You know what, though? If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do.
Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region.
But then, when I listen to the stories women in tech (for example) tell, and they do tell a LOT of the same stories, it's clear we're pretty far from equality of opportunity.
And I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names... guess who doesn't get called in for an interview.
So I just don't buy that most people even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).
> Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region.
That is a drastic oversimplification.
The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the pool of people who have the right education and experience.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who graduated with the appropriate degree for which they're hiring (in most cases).
Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who got accepted into those schools.
Which can only hope to be reflective of those who chose that education/career path to begin with.
Which can only hope to be reflective of the population that sought out things like math and science when in secondary school.
Which only then can only hope to be reflective of the general population.
At each step there is filtration. It's affected by people's upbringing, their role models, what advertising they were heavily exposed to as impressionable children, who their friends are, who their teachers were, whether computers were popular when they were going through school, the list goes on and on.
The problem of under and over-representation in tech is a real one, but pretending that companies just need to somehow make up for all of this filtration, at the very very end of a literal lifetime-sized pipeline, is folly. Outreach needs to happen much, much, much sooner than that. At the end of the day, companies are at the mercy of who's in their hiring pool.
Since graduating college I've stayed continuously employeed at several different Bay Area tech startups, so I'm pretty sure I have at least decent technology skills. Yet I've been to several interviews where questions about race/ethnicity were brought up (and I failed to get offers from those companies that ask such questions). I can only imagine what it's like being a woman going for these positions. My point, a lot of the filters these companies put up are totally artificial.
I even had a chance to ask a well known SV entrepreneur/investor about what VCs look for, and he said one of the things is "people who look like him." I appreciated his honesty, but it certainly seems like there is a lot of talent that is ignored because people and companies are using poor hueristics.
How do questions of race and ethnicity come up in an interview? It's illegal to ask that and they can be sued so usually they're very careful to not touch the subject.
It's not illegal to ask about race, but, asking about race is a good indication you are discriminating based on race, which is illegal.
As to why they do it? I'm guessing that they either don't know not to bring up race or they don't care about discriminating based on race because they probably won't have any consequences.
I've seen plenty of casual workplace sexism and racism in my life. It happens.
It's not illegal to ask about race; it's illegal to discriminate by race. Companies usually avoid asking such questions because they can be used as evidence of race-based discrimination should the candidate decide to sue. The same applies to other fedaral protected classed (sexual orientation, religion, etc)
There is an easy way to discriminate on race without asking about race (aside from the obvious) -- pay. Lower the pay enough and only certain races (those at a competitive disadvantage in the job market) will apply.
At my previous employer, there were some positions with salaries so low that the only people who applied were foreigners who were so desperate that they were willing to take it. White Americans (and American-born Indian Americans for that matter) with computer science degrees simply had more options than to take such a terrible role at such a terrible salary. It had nothing to do with the company discriminating.
One white guy told me his buddies used the word "nigger," and why was this such a big deal? Another person started off saying "I can't ask you anything illegal, so let me ask you this," took a long pause, which was then followed up by a programming puzzle about monkeys. None of these questions were flat out illegal to ask, but from other software engineering interviews I've been in they're certainly not standard questions.
That's not even the craziest interviews I've had. I had one at a pre-funding startup in a warehouse. When I got in there were several rifles and pistols on the conference table. Allegedly they did security contracting and were looking to "pivot."
None of what I've said has happened at large companies I've interviewed with like Google or Uber, but small startups definitely have some "interesting" practices.
As someone whose both given and taken several interviews, this is highly abnormal. (Though, I'm essentially WASP, so perhaps I don't receive them.) There is (IMO) no legitimate reason to ask questions of race or ethnicity in a interview for a software engineer or similar (as it's simply irrelevant) … especially in today's world where we're trying to fix any discrimination in the field.
OK, but if you're interviewing over skype with me and your name is Abdullah Izrahim and your address is Dubai... it's not unreasonable for me to ask if you're able to work in the EU...
