Is this just a "the means justify the means" argument or am I missing something?
Discrimination is wrong because of the harm it causes, not because it's a violation of an immutable law of fairness or whatever. There's a fucking lot to balance after all.
In the constitution of my Country (and many others) there's written that "all citizen are equal in front if the law, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age (..)" etc
Nowhere it is said "because it's economically inconvenient"
They are considered human rights, that people inherit as humans when they are born and are inalienable.
So, no.
Even people who discriminate have the right to not be discriminated.
So if I punch you in the face and steal $100 once every day for 30 years, all that is required for perfect fairness is today I merely stop punching you and stealing from you. I get to continue to enjoy my much greater security in life and your reduced ability to compete since I have all your money and have maimed and damaged you. Got it.
For example women in Europe, especially east Europe, were hired to program computers back in the 50s and 60s because it was considered a job for typists, which were mainly women.
Some men were scientists, some were engineers, teachers were highly regarded, but most of them worked horrible jobs in farms where women were never seen, because the job required physical skills and also because men were through they had to provide for the family.
Nobody has ever seen a woman in the European mines, it makes sense though.
Families paid the toll watching their men dying of silicosis and other horrible diseases.
Women got more comfortable job as nurses,because society decided they are natural born caretakers, where the few men in power sometimes abused of them.
So please don't make assumptions based on some modern propaganda, things are much more complex than they look.
Unless you're from the ruling class, we are all largely in the same boat in the end.
Besides, hiring a woman this way, assuming the story is true, is not exactly morale boost material.
That's debatable. What was the impact of the biases against women towards them working STEM jobs? Could it still linger today in having created the cultural environment which is why few women pursue STEM and why it's still predominantly men?
> Research has shown that women are no less capable than men in science and mathematics. But, according to the AAUW, external factors, like a lack of role models, cultures that tend to exclude women, and persistent stereotypes about women’s intellectual abilities, reinforce a wide gender gap.
> What was the impact of the biases against women towards them working STEM jobs?
I guess what OP is saying is that the beneficiaries are largely not people that actually suffered discrimination, they are just people that tick all the boxes.
You can make an argument that women today are still being discriminated against or are in a disadvantaged position because of past discriminations against women. Therefore the women they hired was an appropriate beneficiary.
As research shows, there is still bias against women in hiring, especially in the resume selection process.
And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs because of historically induced cultural biases.
If you discriminated against women in the past so that the profession got taken over by men, had only men's in it, men became all the professors, men became all the role models for the profession, it shouldn't be surprising from a sociological level that women today don't find STEM appealing because it's all men dominated and doesn't seem friendly or inviting to them.
How do you break this cycle is a separate discussion, and there's a seperate argument that affirmative action doesn't work.
> Balance it against nothing. The beneficiaries are not the same people as the victims.
This makes two claims:
1. That the woman that was hired is not at risk of discrimination.
I challenge the truth of this statement, because as the research I linked shows, it seems likely there are still biases against women in hiring processes even today.
2. That women are no longer disadvantaged when it comes to their likelihood of pursuing a STEM career and getting into the field.
I challenge the truth of this statement, because some research also shows there are still socio-cultural biases that turn women away from the field.
Now it's not because I challenge the truth of those statements that I claim to know the truth myself. I don't know the truth.
To me, right now, it appears that:
1. Women still face bias in hiring
2. Women are oddly not pursuing STEM careers
3. Socio-culturaly you can see that it wouldn't be as attractive to women to do so
4. There's a nature vs nurture question mark, but it's hard to say women naturally don't like STEM as much, given there's clearly socio-cultural influences at play, so how do you isolate that variable?
When I take all this, I feel there's a lot of reasons you might want to try to balance things out.
You might want to balance out the still existent hiring bias.
You might want to balance the discrepancy in gender in the field.
You might want to balance the socio-cultural influence, to try and reverse them, making STEM more appealing to women.
Now I say "you might", because it'll depend on your values, but if you value equal opportunity for women, wanting to try and balance those things seem logical to me.
> Should I get some kind of preferential lanes, even thought nothing of the sort ever happened to me?
Possibly yes. There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered. If some of those have affected you as well, you wouldn't have gotten the same opportunities as your peers whose family wouldn't have been discriminated against. Maybe the ripple stoped short and you weren't impacted at all, but we can reason some cases where it wouldn't have, and children of discriminated ancestry would even today be impacted by those second order effects.
> What about truck divers' industry, where what you are claiming as discrimination is undisputable?
