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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

There appears to exist a fundamental but dissonant set of principles exhorted by people who are interested in the exploration of the male/female equity narrative:

     (1) "There is no meaningful difference in intellectual, risk-taking, leadership, or genetic ability between men and women".

     (2) "As a whole, instutitions perform better when more women are involved".

These statements each imply that the other could not be true, but they are often discussed in conjunction with one another. Which is it- are women superior in some way that men can't access and including women yields a reward to any organization, or would substituting women in for men lead to no measurable performance changes across industries because men and women are balanced in ability?

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These don't contradict each other at all, unless you don't understand the fundamental idea of a team or organization.

Let's say I have ten people with experience A. I add an 11th person with experience A. My team still just has experience A.

I have ten people with experience A, and I add an 11th person with experience B. Now my team has experiences A & B.

Breadth of knowledge and perspective is the heart of innovation. Adding a wider variety of experiences to an organization improves its ability to solve problems.

Now, this is so obvious, I'm left wondering why you're so desperate to maintain the illusion that women are inferior in some way?

You have misconstrued my point in a very silly way. Is there some reason that a woman can gain experience A that a man can't? Or a way that a man can gain experience B that a woman can't? Is the optimal ratio in an organization 50/50 men-to-women? If I turn $200M profit a year but my board is 80/20 men to women, can I get $270M a year with some gender-based replacements?

I don't care about any illusion about inferiority or superiority; what I am desperate to do is stop other people from fallingunder the influence of fools who change their ideas as soon as it becomes politically expedient. Either adding women is a performance benefit, making them superior or at the very least different in a completely inaccessible way to men, or it has no result because men and women are interchangeable.

I think most people who are interested in male/female equity would not tell you that men and women are identical.

Any measure along the lines of (1) comes to us through the filter of a world who narratives and institutions have been shaped around the abilities and preferences of men, such that it comes off as a little obtuse to use them to justify disparate outcomes, which is most often what is happening when this comes up.

I suppose it depends what circles you run in. I can name thirty people without pausing for breath that I know who believe that not only are men and women interchangeable, but that it is ethically monstrous to even assign shades of "masculine" or "feminine" to any behavior, as that implies that more of either men or women display that behavior. Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing how common that way of thinking is- I thought it was constrained to academic and artistic circles in major urban cities, but these ideas have begun to crop up everywhere. Perhaps you're right, and they are the exception, rather than the rule, but they also seem to be the ones I keep getting caught up in discussions of male/female equity.

I think it's better to avoid casual gender stereotyping of behaviors, but I have to raise my eyebrows a bit at the notion that there is a large contingent of people who think it is "ethically monstrous." I suppose it might come down to circles though as you say. Good luck out there.

The way I see it, (1) is viewed through the lens of men and women as sexes. It aims to say that there's no meaningful difference if only the sex is different - a hypothetical man, every other trait remaining unchanged, who would have his sex changed to female, would not result in a meaningful difference in those characteristics. Therefore, sexism is unjustified.

However, (2) seems to say that women, bring to the table a different set of experiences and knowledge than men. Their knowledge is significant since it represents, on some level, approximately half of society. Finally, because women are underrepresented in C level management, this set of experiences means that women have advice and knowledge that can meaningfully influence corporate decisions - that knowledge would be more difficult to come by for men.

So they only appear contradictory when parsed at face value, but actually - at least to me - they seem to be referring to completely different subjects.

You made them contradictory yourself-

"... would not result in a meaningful difference. Therefore, sexism is unjustified."

"... bring to the table a different set of experiences and knowledge than men".

If women are indeed bringing differences to the table that could result in better corporate strategy (I have no reason to believe they're not), then there are meaningful differences between men and women, and predicting attitudes, knowledge, or experience based on sex (ie sexism) is justified.

I don't believe mistreating or limiting women on the basis of sex; of the five most technically competent people I've worked with, three were women. The CEO of my very competitive company is a woman. What I chafe at is the continual, brazen advertisement of propaganda from people like the author of this article, who say in one breath there's no meaningful difference between the abilities of men and women and the history of treating men and women differently is stupid and unjustified, and then in the next that adding women gives a performance benefit to organizations because women can contribute more than the theoretical men they're replacing (who were unable to provide what the women would). It is self-inconsistent and I think dishonest.

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