[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.)

[rayiner]

> 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.

Under simple economic models, given fixed supply, small changes in demand can have large impacts on prices.

[shasta]

Depends. There obviously has to be a large change in the demand curve at the supply point if that point is fixed. But I agree that a small horizontal shift in a demand curve can have a big impact.

I don't think that's the right way of looking at it, though, because it treats the men and women supply-demand problems as independent. As long as the prefer-men employers are outnumbered by men, they won't affect equilibrium in this simplistic model.

[TeMPOraL]

Because there isn't irrational business-hurting discrimination among programmers!

>> to explain why women are vastly more represented amongst high SAT math scorers than among programmers and engineers.

Except they're not! Pretty much every source I've seen puts women as underrepresented on SAT math scores, and this trend apparently goes back down to secondary school or earlier.

[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...