of transmission. No "inherent" or identitarian notions are needed at all.

What you're describing here is a disparity of outcomes reflecting a disparity of opportunity, isn't it? I agree with everything you said here, but you're presenting it as a disagreement, so I'm a little bit confused.

What you're describing here is a disparity of outcomes reflecting a disparity of opportunity, isn't it?

What I'm talking about is a kind of "grassroots" disparity of opportunity. It's not necessarily the same as a "systemic" disparity of opportunity. The former can often be available to people who are literally poorer than the poor. (As has been the case for Chinese immigrants at times.) Irish Traditional music contains another example of the former.

Often, disparities can be a mix of these two things.

I agree with everything you said here, but you're presenting it as a disagreement, so I'm a little bit confused

I'm glad you're feeling a little bit confused. Often, this can be a good sign!

The problem with how such disparities are talked about and acted upon, is that the complexity of the situation is often downplayed or drastically underestimated, then combined with a punitive attitude of blame and compensation. This isn't how these things are known to work. The best way to transmit cultural knowledge is through some form of competition. (Friendly and peaceful are best, of course.)

I don't think anyone here is arguing for punishment or blame, though — I certainly wasn't. All I said was that if you look at a group getting much worse outcomes and declare that their opportunities were at least as good as the group getting better outcomes, it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable. If you wouldn't feel confident saying that explicitly, then comments about "outcomes vs. opportunity" are misguided and there's probably some kind of opportunity disparity that you've missed but which is reflected in the outcome.

I don't think anyone here is arguing for punishment or blame, though

An old schoolmate of mine who was at Google before the James Damore thing happened, was saying stuff just afterwards like, maybe it's time that males got stuff taken away from them.

All I said was that if you look at a group getting much worse outcomes and declare that their opportunities were at least as good as the group getting better outcomes, it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable.

Sorry, but it doesn't follow logically. I've dated two women who can code, and who can outperform students I've taught in that, but who don't like doing it at all. Their employment outcomes as programmers would be nil, because that's not what they want to do. People keep explaining this to you, and yet you keep coming out with, "it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable." I got a group of two who are capable, but have an outcome of zero. Proof by example, your logical assertion is wrong. (No guff about anecdotes vs. data. You're the one who said, "it logically follows," and even a group of two is enough to refute "logic.")

> Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity.

Additionally, this is also affected by Simpson's paradox. Without conditioning on the correct causal effects, you may end up at exactly the opposite conclusion to the truth.

Your problem is that you're measuring outcomes only in terms of money. Maybe women value time & family more than money & success?!

Women do yoga. Men do martial arts. Which is "better"? Which is the "lesser outcome"? None. It's just a difference (in preferences and therefore outcome).

I know a man who does yoga and martial arts.

Seems like an extremely reductive view to take: you can't use time and family to buy food.

Gender roles aren't so cut and dry any more. Given that, maybe outcomes should be considered independent of gender?

> you can't use time and family to buy food.

Yes, but you also don't need millions. Any measures of pay inequality will be skewed by extreme outcomes (as the distribution is floored), so people who decide they earn enough and prioritize time/family over further career progress will appear in statistics as "inequality" (edit: even though it's actually good that our society is so wealthy and productive that some people can afford to do that).

> so people who decide they earn enough and prioritize time/family over further career progress will appear in statistics as "inequality"

It's even worse than that. According to the same statistics, a person who bought a ticket for their favourite band's performance last night is worse off than a day before, whereas their favourite band are better off. In fact, the statistics would show that inequality increased dramatically last night, the band was famous and there were 10k+ people giving away their money, whereas - let's say, five - random guys got "significantly richer" at the same time.

The value of the emotional uplifting and sense of life after the gig? Nah, not an asset to rely upon in "strict" statistics.

I think I prefer dynamic systems view. We're oscillating. We've been under the target, overcorrected, and we're above the target now. Like always in (widely-understood) politics, this will be met with another overcorrection; all we can hope for is that there's dampening in the system, so that we'll converge on target at some point.

I don’t really like being accepting of oscillation.

Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against.

Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.

It is not progress at all. The pendulum of who to discriminate against has been swinging back and forth for hundreds of years. And every time a new group is targeted, it is to the cheers of some other group.

It's difficult to have a factual debate around workplace discrimination because anyone who suggests that women are being favoured, is instantly attacked by social justice activists who rely more on moral outrage rather than facts or logic. A lot of the discussion on this thread today would not be something that people would say out loud near coworkers.

I agree with you strongly. This isn't progress. This is essentially the same shit on a different day, and amplified by social media. I'm by no means accepting of it, I just feel this analogy is more accurate.

