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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

At the same time, we should avoid using specific cases as proof that there is institutional bias, just as we should avoid using specific storms as proof of climate change.

Of course, then all we have to work with is overwhelming statistical evidence for both issues, and that never convinces anyone.

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Do we have statistical evidence of this bias? I'm not doubting we do, I would just like to explore it.

There are many professions that are dominated by a single gender or a single ethnicity. That's not necessarily evidence of bias.

There are lots of ways to explore this. For example, sending identical resumes with female and male names for engineering jobs and measuring requests for interviews.

More data would be nice to have. In lieu of that, I enjoyed Scott Adams' verdict on gender bias: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gend...

I'm not sure I'd trust the guy who wrote "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently" on gender issues.

I read a bit of his stuff and he seems reasonably cogent (with perhaps a bias towards ignoring the cultural basis of gender roles), but with a tendency for poorly considered word choices that get him into trouble. The full context for your quote is here:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881506316/im-a-what

He addresses your direct quote explicitly lower down the page:

"I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar."

Is there not still something condescending in proclaiming that a man's best strategy for dealing with women is to deal with them in the same way one would deal with children or the mentally handicapped? It sure seems condescending to me...

Sadly, assholes can be right, too. Having a good asshole filter doesn't mean you have a good 'this person is right' filter, or vice-versa.

"I’m not saying women are similar to either group"

I'm just lumping them together in the same group. Uh huh.

And he continues:

> You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

Which is kind of a good point. I definitely don't argue with Christians about evolution because it's clearly a waste of time and I have more important things to do.

...a good point, horribly argued. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy because he is mentally handicapped and is not responsible for what he is doing. How does that relate to a woman only making 80 cents on the dollar? It's an awful, awful analogy.

The implication is that a mentally handicapped man shouldn't do what he does but can't be blamed because he isn't responsible. But women should complain about earning 80c on the dollar.

You probably think you're doing women a favour with this nitpicky attitude, but it only trivializes the focus of the issues to the wording choice of a single fucking person. Let the little things slide.

I'm not arrogant enough to think that "women" care one bit about what I'm doing.

it only trivializes the focus of the issues to the wording choice of a single fucking person

Have you been on Hacker News before?

>How does that relate to a woman only making 80 cents on the dollar?

Because women don't make 80 cents on the dollar, unless you think brain surgeons and hairdressers ought to make the same amount of money.

Amazing people still believe that, despite the evidence staring them in the face.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/the-pay-gap-is-beca...

"Are women paid less than men because they choose to be, by gravitating to lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work? [...] But a majority of the pay gap between men and women actually comes from differences within occupations, not between them — and widens in the highest-paying ones like business, law and medicine according to data from Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor economist and a leading scholar on women and the economy."

Amazing people put forth that bogus 81 cents number and then start talking about data as if it supported their position. I was just pointing out that number was obviously fraudulent as it doesn't take occupation into account. But what happens when we look at education, occupation, hours worked, willingness to travel, etc?

"This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

Amazing that the other reply to my post told me to not have such a "nitpicky attitude" [1] when another tells me that such nitpicking is crucial. It's almost as if people are doing any mental gymnastics they can to derail conversation into insignificant side roads rather than the actual issue at hand.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9279813

Amazing that after I present actual data you try to deflect by replying to my post with a criticism of something someone else wrote, completely ignoring the subject.

You clearly didn't get my point. For one, I'm not the one that brought up the 80 cents figure. But is it 80 cents? 70? 90? That's not the actual issue. Does sexism exist in tech? If yes, how about talking about that?

It's like entering into a conversation about how to fix the problem of racism within the police by asking "ah yes, but how racist are they?".

Sure, let's talk about sexism. My company has a program by which women are promoted even though a man with the same skills and experience would not be promoted. Does this seem fair to you?

Somehow I doubt I'll be able to find a lawyer to take the case if I sue.

I can't reply to your comment below:

> You clearly didn't get my point. For one, I'm not the one that brought up the 80 cents figure. But is it 80 cents? 70? 90? That's not the actual issue. Does sexism exist in tech? If yes, how about talking about that?

> It's like entering into a conversation about how to fix the problem of racism within the police by asking "ah yes, but how racist are they?".

