[unscrupulous_sw]

Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with "friends" (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).

Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50/50 will "lower the bar". So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.

I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren't talking about math problem here and that they don't want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.

After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a "talk" from my manager.

[wonnage]

You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group is not 50/50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar.

The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance.

You can't brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.

[unscrupulous_sw]

Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards.

Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with.

I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid.

Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask.

The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.

[mike00632]

>Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards.

Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

Why isn't it the case that the bar is already lowered for straight, white men or people who otherwise fit tech stereotypes?

Or why does the value of diversity have to manifest in every individual? Maybe being in a diverse work force makes the cis, straight, white men and the company as a whole perform better.

And even if everything I'm saying is just flowery rhetoric with no rational basis, it's still a respectful way to view and treat other people, and your model that suggests women are generally inferior to men takes a big shit all over the aspiration of living in an inclusive, harmonious society.

[unscrupulous_sw]

> Why can't you criticize your own model, though?

I do but lunchtime only lasted so long before it imploded

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

If you're making "embarrassingly obvious deductions" you might be pattern matching me into your favorite straw man and not really deducing anything at all.

I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said. The only premise I assumed is that there are currently more men than women at the top (e.g., pipeline problem). You can even have the average women be way superior to men and still have the problem of hiring more women leading to lower standards, if the few top women are all happily employed elsewhere. I am not even saying this reflects reality, just that your logic sucks.

Why does everything have to be a dog whistle to fit people into hate groups? Some assholes like me are merely technical correctness assholes.

[mike00632]

> ...pattern matching me into your favorite straw man...

So you were just trying to make a nuanced point about women's general engineering skills based on their biology and don't want to be lumped in with all those unsavory people who give lesser consideration to women engineers based on sexist beliefs about women. Noted.

>I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said.

Didn't you imply that hiring women would be 'lowering the bar'?

[Lewton]

Are you so blinded by your pattern matching of what you think he’s saying that you can’t even read the second half of his post??

If there are significantly less women applying for software development jobs then statistically, assuming women are equally good software developers as men, aiming for 50/50 representation necessitates lowering the bar

This does not mean that it’s not a worthwhile pursuit to aim for equal representation

It’s an argument for working towards more women in STEM (we want bigger application pools!)

[umvi]

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

Not at all. Consider:

- You have a pool of 100 men to choose from

- You have a pool of 10 women to choose from.

- You need to hire 20 people.

So, you choose the top 10% of the men and 100% of the women in order to achieve gender parity.

There is no premise that men are inherently better, only that the talent pool is so much larger that you can more easily distill high quality candidates.

[mike00632]

>There is no premise that men are inherently better...

Well, you explicitly contrived a premise that suggests women are excluded from hiring for some other reason. Why are you only choosing from 10 women? And did you not consider the point about the benefits of diversity not needing to manifest in every individual?

[umvi]

> Why are you only choosing from 10 women?

Because only 10 women applied. Meanwhile 100 men applied.

So then you say: "Your recruiting efforts need to target more women".

How? If you go to a college STEM fair to recruit, the same thing will happen. 10 men will stop by your booth for every 1 woman.

[Lewton]

> Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better

Why couldn’t you criticize your own model of what you assumed the guy you were replying to was talking about?

He said nothing about women being inferior to men

The fact that you seem to think that challenging your own assumptions is so easy while at the same time being fully incapable of doing so is pretty damned rich

[mike00632]

>He said nothing about women being inferior to men

No, he just clearly implied it.

[onecool]

"Anybody can create a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break" -- it's easy to not see something wrong with what you're proposing for a variety of reason, this is why level-headed discussion is necessary and valuable. Nobody has the same background or viewpoint, and it's oftentimes harder to criticize others than it is to criticize yourself.

[mike00632]

But it's difficult. Nobody likes to confront people and tell them that their views on women's biology affecting their engineering skills are sexist. It also causes strife in the workplace.

What I suggest is to just be polite to your coworkers and let HR worry about the hiring process. Don't say anything to your coworkers that could suggest they are somehow inferior or have "bad" genetic traits. This seems like basic human civility that gets tossed out the window when someone has a right-wing view about a minority or women.

[eadmund]

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better.

You are incorrect. Let's imagine a group of ten men and ten women: we want to hire four in total. Let's assume that we can reduce a potential employee's worth down to a single number from 1 to 10, in order to simplify the example. The men are rated [1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10]; the women are rated [3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10]. In this example the women are better on average (5.6) than the men (5.5) — but hiring the top four candidates results in hiring three men [9, 9 & 10] and one woman [10].

This is because while the mean woman is better than the mean man, the standard deviation of skills is more widely distributed across men than women in the example: more men are excellent, but also more men are terrible (in the example, the lowest three candidates are men!).

