Comment by Humjob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Humjob | Hacker News Reader

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Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Every psychological dynamic you see playing out in mass societies liberated from artificial constraints on the sexual market flows from this premise. This means, as a systemic matter, women are coddled, men are upbraided. Women are victims, men are victimizers. Women need a leg up, men need to man up. Women have advocacy groups, men have equal opportunity violations. A woman subjected to the indignity of eavesdropping on a tame joke about dongles makes national news, while the chilling fact that 95% of all workplace deaths are suffered by men barely pings the media consciousness.

It is what it is, and it will never change so long as humans are a sexually reproducing species. All the laws in the world can at best only paper over the very primal compulsion of people to value the life of the average woman more than the life of the average man, and sympathize accordingly. Railing against it is akin to shaking a fist at sunspots and gamma rays. It’s therefore folly or self-serving disingenuousness to act like there’s some moral high ground to stake out by imparting culpable agency to an indifferent, organically emergent biomechanical phenomenon. Rationalizing favoritism toward women as some sort of payback for male privilege, or refusing to acknowledge this favoritism altogether, is an example of the cognitive calisthenics and evasive sophistry most people will indulge to avoid grappling with the cold, black void of an uncaring evolutionary replication machine.

Copy-pasted spam. Flagged.

Actually I made that up all by myself.

I seem to have made some sort of mistake. On one of my computers the flagged comment doesn't appear and my comment appears to be the source of controversy.

The amount of upvoting and downvoting of parent comment is insane, please share your thoughts instead! It's just imaginary numbers that go up or down and mean nothing - don't be afraid to say what you think on their account.

This is a common piece of spam copy-pasted onto basically any threads involving gender dynamics. It's not worth replying to, and least of all upvoting.

Don't feed the trolls.

Why is it not worth replying to? Is it improbable? Is it wrong? Keep your upvotes, engage me in a glorious text battle.

> please share your thoughts instead!

Alternatively, don't feed the trolls.

The problem is that stepping into this minefield with your own comments is just going to get you downvoted into oblivion yourself.

The view that equality means you judge people on merit, not their gender, is not a politically correct one.

Why? What is to be gained from troll-feeding?

Seriously?

Well no it's highly contrived. I would hope the world doesn't oscillate radically back and forth between extremes.

But, if you hire more women than men to fix the skew, you're going to end up with more younger women in the department than men. Once the ratio has been fixed you return to free hiring, 50-50 or whatever is considered fair at the time. Years down the line all these women you hired to fix the ratio start retiring. Your ratio drops precipitously and you start hiring women again at a higher rate. This pulse continues, every 30, 40, or 50 years, it can converge or diverge depending on what the actual ratio of gender is in the hiring pool.

By purposely hiring more women you are forcing the ratio away from it's natural state, and you will have to continue poking and prodding the numbers to continue being PC.

Initially I was just like, oh look, there's a loony on the internet. Then people started upvoting it.

This ridiculous thing is the second top comment in the HN thread and people still try to say we don't have a problem with sexism in the industry.

Since we're there, I feel like saying that my own experience is that while the tech team is undoubtedly imperfect, we're generally less overtly sexist than our colleagues in management and other areas, and I feel like we get an unfairly bad rap. My own experiences make me skeptical that hiring bias or misogynistic culture are the reasons that women are more poorly represented in tech than in other business areas. I acknowledge that this is all anecdotal, and I don't work in SV or indeed the US.

But I guess we agree that the OP's focus on ova and sperm is not a productive way forward.

And yet there are real problems. Women are underrepresented in tech, government, finance. Women do make less money even if you control for expertise and experience. Women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted.

What's your solution?

We are not all equal in every way, and neither are the biological difference in the genders.

Men tend to take more risks, while women tend to take more safer routes.

Men tend to spend more time at work, while women tend to spend more time with family matters.

Hence men tend to be both at the very bottom (as the larger percentage), and at the very top. And women throughout in between.

> Women do make less money even if you control for expertise and experience.

It's something like 97 cents to the dollar when you account for time on the job.

It's only when you pretend that 5 years of total pay (to a women) should be equal to 10 years of total pay (to a man), when you have the disingenuously reported "pay gap".

> Women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted.

And men are more likely to be killed. And they also die earlier.

But what does this have to do with anything?

I'd rather focus on doing the job well, hiring the person that produces the best results, instead of pretending that if we just have this perfect diversity through forced quotas, and push to having 50% of women in all fields (except for the fields that they don't want), that magic will happen.

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