[wolverine876]

> My classes were like 30:1 or worse male to female. Gender gap being close will always look like hiring bias to me...

How do your personal classes represent the labor supply? The fact is that most college students now are female.

[almatabata]

Yes but they are not really spread out evenly across majors. Certain majors are overwhelmingly female and others are still majority male.

See this statistic from 2017: https://inside.collegefactual.com/stories/the-most-popular-m...

[raxxorraxor]

Pretty accurately I would say. I studied technical computer science. 4.1% of use were women.

I lived in a shared apartment with 2 women and almost all their fellow students were women. Not computer science or anything technical of course.

To me the gap is closing because tech firms have more non-technical positions.

[leereeves]

Close to 60% of college students are female. Why don't we see that as a problem?

Why is acceptable to deny young men equity in education?

[wolverine876]

Maybe start by saying what you think ...

[leereeves]

Ok: I think people who are genuinely working toward equity would advocate equity for all people. Those who only advocate for equity when it favors certain groups aren't really working toward equity at all.

What do you think? Shouldn't university DEI programs be trying to recruit more young men to reduce the gender gap in higher education?

[wolverine876]

Great, thanks for making a clear assertion.

IME, that particular assertion has been discussed at length for years. Is it intellectually curious or interesting to start over again? Why would you want to have the discussion again? But I asked for it, so I'll go along with it a little.

...

Imagine a wealthy hedge fund manager's white male kid, a graduate of Exeter and a reasonably qualfied candidate, is denied admission to Harvard. How does and doesn't that implicate equity? Imagine a bicycle delivery person's Latina female kid, a graduate of an underfunded public school and similarly qualified to the other kid, is denied admission to Harvard, or is admitted but can't afford it. How do those situations differ?

White billionaires and Latinx poor - an extreme example used for simplicity (skipping the real-life complexity of, for example, Latinx billionaires) - are both 'groups', and each individual in both groups should have equal rights and something like equal opportunity. But to infer that the two situations are therefore the same with regard to equity is, IMHO, obviously false - to the point of being dishonest and just disruptive, demanding we spend our time explaining it. So I'm going to skip the explanation and assume we all understand those parts. ...

...

A few thoughts on the issues:

  Discrimination x Power = Harm

The harm caused by discrimination is some of the worst in human history. To cause harm, discrimination requires power. Imagine Native American businesses in Los Angeles refused to hire white people. It would be discriminatory but mostly harmless - the white person's job market is statistically unaffected because Native Americans as a group have little power. But if white people decided not to hire Native Americans, there would be lots of harm; it would effectively end careers and economic opportunity for many Native Americans because white people have enormous power (and such things have happened). Using a ten point scale,

  (1) 10D x 0P = 0H
  (2) 10D x 1P = 10H
  (3) 1D x 10P = 10H

(1) The truly powerless can cause no harm, ipso facto - they are powerless. (2) Even with maximum discrimination, the weak are limited. (3) Even minimal discrimination by the powerful can cause significant harm.

Young male education: IMHO it is a real problem that isn't getting enough attention. I doubt it's tied to race (is there evidence that it varies by race?) and while I suspect it's tied to family wealth, I'm not sure - that is, I could imagine that wealthy males and low-wealth males both perform at 80% of female economic peers, but that still lands wealthy males in college because of economic inequity. Still, I don't know those gender differences are an issue of equity - not every problem is an issue of equity.

> I think people who are genuinely working toward equity would advocate it for all people. Groups who only advocate for equity when it favors certain groups aren't really working toward equity at all.

I agree to a point. First, people have limited resources; they can't solve every problem for everyone; you can't tell a brain surgeon that they are discriminating against cardiac patients. Second, sans harm (see above), there is no issue of equity; nobody needs to advocate for white billionaires (though it seems that more HN commenters advocate for Elon Musk than for poor people in disadvantaged groups).

Most importantly, IME people who raise the parent comment's well-worn question advocate against equity measures for black people, women, and other disadvantaged groups. I don't recall any of them (I don't know you) supporting equity measures for those groups and arguing to add, for example, measures for poor white males.

[leereeves]

> To cause harm, discrimination requires power.

For the sake of argument, I'll grant that rather controversial view. We're talking about discrimination by university administrators and admissions. They hold immense power in world where the college you attend determines the opportunities available to you. They fall in category "(3) Even minimal discrimination by the powerful can cause significant harm".

The rest of your comment is irrelevant and only obscures the issue. The question about a rich white male graduate of Exeter vs a poor Latina graduate of public school, muddles sex, race, and class into one bad example.

When all else is equal, should universities admit a male student before a female student in order to reduce the gender gap?

[wolverine876]

Dismissing it all isn't an argument, it's the lack of one. Make some arguments instead. I'd be particularly interested in hearing how power isn't required for harm (note: for harm, not for discrimination)

Regarding your one actual point: Clearly, certain racial and gender groups have more power than others, and they use it to actively discriminate to some degree - some do it very openly these days.

[slenocchio]

You seem to realize yourself that categorizing people just on race/gender isn't compelling, which is why in your examples you also add the economic conditions to make your point sound correct.

The idea you espouse, in practice, justifies injustice. It's asking children to pay for the sins of their parents. And everyone (even the people who supposedly benefit from this idea) will suffer as a consequence in the long run. You unwittingly sow the seeds of _more_ racial/gender animus, not less.

[wolverine876]

The injustice is there: people discriminate against certain racial and gender (and other) groups which lack power. It's been going on for centuries, so it's not going away on its own.

What shall we do about it? Insisting it's not there doesn't solve the problem. If you have better idea of how to resolve that injustice, let's hear it.

[raxxorraxor]

I disagree, power isn't a requirement for discrimination, you have wrong priors.

In fact making that a premise leads to quite a few assumptions that are clearly wrong that falsification is trivial, even if you could nail any sensible quantification of power.

[wolverine876]

If it's trivial, let's hear it! :)

[raxxorraxor]

Technically he provided exactly the same amount of information that was available to indict tech with being anti-women or something. The exact same amount for that matter.