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Comment by blueboo | Hacker News Reader

This is the premise:

There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo.

Maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe it’s asking for a virtue signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this requirement had adverse effects (evidently it has.)

But there is a through-line of coherent logic, and the total failure here may be cause for alarm.

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I understand you’re trying to strong man this. But I think we need to interrogate the premise here. How does “inequity” represent a “threat” to our “long term survival and prosperity?” What is the specific causal mechanism by which we expect that to happen?

It seems facially implausible to me, given that America became prosperous when these inequalities were much worse. Why do we accept this premise as a given?

> Research has generally linked economic inequality to political and social instability, including revolution, democratic breakdown and civil conflict.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality

> There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society.

I think this needs to be backed up with evidence rather than merely asserted. I've been reading through a number of books by Thomas Sowell lately and he presents enough statistical evidence to explain disparities without any hint of racism, sexism, etc. Regardless of if you agree with him or not, the mere fact that alternate theories exist that explain why society looks as it does today should be enough to question the foundational problem that DEI claims to address.

Take as an example the gender pay gap which is presented as women earning 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. While statistically true in aggregate, DEI tends to treat this axiomatically as a sign of sexism. If you dig into the statistics the vast majority of this difference is due to the fact that many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children.

> many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children

Expect there is evidence to suggest that women that earn a higher income are less likely to leave the workforce, which is further influenced by access to affordable childcare and dual incomes.

The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.

> The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.

That can't possibly be true, because in a market economy, the more-expensive workers (men) would be laid off and replaced by less-expensive, equally-capable "same title and responsibilities" workers (women). This doesn't seem to be the case on a grand scale, which means it's more deep/complex than the "men get paid more than women" headline we're all used to seeing.

Are you arguing that society operates from a position of optimal market theory, and that cultural norms, prejudices, and biases play no role in salary or pay rates for anyone It's not particularly hard to find examples of disparity or exploitation.

Disparity and exploitation are not the same thing as ignoring an obvious way to reduce labor costs. Why would companies be smart enough to outsource labor overseas, but somehow lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs? Because the "women make 77 cents on the dollar" meme is just looking at raw incomes, and not adjusting for type of job and experience.

> "women make 77 cents on the dollar" meme

So you've done more search than everyone else putting out data? Maybe you can share all your hard-earned discoveries on the subject, since so you're so confidently well-informed.

Men account for 13% of nurses, but average $90k vs $76k for women.

https://blog.carlow.edu/2022/12/29/how-the-gender-pay-gap-im...

Female lawyers under 35 make 90% of their male counterparts, but the gap increases to 76% by middle age.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers...

The trend continues for doctors, police, and even teachers.

> lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs

If you think "know-how" is the problem, you're ill equipped for this conversation.

Then why don't they just hire women to do the exact same jobs as men and save a ton of money? You're still not offering a rationale for why companies aren't making use of an easy way to reduce labor costs. Which is more likely: that companies hate women so much that they're willing to ignore an opportunity to make a massive leap in profitability? Or perhaps you need to read your studies more closely and it's not the case that men and women are paid differently for the same work?

Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:

> Male nurses also reported working more hours per week, at an average 39 hours plus five hours of overtime, while female nurses reported working an average of 37 hours plus four hours of overtime.

I agree that if you just count the W-2s and ignore hours worked, subfields, travel, etc. then men make more than women. My whole point is that this kind of comparison is naive.

Likewise your study on lawyers grouped a hugely varied profession all into the same category. As an analogue, take doctors. Yes male and female doctor have different average incomes even for the same level of experience. But that doesn't capture the fact that over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite. This one will have an income disparity even when men and women are equally paid for the same work. It's a similarly naive analysis to lump together all lawyers into one category.

> You're still not offering a rationale

It's a fantasy world to believe that people operate purely on rational and logical long-term thinking. What's your rationale for slavery? Why couldn't women vote until recently? What's your rationale for why American women couldn't go to bars unattended as late as the 1970s? There's literally no shortage of examples showing the mistreatment of women, yet it's hard to believe that pay discrepancy remains till this day?

The entire premise if flawed if your operating under the assumption that people think in market and game theory. Prejudices and biases easily overcome rational thinking.

> Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:

The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay.

> over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite

Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at. Until then, the research and data that's in supports only one of our positions.

There's a vast difference between suboptimal decision making and ignoring a massive cost saving. The line that "went make X% as much as men" is widely spread, it's inconceivable that executives haven't heard this line. And the profi gains from a 10-20% reduction in labor costs would be staggering. No, prejudice doesn't cut it as a rationale.