I don't know anything about the truck driving industry, so I can't speak to it. But if there's bias and socio-cultural influences that affect people's opportunity I'd probably think the same.
It's a fallacy to ignore that an existing bias reinforces itself and requires active counter force to change it.
There are all kinds of well understood factors that influence women to avoid many typically male populated environments that are caused by the men and not by the women's simple innate disinterest in the topic.
They are voluntarily choosing to avoid being abused and insulted and disrespected, not voluntarily choosing not to be engineers or competitive gamers or whatever.
As a side note, you can't use the word fallacy as a synonym for wrong.
A fallacy is when your arguments don't actually prove that the conclusion is right, yet convinces people that it is. It's an error in reasoning that leads you to believe the conclusion derives from the premise, when it doesn't. It doesn't even mean the conclusion is wrong, just that it doesn't derive from the premise and arguments and as such hasn't actually been proven right.
So you should say: "It's wrong to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination".
Because"that X can be fought with a variation of X" isn't fallacious, this is a logical possibility. A variation of X could in some circumstances be used used to fight X. There's no error in logic here.
Let's take as a given that there was discrimination in the past. Unless you have a time machine you can't go back and change that. Hiring more people of the discriminated-against group now benefits new workers of that group (who haven't been discriminated against because they haven't had jobs before) but that does nothing to rectify the past wrongs, it just creates new victims (those who lost out on jobs that they should have gotten.)
The fundamental problem here is that attempts to redress discrimination pretend that groups can be victims. Nope, victims are always individuals. Does killing a Hatfield bring back a McCoy?? (Note that the original implementation of affirmative action was needed to break the problem of the social contract against hiring blacks. That's long since been done, the program should have been dismantled 40 years ago.)
As for continuing discrimination against "women", look more carefully at the pattern--the "discrimination" is the result of having children. Taking time out of the labor market (or working fewer hours while still in the labor market) translates to less experience and thus a lower value. When you control for actual hours worked (do *not* have a "full time" category!!), actual years of experience (maternity leave is at best zero experience, likely negative experience as that's time not keeping current with changes) and actual position (no lumping similar categories--pediatrician pays less than cardiologist) almost all the supposed discrimination vanishes. Compare young, childless, degreed women and they're making *more* than their male counterparts.
My point is focused on equal opportunity. Any individual should have the same opportunity to pursue a tech career, irregardless of their gender. Why tech careers? Because those are really good job opportunities.
What people are trying to "balance" is the unequal opportunities between women and men.
Now I'll assume that you value this goal, because otherwise we need to have a very different conversation.
I've assumed in your prior comment that "Balance it against nothing" refered to you arguing there is no gender inequality of opportunity in tech.
Now, if that was true, you'd expect to see a proportional representation of genders in the field, but that's not what we observe at all, it skews heavily male.
How do we explain this?
Based on your other comments and comments from other commenters, I saw "autism" skews male (I'm not sure about the accuracy of that fact), and tech skews autistic (I'd need data on this), and maybe that explains it.
I also saw some Nature vs Nurture, that maybe women are naturally less interested.
And I saw child bearing, but this is part of the goal, motherhood shouldn't affect your opportunities otherwise it's no longer equal since women have to give birth, and we're back at your gender impacting negatively your opportunities.
Now I'm not actually saying these couldn't be part of the explanation. They could, and if some of those were exclusively the cause, it would explain why we see a male skew in tech, and it would mean the skew isn't due to social inequalities, but women's own personal choice.
What I'm saying is that this conclusion is highly debatable, because there are other explanations that hold more or less merit.
The two I provided I backed up with research.
The gender discrepancy could also be due to:
1. Resume bias, which could indicate a greater trend of overall hiring bias, that might even expand to bias in school assignment grading, school entry application selection, parental encouragement, even women's own self-perceived qualifications.
2. Socio-cultural influences, like the lack of role models, an unwelcoming tech community environment that is intimidating to women or hostile to them, etc.
Again, I'm not saying these are the explanations for sure.
What I'm saying is that they're likely explanations with research backing.
So when you say "Balance it against nothing", you imply you know the absolute truth about this, that you just know for sure there isn't any inequality here whatsoever, and I simply disagree, you've not demonstrated the lack of inequality in a convincing manner, there are bodies of research in fact that indicate that there is still some level of inequality, and that it could be this remaining inequality that explains the gender gap.
That's why I say: "That's debatable". There are as likely, or arguably more likely explanations that would indicate lingering inequality.
But we’re coming up on 70 years - nearly a century itself - of so-called “positive” discrimination (affirmative action). Almost nobody alive can even remember what you’re balancing out.