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Comment by dweekly | Hacker News Reader

Mainly, it lets you measure how racist/sexist/etc one's system is.

For instance, if you see that applicants that are otherwise equally qualified are getting rejected on recruiter screen disproportionally by race, you may have an issue with how your screening is done. And yes, this happens: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf

A reasonable goal is that race, gender, and sexual orientation should have no bearing at all on how likely it is that you get hired, promoted, or fired. So these inputs are typically blinded to hiring managers but available to HR in aggregate to let them perform these kinds of analyses.

I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)

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It doesn't tell you how racist/sexist the system, it tells you your demographic.

There being more male construction workers doesn't make it a sexist system.

There being more female teachers doesn't make it a sexist system.

There being more asian doctors doesn't make it a racist system.

Let people do what they want to do, you can look at demographics but stop trying to read racist tea leaves with it.

If you collect demographics of employees, it tells one story.

If you also collect demographics of applicants, it may tell a different story.

If your employee demographics look skewed, but they're consistent with applicant demographics, you have an easy out when accused of ism.

Of course, if you collect the information, you might also use it for ism purposes. Or you might just lose or discourage applications from non-favored people. It's hard to show.

(It also doesn't help that the federal categories feel poorly chosen and ill-defined)

There being more male construction workers doesn't make it a sexist system.

Are you sure? There being more male programmers is widely used as evidence that it's a sexist system.

Yes and that's a fallacy.

If females don't want to go into programming then don't make them.

There are really good female programmers, but males tend to be more frequent.

We all have different traits that make us good at different things, that's the beautiful thing about humans.

Sure, 50/50 is probably not where a lot of professions should be. But it's pretty unrealistic to assume the percentage we are at is exactly where it should be. Especially considering how many women in professions like programming have so many stories about how difficult it is to get in and stay in the field.

I'm sure there's a lot of anecdotes from male programmers about how difficult it is to get in and stay in the field, it's difficult.

But if there is something to address, address the pain points specifically and directly.

Don't try to guess a "correct" ratio and work backwards with affirmative action (denying one race to boost up another).

For all you know the current ratio is the realistic ratio and where we should be.

Stories about how difficult it is to get into the field and actually having difficulty getting into the field are two very different things. 2 out of the 3 employers I've worked for had explicitly discriminatory policies favoring women. And they weren't subtle, we straight up reserved slots for women despite this being blatantly illegal.

In reality, the proportion of women in STEM directly matches the proportion of women in STEM majors, which directly matches proportion of women who say they're interested in STEM.

Except if you know that for some hypothetical demographic A and demographic B where all applicants are equally qualified you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics.

If it doesn't, you have an issue. The only way to know for sure is to measure.

E: To be clear, assuming equally qualified candidates, you would want expect hiring proportions to match the same A:B ratio as you get from applications.

>you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics

No, I wouldn't expect this at all as I do not expect the height distribution of basketball player to reflect the height distribution of the general population. As I do not expect the personality trait distribution of pop stars to be the same of programmers, and again I do not expect the latter to be similar to the general population. Personal inclination, innate intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, and of course demographics, parenting, generational wealth all play a role.

Height is an inherent advantage to the game of basketball. It is also not a class of people protected by law.

Skin color is not an advantage when programming. It is also a characteristic by which it is illegal to hire a programmer.

Thus the "assuming equally qualified candidates" in my original post.

That can be measured (imperfectly, but well enough), by filtering only for qualified candidates and then comparing the rate at which both A and B are hired and the rate at which they appear in the filtered list. E: This of course requires the filtering to be done _only_ with knowledge of a candidates skills/accomplishments, and association with demographics (including name, location, etc.) to be done only after the sorting.

It's like you only read the first sentence of the parent comment. The only reasonable response is to point you right back to it.

Did you read the comment you're replying to or are you just pasting a cookie-cutter argument?

> I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)

Maybe institutions can afford to leave sexual orientation out of it until you’re talking about a body of people that is firmly within the age of consent threshold or has at least hit puberty. A lawyer might disagree but for him the remedy is to bend him over and remove the stick from his ass.

... so "asexual"?

Or just don’t ask.

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