I don't understand how you can speak critically of people asking the most mature, rational and productive question in the situation. You can't make a plan to deal with a problem if you don't have at least some idea of how big it is.

  Person A: "The dam is overfilled, we need to drain some of the water." 
  Person B: "Oh, really?  How do you know it's overfilled and how much water do you think we should drain?"
  Person A: "OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE THE NERVE TO ASK ME THAT!  CLEARLY YOU *WANT* THE DAM TO BE OVERFILLED, DON'T YOU?!?"
  Person B: "..."

This is a pretty shitty article.

> Take doctors and surgeons. Women earn 71 percent of men’s wages — after controlling for age, race, hours and education.

> A pharmacist who works 40 hours a week generally earns double the salary of a pharmacist who works 20 hours a week, and as a result, the pay gap for pharmacists is one of the smallest.

These two quotes reveal that "controlling for hours" means "calculating per-hour wage", i.e. the underlying assumption is that the wage should depend linearly on the number of hours worked.

Which is obviously not true. Take finance, for example. If you're not willing to work 50, 60 hour weeks, you won't just get paid proportionally less; what will happen is that your career will stagnate, you won't get promoted, or might even get fired!

Also, personally I definitely want to be paid "disproportionately" for all the hours I do outside my "normal" working hours - after all, I want some time to enjoy life as well!

The final suggestion in this article is that workers should strive to make themselves as replaceable as possible. But this is, IMO, the worst advice possible; it won't have the effect of "averaging" the wages to make them more equal; instead, the best performer's wages will be pushed down to match the worst performer's wages, as it will no longer be possible to differentiate workers by performance. Brave New World!

Just...most Christians believe in evolution just fine. Its a few fundamentalists that don't, and ya, I don't want to argue with them either, not worth the energy.

> most Christians

[citation needed]

Given that the most mainstream support for evolution in Christianity involves the magical hand of the Lord pushing every last selection, I don't know that I'd say they believe in it "just fine," more that they believe in a really bastardized version of it so they stop looking silly.

I can't believe I have to argue about this. Ok, citations...

The pope believes in evolution:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/28...

A lot of the Christians in the world are catholic, you know. I guess if you want to be American-centric though, so lets go to Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution

There is a nice chart there, but...

> Molleen Matsumura of the National Center for Science Education found, of Americans in the twelve largest Christian denominations, at least 77% belong to churches that support evolution education (and that at one point, this figure was as high as 89.6%).

Really, I'm probably an Atheist also (though I don't identify as one, I just don't believe in God), and the only time I have to deal with creationists is in small town America (evangelicals), but they are not the overwhelming majority of Christians (I guess...I don't really ask).

And if they say they believe in evolution, why doubt them? Why accuse them of making twisted rationalizations? It just doesn't make for intelligent debate on either side.

Thank you for reading my comment. The pope believes in theistic evolution which is essentially incompatible with actual evolution. It's like saying Deepak Chopra is an expert in quantum science. Even better, not all Catholics believe in lock-step with what the pope does (see: Catholics who have gotten abortions, Catholics who are rich, Catholics in favor of the death penalty, etc.).

I don't know why you would think I'm being American-centric, my comment was regarding Christians around the globe, not just the ones you've met. There are an awful lot of Christians in non-industrialized countries who don't behave like the ones you've met.

> I'm probably an Atheist also

Don't try to include me in your fedora-support-group, I'm Jewish.

> And if they say they believe in evolution, why doubt them? Why accuse them of making twisted rationalizations? It just doesn't make for intelligent debate on either side.

If the Russian government says it has fair elections, why doubt them?

Please don't conduct religious flamewars on Hacker News.

I'm not sure why anyone gives Scott Adams credence as an expert on anything other than creating a fairly successful comic strip.

He seems to think things through and come to a lot of his conclusions logically. The parent comment illustrates this well. Just as PG is respected for opinions that aren't directly related to VC, people can be knowledgeable about things outside their main field of work.

Also, nobody said Adams was an expert about feminism and the wage gap.

There is enough evidence to be suggestive. Much of it comes not directly from tech - for example, there were studies done with identical resumes, as you suggest, which showed bias, but not in tech. Still, there is enough of that, as well as enough anecdotal data, to debate about. However, there is nowhere enough data to arrive at a solid conclusion either way.