[mike00632]

If we're going to contrive an instance that will result in a gender gap then why not just say we hire only 3 people? That would be a perfectly contrived example that would illustrate what you're trying to say.

Beyond your contrivances, I take issue with you suggesting that employees can (or should) be rated on a linear scale. Companies have very specific needs and maybe a candidate who is a "2" on your scale is a "10" at fulfilling what the company needs.

I'll say again too that the value of diversity doesn't need to manifest itself in every individual.

[TeMPOraL]

> Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates.

[citation needed]

If this is just inferred based on that observation about judges and meal breaks, then keep in mind that this is just a factoid, and a one that fails the sniff test. C.f. http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges.

[ambien_]

Regardless of the model, how can optimizing two metrics ever yield an improvement in the first compared to just optimizing it alone?

Or is the idea that, because the old model sucks, we need to optimize this intermediary metric (diversity) in the interests of the ultimate goal of raising-the-bar?

[lazyasciiart]

It could work better because we are so bad at actually optimizing for the first variable that we would get better results by not optimizing for it.

[xyzzyz]

This is the standard model used in education, military, and industry. Millions of people go through processes designed according to this model every year, and probably tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written in context of this model. Your complaints are mostly utterly false (eg. “technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin“ is in contrary of the established consensus in literature, and so is “ Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance“).

If this was indeed a shitty model, it would have been pointed out to grandparent when he brought it up, but since this model is commonly used and extremely useful, what he got instead was silencing and penalizing through anonymous back door channels.

[blub]

You don't need statistical models to figure out that if you're desperate to hire certain people and there's very few of them in your hiring pipeline, you'll turn a blind eye towards certain interview mistakes where you would normally disqualify candidates.

[jariel]

You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'.

If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity.

Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist.

Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture.

This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many.

Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.

[manfredo]

This parallels my experience. I have repeatedly feigned support for denying employment to white and Asian men to increase our proportional representation of demographics categorized as diverse. The company has set an outcome based goal to have 33% women in tech roles. When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination. But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.

[cmdshiftf4]

>But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.

Nor should they. The pursuit of equality has been replaced with a demand for equity and the talking heads espousing this demand have become sufficiently skilled at publicly shaming companies and individuals that leaders have decided that acquiescing and silently taking on the bill involved in prioritizing in-office demographic makeup over all else rather than ending up on Vox & co. and being publicly tainted forever.

On an individual level, it is career suicide to go against the corporate narrative supporting the above, particularly when you consider that the most ardent supporters of the narrative are empowered to also have some of the most significant impact on your career (HR).

[dahart]

> When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination.

This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.

The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)

The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.

We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.

So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

[cc81]

Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?

Look at other previously male dominated positions like doctors and law where you now in Sweden have more women graduating those fields than men. Something changed there. I doubt software development has been more hostile and conservative than for example law.

The thing is that women are studying at university at a larger degree than men in Sweden but they are not selecting STEM fields, especially not computer science.

Maybe it will change with role models, culture and different initiatives but I suspect that most young women right now think it is a boring as fuck career (at least those I talk to).

It would be like someone asking me if I would like to study to teach kindergarten. Maybe I as a male have been conditioned not to see that as an option and maybe many more would choose that career if we were raised differently but for me it just sounds like something I would really really not like. I respect the work but for me taking care of tons of kids all day sounds incredibly boring and rough. The idea that there is discrimination (which there is and some men suffer from) is not near my mind.

Most women I talk to express similar thoughts about software development.

[dahart]

> Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?

Why do you think those two things are mutually exclusive? What if women are choosing to leave computer science because it's somewhere between subtly discriminatory and outright hostile?

I'm sure it's cultural because: in the US women in CS was ~37%, today it's 18%. Why the huge swing? There have been times in recent history when many many more women chose computer science. In India, there have been years when the participation rate was above 50%. There are places on earth today where many many more women chose STEM.

So, it's obvious based on the data we already have that today's low participation rates by women in the US and Europe is not an intrinsic property of women, rates are neither fixed nor the natural state of things.

All the rest of what you said is that maybe it's attitudes, and sure, maybe it is. Maybe that's the problem?

I've spoken with women too, and anecdotally, most women say the exact same thing as most men when they say computer programming sounds super boring. Some women I know confirm that discrimination and hostile behavior exists and is alive and well, especially the higher you go in an organization.

[cc81]

I don't think the problem is that they are leaving computer science, it is that they are not choosing it.

Participation used to be higher but now it is less; despite women getting more agency, doing better at school and getting high education than men. If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.

