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Comment by tomwalker | Hacker News Reader

In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male. This is not unusual unless you do surgery.

"Looking at the figures shows that the picture is unambiguous. Not only are women doctors to outnumber their male counterparts in the UK by 2017, in general practice this will happen in the next four years. Entry data from medical schools show that over the past four decades the number of men entering medicine has doubled whereas the number of women has increased 10-fold."

http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=2...

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In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male.

And in my chair, 100% of mobile engineers are female. Woo hoo.

Now let's move on to your article. So much material there, where to begin!

We are feminising medicine. It has been a profession dominated by white males. What are we going to have to do to ensure it retains its influence?

Oh no, what are we going to do to ensure that medicine remains dominated by white males?!

There is a tsunami of women coming through.

Aaaaahhh... TSUNAMI! SOMEONE GET THE LIFEBOATS! Nope, doesn't sound hysterical at all.

I am not saying that we should ensure that white males dominate anything.

I just believe that there should be NO discrimination whether positive or negative.

People should get a position based on their merit. If it ends up that a profession is all male or all female, so be it.

I would never spout a ridiculous angle such as 'child minders are predominantly female so lets make it easier for a male to get the job'.

Merit has little to do with social choices, though. Just look at how often "cultural fit" comes up in discussions of hiring.

You are imagining an idealized utopia. The problem is, we don't live there. Unless hiring is done purely through objective tests that have been tested for bias and normalized there will be social-status factors involved. Coping with those lets us get much closer to a merit-based world than pretending they don't exist.

Imagine you had some code but a system-level round function was broken: it rounded up on 4-9 and down on 0-3. You can't change the function without changing the entire operating system. Would the best approach be to say, "I don't think we should discriminate! Round functions should behave correctly!"? Or would it be to compensate for the known flaws while working to change the system-level issues?

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