I am sure this has been mentioned to death. But I always find this contradictory. Companies cannot be soley profit driven if at same time they artifically reducing supply of eligable candidates. That makes no business sense.
So if companies are rejecting someone that means as whole (read net), they are expecting more bang for the buck.
And Oracle would be near bottom in such list. Oracle hire Indians because its cheaper not because of some altruism. At least until Indian Govt makes it artifically expensive.
Illiquid markets, stable equilibria (that are not at global minima), and irrational decision making.
Unless your model accounts for such things, it's too simplified. Particularly when it comes to human factors. And if your model is that deficient, it's not really providing useful insights.
Modeling complex phenomena well is tough. But you need to have enough humility to understand when your toy model might be deceiving you.
It's not as though the company is purposely discriminating though. People naturally discriminate and it takes conscious effort to stop yourself from doing so.
At least that's what I was told at the talk about diversity and inclusion during my orientation at one of those big tech companies.
Apparently it's because we benefited from being able to make quick judgments before civilized society was a thing.
> Companies cannot be soley profit driven if at same time they artifically reducing supply of eligable candidates.
If there is a strong shortage of supply, you can be sure a lot of people will get over their prejudice -- but in labor markets, there often tend to be more offer than demand, so companies can choose whoever they want, without hurting the business whatsoever.
Now, having done a few job applications myself: there is apparently a tax break or something for hiring a person of color, because race is always included in the job application, and always under the same header as questions for, say, disabled or veteran status.
However, asking in the interviews is unheard of, at least in shudder retail. And while outright denyig someone for their race isn't as common as you might think, people do instinctively like people who look like them, and they also have this bad habit of not questioning it when they like something...
There is no tax break in the US for hiring certain groups of people (at least in regards to race and ethnicity). This data is requested for reporting purposes only. This is how companies can release "diversity reports" or answer questions when EEOC investigators start asking questions.
I seem to be lucky in that I haven't directly seen any racist hiring policies. But, then again, I've only worked hourly retail jobs; for all I know, the higher you go, the less likely a hispanic man is to be hired. And it doesn't help that there's so many variables to control for--as other comments stated, it's filters all the way down. As an example ffrom the entertainment industry, I have never owned a computer powerful enough to handle both running a recently released game and recording footage of the gameplay, which means that my dreams of becoming a Youtube Star are rather limited. And don't even get me started on capture cards. The rich kid down the block can afford it because his parents buy it for him; my parents don't, and the reason for that could extend as far back as the lessons my grandmother learned when she had to work her way to the top of the Georgia Pacific packaging plant where she made her living.
You're right, the problem is bigger than a company. It goes deep, society-deep. And I don't think anyone would say "poor black kids have a fair shake, right up until Oracle doesn't hire them". Of course not. Some groups get shafted from birth, by being born into poor communities, by being born into communities where the police split their heads for looking the way they do.
You're right, it's not just on some tech company to fix societal racism.
What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!"
I mean, jesus, the status quo does not need any defense. It's already winning by default.
> What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!"
It's because we've been in roles in companies like these, dealt with diversity and hiring policies that seemed ineffective, counter-intuitive, and bureaucratic, yet there still always seems to be this cloud over us that assumes we're all secretly just racist.
It feels like we already bend over backwards to try to hire diverse candidates and comply with policies that suggest / require that. I'm sure Google, Oracle, and Palantir certainly have them. Yet these lawsuits have these big bold headlines basically implying the companies' policies are racist based on (if you think other factors are much bigger causes) unreasonable assessments. When we see it happen to them, we know it can happen to us, and it's easy to get defensive.
Everyone is carrying around unconscious biases in them. It's built into being human, so bullshit if you're about to say you're somehow immune.
We're also all biased to think the status quo is the way things ought to be, so when we see a company that's mostly white folks hiring a few more minorities, suddenly MINORITIES ARE EVERYWHERE.
Look, the problem isn't that you or I have unconscious biases. That's normal. That's human.
