Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhearTheCeal | Hacker News Reader

In economics, we call this signalling. Employers often have little information about the quality of the employee, so naturally they 'signals' that indicate the applicant is of high quality.

Things such as a college degree and experience are obvious signals, but they are not the only signals. Race and sex play a part as well, assuming that different races/sexes exhibit different behavior on average. This is statistical discrimination[1], not bigotry. In fact, this discrimination is efficient because it lessens the likelihood of choosing a bad employee. This is why men are given more job offers than women- a man is less likely to go on paternal leave or switch to part time because of 'stress'. If this discrimination did not occur, the employees would be of lower quality which hurts productivity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_discrimination_(eco...

View on HN

You are operating on some very questionable assumptions which you've masked with jargon to lend credibility to your position. Kinda like phrenology. Where is your evidence that these race/gender "signals" correlate with applicant quality in any way?

But you are absolutely correct that employers do factor race into hiring and recruiting decisions. My evidence: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2018047

You can call it whatever you want, but it is still illegal in the US if it has a bias against any protected class.

Although whether that is actually what is happening in this case is debatable.

Your (or anyone's) conclusions that men are "higher quality" employees simply because they are less likely to go on paternal leave or switch to part-time because of stress are spurious at best. There are many factors that go into determining the quality of an employee and these narrow observations are far from conclusive. For instance, who's to say that men don't simply become far-less productive in response to stress?

And, the link you provided does nothing to support your conclusions that such discrimination is "efficient". It draws no conclusions in either direction and, in fact, merely states that such discrimination exists. I think we know that.

Do you have any citations that show a positive correlation between discrimination and the quality of employees?

Because, otherwise--given the article to which you are responding--you seem to be propagating the idea that such discriminatory "signalling" is superior to credentials, experience, and other achievements when determining the quality of an employee. In fact, you seem to be endorsing what the author experienced as "efficient" and therefore beneficial from an economic perspective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com