[Aapjes]

People's qualifications are not all the same. Imagine that Google wants to hire 1,000 people, but 10,000 people apply for a job. Then Google logically ought to take the best 1,000 people that apply.

With diversity quota's, the company may decide to hire a less able woman in favor of a more able man.

[jacalata]

The reality is that 2,000 of them are indistinguishably good and diversity programs are intended to make sure that google hires equally able women out of that group instead of choosing all the men.

[Aapjes]

Imagine a theoretical scenario where they have 500 female applicants and 9,500 male applicants, but desperately want a 50/50 workforce. Then they logically would hire all female applicants, including those who are not part of the 2000 most capable applicants.

Using your number, with 2k out of 10k applications being indistinguishable elite, that means 1 in 5 applicants are suitable to be hired on merit. Assuming that female applicants are no better or worse than the men, you'd expect 100 of those 500 female applicants to be indistinguishable from 1,900 male applicants.

So then 400 women would be hired who are in fact distinguishable worse than those elite 100 women and 1,900 men.

[deanCommie]

You clearly have no idea how hiring works at major tech companies like Google.

1: Even if there are a 1000 positions, and only 1000 candidates, if they are underqualified, they do not get hired. Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, try to have an objective bar, not one relative to the available candidates.

2: Nobody is pressuring for a 50/50 workforce. It's an ideal, and a reasonable-sounding long term goal, but even the most aggressive pro-diversity initiatives do not set a target of 50/50 ratio. In fact, in most cases HIRE targets aren't set at all. The targets are set for opportunities - ie number of diversity candidates evaluated or interviewed. The hiring process remains pure.

Source: Work for major top-10 tech company and do a ton of hiring, and diversity training.

[geofft]

> Imagine a theoretical scenario where they have 500 female applicants and 9,500 male applicants, but desperately want a 50/50 workforce.

I agree with your conclusions from these stats, but why is this theoretical scenario relevant? Do we believe that this more closely resembles the actual scenario than one where there are, say, 4,000 female applicants and 6,000 male ones?

[Aapjes]

Women get 18% of computer science degrees, so it seems doubtful that Google would get a 40/60 split in applicants.

But the specific numbers are not the point of my comment. The issue is that if there is a lot of pressure to get a 50/50 workforce, but the pipeline is not 50/50, then favoring less qualified men over more qualified women becomes a possibility or even very likely, since how else are you going to achieve this?

I think that it is up to those who desperately want a 50/50 workforce (just for tech, not for most of the other gender-imbalanced jobs) to make the case how they can do this without sexist discrimination in hiring or if they do favor sexism in hiring to make that explicit.

[geofft]

The company may also decide to hire a less able man in favor of a more able woman.

Given that the vast majority of incompetent people I've worked with have been men (if not all of them), I'm surprised to see less attention to this phrasing of the problem. Maybe it is too politically incorrect to bring up?

[dunkelheit]

> Given that the vast majority of incompetent people I've worked with have been men (if not all of them), I'm surprised to see less attention to this phrasing of the problem. Maybe it is too politically incorrect to bring up?

I downvoted this.

Given that there is a fair amount of incompetence in tech; that there is also a significant number of women in tech; that you are not a junior person and that men and women have similar abilities, I find this statistically implausible. Please consider the possibility that you have a subconscious sexist bias against men.

[geofft]

> Given that there is a fair amount of incompetence in tech; that there is also a significant number of women in tech; that you are not a junior person and that men and women have similar abilities, I find this statistically implausible.

Why is this statistically implausible?

There is a fair amount of incompetence in tech; there are a significant number of women in tech; I am not junior; men and women have similar abilities; many men seek tech because it's high-status instead of because of intrinsic technical interest (Damore 2017); many men have a sexist bias towards men.

The natural statistical result is that while both competent men and competent women get hired (as they should!), incompetent men get hired much more often than incompetent women.

Is this logic flawed?

> Please consider the possibility that you have a subconscious sexist bias against men.

I am certainly considering that possibility, and I know exactly why I might have that bias if it is in fact a bias: every single person I've been frustrated at working with has been a man. I don't want to be biased, and would definitely appreciate being talked out of this, if it is in fact a bias.

[dunkelheit]

Agreed, not implausible. Sorry for downvote. Actually after having thought about this a bit, there are many possibilities.

One (the one you seem to be in favor of) is that due to higher hiring standards even if the average abilities are similar, after the hiring filter average woman is more skilled than the average man.

Another is that (just like it was described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988086) you have lower standards for women than for men so that you cut incompetent women some slack.

Yet another is that while the averages are similar, men are much more varying in their abilities, so that both ends of spectrum (outstanding competence and extreme incompetence) are dominated by men.

Etc. There can be a lot of explanations besides the bias in hiring and without some empirical evidence it is difficult to choose.

FWIW I've met my share of incompetent women. But I'm not US-based, and that might explain the difference.

[Aapjes]

> many men have a sexist bias towards men.

Proof? Gender neutralized experiments find a great variety of results, with sometimes a bias in favor of women and sometimes a bias in favor of men. There is no consistency here that can be seen as proof that men are always biased towards men.

I'm not aware of any scientific studies in the tech field, but this layman experiment in tech with voice masking for phone interviews found that women who were made to sound like men were rated slightly worse and men whose voice was masked to sound more like women were rated better:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

They found that the actual reason why women did worse in their interviews is that women handled failure at the interview worse than men. The women often quit after initial failure, while the men persevered and came back to try again. So it was an issue with how men and women were conditioned to handle failure in combination with the way their hiring practices were set up, NOT discrimination by the interviewers against women.

This kind of discovery is exactly why we need less of the kind of 'common sense' that results in people assuming they know the cause (usually by putting all blame on one group) and more actual research into the causes.

> Is this logic flawed?

Your logic is not flawed, but it's nothing more than a theory when you don't have solid evidence to back it up.

There are equally plausible explanations that you did not consider. For example, we know that men are more willing to take risk, including risk of failing by the Peter principle. So women are often unwilling to take jobs they do not know for sure they cannot do. This latter explanation actually explains the known facts a lot better than the 'men are much less willing to hire women' theory.

> I know exactly why I might have that bias if it is in fact a bias: every single person I've been frustrated at working with has been a man.

That is merely justification for being less willing to work with men, not justification for assuming that men are biased to hiring men AND that this is the main/only cause of the disparity. You have inserted a ton of assumptions to get from A (worse experiences with men) to B (assuming that the cause of the gender disparity is gender discrimination during hiring). The sheer quantity of assumptions necessary should drive a rational person to verify whether these assumptions are true.

I see you as biased for jumping to conclusions and especially for defending retributions against those who question those assumptions. At that point, my charity ends and those who desperately want to blame one group and who are unwilling to consider the possibility that anything they do to that group can be unjust, get lumped in with the other evil groups who desperately wanted to blame one group and were willing to harm that group.

[Aapjes]

The hiring ratios for Google track the ratios of the applicants, so that could only be true if the female applicants are better than the male applicants. This may be true, but I've seen no evidence of this.

That the vast majority of incompetent people you've worked with have been men can be explained by the gender ratio at Google. If most workers are men, then most incompetent workers would also be men, if men and women are equally likely to be incompetent.

My impression is that female workers at Google disproportionately work in the less technically hardcore jobs, which may actually be easier to be competent at or you may interact with those workers differently. So this may also skew your anecdotal observation.

Damore may have been worried about an increase in pressure to hire women leading to hiring women for the more technically hardcore jobs, which given the few female applicants for these jobs, could then lead or may already have led to worse hires then if there had been no pressure by the company to have pro-female gender bias.