[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.

[LorenPechtel]

>> 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?

If this is evidence of gender discrimination it's by the parents, not by the companies doing the hiring. The companies are doing nothing wrong in hiring the most qualified even if that skews highly male.

The reality is that the autism spectrum is *highly* overrepresented in STEM, especially the solitary pursuits (things like programming where the job is a worker at a computer.) The autism spectrum skews highly male. That's going to skew such jobs male. (And, personally, I think this actually understates it--autism is not binary, but a spectrum. That means there's plenty more that lean in that direction without reaching the point of qualifying for a diagnosis.)

> 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.

And the antidiscrimination efforts do virtually nothing about this. Companies neither know nor care what someone's class background is, they just care what they can do.

> 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.

You're assuming discrimination perpetuated by the employers, yet the only sources of discrimination you cite have nothing to do with the employers. There's no cycle to break.

[didibus]

I'm not saying the employer is discriminating. Read my other reply to you, I think it clarifies better what I'm saying.

My argument is that, there's a great possibility that gender inequality persists today, and that it contributes to the gender gap. Not that I'm convinced it does for sure, but that it's still highly likely it does, based on research data and other reasonable hypothesis.

Therefore, some companies are trying to combat this possible inequality, by choosing to prioritize a similarly qualified women candidate over a qualified men, in order to limit the effect of possible hiring bias, and promote women representation in tech, in hope to make their workplace more women friendly.

If there is in fact lingering gender inequality, this should help combat it, and it's arguably a good thing (we can separately discuss if in practice it works to combat it or not, but at least it's understandable why they'd do it).

If it turns out there isn't any lingering gender inequality against women, I agree that this would appear to put a bias against men now, creating an inequality against them.

This is where it gets a little tricky, because now it's about your belief of the true cause. I see some men worried about their own career chances often believe that probably there isn't inequality and it's just personal choice. But I also don't understand why you'd worry about it in that case, if women just don't want to become programmers, no amount of policy encouragement would change that, and you've got nothing to worry about.

I also personally feel the evidence for lingering gender inequality appears stronger, and I think you can learn valuable insight by trying some corrective policies and also seeing the outcome. The more policies fail to reduce the gender gap, the more you learn the factors that have or don't have an impact on it, eventually that could lead us to know the real cause.

[LorenPechtel]

Sure there are differences. However, you aren't showing that companies are discriminating to cause that difference. Companies shouldn't bear the burden of righting wrongs that they didn't cause, especially in cases where it's not at all certain there is even a wrong going on.

What you are missing is that if women just don't want to become programmers the drive to not discriminate means companies will be overpaying for female programmers.

And we have seen that policies aimed at reducing discrimination had a big effect in the civil rights era but then accomplish virtually nothing since. Instead, we see wilder and wilder efforts to "prove" discrimination while ignoring the marketplace is saying it's the other way around.

[didibus]

> However, you aren't showing that companies are discriminating to cause that difference

Correct, I'm also making no claims that they are. The discrimination, if there is any, appears to come from socio-cultural causes.

> What you are missing is that if women just don't want to become programmers the drive to not discriminate means companies will be overpaying for female programmers

I'm not following that, can you explain? I'd assume they offer similar pay to man and woman, as far as I know, there's no evidence they're paying woman more, in fact, seems to be the opposite.

> And we have seen that policies aimed at reducing discrimination had a big effect in the civil rights era but then accomplish virtually nothing since

Ya, I'm not sure that you can solve the problem at that level either.

In practice, I think women hiring pushes like this has actually caused some men to be even more hostile to women workers, and that's actually having the opposite effect, work environments are even less welcoming to women, and their credibility is being questioned even more, as people claim they were hired to meet quotas, etc.

It's hard to change socio-cultural attitudes. And it only takes a few derogatory men to make the field toxic to women.

The issue is, what else can you do?