I brought up dynamic systems to point out that this isn't and won't be a three-step process of "the extreme, the other extreme, the golden middle". This phenomenon is continuous and oscillating; more than that, it can be dampened, stable or runaway, and which of those it is, depends on a lot of factors. If we manage to dampen it down, then we'll have made progress.

If you aren't just hiring every person who walks through the door, you are discriminating. The question is whether you are hiring on relevant characteristics or irrelevant bullshit, and whether your job is more appealing to people on the basis of protected characteristics in ways that end up with an overwhelmingly-male workforce of people willing to be treated unfairly. Being thoughtful and taking responsibility for which people you are choosing to include is at least honest, unlike accepting a sexist status quo as magically "neutral".

It doesn't seem like the system dampens. Instead, there seems to be some kind of anger that for 99% of men "privilege" means working hard, making compromises, and other stuff that's roughly as crappy as being a housewife. Men aren't all that happy they've got this "privilege", and when women have the option of being a salaryman they feel like they must have been cheated because it's not a top-floor office where everyone just sips whisky on leather lounges.

Having to deal with men who "aren't happy" that they exist sure sounds like something that would make the job suck more for women than it does for men.

Why?

How do you factor in path dependence? (A kind of inertia, that either requires some affirmative action style correction, or an "unfairly" long time to overcome.)

I don't see path dependence as explicit component of this model; "affirmative action style corrections" however are accounted for in the amplitude; they're part of the corrections that happen (or increasingly, IMO, overcorrections).

It's this kind of thing which gets abused in politics. You see the same thing with a certain countries in the Middle East.

So, you're a boring white male who works in one of these industries. You're told constantly that you benefit from "white male privilege". Your experience, the statistics, clearly show this to be bullst.

What do you do? Do you trust anything that other authority figures tell you? Of course not. So you stop your kids getting vaccinated and vote for your country to leave the EU because it means 350 million a week more for your National Health Service..

This is the trap progressives - whose number I count myself in - must do better to avoid if they want to progress towards a fairer and better world.

There are a lot of clueless "progressives" out there. Usually more focused on their ideology/dogma, than on actual problems and solutions.

I'm genuinely curious how we might factor in the differences between genders in occupation selection and that women and men may innately value different types of work e.g. women are more empathic than men and dominate the nursing field etc

By keeping an open mind. It's ok if 90% of women want to just play with kids all day, and 90% of men want to play with guns all day. But telling, suggesting, stopping the other 10% from trying the other side is the problem.

It's inherently hard. After all, statistically 9 out of 10 will match your expectations, but you should embrace the outliers, help them understand, that they're perfectly okay, and capable of doing whatever they think they want, be it guns, C++, teacher, nurse, etc.

I'm interested in what you think of actions that aim to correct entrenched issues by forcing them. eg affirmative action.

Reminds me of Electroconf. A GitHub conference where they did blind selection in an effort to avoid biases. Everyone selected ended up being male. Someone complained on Twitter and they had to cancel the whole event.

That's interesting. I have seen a number of female tech personalities being pretty critical of being asked to speak for free. I have never been paid by a conference I spoke at, speaking as a male. I never connected that maybe having that expectation of getting remuneration discourages people from speaking since most conferences probably don't.

That said, I have come to see some pushes for diversity in tech as being extortionist. Some of the tactics used by some specific women who push for diversity in tech are blatantly self-serving like offering workplace diversity consulting but also naming and shaming corporations and individuals for lack of diversity.

If conferences were built by men for men and are, in some inadvertent way, less rewarding for women to attend, it would make sense that women substitute monetary compensation for the non-monetary compensation they don't get.

Is there a fairness issue if the conf is not gender diverse enough? (but does blind speaker selection, and offers the same compensation to any prospective speaker)

If it seems like a literal boys club, maybe it's ok if organizers don't cajole women to attend, who don't seem to want to.

It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.

Maybe it's the result of individuals asynchronously but collaboratively acting to get the most for their class of people. Since there isn't a "council of women in technology" that meets bi-weekly to decide what each speaker should do for each conference, the women speakers act independently much of the time. To get the best for women they know they have to ask for stuff: fees, travel, tickets for other women. Men are not going to just give it to them. They try to do their level best there every time they get an invite. Every so often -- through casual conversation, meet-ups, online communities, articles in magazines, letters to the editor -- there is a chance to communicate about what worked and what didn't. There isn't an easy way for communication to happen about the net effect of speakers' actions for a particular conference when it's happening, or even afterward. There is a ratchet effect and in, addition, a general sense that "there is still more to be done" for women in technology. When the next conference rolls around, still more is attempted...

What are the downvotes about?

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