Regardless, all this is offtopic for this article. This was a lawsuit between two parties, not an attempt to prove sexism exists or does not exist among VC firms (much less tech in general).

In general it's very hard to control for all factors. The most compelling analysis with robust controls that I have seen is: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903

The paper shows that adding a screen to orchestra auditions significantly increased the number of women who were chosen for symphony positions. The study is very compelling because the cause/effect relationship of gender-blinding the auditions can be observed very directly.

A musical audition is somewhat unique in that you can conduct the "interview" in a way that the "interviewer" remains blind to gender/race/etc.

One problem with this is that orchestral music is a very traditional, opinionated industry. There could be biases specific to that setting that don't show up in others.

Are you suggesting that the software tech industry isn't in its own way at least as traditional and opinionated?

The software industry is at most, what? 100 years old? 55 years old if you want to start from the beginning of the rise of business computing? It's an industry created in the midst of massive social changes that has been chasing moving targets from the beginning.

Orchestral music (as we know it, an argument could be made for orchestra-like organizations going back another few millennia) has been around since the 16th century or so. That is a much longer time for exclusive traditions to develop.

I'm sure they're both traditional and opinionated, but I would expect that the scale at which they manifest them will be very different.

Well it wouldn't be that outlandish to do truly blind programming interviews.

Just use a collaborative editor and possibly wacom stylus (can't be any more cumbersome than the traditional whiteboard), plus a text chat interface to conduct the interview. The interviewer interacts with the candidate in real time but doesn't see him or her.

Where cheating is a concern you can have a different employee (who does not provide interview feedback) monitoring the candidate over a camera to ensure they're only using the approved terminal, not phoning a friend.

Any medium to large-sized software company should be able to pull this off, and it would eliminate the possibility of gender bias in the interview results.

I agree with you that this would be a great experiment. However, that won't stop any potential bias once they get the job.

simple. require everyone to work in cubicles that are closed off where your coworkers cant see you. all voice chats must be done without video and with voice modulation technology so that gender can not play a role. Also, the persons name must always be changed to J Smith to not hint at gender or race.

Or change the name 'J. Doe' so you can't even tell if they are alive or not.

Agreed, of course. But I still think it's a good idea to eliminate one opportunity for bias if we can.

>wacom stylus

That might not work as intended. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology),

>Uniformly the research indicates that gender can be determined [from handwriting] at a significant level.

Considering the subject is graphology, of course, one may question the quality of the studies cited but at least the journals like Journal of Applied Psychology appear legitimate.

In my experience, at the hiring level gender bias works towards normalizing the current skew of modalities. It is after hiring, when growing leaders and assigning responsibilities that bias is more often clear.

It's not necessarily evidence, but I imagine the correlation is quite strong. I can't think of a single counter example, where a profession is dominated not as the result of bias.

I don't think clinical psychology is dominated by women due to bias.

That's a pretty good example, but I wouldn't completely discount the role of cultural bias in amplifying the gender imbalance in that field.

Why not? Or rather, why do you think technology is but clinical psychology is not?

Women are historically associated with being more "nurturing".

Don't you think people would prefer to see a nurturing therapist over a non-nurturing one?

I can think of two off the top of my head:

1. Professional sports

2. Trading

Really? I feel like those are horrible examples.

Professional Sports is one where we have gender segregation that directly leads to very different cultural and monetary values for careers in that field.

Trading is a field where I would expect to find a large amount of bias and outright gender discrimination, but the evidence I have for that is anecdotal.

We have gender segregation in sports because men are stronger than women, hence better in most sports (at least the most viewed ones - football, rugby, american football, basketball (height matters here as well), hockey, ...). If there was no gender segregation, all the teams would still be all-male, and there would be no women's only teams.

>> If there was no gender segregation, all the teams would still be all-male

Possibly, but I doubt it. I do think there would still be a gender imbalance, but I don't think that we would see 0 women capable of performing at that level.

>> and there would be no women's only teams.

Why would allowing women into the top leagues of sports mean we couldn't still have all-women leagues?