It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is. And that more choice and more opportunities just makes other career paths more alluring.

Of course there can still be sexism and discrimination in certain cases but it is also very possible that it does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.

[dahart]

Yes, "leaving computer science" means that participation rates are going down, that fewer women are choosing it now versus in the recent past. The phrase always meant women as a group are leaving, it never meant that lots of individual women were starting CS careers and then quitting.

> If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.

That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.

You're trying to suggest that women as a group don't want computer science, by their nature as women, but to make that claim you have to deny history and ignore facts.

> It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is.

The numbers changed a lot, and there is a reason. What you're saying is you don't know the reason, and I agree with you.

> it is also very possible that it [discrimination] does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.

I think it's extremely, extremely unlikely. It's demonstrated that the choices are cultural and not intrinsic to gender. So, your job then is to show that cultural attitudes are not affected by cultural discrimination. You're setting yourself up for an impossible task.

[manfredo]

> The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women

This is a very bold assumption on your part. For one, representation of women in technology was actually higher when discrimination against women was more prevalent, during the 1970s and 80s. This inverse relationship between gender equality and representation of women in technology is reproduced today. Countries with less gender equality actually see higher rates of women in tech as compared to countries with more gender equality.

The notion that discriminating against men will somehow end discrimination against women is similarly naive. When discrimination in the workplace occurs, employees are aware of it. Putting women in a situation where the majority of their coworkers know that they are being held to a different standard is an exceedingly easy way to foster a toxic workplace.

> So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

Rethink whether there's anything that needs to be fixed. We should see women as individuals capable of making their own career choices, instead of as objects to be herded into one field or another.

[cloverich]

Why would it requiring discrimination be a problem?

[manfredo]

Because employers in the US are legally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex and race. At least in theory, enforcement seems to be lax in Silicon Valley.

Also, it creates a situation where people are aware that non-diverse employees are held to a more selective standard. This can increase impostor syndrome among diverse employees who may feel that they would not have been employed if they weren't of a specific gender or ethnicity.

[BurningFrog]

You're asking why race and gender discrimination might be a problem?

[cloverich]

I am asking why using discrimination (favoring women) to reverse a discrimination trend is a problem. Not why discrimination in general is a problem, which it obviously is.

[BurningFrog]

Thanks. I have two thoughts.

1. The position that it's OK to fight discrimination with more discrimination is very different from the idea that discrimination is inherently bad.

2. The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.

If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

[dahart]

> If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

Conversely, if genders don't have a different intrinsic, permanent distributions of interests, then not using some affirmative action to correct the situation amounts to preserving the status quo of known cultural discrimination.

The problem with what you said is that we already have data, the distributions of interest have changed dramatically over time recently, and they are currently different from country to country.

That's pretty clear, hard evidence that the gender differences in occupation choice we have today in the US (for example) are not intrinsic to the genders. So, what does that leave as possible causes?

[cloverich]

> The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.

Its certainly not controversial that _some_ of the discrepancy is caused by discrimination. It is very obviously true historically for many careers. Consider medicine, where women were relegated to nursing because they couldn't cut it as physicians. Today that idea seems absurd, and of the brightest people I met in medical school, there was a fairly even split of men / women. So far medicine was more challenging than the typical programming job I"ve held, which is at least partially relevant.

To be clear I am certainly not arguing that 50/50 is the natural distribution of men/women among programmers. I have no idea what it is. But I'll bet it is higher than 98/2, which is about the ratio in the last 4 programming jobs I've held.

Lastly, I have two young daughters now. Its been a bit shocking to me to see how early they are inundated with messaging steering them towards being pretty, dressing like a girl, etc. I have no doubt the lingering stereotypes and cultural pressure steers women into so called traditional roles from an early age.

[will4274]

Well, employment discrimination by gender is illegal in my country.

[alchemism]

One org’s discrimination is another org’s curation, semantically-speaking. The subjectivity usually depends on which side of the dividing line the perceiver finds themselves.

[weberc2]

It’s discrimination either way. The subjectivity is just about whether or not it is deserved. Some people think certain races or sexes deserve it, which is deplorable but technically subjective.

[dahart]

This isn’t about races or sexes deserving it, this is about fixing an existing imbalance that happened via cultural discrimination. The idea is to get closer to balance and then as soon as we’re closer, stop discriminating in either direction. When you call people trying to fix this deplorable, let’s just be clear, you’re judging negatively the people hoping to end cultural discrimination. If your proposed solution is to not do anything, we already know what will happen, because it already did: more cultural discrimination.

