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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> At our CS faculty, only 30% of undergrads and 15% of the professors are women. Going on parental leave during a PhD or post-doc usually means the end of an academic career. However, this lack of diversity is often abused as an excuse to shield certain people from any form of criticism. Reducing every negative comment in a scientific discussion to race and gender creates a toxic environment. People are becoming afraid to engage in fear of being called a racist or sexist, which in turn reinforces the diversity problem.

This was an unexpected twist! It's rare to read such an honest, unbiased opinion on this issue.

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In my opinion the dominant discriminatory mechanism is:

1. The expected working hours and travel schedule

2. Poorly-compensated, unstable unemployment through the mid-thirties as de riguer

I'm a man, but my experience is relevant in that I left early for industry from a Physics PhD that was dragging on, in large part because I wanted to start a family. I'm now, according to the feedback I receive, a high-performing C++ developer in the CAD / CAM space, and I didn't have to move around the country doing temp work for below-market compensation, work crazy hours, or suffer through the degrading administrative bullshit one must endure to convince a committee. And I have a seven-month-old and a partner getting a master's on my salary, and we get to live near my parents.

It was unpleasant to nod along when "enduring the company of gross assholes like you" was presented (rather than the above) as the dominant discriminatory mechanism, but, you know. There were plenty of gross assholes and it was a learning experience and I guess I'm now probably better for it.

The divide you're describing between careers C++ development and physics can be explained by simple supply and demand. You've responded to the market and are better off for it.

Also, when you have a bunch of very intelligent and hard-working physics grad students, how on earth can "working hours" not be a discriminatory mechanism between them, when the coveted faculty positions are so few and far between? Does it not stand to reason that a person who devotes more of his day to the work will come out ahead, on average?

It isn't good or bad, it simply is.

“It isn’t good or bad, it simply is” implies it followed some amoral natural law.

These are human-created systems, though, and would be built upon human ethics and morals. Stating academia as an institution just “is” isn’t much different than asserting the military-industrial-congressional complex just “is”

> implies it followed some amoral natural law

Doesn't it? If you have two lions of the same physical ability and one of them hunts for six hours a day and the other one hunts for 12 hours a day, which one would you expect to be more successful?

> Stating academia as an institution just “is” isn’t much different than asserting the military-industrial-congressional complex just “is”

It's not about academia specifically though, it's about any and all systems where individuals compete. Given similar talent, the one who puts in more time/effort will likely win.

Except I don’t think we can/should reduce our institutions to such a simple model. There’s many more inputs than just work-hours.

We build our institutions to guard against this. That’s why we don’t live in an anarcho-capitalist society and have things like anti-trust laws.

> There’s many more inputs than just work-hours.

Obviously, but if you consider those to be very similar at the top of some field, wouldn't you expect work-hours to be important in predicting the outcome? I'm sure you can draw clear lines between two individuals, but when you look at many people of similar ability, how much time they put in will most likely predict their results pretty well.

> We build our institutions to guard against this.

We do? Is there a thing where you can explain that you're as smart as other people and therefore it shouldn't matter that they work 5 days a week in some area and you only work one day, and that it's unfair that they produce more results than you and get the promotion/grant/whatever you compete for? I've never heard of it.

The anti-trust example in the previous statement is one. It doesn't matter if someone is more successful, even if it's due solely to an extraordinary work ethic; societal institutions will artificially limit their market share.

Sports is another example. Leagues put salary caps as well as minimum salaries to artificially limit compensation.

Both sports and economics put these in place to provide a bulwark against such "natural laws" in favor of human defined ethics like fairness.

Those are extremely different things. There is no monopoly in academics or personal career. Sports is a terrible example imho, because most of the compensation isn't in the salary, it's in the ad contracts.

> Both sports and economics put these in place to provide a bulwark against such "natural laws" in favor of human defined ethics like fairness.

That's not at all why we have anti-trust laws. They are harmful to the economy, that's why. If they weren't, that is, if monopolists usually were more efficient in lowering prices/increasing quality/innovating than companies that had competitors, we'd have no issue with monopolies at all.

Fair enough on the anti-trust point. But societal institutions still put artificial limits, such as minimum wages. In different eras, the U.S. put maximum limits as well. The U.S. also limits profits in certain industries through regulated monopolies (e.g., insurance, utilities).