The problem is that we insist we don't, we're doing everything right already, and there's nothing wrong. That's where the problem is. That's how this shitty status quo that has effectively locked minorities into a second-class life gets perpetuated.
> Everyone is carrying around unconscious biases in them. It's built into being human, so bullshit if you're about to say you're somehow immune.
> Look, the problem isn't that you or I have unconscious biases. That's normal. That's human.
Agreed, and I don't think I am (or anyone else is) immune.
> The problem is that we insist we don't, we're doing everything right already, and there's nothing wrong. That's where the problem is. That's how this shitty status quo that has effectively locked minorities into a second-class life gets perpetuated.
I'm not insisting we don't. My point is that it's easy to get defensive when it's implied that you're racist over and over again regardless of the truthfulness.
It's not even good for the people allegedly being discriminated against. When focus and resources are put on the wrong area (e.g. tech company employee racial proportions), it just frustrates those of us in the industry and ignores the actual reasons for the issue (mostly cultural). We could be spending that money and resources toward getting girls into tech at a young age, or getting more computers into inner-city schools. Something that might actually affect the hiring pool.
But we don't have that discussion because the lawsuits imply the problem is with tech companies. Whether it is or not isn't even a discussion because it appears to be rampant if you've never been in a hiring role in the tech industry. If you have, you know what the hiring pool looks like, and you know you (and other companies) are being held to an unreachable standard if you're expected to align with racial proportions that don't apply to tech.
> What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!"
Because the problem actually does lie elsewhere. Being a corporation is not evidence of guilt.
I totally feel you and I agree, I was just pointing out that it's really difficult to get a tech workforce that's reflective of the general population.
Maybe my defensiveness comes from the fact that I'm in a hiring position in one of these big companies, and I'm fully accustomed to how hard it is to find candidates outside the typical racial and gender mix you tend to see in tech.
Not that it isn't worth it to try, but I just think we should be careful about placing too much blame in any one place... because it's so easy to refute (since it's not 100% the company or hiring manager's fault) and then real subtleties can be lost in the discussion.
> What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!"
I guess because as people who are likely to be subject to those hiring practices, they like them as they currently are.
>The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified.
This is a weak assumption to base the rest of your chain on. It falsely posits that the company isn't in control of who seeks employment there. In reality, the company controls where and how it advertises job openings and how it markets itself towards potential employees. When a startup advertises a hackathon with incentives of "hot women to serve you beverages", they can't claim to be helpless victims of an applicant pool devoid of female engineers. And while most examples of encouraging or discouraging certain demographics aren't as blatant as this egregious-and-yet-actually-happened example, there are plenty of subtler but very strong ways companies discourage women and minorities from applying.
>I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names...
There is no polite way to put it, but I would be surprised if among black applicants having a "black" name did not predict worse actual performance than having a "white" name. The same goes for white applicants with "white trash" names. If there are Asian equivalents, same for them.
You know, resumes contain other signaling information on them other than the applicants' names. It would definitely surprise me if you could predict any performance metrics with statistical significance based on name alone.
I mean honestly imagine a resume that says: graduated from Yale 2011 with a BS in Computer Science. Worked for Qualcomm for 2 years before taking a job as a PM at Google. Currently looking for a new job to move back to the east coast to be nearer to their family.
And you're telling me you can predict this person's future job performance based on whether their last name is Park, Lewis, or Johnson?
If you start with $1 million in pennies and I start with $1 million in pennies and we play a game with a fair coin: heads I win, tails you win - with the winner getting a penny, guess what happens if we play the game over and over again? Over time, one of us will have $0, and the other will have $2 million.
So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time.
The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.
A fair coin means that it is equally likely for you to take a penny from me as it is for me to take a penny from you.
For instance, if we play the game 1000 times, heads might come up 505 times and tails might come up 495 times. Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0.
Therefore, over time, we'll both stay at $1 million.
