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Comment by spacekitcat | Hacker News Reader

As a woman in tech, I feel that it isn't actually a meritocracy.

I think people have a habit of assuming men did the real work in a project, so they get a disproportionate share of the credit. People also have a habit of pushing women towards front end work, making the assumption that men are more 'technical' than women. It can be difficult to watch men get all of the credit for your blood, sweat and tears. It's especially bitter when they then say it's a meritocracy and you feel like saying 'what exactly did you contribute to this?'.

The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. The first issue is that I don't think we are especially good at identifying the best unless it's very easy to measure (sport for example). The second point is that it takes work to overcome your own biases and I think this feeds into how we evaluate 'the best' more than we like to admit.

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Meritocracy is a good thing and we should never stop striving for it. The problem isn't that some strive for meritocracy, the problem is when people argue that they are meritocratic when they aren't. It is pretty easy to argue that there is plenty of merit in hiring women, like adding diversity to teams has benefits and so on, I don't see why you need to argue against the concept itself.

> The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work.

Not really, the concept is nice both on paper and in reality. The most successful companies in the world today are much more meritocratic than most organizations that preceded them, they produce great results using it, the concept works great. And I don't see why you think it wouldn't, we humans have two signals, merit and bias. Without merit we just go by our biases. The problems you describe doesn't come from focusing too much on merit but too little on it.

I think proponents of meritocracy are naive.

People who think that white men will hire more minorities and women if they focused less on merit are naive.

Striving to build an environment where effort is made to attribute credit where it's due and to strive for equality of outcome for all is what we need to do. You're still picking the 'best person for the job' according to your own biases for what constitutes the 'best' (because how else could it work?), but you're also making an effort to ensure that your team/department/company isn't just all white (straight etc) men.

> Striving to build an environment where effort is made to attribute credit where it's due

That is what meritocracy is all about though.

> strive for equality of outcome for all is what we need to do

This is your bias speaking.

I got my job at Google by doing well on online coding competitions. I didn't do it with anyone else, I just sat at home and practiced on my own. Anyone could have done that. Show me a single woman who did well enough to get a t-shirt from the main google code jam competition but failed to get a good tech job and I could see your point, but I don't think there are any.

More importantly you'd expect that women would flock to those more objective ways to get into the industry, however it is the other way around, competitive programming is almost only asian and white men. Asians love it since it is a way for them to circumvent the bias against them and get jobs at Google or equivalent, why can't women do the same? And if women refuse to do the same work I and many of my peers did to get in yet still say I got in via privilege why should I take them seriously instead of just assuming they are biased against me? It isn't like women have less time as students than men have, they just choose to spend it differently.

Listen, I know what I’ve experienced.

Edit: No actually, I can't understand what this is? You are trying to convince me my experiences are wrong. You don't seem to actually want to understand my point of view, so what is this? Why are you wasting both of our time like this?

> You are trying to convince me my experiences are wrong.

No, I am not, I agree that there are many situations where women are not taken seriously due to their gender and assigning project credit is one of them. I 100% believe that has happened to you, that is wrong and we should try to do something about it. If you want that then you support meritocracy instead of biasocracy. However I'm trying to convince you that this statement is wrong:

> strive for equality of outcome for all is what we need to do

Men and women are different on average, maybe because of socialization etc but fact is that today they are different. My path relied on anonymous interactions online, so is by far the most friendly for marginalized groups. However marginalized groups like women are basically non existent on that path. That proves to me there are more differences than just discrimination. If you want to hire someone like me you wont find a woman, as there are hundreds of men for every woman with that background. Now you might not want to hire a person with those skills, but those who do will not find women to hire. And not because of discrimination, they don't even try to work for it in the first place.

This is why you've been pushed towards front end work and denied the credit for tasks that might put you on a path to power. Those above you can sense what you'd do with it. You'd say: "My experience has been this, and none of you can argue with that, so here is what we're going to do to make up for the injustices I experienced. Deal with it". The equality of outcome you so desire would be you and everyone underneath you unemployed, whole organizations gone bankrupt, and entire countries: a gulag.

Big brain comment here.

What is the problem with hiring a white person vs a blue person if the white one is better? And vice-versa, hiring the blue one if he is better?

If you want to hire white workers regardless of their competence, then you should start a company.

"Better" means that they have a high probability of doing the job as the employers sees fit. Don't go nitpicking on defining 'better'. If you do, you're not suited for the job of deciding who to hire.

And if you are suggesting that hiring process is biased then you are right - people are not robots.

So you are basically describing a malfunctioning meritocracy, where the function that determines merit is corrupted by biases. Seems like the solution would be to remove biases (e.g. in case of coding interviews, do blind interviews instead of/in addition to in-person ones).

As a side note, my experience in all the teams I worked at (tech in SFBA and Seattle) is that white men are a small minority, and if you exclude Eastern Europeans barely exist at all. Even if you exclude the usual suspects, I'm pretty sure I've had more coworkers originally from North Africa than originally from North America :)

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