It's a strange moving of the goal-posts to posit that sports doesn't count due to endorsements. There are also examples of leagues that limit these as well (UFC being one, although the case can be made this is of the managers interest). It becomes more pronounced in amateur levels (e.g., Olympics).

The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution.

Someone above brought up E. Weinstein. He's been a vocal critic of how academic institutions use immigration institutions to artificially drive down labor rates. There are seemingly boundless examples of institutions either biasing or leveling outcomes.

The larger point being institutions do put artificial limits on all kinds of interactions. These interactions have societal ethics forced upon them and don't exist in a libertarian vacuum consisting of only natural laws.

I don't believe we do minimum wages for similar reasons either. We want people to be able to live (or, at the very least, survive), and we don't want to distort the markets by subsidizing their lives when working doesn't pay enough. But that has nothing to do with removing competition, or limiting competition to some areas, i.e. "natural talent" but forbidding to put more work in than your competitors.

> It's a strange moving of the goal-posts to posit that sports doesn't count due to endorsements.

If you go for total comp, endorsements is part of it. If you don't, you'll just see that the average salary in highly lucrative and competitive fields will sink and the stock options, bonuses etc for the top performers will increase. In both cases, the result is the same: the top performers get substantially more than the rest. The different is only whether you're trying to hide that fact by making them nominally earn close to the same, only to then give some of them the rest of the money in a different way.

> The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution.

And they are also a very special case, with lots of intricacies and paranoia and not something that comes to mind when you ask people about rewarding merit and efficiency.

Nobody is arguing that anything and everything must "only consist of natural laws". But to claim that something as basic as "more effort = more results" shouldn't be allowed to be real because it's too much of a natural law and has no place in civilized society sound ridiculous.

It's fine if you want to argue that we shouldn't promote the top 1% of each year and murder the rest. I agree, and we don't. But to not consider the actual output of people competing for something because they might have put in different amount of hours?

Should we have the Olympics add more classes where only people may compete against each other that were born on the same day and had their training supervised and limited to a reasonable amount achievable by every hobbyist for their whole life, to make sure that none of them had an "unfair advantage" by training harder or longer than the others?

I think my original point is getting lost based on the way you are speaking about those examples.

My intent is not to rail against the idea that “more work = more results”, all else being equal.

My point is that this is not something that should just be expected to run its course because it’s a “natural law”, and is thus some evidence of some fundamental truth. Society places limits on how far these “natural laws” can extend. The “intricacies” of special cases are exactly what I was inferring when I stated what I felt was too simplistic of a model; namely, reducing the systemic effects to a single correlation like “more work = more results”. In the real world I think those rare situations that can be boiled down to such a simplistic relationship are the exception rather than the rule.

We do add rules to many (most?) sporting events, largely out of ethics. Combat sports have weight classes, others have age restrictions, Olympians have pay restrictions etc. Whether or not your examples would be adopted is a matter of social convention about what is “fair enough”, so they seem to illustrate the point about society setting ethical boundaries.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the meritocratic goal of “more work = more results”. To get there, though, all else must be equal which is too idealized to work in the real world. So society creates ethical rules, outside of natural laws, to get closer to that level playing field. Insinuating differences influenced by institutional convention is evidence of some foundational truth is naive and potentially dangerous.

> My point is that this is not something that should just be expected to run its course because it’s a “natural law”, and is thus some evidence of some fundamental truth.

What I'm missing is what alternative you see. Sure, we could turn the relationship between input and output on its head and watch what happens when whoever crosses the finish line last wins the race. But what does that achieve?

> We do add rules to many (most?) sporting events, largely out of ethics.

We add constraints so we can compare the abilities, and that gets too hard to be useful when we don't focus on something. If we had a new sport, not unlike a decathlon, but testing every skill imaginable, I'm sure we'd find the field much closer together, and we'd probably have quite a few surprises, but it would take forever and wouldn't really tell us anything. Constraining it with rules allows for comparison.

Yes, of course, we could constrain researchers as well by how much time they were allowed to work, or which books they were allowed to read, and how often they are allowed to look something up etc, but we're not really interested in some very narrow, hyper-specific "research" skill, it's not a hobby, we want results. Ergo we look at who gets the most results, or gets them the fastest, or cracks the hardest puzzles, whatever you may use to compare researchers.

