Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Is the right thing to assume we should target 50-50 gender representation as a first-principle outcome target in all fields? If so, it’s a negative sign that the marquee companies analyzed hired at about the gender split of universities they targeted.

Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the question, “am I likely to get a systemically fair shake when interviewing?” From the data presented, it seems likely that the answer is “yes”.

By all means we should work on the pipeline. I’m supportive to the idea that, by default, we should expect 50-50 representation, but when we find pockets where that does not hold, we must be open to understanding possible reasons. Army/Marines, oil/gas work, and airline pilots are other readily identifiable fields without a 50-50 representation. Is this good, bad, or indifferent?

If women who enter those fields achieve success at the same rate as the overall population, is the hiring and evaluation system (basically after their decision to enter the field) “fair”? If not, why not?

I’ve got a bunch of hobbies and none of them are even close to gender parity. Go check out poker rooms in Vegas and find me a single table where the players are 50-50 men-women. Visit flying clubs, carpentry groups, engine mechanics shops, you won’t find gender parity in any of these. And nobody is really tackling any of these as some urgent problem to solve. Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?

EDIT: Also, why do we think it can be fixed? Can the gender balances in hobbies be fixed? Is the lack of female metalworker hobbyists or male quilters attributable to a “pipeline problem”?

It's all about the money. People care about professions because "female" professions tend to be paid less than "male" ones.

I assume you mean something like care professions? They don't pay less because it's mainly female workers, they pay less because they can't easily scale the generated profits.

https://www.onlinefnpprograms.com/features/men-in-nursing/

"The ACS also reported that men are more likely to gravitate toward high-paying nursing jobs. The highest representation of men is in nurse anesthesia, a role that often pays six figures. According to the ACS, about 41 percent of nurse anesthetists are men, and their median earnings in 2011 were $162,900. Among nurse practitioners, 9 percent were men making $96,400 per year on average."

Real life does not work with targets, but with whatever gets. Creating artificial targets just because some people think they are right does not make it right.

Diversity is good. Diversity targets are evil. This is how you can become evil trying to do something good.

>>>Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?

And it's not like it's ALL professions. I don't see anybody pushing for 50% female representation in coal mining, logging, or waste management.

> Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?

The logic is (from certain points of view at least) - if programming is a desirable occupation, both for individuals, and also for us as a society, then if we have something that "artificially" restricts the amount of programmers - we want to get rid of that something.

In other words, if it really is true that we could have twice as many programmers, that's better for society. If some segment of the population is far less represented in that profession, it could be for a number of reasons, but it's certainly some indication that there might be many potential programmers who are missing out on a possibly valuable profession (and who we as a society are missing out on being programmers), and this is possibly "fixable".

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