[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.

[cc81]

>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.

Yes, and my point is that when those women got more power, more choice, more money and more freedom they started to become less likely to choose software development and more likely to select other professions. Other professions that had historically been male dominated.

So it could be that if you are free to choose there are certain professions that will have a larger part male or female and that will amplify in a culture of freedom. You will choose what your friends choose.

For example I don't think that you would ever have 50% men/women that are interested in working in kindergarten. I think there is some biology in that and then it is amplified by most men not wanting it making it less likely for those that might want it to actually choose.

[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?

[BurningFrog]

At most, it's evidence that intrinsic interest is not the only factor in career choice.

The most fascinating fact here is that the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

It's easy to interpret that as when you're rich enough to pick the career that actually interests you, rather than the career most likely to keep starvation at bay, people follow their interests more.

[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.

[BurningFrog]

My programming demographic experience has been 80/20, FWIW.

Yeah, the smartest women go into medicine and law instead of programming. I claim it's largely because they find working with people more interesting than working with machines.

Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female, and that is who they genuinely are.

[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.

[weberc2]

> 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 visible positive visible/out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against.

The issue isn't positive vs negative discrimination or else the "fight racism with racism" camp wouldn't cry foul when positive discrimination is applied toward whites or men (in those rare cases when it actually is) nor would there be so much overt negative discrimination toward men and whites (the use of "white men" as a slur, the accusation that men are rapists and need to be trained not to rape, the propensity to blame all problems on whites/men, the existence of work groups and meetups that specifically exclude whites/men, etc). It's pretty clearly that there is some notion that certain genders/races are more deserving of both negative and positive discrimination than others.

> 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 confusion is understandable; I should have used a different term. I coined "postive racism" to mean discrimination (specifically negative discrimination, per your definition) toward some group that is perceived to deserve it--those who advocate for the discrimination see it as righteous, hence 'positive'--for the sake of a somewhat familiar, concrete example, Antifa advocates for negative discrimination toward whites, men, etc. I should have used different words since "positive racism" sounds too similar to "positive discrimination" which already has an established meaning (and perhaps "positive racism" also already has an established meaning as well). I also used "discrimination" a lot when I technically meant what you're referring to as "negative discrimination"; in general, my post was ignoring affirmative action or "positive discrimination" because I don't understand it to be even remotely central to the broader national debate on race and social justice.

I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism, although I think it's ill-considered and probably produces more racial tension, division, and strife than it alleviates. The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. And while there probably are some who support affirmative action to antagonize whites, the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.

> Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working?

It's been working very well. Racism has been declining since the civil rights movement by all indicators. Equality of opportunity is at an all-time high in the history of the US, the West, and the whole world. You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values. Chief among those values is individual liberty which naturally gives way to equality, and which is the antithesis to collectivist movements such as white supremacy, fascism/nationalism/national-socialism, communism, and so-called "anti-fascism" and "anti-racism" movements that are popular today.

> When has it worked better than affirmative actions?

I speculate (speculation is all we can do for this question) that it has always worked better (and far better) than affirmative action. As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.

> 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.

Depends on how the problem is defined and one's values (hence the "subjectivity" in my original comment).

If the problem is "too much racism", then most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem--racism is deplorable.

If the problem is "certain races and sexes deserve to be treated poorer than others" then of course racism will appear to be the solution. It's an inherently racist viewpoint, and people who espouse that viewpoint are (by definition) racists.

[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.