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Comment by rajin444 | Hacker News Reader

How do you know 50% is the correct amount of women at all levels?

I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem like the first reasonable target: all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.

I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed like the expected amount.

Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how you are going to persuade a huge number of women who wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men to do the reverse. That is what your target requires (across many occupations). It will never happen.

I'm not trying to push people into roles they don't want (I think I've made clear that the approach I described is a simple one to start at, not a good policy). My model in this case (which doesn't really map to reality) is "gender preference for roles is unbiased uniform random".

I don't really think job preferences are that strongly encoded in gender, I think far more men could be kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of extra work because people don't trust men with kids as much.

Where is the free will of individuals factored in? I mean, if people in group A don't want to do job B, should we force them to reach parity?

I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let people decide.

Funnily proponent of the theory 'make everything 50%' tendd to think of an individuals free will as the most feeble thing that can be broken oh so easily by almost anything.

I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.

Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..

that is one of the reasons I said my approach was a good start.

It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".

I agree! I think trying to apply a high level value will result in more discrimination, however. i.e, if we see X group of society under/overrepresented by Y%, we do not have enough understanding to draw any meaningful conclusions from this. Large enough discrepancies should be investigated as possibly a canary for discrimination, but in some cases there may not be any (NFL lineman will likely always be men).

I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.

> A simple first order approximation is "no preference".

That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as societies become more equal, gender disparities in field choice increase.

See: "Countries with greater gender equality have a lower percentage of female STEM graduates" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...)

> all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.

Why?

They didn't say it is.

> It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination

Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".

About 20% of people in CS are women. Ordinary male variability, difference in median aptitude, and employer selectivity could explain some of the disparity. But 20% is extraordinary. And people rationalized the disparity in biology the same ways people rationalize the disparity in CS.

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