I think sports segregation is BS and have yet to hear an argument that actually justifies it.

I understand the natural segregation in sports, as men are more physically fit in general, but could you explain the trading bias? I'm not saying you're wrong about it, I just want to understand your PoV more. Thanks

Trading involves a lot of risk, and people more prone to taking risks gravitate towards it. And it's been shown that overall men are more likely to take risks then women. Just a possible reason why there are more men.

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks

Finance is the best poster child for "Good ole boys club" outside of politics.

My experience working for good technology companies is that most engineers truly want to hire good engineers. I was lucky to work in groups where there was no gender bias. Female colleagues or bosses where recognized and respected based on merit. Obviously this is just my experience. On the other hand bias based on age seems to be much more common. Perhaps this is part of people wanting to hire people with similar cultural background.

What happens in the world of VCs and top executives has no relation to what happens in the real world. I suspect that the top 1% is dominated by jerks and males. We shouldn't extrapolate what happens there to the rest of us. Let them sue each other.

I haven't been able to find an academic study specifically looking at software engineering or tech jobs, but there are other studies I've seen that send out identical resumes (with just the name changed) suggesting that men are generally perceived to be more competent.

Science faculty reading resumes for a "laboratory manager" position prefer the male candidate http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

Academic psychologists are more likely to suggest hiring the male candidate http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

At the same time, we should avoid using specific cases as proof that there is institutional bias

Which isn't what the OP did. I don't know that statistical evidence is all we have - we (hopefully) have the experiences and opinions of the women we work with, know or are related to. Listening to them would be a positive thing to do.

I think the most important thing to realize -- before we look at statistics, which we definitely should -- is that if a number of people, our coworkers, feel uncomfortable at our workplaces -- and it doesn't matter whether that number is large or small -- then we should feel terrible and do something about it. Those experiences can be so horrible, that even if the number of cases is small, our sin is bad enough.

Having said that, I don't believe that number is small at all. Women have been fleeing the software industry for the past few decades, showing decreasing participation and an opposite trend to that in most other industries[1], and I don't think that software is so inherently different from other technical professions. And, as an outsider who visits Silicon Valley a few times a year, I can report that my own personal, probably biased feeling, is one of being overwhelmed by a thick, palpable atmosphere of sexism that I have seen in few if any other places. I should add that I have learned to see sexism only over the past few years; before, I was completely blind to it.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

>I think the most important thing to realize -- before we look at statistics, which we definitely should -- is that if a number of people, our coworkers, feel uncomfortable at our workplaces -- and it doesn't matter whether that number is large or small -- then we should feel terrible and do something about it.

Or maybe they should. The legitimacy of their reasoning matters. I don't mind making changes for people who have a legitimate issue, but work is for adults.

So what you're saying is, you don't mind causing other people -- your coworkers -- severe distress if their "reasoning" is faulty according to you?

But, of course, that's not really what's happening. As you can see in the data, "adults" is actually "men" only when "work" is "software". I can assure you that medicine and law are no less stressful work environments than software, yet for some reason women seem to want to work in those professions more and more (as well as in science in academia and other fields of engineering) while they're fleeing software in droves.

I think you should consider the possibility that you're contributing to a hostile environment that you simply can't feel because you haven't tried really putting yourself in other people's shoes. Because if that's what's happening and you're wrong, then you've just been part of something really terrible. If, on the other hand, you're right, then all you did was to "unjustifiably" adjust your behavior to relieve the suffering of some of your fellow humans.

Even if you're not convinced that this big difference in ethical outcome merits changing your behavior right away, I think it at least justifies truly listening to what women are saying, and trying really, really, really hard to examine whether you just might be doing something wrong.

>So what you're saying is, you don't mind causing other people -- your coworkers -- severe distress if their "reasoning" is faulty according to you?

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Because I'm not causing them stress. They're causing stress to themselves.

>As you can see in the data, "adults" is actually "men" only when "work" is "software".

What data? What are you talking about?

>I think you should consider the possibility that you're contributing to a hostile environment that you simply can't feel because you haven't tried really putting yourself in other people's shoes.

It's not reasonable to expect men to tiptoe around special snowflakes primed by coddled upbringings to take umbrage at every perceived slight.

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