[didibus]

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.

- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/06/women-in-stem...

Now I'm not sure if trying to hire more women can really reverse this, but I do think there's at least an argument to be made.

Factor in that there's also still resume bias against women: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/uncovering-hirin...

Where it's shown that women need higher GPAs to be perceived as equaly qualified as lower GPA male equivalents.

And you could also make an argument for needing to fight the still existent hiring bias against them.

[peoplefromibiza]

> 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.

Otherwise it wouldn't take much to find them.

[didibus]

Yes, and that's debatable.

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.

[peoplefromibiza]

> Yes, and that's debatable

You said it, ok, but what do you wanna debate about?

Data shows that, at best, some people in some categories are being hired.

> And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs because of historically induced cultural biases.

Doesn't imply that women hired today have ever been discriminated or come from families that were.

My family was anti fascist and discriminates during fascism, more than that, they were persecuted.

Should I get some kind of preferential lanes, even thought nothing of the sort ever happened to me?

> got taken over by men, had only men's in it, men became all the professors

this is at best unprovable.

in the worst case it is simply bad faith.

What about truck divers' industry, where what you are claiming as discrimination is undisputable?

[didibus]

I'm responding to:

> 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.

[peoplefromibiza]

> This makes two claims

It makes only one claim: that the people being hired now are not the victims of past discrimination.

Which arguably very probable, unless proven otherwise.

> 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.

there are biases even against men. There are biases against almost every category you can think of.

Look t the layoffs, it's men in majority.

The reason is obvious, still the statistics don't lie, right?

I'll ask you again, why isn't that a problem in the truck driver industry, were it's only men?

And if that's true, why is it so hard for companies to find women to hire.

A thing that is evident to anyone working in tech, there are simply much less women candidates than men, companies that need employees should or shouldn't be allowed to look in the largest possible pool?

Last but not least, tech is not STEM.

Tech is simply a job, you don't need a PHD or a thesis on the theory of everything to participate.

In US in the 50s and 60s women accounted for 40-50% of computer programmers, according to research by Claire L. Evans. In the 80S it was 36%. Now it's 26%.

What changed is not discrimination, but that the industry first started asking for prior experience with computers, which men had more than women.on average, also professors started to ask more from their students, thanks to the boom of personal computers, programming classes were in high demand and the number of seats was still very limited. The real divide became between who had a computer at home and who hadn't. So many men too had no access to tech jobs or higher education in tech, it's not only women.

A fun fact: I was born in Italy in the 70s, I had a C64 as a kid that my sister hated, not because it was for boys, but because she thought it was boring. She liked books. She has become a scholar of literature.

Fast forward to my teen years, I was playing volleyball and had no interest for computers or programming, I was a sports guy.

Then in high school there was a limited number course for the final 3 years that taught CS and programming that I enrolled to given I had very good grades because if I was admitted I could stop studying German and Geography, that I had no love for. We were half boys and half girls in my class, the girls simply had no interest for computers, except a couple that went to study CS at uni with me. Boys were even worse, they could only think about soccer. I was very hood at it, I don't think that's because I'm special, it's simply because I studied and did the exercises at home. On paper before buying my first PC! But AFAIK many of my classmates, men and women, are now working as some kind of programmers because the request is so high that even the not so skilled have a good chance of being hired (yeah, some are doing Cobol...)

> There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered

I disagree.

There are other effects that are more important than me and my family: fascism was defeated and nobody suffered again because of it.

Which is exactly what my family wanted.

Being a victim is not a full time job, you are a victim only if you are one, not if you think you are.

[didibus]

I'm not really seeing what you're rebutting?

Are you denying the results of the research I linked that shows resume bias? Or think the research wasn't thorough enough?

Are you saying that you believe the only reason for there being less woman in tech is their nature, that their gender makes them naturally less interested in tech? And your only data point here is an anecdote about you and your sister?

> What changed is not discrimination, but that the industry first started asking for prior experience with computers, which men had more than women

You don't see this as gender discrimination? Why did men have more access to computers? Why was the access to computers based on gender?

> It makes only one claim: that the people being hired now are not the victims of past discrimination.

I guess we interpret what they meant differently. I didn't interpret it to mean the victim of past discriminations, they never use the word "past" or refer to the past in any way.

My interpretation and what my rebuttal was for is that they're saying that the current women are no longer at a disadvantage and don't suffer any disproportionate discrimination anymore.

Basically the question is, are women today being pushed away from pursuing a tech career, and do they face additional obstacles in doing so if they try?

The person I responded too seemed to imply that the answer is No they're not. I'm not convinced because research still demonstrates that obstacles do exist which aren't seen for men.

> The real divide became between who had a computer at home and who hadn't. So many men too had no access to tech jobs or higher education in tech, it's not only women

Class discrimination is also important to fight. Access to opportunities shouldn't be reserved only to the rich. But women are in an even worse position if they're also from a poor family.

> Look t the layoffs, it's men in majority.

It's obvious that when most employees are men, most of the employees laid off would be men as well? Maybe I didn't get what you meant here?

> A thing that is evident to anyone working in tech, there are simply much less women candidates than men, companies that need employees should or shouldn't be allowed to look in the largest possible pool?

Exactly, that's the other point, there's less woman in the pool, so you need to make sure they don't get starved out, and to increase the representation of women in the pool you need to go out of your way to recruit women, it's one possible way to break the cycle.

I feel like we're talking a bit past each other at this point though. Maybe I get the impression the disagreement is on the Nature vs Nurture part? Are you explaining all the discrepancies as inherent to being a woman vs a man? That it's all just caused by natural interest and motivation?

I think this is an unanswered question personally, and I'm not seeing conclusive evidence that you can conclude it's purely a natural based outcome. Your anecdote about your sister really doesn't meet my bar for proof unfortunately.

[willnonya]

It's a fallacy to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination. But then that isn't the only fallacy you're promoting is it...

[Brian_K_White]

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.

[didibus]

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.

[LorenPechtel]

You miss the point.

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.

[didibus]

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.