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But, er, doesn't the observation that the actual ratio is different evidence constitute "evidence"? Fowler's point is that lopsided ratios existed many times in the past, and people argued that they were natural, but they turned out not to be, as was proven when the barriers were torn down and the ratios equalized. So in that sense, he's arguing that ratio observations do not count as "evidence" in this context. However, what he's overlooking is the fact that in most cases, those imbalanced ratios in the past were buttressed by direct barriers to entry - women and minorities were usually actively excluded, and then when the active discrimination stopped, things started to equalize, often very rapidly (the "Jackie Robinson" effect). We have seen this happen in most fields (tech has just about the worst gender imbalance in any field apart from nursing). And now we're at a point where explicit barriers to entry are all but absent. So as time goes on, the observation that the ratios are not approaching 1:1 in tech suggests more and more strongly that there's something else going on, and that the methods used to create parity in other fields (fighting -isms, mainly) are not addressing the root cause of inequality in tech. That's not to say that this is evidence that there's not some other sort of more subtle discrimination going on; that's certainly possible, and I'm open to evidence that something in tech is somehow worse than in other fields (I've never seen any numbers to suggest this, and when looking at data like salary gaps, tech appears to be more equal than most fields). But it does mean that we should be wary about drawing the same causal conclusions that we drew 60 years ago when the situation was very different... |