Researchers Find a Hiring Bias That Favors Women | Hacker News Reader

Researchers Find a Hiring Bias That Favors Women

npr.org

46 pointsjfaat20 comments

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481 (141 comments)

It's possible that after multiple decades of the louder parts of society (i.e. the media, and groups with opinions that are far enough from mainstream for the media to consider newsworthy) the rest of society has come to expect more from white males. When comparing two equally qualified applicants, of which one is a white male, people may tend to favor the other applicant based on a perception of rarity. They may expect that if they ran the ad looking for applicants again they'd get a few more white dudes just like the one they're considering but aren't as likely to come across another woman with these qualifications (which is true when you consider the gender makeup of the STEM fields) so they select the woman based on that perception of rarity, rather than by further comparing the applicants or tossing a coin.

On the other hand, diversity is one of those education buzzwords. Every university wants to be "diverse" and none of them would be caught dead with an all white male department group photo on their website. So if one wanted to nit pick, the women do have an additional qualification that's important to their employer, diversity.

About time.

I say this because it's a long held suspicion of mine that any gender ratio inequality is a thing that exists, not at the pay negotiation, not at the application, not even at the education, but far before that.

I'm not even completely sure that it can be defined as a result of anything other than "different people like different things".

> "different people like different things"

This is not without influence though. If you grow up always seeing men as doctors and women as nurses, when you decide that you want to go into medicine it will set your expectations about what your should strive for. To say that seeing something always be a "certain way" does not subtly influence people ignores basic human nature.

If you (as a boy) see knitting as "something that girls do" you may suppress your interest in it as a child because you don't want to be ridiculed. This just further re-enforces the idea that only women are interested in knitting. There may be the rare male that dares to not care what the prevailing social winds are, but we can't necessarily rely on people always ignoring societal pressures. Discouraging the societal pressures in the first place is much better.

We agree, but the problem is I see comparatively little effort being expended to change those perceptions as I do effort expended on (and now apparently, provably so) misdirected outrage at pay and candidate selection and such.

How does one even go about proving that the "social pressure" is or isn't more than monkey-see-monkey-do? I think I understand the theory, but I definitely don't understand what its logical basis is. The further I dig, the further I see more subjective a priori assumptions.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372355

Oftentimes when "previously" links are posted, what is linked actually has discussion on it. That page is rather empty.

Makes perfect sense. An engineering team full of sweaty dudes would definitely favor a qualified girl over an equally qualified guy.

Men should start some sort of movement to fight this inequality and be excessively loud about it.

Can't tell if sarcasm...

If I said it was sarcasm I'd lose karma because I'd be sexist and I'd be criticizing one of the most strongest groups in America today. So essentially I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being 1000000% percent serious.

At least you admit the karma factor. My adversity to losing karma just suppressed the second part of my opinion..

Poe's Law to the rescue(?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

It won't work. First they will be "its all about equality, I assure you" but then it just become about power and who can get privilege over someone else.

The sad truth is, people only want equality when it benefits themselves in some way. The same person who self-identify as pro-equality will fight tooth-over-nail to keep national laws that generate benefits for their gender.

In such a movement, the lack of privilege would become a form of psuedo-power. The people with genuine power (the rich celebrities with large social followings) would dominate of course, but they would all argue they they were less privileged than the others and that their voices should therefore be given special status. They would use this psuedo-power to justify attempts to silence "privileged" people who in fact lacked genuine power (personal wealth and social influence).

..they would use this psuedo-power to justify attempts to silence "privileged" people who in fact lacked genuine power

Would it surprise you all to know that's kind of what's happening right now? Granted the actual impact usually isn't much more than a flimsy justification to level personal attacks against people they don't agree with on the internet, but the mindset definitely already exists.

I think we're all on the same page here. I have found that talking about things indirectly is a decent way to avoid annoying personal attacks (which, in my case, have reached out beyond the internet in the past, albeit with limited success.)

> The sad truth is, people only want equality when it benefits themselves in some way.

This is probably true but keep in mind that there are benefits in equality even for the group currently in power.

These things are usually counter intuitive. Although it benefits all, the benefits are not intuitive or readily apparent, thus it is never acted upon.

For example, paying workers higher wages benefits the economy as a whole and in turn benefits the business owner, but this is counter intuitive logic and business owners tend not to desire raising wages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com