[weberc2]

It’s not deplorable to try to end discrimination, it’s deplorable to discriminate on the bases of race and sex, even if you believe that you can fight racism and sexism by way of more racism and sexism. And it’s as ridiculous to think that this approach would reduce the amount of racism/sexism as it is to think that the only other option is to do nothing. The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality. But even if you do nothing, it’s strictly better than promoting some twisted notion of “positive racism” if only because our society had already been trending away from racism from the start of the civil rights movement right up to the point when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.

[dahart]

I can understand why some people think fighting discrimination with discrimination sounds bad, especially when you say it that way. But I very much disagree, and framing it that way is exactly that: it's a frame intended to make positive actions look bad. On the one had you have permanent negative cultural discrimination that is keeping some people down who don't deserve it, and on the other you have an attempt to counter that with positive, visible, out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against. (And only until they're no longer being discriminated.)

The symmetry you're trying to imply doesn't really exist. Victims of cultural discrimination in history have been killed, enslaved, raped, harassed, etc. There is no analogue to that for the receivers of affirmative action. It's frequently quite difficult to show who's being materially harmed by affirmative actions as a group. It's common to say that giving a job to a women or black person because of affirmative action is discrimination, but it's not always zero-sum, it doesn't always mean someone else lost the job. And you just can't forget that if someone did lose the job, they still, as a group, already had unfairly high numbers of that job.

Another problem with your judgement is that the whole idea with affirmative action is to favor whoever is the underdog and only until they no longer are, where cultural racism doesn't change sides.

> when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.

This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

> The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality.

Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working? When has it worked better than affirmative actions?

To make a more subtle and deeper point about the irony of what you're saying, how do you actually "discourage" racism without in some way, shape or form giving preference to the downtrodden group? Isn't "discouraging" racism discriminatory against someone? If all discrimination is deplorable, is "discouraging" racism then deplorable because it's discriminatory against racists?

> But even if you do nothing, it's strictly better

Disagree. And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.

[alchemism]

Right. When the new executive is tasked with “cleaning up the misogyny problem at Uber” (as an example) it can only be be accomplished by discriminating against misogynists, by removing them and especially through not-hiring new ones.

[weberc2]

I genuinely can’t tell if “misogyny” means “sexual harassment” or “men having mildly nonconforming political views” a la Damore. If the former, no one would object to said “cleanup”, so that’s pretty clearly not what we’re discussing.

[alchemism]

It is indeed the former. No one [of high value to society] would object to the discrimination, but it is still a discrimination occurring if the outright harassers are rejected for the benefit of the whole organization.

[bloody-crow]

I've once engaged in a similar discussion with a female colleague and it escalated into a shit-show with manager & HR being involved and colleague being in tears claiming I'm "sexist" despite my aggressive attempts to de-escalate and walk away from continuing the conversation. The HR did an investigation and came to a conclusion that I didn't do anything wrong, but strongly suggested not talking about anything like that in future. The colleague made a claim that she wouldn't be able to work with me in the same company and quit.

[dsmk]

"aggressive attempts to de-escalate"

[bloody-crow]

She initiated the conversation in the first place and I was trying to backpedal pretty much the whole time, but she just kept pushing.

[mixmastamyk]

I don't support or discourage your argument in this case. I'll just make a very important point that many young folks take (and my younger self took) a while to grasp…

There are a number of sensitive issues where stark logic and "inconvenient" facts are very much not appreciated. Best to avoid them in polite discussion.

Given that most social issues are not cut and dry, there is difficulty in finding the logical answer anyway. Rarely do we have all the facts available, even if a correct decision could be made with them. Rather we have mostly personal anecdotes which are not sufficient.

So the unpopular technical point of view is rarely worth giving, while also potentially a CLM (career limiting move).

[mixmastamyk]

For an example, see the results of RMS' recent pedantic take on the Epstein case.

[dahart]

> So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all.

This is one of the problems a lot of engineers have, and I make this mistake too more often than I want to admit.

Cultural discrimination isn't a math problem, and however you modeled it, your logic doesn't map well to history at all. When you double down on a math argument, what it sounds like to other people is that you're not open to the possibility that you made a logic or modeling mistake, that you've decided men are better than women, and that you're trying to confuse the argument with a technicality.

FWIW, there might be math problem with your suggestion that 50/50 would lower the bar. The ratio is not absolute, and this isn't zero sum. More women participating doesn't mean fewer men, it means more people. When there are more people, in general, the absolute number of excellent people goes up.

I don't know what you mean by "the bar". What does it mean to lower the bar? Are you talking about how hard it is to get a job, get promoted, be in the top 10%? I don't understand your argument.

No matter what math/logic you used, the layman translation of saying the bar goes down with inclusion of more women is that you believe women to be inferior. That may not be your intent, but that's what people are hearing you say.