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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

In a roundabout way, the author points out that because of differences in preferences between groups, equal access to opportunities don't lead to equal outcomes.

However, the 'equal opportunities don't lead to equal outcomes' argument is often used as an excuse to ignore inequality - if we all pretend we've all got perfectly equal access to opportunities, we can attribute any difference in outcomes between groups to group preferences and call it a day.

Yes, I'd expect that in a world where access to opportunity was truly equal, the gender balance of founders would still be skewed. But that doesn't imply that there's equal access to opportunity in tech today, and it certainly doesn't mean we can say 'no gender problem here' and stop thinking about the ways we inadvertently discourage women from doing what we do.

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Thus begins yet another unendable initiative. Differences exist, therefore we say there could be inequality. Since there could be inequality, better to consciously bias against the alleged inequality, just in case the inequality actually exists. And since it's impossible to prove its nonexistence, better to simply state that it exists. After all, there HAS to exist some bias somewhere, no matter how significant. It's safer to think this way because you avoid being labeled as "against equality", and can enjoy life with the other "enlightened".

I just call it pure cowardice.

"Pure cowardice". Anyone who disagrees with you does so because they're afraid of acknowledging the truth that you've arrived at. Great comment.

Come now. We know there's inequality, and we know there's bias. The question is always "is this particular outcome due to bias or some intrinsic difference?"

When we honestly can't tell and the outcome is important, I think it's reasonable to proceed as if the problem is bias. First, because to just assume it's natural differences and be wrong means you're screwing up people's lives and supporting an unfair system. And second, because historically we have fallen back on natural differences in ways we now realize are total bullshit.

See, for example, the Confederate Vice President's "Cornerstone Speech": "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

If you're going to call something cowardly, I'd favor people who argue for continuing the (favorable to them) status quo on the grounds that it's intrinsic to the universe. There's not much bravery in justifying a system that's working well for you.

Wouldn't the prudent thing be to give everyone equal opportunities, and then require solid science for every step away from that. For instance if you want to go on a campaign to specifically encourage women to make different choices than the ones they currently make, you should be pretty sure that what you are doing is helpful.

Right on! The last thing we need is more busybody do-gooders trying to fix something without sufficient evidence that it's even broken.

What really gets my goat is how people willfully ignore or marginalize anyone in the "victim" group who doesn't toe the line. For example, look at the editor's note for this article: "Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Penelope Trunk, writer and founder of Brazen Careerist. Her opinions are her own."

I took a look at the past 30 guest contributor columns, and not a single one of them was prefaced with "Her opinions are her own" (not even the $100,000 green card article had Techcrunch distancing itself like this). This is the CYA mentality that kills honest debate and rushes in stupid policies.

You may not think there's sufficient evidence that there's something broken. In which case, you aren't obliged to help fix it. But unless you have strong evidence that things are working perfectly, then by your own standard you should stop interfering with people trying to fix the problems they see.

You just illustrated the entire point of the TC article. The "problem" you see (not enough women in startups) is only a problem in your mind. Maybe this is caused by generations of gender role programming, maybe this is caused by biological differences, maybe it's caused by the divine will of the flying spaghetti monster. What right do you have to "fix" other people's voluntary decisions?

What I don't hear is the argument that "women want to run startups and they are being blocked from the field". That would bother me. But a skewed outcome, by itself, is not a problem that needs to be fixed... and why shouldn't there be some scientific rigor applied to social meddling?

It is actually a problem in quite a number of people's minds. And by the way, all problems occur only in people's minds.

I am of course not trying to fix other people's voluntary decisions. But I would like to fix a system that unfairly limits the options that people have. So if you're arguing for more freedom of choice, we're on the same side.

If you would like to apply scientific rigor to your political choices, go to it. If you would like to fund me sufficiently so that I can bring my level of rigor up from "best I can do" to "finding the Higgs boson" then I will happily cash your checks. Until then, I'll press on with what I've got.

Arguing that all action should stop until the data is perfect ignores that we are talking about real people's lives here. Around the time of the Civil War, people didn't say "Hey, let's wait a few hundred years until we can determine for sure whether or not, as the slaveholders claim, negroes are inherently inferior." Some people decided slavery was wrong, and worked to put an end to it. The same goes for women's suffrage, which isn't even 100 years old in this country. There is no particular reason we should default to the status quo if we lack data: it has been wrong before, and there's no reason to think it's perfect now.

There is a clear and obvious difference between "not enough women found startups" and slavery/women's suffrage:

* If you asked a slave what prevents him from being free, he/she can point at the specific individuals and institutions restricting his freedom. The slave owner, the laws.

* If you asked an American woman in 1919 what is holding back her right to vote in federal elections, she can clearly point at the US constitution.

In both cases, these situations were (rightly) fixed. On the other hand, not even the gurus of HN can come up with a coherent explanation why there aren't more women in tech startups. It's not like women are marching in the street demanding that we repeal the ban on female CEOs. The current outcome is a result of voluntary decisions. I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect a higher standard of evidence before we start telling people "you think wrong".

FWIW, I also find it lamentable that the tech industry is a sausage-fest. But that's my problem. If you told my partner that she's broken because she doesn't want to work in technology, she'd tell you to f*ck off and go meddle in someone else's life.

You're cherry-picking. The problem for women's suffrage to solve may have been obvious in 1919, but that was the last problem of a long series of them. It was no less wrong that women couldn't vote in 1783, but it was a lot less obvious then. You're also pretty breezy about the clarity of slavery, but I think it's much more obvious from 2011 than it was at the time. See, e.g., the Cornerstone Speech or the Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession, where leaders of the day explain slavery as a beneficial system rooted in the natural differences of the negro and the white man. The same argument, I note, being used today on HN to justify startups remaining a boys-only clubhouse.

