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Something I'm sceptical about: the idea that introducing people that look different magically automatically leads to better performing teams. Questioning this verges on heresy in this day and age, yet there seem to be plenty of companies that are utterly lacking in (superficial) diversity, yet (rather inconveniently for diversity cheerleaders) somehow make massive profits in spite of their handicap.

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.

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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...

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?

That's a bit of a strawman, the second paragraph never posited this unless you really think discrimination against women in 2015 is comparable to discrimination against blacks in 1955.

What I think the second paragraph fails to talk about is truly rampant discrimination leads to less opportunity for people to achieve the same quality/throughput of work as those not discriminated against. If you're in a group that has been systematically discriminated against it's not really reasonable to expect that group to have equal representation in an in a high skill pool they've not generally been allowed in.

Back to talking about the original point made by the comment though: The conversation and data (usually) isn't "Jane has shown herself to be equally as valuable as John but nobody will hire her for more than <smaller>% the rate of John" it's "women are not in the same high paying roles as men in the same field, by some percentage, why is that" and usually people can agree it's not that women are naturally <x>% worse performing than men in every way so there is something discriminatory we are doing wrong as a society still.

Discrimination at the education level made sure that very few companies could do that. Discrimination at the military draft made sure to ship out the maximum of African Americans to die in the war. In addition the African American demographic had significant less money that other demographics, and discrimination against lower classes has always been a source for fear and hostility.

You add all those up and you get most of the equality and fairness of 1955 African American life. None of it can be applied to women in 2019.

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.

The reason that flame war topics tend to become reiterative is that they tend to follow the same path.

Someone bring up the argument that "introducing people that look different magically automatically leads to better performing teams". Someone counter with "it's diverse views increase creativity". The naturally reply is then: No organization that promotes diversity care about diversity in views. One one care if an employee is nudist as long they follow the dress code, and if they don't they get fired. The wast majority of diversity seeking companies do not care about economic background. Universities do not want equal outcome in terms of political diversity in professors.

> One reason why females are being paid less overall is because they're leaving higher paying jobs, due to harmful behavior ... It's a boys club ... "not being taken seriously"

Which I always respond by saying that in Sweden about 85% of both women and men work in a gender segregated work place. Men leave the same rate female dominated industries as women leave male dominated industries. The same "leaky" pipe concept that people use to describe the tech industry is used in the teaching profession, with men leaving at a significant higher rate in all stages. By the age of 50 almost all men has quit the profession by either changing profession or moving to a more male dominated sector like after-school activities.

Reading the research into that you can almost substitute papers from the tech industry and just cross over male and write female. "not being taken seriously"? Checked. Toxic environment? Checked. Sexual harassment? Checked. Bullying? Checked.

There is a yearly survey here in Sweden over work safety, and last year the profession with highest sexual harassment and bullying rate for a minority gender was nursing, switching place with construction which went from being #1 to #2. There was a few news articles that noted the change.

Then we have the question of pay differences, the complete lack of census on how it should be calculated, employee retention, society reaction to choosing a low vs high paying job, and more.

> In their mid 30s, 44% of woman leave the tech industry.

There couldn't be something else going on in women's 30s that contributes to them leaving the tech industry. Are they fleeing to other industries?

If not, then this claim is absolutely ridiculous, and you know it.

They are fleeing to other industries, but the numbers are hard to get data on. This, in part, because some leave the work force for years and then come back into another industry. Anywhere from 20 to 25% are immediately going to other industries. It's an absurd amount.

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.

Please excuse my pedantry, but the saying goes ... solvent, not ... insolvent.

> 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.

Then you should be able to start a company in the same industry as these sexists, abuse this fact, and run them out of business because your operating costs are lower!

To some extent this happens, but it's rare.

Much of the sexism I experience in the tech industry is ignorance. Guys assume their female counter parts will work the same way they do and then dock them when they don't line up with expectations, sometimes firing them, despite that they were successfully getting the job done.

I've had managers hire me just for my looks. I've been the lead engineer at multiple companies, and one of those companies management refused every single bit of advice I gave, refused to let me attend important meetings, and when I finally was able to I was intentionally talked over. However, if I convinced other to make one of my suggestions on my behalf, their response was well received.

Around 44% of females in the tech industry who are in their mid 30s leave the tech industry. It's that bad.

When there is a decade+ of unhelpful and often harmful behavior, it results in wanting to leave and have nothing to do with it. Some do start a business. It does happen, but they're far from the majority.

Do you know offhand how many males leave the tech industry in their 30s?

That is why there are no fair wages in capitalism and everyone is underpaid

If everyone is underpaid then no-one is.

You can only have underpaid if someone else is deemed to be overpaid, or is paid "normal" amount.

Investors are overpaid

The fair wage would be what the customer is charged minus other expenses

A completely free market of a commodity good produces the theoretical maximum economic surplus. You can argue that the wages are not distributed evenly, but the most dollars are earned under capitalism. That means that not _everyone_ is underpaid.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

From your own link[1]:

>multiple studies find that pay rates between men and women varied by 5–6.6% or, women earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from other unmeasured differences, a greater value placed on non-wage benefits, gender discrimination and a difference in willingness and/or skills to negotiate salaries.

>The extent to which discrimination plays a role in explaining gender wage disparities is somewhat difficult to quantify, due to a number of potentially confounding variables.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...

That seems to suggest that right now there's not enough evidence to suggest the POSSIBLE 5-6% gap is directly attributable to gender without accounting for other variables. This doesn't run COUNTER to what you said, but it also doesn't fully back you up.

I’m not sure what parts you feel like aren’t aligning with what I said, I read the parts you quote and it seems to match what I intended.

But, FWIW, here are a few things to consider:

1- the 5-6% gap / 94 cents per dollar number is an adjusted number that takes career choices into account. The unadjusted raw data number is around 80 cents on the dollar. Your emphasis on the word possible is missing the fact that the evidence of a gap is absolutely clear. What’s missing is unassailable proof of the causes, especially when you remove some of them by adjusting the data.

2- Adjusting for career choices is intentionally removing something that we know is currently different between men and women, and career choices are driven partially by cultural norms, which in the past are known to have been caused by discrimination. Adjusting that way might be the right thing to do, but that’s not entirely clear, it might also be rose-tinted glasses.

3- You’re picking only on today’s data point in the US, and my point was explicitly that yesterday’s data and data for other countries is even more conclusive, even after adjusting for career choices. The unadjusted data has risen 20% in the last 50 years, but it still potentially has 20% further to go. https://www.pay-equity.org/info-time.html

4- Yes, quantifying discrimination is absolutely difficult. Please note that my comment claimed the existence of a pay gap, not that the cause was discrimination. Many kinds of bias and discrimination are extremely difficult to detect. Lots of evidence that biases are unconscious and sometimes act against someone’s conscious & stated goals. That said, given that discrimination has absolutely occurred in the last century, and that the pay gap is only recently closing, and that women’s choices are currently fluctuating and not fixed, it would be a pretty bad bet to assume that all bias has been eradicated from our society already.

> "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...).

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

Like so many things which are considered "soft" criteria for hiring, the problem is that those who argue that such things are a "plus" have a whole body of no evidence.

Nobody has taken one of these "soft" criteria to an extreme and blown everybody's doors off in business. As such, that tells everyone that "soft" criteria are simply far less important than many, many other things.

I think if you had figured out the sophistry in this reasoning you would've explained it instead of dismissing it without making any real point.

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