Comment by Padding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Padding | Hacker News Reader

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Our society has a weird and twisted notion of freedom. Have everyone do whatever they feel like (within the legal limits, of course) .. and no one thinks twice about it. Millions of people dying? Yeah, sure, ressources are scarce - not our fault the universe is so cruel. Right?

But then as soon as someone somewhere manages to twist reality in a way such that it actually impacts our emotions, e.g. by claiming that it could be your child to suffer this inequality in life, all of a sudden there's an outcry out for regulation to fix that one specific issue with rationality-be-damned and ends-justify-the-means methods.

How about instead we take a step back and look for structural causes for these issues. Chances are that if our society allowed for the tech-industry to be unjstifyably hostile towards women, it also allowed for some generic industry X to be unjstifyably hostile towards some generic group Y of the population. Chances are that if our society allowed for marketing to negatively impact the opportunities that women have later in life, it also allowed for some generic business practice X to negatively impact the opportunities that generic group Y of the population will have later in life.

Given this, what kind of madman would assume that providing an ends-justify-the-means hotfix that solves (or at least tries to solve) the issue for some y (in Y) is the right approach to this?

Or to put it more bluntly, what makes women so much more worthy of our attention compared to all those other groups of people that are struggling in life? Why do they get to fasttrack their issues, rather than have to wait for a structural solution that benefits everyone, just like everybody else too?

I think you're right. We need to start looking at the problem from further away. Fixing one specific lack of diversity doesn't help solve the others.

Take for example Google. In their diversity report[1] it shows that only 17% of employees in tech related jobs are women. That's something people have talked about for a while and shows a lack of women in tech. We seem to be ignoring the fact however that 94% of Google's tech employees are white or Asian. Only 2% are hispanic and only 1% are black. Why are we ignoring this? As you say we need to step back and look at the bigger problem - lack of diversity - instead of focusing on one specific area (women).

[1] http://www.google.co.uk/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech

And how many are bald? How many have blue eyes? My point is: how come we are so sure that diversity at some place X should exactly match demographics?

> how come we are so sure that diversity at some place X should exactly match demographics

Assuming that those demographics are independent of talent or skill, why wouldn't diversity of a population match the diversity of the population as a whole? At least for a large enough company, of which Google (with over 50,000 employees, although not all are in the US) certainly qualifies.

Or to put it another way: if you took 50,000 people at random from the US, then their demographics would closely mirror the demographics of the US as a whole. So if the diversity at a company is very different from that, then something is happening to cause that difference.

It isn't that women are more worthy: I shouldn't get any more than a man does, yet.. i shouldn't get less or passed over because I'm female. It happens, though. But my rights aren't more important than someone elses and if I absolutely had to, I'll pass on a right or two if it means that people are fed (within some reason, obviously, and facts to show me why I'm losing).

If there is a structural solution that is actually doable, by all means, please share. But until then, any pieces that are solvable we should, by all means, solve. Not because one group is more important, but because we shouldn't make people suffer or be discriminated against.

Note that this article doesn't talk about regulations. Just about selling construction toys that match the girl stereotype.

Women are not so much more worthy. They just happen to be a very large group that suffers a lot despite many years of effort to reduce that suffering.

But there are movements to reduce the siffering experienced by different groups.

Women are far better complainers than men, it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint to maximize resources from the traditional role bread winner when gathering resources was a priority. That's why no amount of diversity programs are going to satisfy this group and men should learn to deal with this. The exceptions to the notion that men dominate society (like Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton) prove that there are no roadblocks specifically preventing women from achieving the highest positions of power and meritocracy is enough to allow you to be a reasonable success in your career.

"Women are far better complainers than men"

Why thank you drcross for giving us a demonstration of why women are going to need a little more encouragement than men to get into tech...

"The exceptions to the notion that men dominate society (like Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton) prove that there are no roadblocks specifically preventing women from achieving the highest positions of power and meritocracy"

Yes, and the fact that the current president is black is proof that there's no racial discrimination roadblocks in the US. Hey, do you want to buy a bridge? I have one I'm trying to sell, runs from NYC to Brooklyn, you'll make a killing on the tolls.

Is this satire? The cliche of women being naggers being explained as an evolutionary trait sounds like introductory biology passed through a filter of 50 year old sitcoms and bad stand up comedy.

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