Blind auditions and gender discrimination

This was a replication attempt that came up with the opposite results:

https://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv%3A77108

Are you asking for technique for hiring processes or employee retention?

From observation, I see very fair hiring process in companies that treat employees as replaceable cogs that get trained, used and within a few years replaced. One place that I know which operate like that has equal hiring ratios, gender ratio of almost 50/50, pays exactly the same for both women and men, and are extremely unflexible in terms of work hours, task selection/satification and pay. As a result they also have a very high churn rate.

Not sure if shredded. The author detected no significant bias in blind auditions due to gender. This may or may not mean that blind auditions are more effective in equalizing opportunities - are fair.

Why? They are both by the same author but don’t have the same content.

> If this were the case, companies would - because they could do an equivalent job to a man for less money - simply hire all women workforces which due to their lower wage bill would outcompete and destroy companies that employed men.

That assumes company made up of perfectly rational human beings. If members of the company are sexist it might not work out that way.

> Another one: women are paid less than men for the same work. If this were the case, companies would - because they could do an equivalent job to a man for less money - simply hire all women workforces which due to their lower wage bill would outcompete and destroy companies that employed men. Yet - again somewhat inconveniently! - the real world refuses to match the theory.

I think you could figure out the sophistry in this reasoning if you thought about it.

I'm with you in the sense that I don't buy the proposition that you have to have 50/50 gender balance of say... database administrators, data engineers or devops engineers because otherwise your technology or company will be not as effective as it can be, because you're missing out on that.. something... There's nothing about those roles that is gender specific.

The only argument I can see being sensible is that you want to hire from every available pool of talent, and if the only people working in a specific specialization are white/asian dudes, then it's tougher for potential candidates to see themselves belonging there, hence the business misses out on great employees who go for other careers or others employers who makes them feel more included.

Your second paragraph basically posits that 1950's America would have been filled with companies hiring minority workers at lower wages to achieve superior financial results, but this didn't happen to any significant degree. Was life for African Americans in 1955 one of manifest equality and fairness?

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They always become flamewars. For an HN comment—and, by extension, thread—to be substantive on a divisive topic like this requires commenters to stay with the specifics of the article. If you toss those and replace them with nearest-big-generic-thing, discussion quality will plummet. If you do it twice, square that effect.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> Another one: women are paid less than men for the same work. [...] the real world refuses to match the theory.

Yes, I agree you might think this might be a competitive advantage for someone. So I guess yes it's inconvenient that the theory doesn't appear to work, but that might mean the theory is wrong, not that the pay gap doesn't exist.

This is complicated, has been much studied, includes some controversy, and the pay gap has by all accounts narrowed considerably in the US.

But, the pay gap does exist, in the more distant past unquestionably so, and in some other countries it's greater than in others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report

Except we know the world doesn’t work that way. In the 1950s and 1960s, law firms would not hire Jewish attorneys. Yet today the idea that Jewish people are somehow less fit for legal practice would sound utterly preposterous. Likewise the admission of Jewish and Asian people to elite schools like Harvard. The market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay insolvent.

I think we tend to look at these things from a North American (perhaps India as well) perspective which leads to some of these conclusions (it makes sense that in a diverse pop, a diversity of people would excel in areas) but in Japan, Korea, Rwanda or China since there is little diversity in actual practice, diversity is beside the point. Of course in China many non Han are considered Han enough to be Han, so are for all intents Han.

> "companies that are utterly lacking in ... diversity ... somehow make massive profits in spite of their handicap."

It's important to keep in mind that profits often result from harmful externalities. Those externalities may only impact particular subsets of the population, and so there may be harms that result from a lack of diversity which are not captured by market pricing. In an ideal world, the market would price these in, perhaps by regulation, but we don't seem to have been living in the world according to e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-w... (perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but I think this may suggest that your mother, daughters, etc. are more likely to be killed as a result of lack of diversity in extremely profitable companies...).

This is incredibly strawmanny, but it's probably worth replying to briefly at least.

Something interesting about it is that it is written from a perspective of super-naive, super-optimistic views of capitalism where competition is perfect and actors are always rational.

> Another one: women are paid less than men for the same work. If this were the case, companies would - because they could do an equivalent job to a man for less money - simply hire all women workforces which due to their lower wage bill would outcompete and destroy companies that employed men. Yet - again somewhat inconveniently! - the real world refuses to match the theory.

The most immediate example of how this is a silly oversimplification is that your hypothetical company is restricted to a fraction of the talent pool (the particular fraction will depend on the industry and the demographs of the education/training pipeline for it). Assume a neutral distribution of applicants, and you're still trying to outperform the competition with 50% fewer potential hires. You could be paying less, leading to lower costs, but you can do less if your workforce is half the size, so you probably aren't going to "destroy" everyone else.

For certain industries, and certain demographics, this seems to happen. Agriculture seems to be an example. But it's naive to claim that the lack of, say, an all-female legal firm "destroying" other law firms is an indication that there aren't salary gaps.

Another thing to consider is that in industries where the margins aren't razor-thin, the differences would likely be absorbed - and thus essentially hidden from market effects - in top-end profits instead of being passed on to customers.

I don't think the post should be flagged. They're asking genuine questions, not making harmful points. Without healthy communication and the curiosity to learn we don't grow.

Anyways, >the idea that introducing people that look different magically automatically leads to better performing teams.

It's a misunderstanding. It's not the skin color, it's diverse views increase creativity, and the tech industry is mostly problem solving, which is a creative act. So, for example, hiring someone from South Africa, despite them being white, can give more perspective and more ideas. Likewise, hiring someone from NYC if you're in the Bay Area can have that effect as well. It has nothing to do with skin color.

>women are paid less than men for the same work. If this were the case, companies would - because they could do an equivalent job to a man for less money - simply hire all women workforces which due to their lower wage bill would outcompete and destroy companies that employed men. Yet - again somewhat inconveniently! - the real world refuses to match the theory.

It's such a complex issue. Here is an example statistic that helps explain a piece of the picture: In their mid 30s, 44% of woman leave the tech industry.

One reason why females are being paid less overall is because they're leaving higher paying jobs, due to harmful behavior. There is not a lot of choice.

There are other complex issues too. It's harder for a female to get an upper management position at a company, short of starting the company themselves. It's a boys club. And for those who start a company, sometimes their company is restricted from doing business with other companies due to their sex. Usually they're "not being taken seriously".

There is another side too. There are jobs that are harder for men to get. These jobs don't pay very well.

There is so much more I can say, but if there is any take away here is that not all problems are simple and not all problems should be treated like they're simple. Some are multifaceted beasts and the more you look into them the more you start seeing nested problems within them.