Slavery existed because preindustrial societies were heavily labor intensive and the returns on more skilled labor was marginal. The industrial revolution changed this, which is why abolition movements largely coincided with industrialization.

Restrictions of women's liberties stem from thousands of years of family dynamics where child mortality rates meant that women had to spend most of their fertile years bearing and caring for children. The replacement rate in preindustrial societies was something like 5-6 births per woman due to such high infant mortality rates.

> The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay

It actually does, men work 2 more normal hours and 1 more overtime hour on average. Assuming overtime is paid at 2x normal wages this is about a 10% disparity in paid hours. And again, there's more than just hours worked there's travel nursing, different metro areas, and more.

> Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at.

You're asking me to prove a negative. I don't doubt you can find individual instances of discrimination against women (and against men), my point is that the large disparities between men's and women's average wages overwhelmingly stem from differences in men and women's behavior rather than discrimination.

> The line that "went make X% as much as men" is widely spread

It's not "widely spread", it's widely researched. Show me a study that explains the pay gap as owing to mostly to behavior.

You've provided post-hoc academic rationale, rather than something the average person would have been operating under. People simply do not make decisions the way you seem to be under the impression of. I'm sure the average slave owner used your explanation rather than believing that subset of the population was sub-human chattel.

An example of a behavioral difference is salary negotiation, where assertive women are viewed negatively while a man chest-thumping is viewed positively. Tell that woman who took a lower salary because of cultural stigmas and traditions your rationale and see how far that goes. I've been in the room when a man waved off a woman because of such behavior.

> You're asking me to prove a negative.

I'm asking you to back up your claim with evidence, which you have thusly been unable to do. What you have done is nitpick specific details like that's a gotcha, rather than owing to statistics and population sampling.

Noticing a pay disparity and concluding that it's due to discrimination is just as much of a post-hoc analysis.

And yes, when you account for experience, field, location, etc. the pay disparity effectively disappears (less than 1%)

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/08/01/are-wome...

Seems like this isn’t always the case, so your statement shouldn’t be so absolute: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-wom...

The irony of posting an article that proves my point, you really got me there.

Your statement (which I happen to agree with) supports DEI policies but not the specific practice of requiring a written DEI statement, which is the important distinction OP made.

I think you can be for DEI as a concept and as a corporate or school policy, but against the performative act of writing it out as some kind of weird "pledge of allegiance" in a job application.

Well, the “acknowledge and mark” phrase gets at the statement—That if the org thought objective X was authentic existential goal, it behooves them to understand how an applicant understands and would configure into that plan. (I have no claim about its efficacy. The highly-structured nature of the statement is a head-scratcher. I’m here watching the fallout with everyone else.)

I hasten to restate that is my understanding of the premise, in the spirit of collectively untangling the causal chain here. This is incendiary stuff on HN!

> it behooves them to understand how an applicant understands and would configure into that plan.

I (and a lot of us I think) follow you up to this point, but then you lose us here.

How does a written statement, the expected content of which is clearly known, give any understanding of the individual's position? This type of approach to education seems to me that it actively harms the ability to sway people's opinions.

I have this issue with a lot of discussions of DEI, there are a lot of arguments that support the DEI goal and a dearth of arguments that support the methods being used to achieve that goal.

> How does a written statement, the expected content of which is clearly known, give any understanding of the individual's position?

ChatGPT, please write me a DEI statement for this job interview.

> The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo.

I'm very skeptical that there is any threat to our survival here, or that DEI is any kind of response capable of resolving it. DEI is about "justice", a set of ethical principles, not about some utilitarian calculation about social survival or prosperity.

As someone who is pro DEI and participated in DEI related activities and brainstorms during hiring: I very much doubt that.

This is an ideological statement which brings no fact, no new perspective, is not substantial and does not refute the opponent’s argument (which is that unfair DEI creates resentment that you later pay).

As per Dang’s guidelines above (specifically for this thread), this should not have been allowed on HN.

Now I wonder: Why is it here?

> Now I wonder: Why is it here?

The internet gods bestowed two* of these on us today. The other one is Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267639. I posted an answer there to someone who asked more or less the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862. The principles are the same, so if you're willing to read it mutatis mutandis and maybe take a look at some of the other posts I linked to, you should find what you're looking for.

(* no, it's not a trend—just random fluctuation)

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