[shasta]

> The difference is not being willing to accept "oh it's just different preferences" as a reason for observed disparities without evidence.

Not accepting such an explanation is fine, but making unwarranted assumptions about the cause until they're disproved is not.

The goal isn't statistical equality of outcomes. It's minimized injustice. When a woman is passed over for a job or offered less money than a less qualified man, that's an injustice. Those who seek to equalize outcomes by adding injustice "the other way" are missing the point.

[rayiner]

> The goal isn't statistical equality of outcomes. It's minimized injustice

The mainstream presumption is that statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption.

> Those who seek to equalize outcomes by adding injustice "the other way" are missing the point.

That's a short-run versus long-run issue. From 1970 to 2010, the proportion of women earning medical or law degrees increased from under 10% to almost 50%. That was, in part, the result of affirmative action measures to increase the representation of women. But those measures are no longer necessary and no longer applied. The new ratios are self-perpetuating.

The point that people preoccupied with short-term injustice miss is that skewed gender ratios in professions are often the result of past discrimination and so are in and of themselves a continuing injustice. All else being equal, a rational person would rather enter a profession where they will not face career headwinds as a minority than one where they will. Some measure of additional injustice in the short term can set up a more just equilibrium in the long term.

The opposition to that is an emotional rather than a rational argument. The rational approach is to look at the net level of injustice integrated over time.

[shasta]

> statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption.

I disagree. There are too many other factors that are plausibly contributing. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.

I'm fine with attempting to change the culture to make e.g. STEM more appealing to women. Achieving this by enforcing an artificial prioritization of women over men in tech jobs seems to me a last resort approach. Is that really the only way to achieve the culture shift? In any event, at least I would find reasoning along these lines honest and am not opposed in principle.

[rayiner]

> The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.

Who properly bears the burden of proof is a question of your policy objective. For example, we place the burden of proof on the prosecutor in criminal proceedings because we have a policy objective of rather having guilty people go free than innocent people imprisoned. But nothing intrinsically says the burden of proof has to be with the prosecutor. If our goal was to prioritize making sure guilty people are held accountable, we could shift the burden of proof to the defendant.

Placing the burden of proof it on the person making the claim simply prioritizes the status quo, which may or may not be what you want. Given our status quo is the product of proven, vicious discrimination against women, protecting the status quo through allocation of the burden of proof is the opposite of what we want.

So instead, we have chosen to place the burden of proof on the party citing intrinsic differences as an explanation/excuse for evidenced disproportionate representation.

> Achieving this by enforcing an artificial prioritization of women over men in tech jobs seems to me a last resort approach

It has the strong advantage of being an approach that has actually worked in the past.

[YoureWrong]

> Placing the burden of proof it on the person making the claim simply prioritizes the status quo, which may or may not be what you want. Given our status quo is the product of proven, vicious discrimination against women, protecting the status quo through allocation of the burden of proof is the opposite of what we want.

Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, and thus allows us to do things that are massively harmful to the long-term well being of women (such as raising a generation of men after the inflection point on gender issues which faced institutionalized discrimination in places such as universities), and thus undermine our own end-goals through emotive decisions rather than rational ones.

The problem with the current approach is that you can't continue it long enough to cause the necessary change to restabilize the social trends, because the accumulated backlash of your intentionally inflicted injusticed builds faster than your positive social change, and you've simply entrenched a good reason to retaliate (they were intentionally discriminated against by a group who had previously suffered discrimination and knew what they were doing), and have already entrenched that intentional infliction of injustice is the means of correcting past injustices.

Far from changing the underlying social dynamic, the intentional discrimination against men actually reaffirmed the status quo one meta-level up from where your concern was: women will be just as sexist towards men as men were ever to women, given the chance, and even when they are personally "concerned" with the topic of discrimination.

Because it failed to use science in developing its methods, recent feminism has been a massive failure: far from standing against discrimination, modern feminism has demonstrated that women believe gender relations is a game of tit-for-tat, and they should be positively discriminated against by men looking for retaliation over their intentional discrimination anywhere that feminism has acted in excess.

This is a destabilizing force in gender relations, and should be set aside as an immature view. Instead, we should look honestly at the situation and develop a stance from actual ethics, rather than emotions.