As someone more eloquently stated above, I think the measure is more a symptom than a root cause. So the alternative would require more systematic change. In many ways, academia seems broken. Areas that seem to contribute are 1) the endless push for publication regardless of quality, 2) the disingenuous recruiting of PhD candidates in light of the limited positions available, especially as tenured professors and 3) the way colleges have been run as businesses built on debt in the last few decades. These are not based in “natural law” but human convention.

I think those three areas combine to create students with massive debt and limited prospects, ripe to be taken advantage of under the guise of meritocratic competition. What I’m seeing is that people may interpret success in this area as a natural outcome of what “just is” rather than the byproduct of a broken system.

> > The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution.

> And they are also a very special case, with lots of intricacies and paranoia and not something that comes to mind when you ask people about rewarding merit and efficiency.

The elephant in the room is however, what is merit and efficiency in academia. I would argue the attempt to somehow make scientific output measurable has led to the big problems plaguing academia today, salami publishing, churning out more and more papers with less and less results, making papers purposefully difficult to reproduce, time spend on applying for funding instead of research, crazy work hours... In many ways academia is similar to the military in that short term incentives are actually counterproductive to the end goal that you try to achieve.

> Nobody is arguing that anything and everything must "only consist of natural laws". But to claim that something as basic as "more effort = more results" shouldn't be allowed to be real because it's too much of a natural law and has no place in civilized society sound ridiculous.

Again the difficulty being what does more results mean and is it necessarily good.

That being said I don't think artificially capping work hours (how even) would alleviate the situation, work hours are a symptom not the cause.

Certainly, competition has undesired side effects, and everything you measure will become a target and be gamed. I don't believe there's an alternative available that scales and works reliably. The market-style multi-layer competition (individuals, organizations, regions, nations, continents and blocs etc) is full of problems, but it's the best thing we have.

There's no need for anyone to win, both the person working 6 hours and the one working 12 hours can contribute and be compensated proportionally to their efforts.

No, they can't. There are more grad students than postdoc positions. Modern academia is famous/infamous for this.

One of them will be dead by exhaustion a short time after he piled up his bounty only to have it rot because he doesn't know a freezer...

IMHO, depersonalizing a problem may help to mitigate it.

My IRL analogy:

Working in election integrity, I emphatically encouraged my peers to pointedly ignore intention, to frame problems as "errors", not "fraud".

From the systems view, all fraud are technically errors.

And the conversation is full stop over the moment someone says "fraud", "chicanery", "electioneering".

But if you can keep the convo in the "safe space" of "errors", avoid partisanship and blame and whatever, then it's easier to build coalitions, persuade others, neutralize opposition.

Just my two cents.

I think that’s a good way to phrase it. Another is to focus on the “process” rather than the “person”.

An election process can fail to provide validation against errors. A person, however, commits fraud.

Ya, process vs people is a smarter dichotomy. More general purpose. Thank you.

Human-created systems (science funding in the US) are absolutely built upon human ethics and morals and subject to modification. But the concept of productivity = f(time-invested) is indeed an amoral natural law. f(.) is not necessarily something simple like a line, maybe a sigmoid, I don't know. But the idea that time spent on a problem is, away from corner cases like 0 and 24/7, positively correlated with results and productivity - that idea is indeed amoral and not really mutable.

You bring up the military, and I can draw another analogy - development of a military technology. Sure, you can decide nukes are amoral, but the more actors there are in the world, the higher the chance that someone else will develop them anyway, and will wipe the floor with you, amoral as though they may be. So do you really have a choice? Generall,y when a technological advance is possible and brings about significant advantages for the entity that develops it, it will eventually happen. It won't be good or bad, it just will be. Agonize about it or don't, develop it or let yourself be overpowered by the one who will - your moral choice entirely.

I’m with you in the first paragraph. My larger issue is when the function is reduced to a single variable like time invested. There are some cases where time invested can even be counterproductive because of competing effects (think of newbies working out who assume more is always better and eventually become overstrained). My point is that it’s naive to think time = productivity in anything but trivially simple systems. To think that about complex systems can get you in trouble

Your second paragraph I’m less sure about. It comes across as realpolitik (that may have been your point) which can be used as a rationalization to continue immoral behavior. My bringing up the military is that we can create systems that incentivize certain behavior (lobbying for a military need) and confuse that with natural law when in reality it can be mitigated through a differently oriented system (in this case, one that more clearly separates money and politics)

I did not argue that this situation is "bad," I argued that it's "hostile to people who want to start families."

