[MyHypatia]

Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.

I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!

For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.

One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.

In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.

[Manuel_D]

I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.

1. https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...

[kiitos]

Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.

[Manuel_D]

I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.

If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?

When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.

[naijaboiler]

Anonymization wouldn’t work. Turns out people are very very good at picking up subtle signals that might hint at the anonymized identity likely is. What ends up happening is more discrimination rather than less. If you don’t anonymize, people will still discriminate, but they are always aware their decisions may be illegal or unacceptable. But when you anonymize, they just discriminate against anyone that has any hint of belonging to the discriminated class. And now you have given them an out plausible deniability by anonymizing. This has been demonstrably shown to be true over and over again. Anonymizing is an elementary school student solution to a complex phD level type problem

[Manuel_D]

Some interviews I've encountered consisted of uploading code that gets executed on a remote server. Grading is exclusively done on the correct output, runtime, and memory usage. This is a truly anonymous interview that cannot be biased with regards to protected class. How does such an interview pick up on the protected classes of the candidate?

The hostility to anonymized interviews stems from the fact that one cannot discriminate in favor of particular demographics. This is the goal of the above commenter, as stated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830509

[kiitos]

I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.

[Manuel_D]

Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.

And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.

[kiitos]

You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.

[naijaboiler]

This silly solution is often suggested by tech bros who have a really rudimentary understanding of social problems. I guess it makes sense to someone who doesn’t fully understand social issues and thinks of how they would solve it if it was a technical problem. It’s not. Anonymizing does not reduce discrimination. It demonstrably makes it worse. The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.

[Manuel_D]

It's not that the "tech bros" don't understand the problem. It's that DEI advocates tend to misstate the problem they're trying to solve.

> The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.

This isn't reducing discrimination. This is deliberately engaging in discrimination to change demographic outcomes.

We could have avoided a lot of confusion if DEI advocates were honest that their goals are not to eliminate discrimination but rather to employ employ affirmative action to achieve more equitable outcomes. If that's your goal, then of course anonymized hiring doesn't work: if you can't tell which candidate belongs to which demographic, then you don't know who to give advantage to.