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Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

Please, stop repeating this tiresome excuse. Absolving a company and blaming the pipeline does not help actually solve the problem.

1) There is a "filter" problem, eg bias in interviewing. This is what you are talking about.

2) There is the "pipeline" problem, eg universities and recruiting practices.

3) There is the self-selection problem, eg women / minorities going into other fields because they don't want to deal with the horseshit.

...plus many others, including how the few women are treated after they get the job.

The only cure is sunlight. You optimize what you measure. If we can get tech companies to publish these numbers every year, then maybe they'll start doing something about it.

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blaming the pipeline does not help actually solve the problem.

Sure, but if the hiring process is unbiased, the problem exists elsewhere, so the hiring process cannot be "fixed".

The only thing that could be done at the hiring point is "overcompensate" by hiring many inferior/poorly qualified applicants simply because they are female.

Certainly companies hire "token" minorities purely for PR purposes, but generally speaking it seems unrealistic to expect a large company to routinely pick inferior candidates for the bulk of its workforce.

You are discussing subjective matters. You can't convince anyone by asserting your personal beliefs as truth.

And calling someone's good-faith comment a "tiresome excuse" is rather rude.

I really can't fathom why you were voted down on this.

Regardless of where the failure is there is clearly something about the software engineering industry and the pipeline leading to it that is biased against minorities and women, which implies we are failing to optimally place the most talented (or potentially talented) people in the right positions assuming talent if evenly distributed among various ethnicities and sexes). Which means our economy is not as productive as it could be and we're missing out on the increased opportunity for possible break throughs in software development and other related fields with similar bias.

It's clearly a problem. It may not be directly the fault of say Apple or Google but it is naive to see numbers like that and not be concerned.

"Regardless of where the failure is there is clearly something about the software engineering industry and the pipeline leading to it that is biased against minorities"

How can you say that when East and South Asians are so overrepresented?

Three things:

1. You are confusing P(A|B) with P(B|A).

2. Even if it were true, a lack of bias against a few minority groups would not invalidate the statement that there is bias against other minority groups.

3. You are conflating a very wide and disparate set of ethnic groups in a way that is very misleading (and mathematically similar to Gerrymandering[0]). If we were to break those very broad categories further, we would see that many groups that qualify as "East and South Asian" are still themselves under-represented.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

1. How so? 2. True, but the comment I responded to made a different claim. 3. is irrelevant. There are always under-represented groups depending on how you look at the data, but if you claim general bias against minorities when some minorities are doing very well, you have some explaining to do.

I think it's a fair point that publishing this info on a regular basis is an important way to focus efforts on results.

No, your the problem. Hysterical social-justice-warrior making problems where there is none. There was a study done not long ago that shows the number of people taking computer science was predominately white and male. And the fact is any company that does not have a workforce along those numbers (pinterest for example) should be considered as having suspect hiring practises.

But hey it's only bigotry against "white" "males" and it hip to be ok with that nowadays, right HN?

Why did you quote "white" and "males"? Is it because you suspect many of them to secretly be black women wearing whiteface?

Anyway, there is a reason that white males are not allowed to talk about bigotry against themselves, and it's not about some conspiratorial hipsterism to sabotage you. It's because if you are a white man born in America complaining about discrimination pretty much everyone else in the world will you see you like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90HhZ-pyC2Y

I'm not American, I don't live in America, and I can to a degree I can understand all this retardation coming from a country with such a rich history of overt racism. But goddamn the internet != america and these international tech companies having to pander to you delicate tulips is getting old.

Hell, why not go after Samsung for hiring too many Koreans.

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