Now, you can guess based on my emotional language that I think it is good to pursue policies that make careers more open to people who want families. And, as it happens, the US government agrees, in so far as it designates wanting a family a protected class for the purpose of employment discrimination.

My argument, devoid of moral content, is:

If it's your aim to avoid excluding people who want families from a career, you need to regulate the amount of hours people in that career are expected to work, the amount they're expected to travel, and the distribution of lifetime expected earnings (don't unnecessarily gate a prosperous 40s behind penurious child-bearing years). Since this particular career is overwhelmingly government-funded, free-market analyses miss the point - the government decides how many Physics Grad Students there are, what they're paid, and largely what their future career trajectories are. Given that it holds the purse strings it also holds substantially more power to regulate working conditions than it otherwise would.

It's empirically obvious that people who want families are excluded from science, and I'm positing that the above is why.

I also want the society to support more families, especially by the highly educated people (not in the name of some IQ-supremacy, although you could argue that's beneficial to society, but simply to level the playing field - low educated people don't seem to have any problem having tons of kids, while high educated are delaying family creation more and more - and in case of women, often into their less fertile years).

However, my proposed solutions are quite different, and much more direct - simply address the main issues directly - the main issue IMO currently being housing (at least in major cities, near major colleges, in major Western countries). So you could make a simple rule, giving (either literally, or in a form of long-term (10+ years) loan that automatically gets written of under some conditions) young people apartments when they e.g. enroll in a difficult STEM PhD program. Once this problem is "sorted" (housing represents a major factor in how "secure" you feel about your future - you and your kids never going homeless) I think that would encourage many young highly-educated high-achiever couples to start families much sooner.

Housing is not the main issue (grad students can afford that, after all), child care is.

For several years an adult needs to be present 24/7 and if the adult is someone other than the parent that ain't cheap. If the adult is someone other than the parent and it's not business hours that really ain't cheap.

What's a better use of the NSF's dollars? Funding night-nurses for grad students so professors can keep working them through the night? Or just funding day-care and regulating their hours?

You definitely don't want to just give grad students assets that can be converted into liquidity after some fixed term, because then you're just exacerbating the "you get rich eventually, after you're too old for kids" issue. A better asset would be something like a seven-year voucher for day-care that is:

1. Granted after a two-year vesting period (so that people receiving this benefit get at least a Master's degree)

2. Non-transferrable (so students don't just sell it)

3. Not conditional on continued enrollment (so it doesn't tie you to an abusive professor / department)

Again, I think this only really works with regulations on hours (possibly with a shift system of some kind), but once the federal government begins funding such a benefit there's no reason to restrict it to grad students (I'm sure military service-people could use such a benefit as well, and the more government professions receive it the more flexible the voucher is).

poor compensation is normally a factor that filters out guys more than women because of societal (and partner) expectations.

In the physical sciences (possibly others but I can only speak to what I know), there's an expectation that your compensation hits an inflection point somewhere in your mid-thirties (once you've endured the hazing of the PhD and multiple post-docs). For example, I know that in my company I make a 20 percent premium over junior engineers hired fresh out of college at the same time I was, and I'm a PhD program wash-out.

So it's not exactly "poor compensation," it's more "poor compensation through the years when most educated people have children."

The US is a funny country. Parents mock geeks. Towns are crazy over only sports, and cheer leaders are the most popular figures in schools. Schools tell kids that they need to be unique and they don't have to study hard, and the term "queen bee" is apparently a US thing, and it is definitely not popular, if non-existent, in India. The states dumb down their curriculum. The testing organizations use only standard tests. The whole country sells more barbies than any action figures of female scientists, biographies of female scientists, and experiment kits for kids, combined.

Did your teacher tell you stories of Marie Curie passionately? Did your teacher tell you stories of Noether and her amazing theorems with great admiration? Did your teacher tell you the inspirational stories of Ada Lovelace? Did your teacher and parents tell students that everyone can achieve the same level of mastery on STEM? Did your country treat engineers and scientists as heroes? I guess not.

And now a bunch of lefties are complaining there are fewer women scientists and engineers in the pipeline and attribute it solely on discrimination or bigotry?