You shouldn't stuff your partner's clothes full of straw like that. Nobody is saying that she in particular is broken. But plenty of women are willing to talk about how they've been discouraged or treated unfairly. See., e.g., http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/why.html.

You are welcome to see your feelings about the gender imbalance as only your problem. I see it as a collective problem, one where the data is sufficient to warrant action, and I aim to do something about it.

Cherrypicking? I'm just using the examples you cited. Both of which required legal enforcement to maintain inequality.

Whether or not you like the current outcome (and I don't proclaim to support it or even believe that it will be the same in 50 years), you cannot credibly argue that today, in the western world, women do not have legal parity with men. It's been a rough history but here we are (finally). Further policy changes are no longer the realm of gaining legal equality but pure social engineering based on your esthetic preferences for what you (possibly fancifully) believe gender participation ratios in various activities should be. Like the poster that kicked off this particular subthread, I believe this goal requires quite a lot more scrutiny than the first-wave feminist goal of legal equality.

You are cherry-picking the tiny portion of the historical problem that was obvious and then declaring the whole problem as obvious. It mostly wasn't, which means we can't take the current lack of obvious solutions as a sign we should just throw our hands up.

My aesthetic preferences aren't for equal outcomes. They're for people to have equal opportunities. They don't right now. I aim to change that. I am, however, sometimes willing to use outcomes as one proxy for opportunities until we have significant proof that we have solved all the problems of opportunity.

I'm all for scrutiny. However, I think it should be equally applied. If one only scrutinizes challenges to the status quo, then it's not honest intellectual inquiry. And it's especially suspicious when it comes from somebody who benefits from that status quo. Like the poster that kicked off this particular subthread.

My aesthetic preferences aren't for equal outcomes. They're for people to have equal opportunities.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. How will you know when we arrive at equal opportunities? How do you know that they don't have equal opportunities already?

Legal equality is straightforward and very easy to measure. "Opportunity" is highly subjective. There's a bunch of college kids at OWS protests complaining about their self-inflicted lack of opportunity because they can't get a job in Social Studies. Clearly measuring by outcome is inadequate, yet it's the concrete measurement we as a society keep coming back to.

This is why I think it's quite reasonable and necessary to apply scientific rigor to social engineering projects. And to accept that some of these issues will be things that we simply cannot change in the short term; culture changes because old people eventually die.

Apply your standard of proof for action to your own behavior here. Do you have definitive proof that opportunities are equal? No, I'm sure. Well, then you should stop trying to influence people's opinions and behaviors until you do.

Of course, that's ridiculous. But for the same reason that your suggestion is. You're applying an impossibly high standard to an approach you disagree with, while giving the status quo a pass.

That you don't see a problem isn't proof that there's no problem. That you don't know how to change something is not proof that change is impossible. That you don't want to fix something isn't a reason to tell other people not to try.

Sure. If it were easy to give everyone equal opportunities, that would be the right place to start.

As it is, we have a history of millennia of oppression of women. When my grandmother was born, women weren't even allowed to vote. Men and women didn't enroll in college in equal numbers until '87. Achieving equal opportunity is going to take a while. Until then, doing nothing isn't being fair, it's supporting an unfair system.

What makes it especially tricky is that outcomes influence opportunities. Female legislators and CEOs are still seen as anomalous by many, and that will continue until there are more of them.

A lot of women believe that they have been frequently discouraged from STEM jobs and leadership roles (see, e.g., http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/why.html), so a counterbalancing public encouragement might go a long way to solving the problem.

My eyes rolled so hard at this, it woke up my wife in the next room. Then we both had a laugh at me being described as 'enlightened' - in my neck of the woods, most people think I'm a troglodyte.

Look, sometimes people do real, obvious, correctable things that result in inequality. There's nothing 'alleged' about these things, and correcting them isn't an 'unendable initiative' - usually, all you've got to do is be a little more self-aware.

A case in point - a startup I co-founded a few years back was all-male for a while, and without getting into the details, we didn't always maintain a sophisticated level of conversation around the office. We didn't change our habits after we hired a couple of female college students part-time.

Later, I found out our part-time employees were uncomfortable with our office banter. Not cool, since this was their first exposure to startups and the type of people that work for them. When I found out about this, my unendable initiative to fix the problem was a quick email, which took care of it. (Still irritated that I didn't pick up on this earlier.)

That's it - no systematic bias in the other direction, no big bureaucratic programs by government authorities, just being aware enough of your surroundings to not be an asshole. You can do it too.

That is exactly the right thing to do.

But completely honestly, why did you even develop this kind of culture in the first place? Don't you think you should have prevented the whole situation in the first place?

Heh, that's easy to answer - it's because I was an idiot!

Of course I should've prevented the whole situation in the first place, but I wasn't on the ball enough to realize it was a problem. I wasn't consciously trying to shape company culture at all, which is why it developed on its own in a suboptimal way.

It happens all the time, and it can be essentially invisible to management at larger companies. People get close. Cliques with their own sub-cultures will develop, HR-unfriendly and perhaps legally-actionable things will go on behind closed doors when everybody in the room is friends with everybody else.

Nobody will really notice or care until someone with a different worldview starts having to work closely with them and stuff starts bleeding through.

When it goes on for too long, people may get angry and resentful when trouble starts, and then you have a much quieter but more insidious mess...

What? No, I've never seen this happening from the inside! Of course not! I'm a perfect angel!

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