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Comment by realaleris149 | Hacker News Reader

Probably is just that the percentage of woman in the domain reflects in the percentage of woman in conferences.

That doesn't mean there's a shortage sufficient for you to be unable to find any, and it raises the question of what is keeping the percentage that low, and sometimes part of the answer to that is that people can't see themselves there because of lack of representation (and yes, that does creat a chicken and egg problem). You may not be able to fix that, but anyone who claims to care about discrimination ought to at least consider if there are any steps they can take to try.

I think based on other comments I have read, we will have very different views on what constitutes discrimination, which to me is an active action not a passive result

You're right we probably would. Discrimination is very often passive but conscious. That does not mean that all perpetuation of discrimination that happens passively is conscious - probably the vast majority is not.

Let me give an example, to explain:

* If you receive two applications and the one from someone in category A is better but you choose the one from category B, I presume we both agree that is active discrimination.

* What I'd argue is conscious discrimination but passive is if you e.g. choose to continue to let having graduated from school X count extra much when evaluating candidates, knowing that this will bias your results towards category B and that having graduated from school X has no demonstrable impacts relevant to the job. Whether or not this counts for you I guess may depend on whether you see the individual factoring in of the graduation as an active action or just continuing to passively accept the same discriminatory rules.

* What we'd presumably both agree is not conscious/intentional discrimination is if you choose to make having graduated from school X count more, but you do so you while having no idea that this will happen to bias hiring towards category B.

But in the last case, I'd argue that while we presumably agree it's not discrimination per se, it still perpetuates effects that are likely to be an outcome of discrimination - e.g. chances are the reason it causes a bias is that the school intake is biased.

I'm not saying people are bad for failing to fix every bias like that. I'm saying that someone who claims to care about discrimination ought to at a minimum aspire to paying attention to unexpected biases, ask themselves why, and consider if there are reasonable ways to address it. One way in this hypothetical example would be to examine which factors in the hiring seems to introduce a bias and determine if they actually objectively correlates with improved outcomes or not, as if their only function is to introduce a bias that does not produce better outcomes, they're to me unambiguously discriminatory whether or not that was the original intent.

Personally, I think a whole lot of discriminatory practices falls in this last category - people may not intent do, they just haven't thought through the impact. But some people have thought through the impact and let it stay this way on purpose (e.g. I mentioned in one comment how my ex pointed a situation like this out to her employer and they refused to address it - it was clear it was on purpose)

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