Get your priority straight.

The idea that girls can’t be inspired by male scientists is extremely sexist.

> Parents mock geeks.

I was a kid nerd. I was mocked. (And bullied too, but I’ll take that one for the team.) Trust me, there was absolutely no encouragement provided for me, except by a few geeky teachers. If girls receive(d) approximately zero encouragement, that sounds like equality to me (though not how things should be!). The idea of geeks being cool, rich and popular is very recent, brought to you by the likes of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Big Bang Theory.

> The idea that girls can’t be inspired by male scientists is extremely sexist.

You're right. I somehow fell into the framework set by the progressives. Any gender can do STEM, and the country I came from ensures that such message is loud and clear. Having female role models helps, but that's beside the point.

> The idea that girls can’t be inspired by male scientists is extremely sexist.

Nobody said that they can't be, that's a straw man. But there is a difference between not being inspired by male scientists and never having a female scientist mentioned to you.

> > Parents mock geeks.

> I was a kid nerd. I was mocked. (And bullied too, but I’ll take that one for the team.) Trust me, there was absolutely no encouragement provided for me, except by a few geeky teachers. If girls receive(d) approximately zero encouragement, that sounds like equality to me (though not how things should be!). The idea of geeks being cool, rich and popular is very recent, brought to you by the likes of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Big Bang Theory.

I don't think the OP was only talking about female geeks but in general. Regarding bullying, I agree it's a big problem, however girls tend to have another issue to fight with, which is being told (by teachers, parents, and other geeks...) from very early on that they are not good at science/math. So imagine being bullied for geekiness and at the same time being told that you can't really do that think you like.

Where do you live that teachers tell girls they are not good with science/math? Even when I went to school ages ago, nobody ever said anything like that to girls in my classes.

I heard it said to girls in my class in Germany (this was in the 80/90s), the teacher in question when challenged said that it was an obvious joke and the girls just can't take humour.

I know quite a lot of women (both in science fields and ones who did not go into science because of this) who told me that they were told this.

I have read it repeatedly on reddit/HN and others by people (in particular those who call themselves geeks/nerds) who argued women and girls are not good at science.

Also one thing I learnt when talking to female colleagues and friends, is that some things we just don't see/hear, because they are said in private, e.g. in teacher meetings...

Where I went to school almost all of the teachers were women. In fact teaching profession here as a whole has been dominated by women for a very long time now. Seems a bit illogical girls would be commonly told to be unfit for science. Do you think the situation is different in Germany, because you have more vocational oriented education and probably more male teachers?

Education in Germany is a bit special, i.e. there are three different "tiers" of schools. The school to be able to go to university (and to which I went) is called Gymnasium and is not and in my experience (I went to a US high-school for a year as a Senior) is less vocationally oriented than US high-schools at least. While teachers being largely female is also true in Germany, the distribution depends on schools, elementary school (grade 1-4) teachers are by vast majority women, but when it comes to the Gymnasium the distribution is somewhat more even (maybe 60/40 in my time). However teachers for STEM subjects (math, physics, chemistry) are still mainly men.

Moreover, I know several women who were told by women, e.g. their mothers, that girls are not good at STEM. Just to say the discouragement doesn't just come from men.

I would go further and state that there is no "diversity" problem, whatever that should mean. There is an a priori assumption that it should be 50/50 and only then a field is just. Why CS though? There are countless other occupations where that is not given. The problems with PhD and pregnancy is a university problem. So I still think it is heavily biased.

"Why CS though?" is a weird statement here.

Why should the vast majority, or even a sizable fraction, of fields not have a gender or race balance even remotely approximating the balance of the general population? Is it not a 'should' but merely 'it's okay if they do'? If the balance was in the other direction and men or white people were being intentionally denied jobs, would that be okay?

Should it be OK for other things to be unbalanced? Should it be OK if 60% of black people can't get houses but only 10% of white people have trouble getting homes? Should it be OK if 90% of asians are turned away from emergency rooms but only 20% of mexicans are?

You can argue that race/gender genetic differences play a role but it's kind of hard to explain away the widespread imbalances here just based off DNA.

There is no indication that people are being denied entry to certain fields.

None that I'm aware of. I've never even seen somebody claim to be an otherwise qualified candidate who is unable to enter a field due to demographics.

