Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

I'm curious to know what aspects of Khan's recruiting/admission policies resulted in such a large number of female admissions. It would be nice if the authors' response included some description of their policies.

As the person who stands at the end of our hiring process’s pipeline, I find “Mark“‘s idea that we’re sacrificing quality to fill some quota merely very insulting. If I were one of the women who has successfully navigated our brutal interview process, I’d be furious.

This is said as if there is no basis for "Mark's" belief. Affirmative action programs are notorious for establishing two-tier admissions policies for the sole purpose of fostering "diversity". While official quotas are illegal, it's well known that minority students are admitted to prestigious universities with far lower SAT and GPA's that their white/Asian counterparts. What's to make us think that's not what's at work here? Especially given that increasing female enrollment was a high priority given that there are so many "big smiles" when it was achieved. Again, some transparency would be nice.

Edited for spelling and grammar

I'm from a minority, and I'm currently enrolled in a phd program (well, about to enroll in september) in a top university. I've been working really, really, really hard to get there. Like, really hard. So it does piss me off when people just waive their hands and say: "pfff, must have been affirmative action or something".

That being said, I understand their reaction. When I put myself in a white male's shoes and I hear every day that we should remedy this and this instance of blatant discrimination, and the next day I hear that a company celebrates the fact that there are more women/blacks/whatever being hired, then it's true that the connection: they got hired BECAUSE they where women/black is a rather tempting conclusion.. and is sometimes true.

I think that some companies are at fault here, using anti-discrimination as a PR move. This can, and I think, does antagonize a lot of people, and is counter productive.

How can people who claim to be meritocratic immediately cry "discrimination! misandry!" when women outperform men? Yep, must have been discrimination, because we all know women can never be better candidates unless there's something else going on.

And being excited about a historically underrepresented group overcoming adversity isn't the same thing as "we are favoring primarily women applications". Anyone who's actually meritocratic would be ecstatic that the walls in tech are slowly dissolving away.

Transparency has been requested by several people, and I think it would be helpful to flesh out transparency.

Here are a few quantitative questions which would help us get closer to the truth:

What % of the applicant pool was women?

What % of the potentially qualified applicant pool was women? [1]

How many interns were hired? [2]

Are there any objective numbers (i.e., besides the # hired) to suggest that a large fraction of the most qualified people were women?

[1] These numbers can allow us to do the same calculation I did here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5233153), or even a proper Bayesian probability update.

[2] I.e., if 3 interns were hired, this is a tempest in a teapot caused by a statistical fluke.

Are tech internships a big enough deal with people to merit this controversy? Don't tell me you need to participate in one these days to break into the industry(if so, that's sad).

One of the commonly-stated reasons for why discrimination persists in a field is that people making hiring decisions are biased. They might not know that they're biased, but they have some notions about the kind of people they want to see working for their company, and they disproportionately hire those people. This is quite an insidious form of discrimination because it's hard to prove, but it is possible to catch people out - for instance if they display a preference for talking to or dealing with male colleagues over female ones, or give more rewards, perks or encouragement to male colleagues. There doesn't need to be a "guys only" sign above the door for this to be a discriminatory environment.

Now, the original "Girls, girls, girls" post talks about how "super exciting" it is for KA to have hired twice as many female interns as male ones, how the women at KA network together, how there are exclusive events for female staff where female leadership is advocated. I know what Jessica was trying to say there, but damn if it didn't wind up looking somewhat like the stuff I described in my first paragraph. Now, I do not believe that KA has done anything wrong, but I don't think it's unreasonable for some people to question this.

This (as I post every time there's a sexism thread, I really should just get a blog or something) is all controversial because people are applying different ethical rules. Some people are applying deontological ethics, which says that there are rules about how to behave, and we should follow those rules (e.g. don't discriminate based on gender). They look at the "Girls, girls, girls" post and see things that look like they might break the rules against doing the stuff I described in my first paragraph. They're not actually looking at the "big picture" because they don't believe that, philosophically speaking, the ends can be used to justify the means. If bias is wrong, being biased in favour of a minority group is still wrong, in this view.

There's another more pragmatic view, which says that we should care mostly about outcomes, especially if no particularly great harms are being inflicted in order to achieve better outcomes. Although I generally lean more towards the rule-based view, in this case, I think KA is pretty clearly producing a good outcome and even if there is some bias[1] then it's not really the end of the world. But I wouldn't condemn or insult someone who thought differently.

[1] A key point about bias and discrimination is that people aren't (and often can't be!) aware of their own biases. If people from KA want to claim that they're totally without bias, that's going to make it hard to accuse other people of bias in the future. This is, sadly, just a Hard Problem and the various problems inherent in solving it are why we keep having lengthy discussions like this.

The world doesn't have to be evenly divided. Just because you see a group of people that are under-represented in a field doesn't mean it needs to be adjusted. We don't need to push for more white people in the NBA. We don't need to push for more men to become nurses. We need to push for equality of opportunity, not outcome.

Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn't see any mention of the size of the intern class. A 2:1 ratio in a very small class has quite different implications than a 2:1 ratio in a very large class.

Meritocracy is like traditional view of objectivity that knowledge exists without the knower. Truth of the matter is, knowledge exists without the knower but it is not independent of the knower.

This is why 14 year olds writing app is a reason for celebration and why encouraging more females is a good thing. By doing so, we allow our work to expand to incorporate the values that those group represent, which is important because our work is user-centric, it doesn't stand by itself. If the work doesn't stand by itself, how can its creators?