[rayiner]

> Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence

Flapping around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, seems like a pretty good description of the situation to me whenever someone invokes "but, but, preferences" to explain why women are vastly more represented amongst high SAT math scorers than among programmers and engineers.

[shasta]

> Letting the legacy of past discrimination stand in perpetuity because fixing it would require temporary discrimination in the opposite direction?

I'm skeptical of the explanation that pay inequality between genders is caused by irrational business-hurting discrimination when the vast majority of people I meet in tech don't seem to have any aversion to hiring women. Suppose 10% of companies won't hire you because of irrational reasons. What does that do to your market value? Under the simplest economic model, it does nothing. Because there is still competition between the 90%. For irrational discrimination to cause pay inequality, it has to be widespread. (Edit: Disclaimer -- the above argument may be flawed. Feel free to correct my reasoning.)

[shasta]

> Who properly bears the burden of proof is a question of your policy objective.

Well, the context was the discussion of policy objectives. If you're saying that we should presume the existence of ongoing discrimination to be the cause of gender inequality during those discussions, then that seems flatly wrong. The rational way to discuss policy is to have an honest assessment of the current situation and then predict how policies will affect outcomes. You don't start by making unproven assumptions. The burden of proof in an argument is on the person making the claim.

You can certainly weigh potential outcomes and decide to go ahead with a course of action even though the benefits haven't been proven.

> It has the strong advantage of being an approach that has actually worked in the past.

Maybe.

[rayiner]

There are basically only two kinds of possible causes for observed disparities in gender representation: discrimination (either active, passive, or social), or intrinsic preferences and aptitudes. Once you've established that a disparity does exist, the cause has to be one or the other.

Presuming that the cause is some sort of discrimination is equivalent to presuming that the cause isn't intrinsic differences, at least unless that presumption is rebutted.

And remember the usual posture of these situations. People establish a prima facie case that something is wrong by showing that there is a gender disparity. Then defenders of the status quo invoke "preferences" (i.e. intrinsic differences) to explain the disparity. I see no problem with requiring them to adduce evidence in support of their explanation.

[dwmtm]

So three coin flips leads to a gender disparity- I guess if you don't observe any of them, no discrimination of heads or tails could occur...

[AnthonyMouse]

> The mainstream presumption is that statistical inequality presumes the existence of injustice unless proven otherwise. That's a reasonable presumption.

That's just begging the question. We may be able to attribute some proportion of statistical inequality to factors other than injustice, or affirmatively attribute some proportion to specific injustice, but we will never be able to fully explain everything.

If you assume malice in all cases of uncertainty then it becomes impossible to recognize defeat of the injustice. Once you have actually defeated it you end up fighting your own shadow forever because the biased assumption always tells you that you haven't.

> From 1970 to 2010, the proportion of women earning medical or law degrees increased from under 10% to almost 50%. That was, in part, the result of affirmative action measures to increase the representation of women. But those measures are no longer necessary and no longer applied. The new ratios are self-perpetuating.

Those anecdotes don't generalize unless you assume the conclusion again. We don't know what the equilibrium proportion of women in each profession is "supposed" to be. Some professions may already be near their only stable equilibrium even if they are heavily unbalanced. Even the idea that there is a "correct" stable equilibrium proportionality in every profession is flawed. There could be professions with tipping points such that whichever sex dominates the culture becomes a substantial majority.

> The point that people preoccupied with short-term injustice miss is that skewed gender ratios in professions are often the result of past discrimination and so are in and of themselves a continuing injustice. All else being equal, a rational person would rather enter a profession where they will not face career headwinds as a minority than one where they will.

Being prohibited by law or violence from working a job because of your sex or race is an injustice. Being the first woman or minority in the old boy's club is a challenge. They are not the same thing. And the subtlety of the latter is not amenable to fine tuning via Uncle Sam's sledgehammer.

> The opposition to that is an emotional rather than a rational argument. The rational approach is to look at the net level of injustice integrated over time.

"In the long run we are all dead." -John Maynard Keynes

It isn't irrational to consider justice on a timescale that affects the people who are alive today.

[Kalium]

> The goal isn't statistical equality of outcomes.

Given that statistical inequality is frequently and loudly trumpeted as proof of injustice, one could be forgiven for reaching precisely this conclusion.