Other than high-profile lawsuits against tech companies accusing them of discrimination against demographic groups?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/07/google-discrimination...

"Now the plaintiffs can request access to internal Google documents to try to support their allegations, which also include some people being “denied employment because of their actual and perceived conservative political activities and affiliations, and their status as actual or perceived Asian or Caucasian male job applicants,”"

There are myriad examples of this sort of allegation from the last decade, it's not hard to find them. They've been discussed here on HN.

OK sorry I meant there is no indication of such denial of entry BEFORE the activists take over. Once they manage to install their quota rules, it is of course not a fair playing field anymore.

> If the balance was in the other direction and men or white people were being intentionally denied jobs, would that be okay?

You're implying – and your argument rests on – that right now, women and non-white people are being intentionally denied jobs due to their gender or the color of their skin [1], and that this is a widespread phenomenon [2]. I would really like to see some hard evidence for that claim.

[1] As opposed to their qualification or other directly relevant criteria.

[2] I'm assuming you mean in the US, or at least in the Western world.

The OP asked "There is an a priori assumption that it should be 50/50 and only then a field is just. Why CS though?" as if CS is the only field that matters here. I responded by asking more broadly about whether imbalance should be acceptable in any field and what kind of imbalance should be acceptable. Why are you immediately assuming that my question is a thin veil over some sort of implied argument?

If you believe that racial discrimination in hiring (or otherwise) is made up, you need merely perform a google search to find many reputable articles and papers on the subject. Feel free to educate yourself.

https://www.google.com/search?q=race+discrimination+in+hirin...

~80% of the Nurses in the US are Female, this is no doubt due to discrimination and anti-male bias according to your worldview, correct? 87% of Garbage men in the US are Men, are you fighting for better female representation in the Garbage trade?

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/gender-ratio-of-nur...

Not sure how you leaped from me asking "should it be OK for there to be an imbalance" to this. Why would it be OK? That's the question I asked in the first place.

Yes and what gender are the doctors? Even though medicine students are 60% female? That's the issue, the prestigious more powerful jobs are largely male dominated, while the "rank and file" who takes orders (or does the dirty work) is largely female. Show me one field (that does rely on the person's ability not looks) where there are more women in the higher ranked positions and more men in the lower ranked positions.

You ignored my question.

>Show me one field (that does rely on the person's ability not looks) where there are more women in the higher ranked positions and more men in the lower ranked positions.

Nursing

The field is medicine and doctors are predominately male.

Because, unlike other field, CS, and especially ML, uniquely positions itself as a field that is setting out to revolutionize how the world is structured. You want more input than just white and Asian folks when you’re going to make such bold claims.

ML can barely look at a jpeg and tell me if it has boobs; I'm not optimistic that we could or should revolutionize how the world is structured around it.

Maybe there shouldn't be an assumption that only a 50/50 proportion is just, but there also shouldn't be an assumption that our current ratio is just fine and not indicative of any problems. I'd note that in the 80s the gender ratio for CS was around 40% women, and that it then began to decline while other STEM fields saw a continued rise. Right now the physical sciences have twice the rate of female participation than CS. Heck, at my college (University of Rochester) while our CS program had maybe 30% women, the Math program was over 50%. Is there some fundamental difference in interest between pure mathematics and computer science that I'm missing? I'd also note the high number of women in CS who report discrimination or harassment.

50/50 is kind of an arbitrary strawman, there aren't many demographics approaching that in the western world. Even in the US, the male/female split is closer to 49/51, so you wouldn't expect 50/50 there either without a small bias. There are various other demographics with an uneven distribution too - even if we decide it should be 49/51 based on the gender balance of the overall population, is that necessarily representative of the hiring pool (i.e. excluding teenagers, children, students, retirees)? Some rigorous analysis is necessary before deciding that a given ratio is Correct, I think. When the ratio is dramatically different from the general population it's at least a sign that perhaps something is wrong.

Indeed, with a correction

_People are becoming afraid_

People are already afraid. Every other discipline outside STEM is completely rotten, it's clear STEM is next.

Good article on that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberal...

Similar has been replicated in removing asking about criminal records to be discriminatory against black people.

It really shows just how systemic bias can be.

Admittedly this makes me uncertain what studies have been done to prove or at least anyhropologically report on effective movements at increasing diversity. We already know (or have evidence that) more diverse teams are more effective teams.

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