> If we actually had equality of opportunity, it doesn't seem like we'd see the kind of disparity we do.
There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this.
You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players.
You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice.
Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.
What you are suggesting, but won't say explicitly is that the black kid who wants to be a CRUD developer won't be good at it; that's a rubbish argument.
The NBA is much smaller than entire industries: there are more CEOs than NBA players.
That's almost what he's saying, but the devil is in the details.
He's saying that within the Black community, there are fewer people who (for whatever reason) have the skills necessary to be a CRUD developer.
Reasons may include, but are not limited to:
- poverty and access to education
- cultural factors pertaining to the value of higher education
- cultural factors pertaining to the types of jobs that are valued (e.g.: perhaps Blacks take jobs that confer a certain status or that are seen as directly giving back to the community)
If this is true -- and I personally find it plausible -- then we would indeed expect blacks to be under-represented in software design.
tl;dr: Perhaps the bias in hiring is a reflection of a bias in competence. Perhaps Blacks are, on the whole, poorer candidates? If that's true, then the correct approach is to focus on education rather than punishing employers.
You are making a totally different argument - not refining OPs original one. If you think yours is a refinement of the same argument, then you could perhaps state which of your listed reasons explains OPs lack of success with the NBA?
For what it's worth - I do not disagree with your argument, but I do not think it adequately explains the situation.
OT: it's somewhat surreal for me to experience HN going all out for the status quo (regardless of subject). I just wanted to get that off my chest - carry on.
I completely agree with you but I'm not sure that we should tackle this problem by targeting employers alone, I think it is a much wider reaching social problem.
Discriminatory hiring practices are but one of many symptoms of the disease.
Interestingly, someone pointed out in another discussion that women are more apt to be found in careers that have educational barriers to entry. Women also obtain college degrees at a rate that is meaningfully higher than men, presumably in part because they want access to those restricted professions.
Is the social problem that the discriminated are pushed to 'over achieve' while the rest have no expectations placed on them and are more likely to fall into whatever work is available? I think this definitely holds true for the tech profession where for many of us the jobs appeared as extension to hobbies, not something we actually sat down to plan to do.
If we were pressured to go to school and get a good, well respected, job above all else – which I think we can say certain segments of the population are – the path into tech would have been far less obvious. Especially when you go back several years ago, before tech was 'cool', but even now doctor or lawyer sounds better than programmer.
Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described:
>most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).
The fact is we already have things like state-sponsored racist entrance policies to our most prestigious educational programs. In law school, it can be several standard deviations worth of LSAT points-- that is a VERY big deal. Even pointing this out, though, means someone is going to flip this on its head and misconstrue it, calling me the evil monster you described.
As I said in another comment, you're never going to see equality of outcome. The NBA will never be dominated by people of Asian descent. Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs. Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men. Men will always have more statistical outliers existing in the "fat tails" of male distributions relative to distributions of women. People are different. It doesn't mean better, or worse. For example, I'm not that exceptionally good at maths, but my friend is -- he's not any better of a person than I, though, and no sane person would make that argument. There's nothing wrong with being different. Demanding that everyone be the same will end up with us in Harrison Bergeron's world, and in that long-run scenario everyone ends up losing except those who take joy in ruling over others.
I believe it important to ensure everyone has equal outcome with respect to human rights, civil rights, and human dignity. There is no good reason why we cannot provide everyone with these. I believe that's where attention should be focused, and we're getting off track by pretending everyone is the same and demanding that the only reason for anything else is that the NBA is racist against Asians! (or coding companies are racist/sexists against whomever it is that doesn't have coding jobs).
>The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a claim on behalf of five women against an oil drilling company in another state. According to the complaint, the women applied for jobs to work as floor hands on the oil rigs, but they were turned down. The women allegedly all had the proper qualifications to be able to perform the functions of the job.
>The women were allegedly told that females were not hired on the rig because it was populated by all men and that women would not fit into the company's "man camp" mentality. The women also claim they were turned down because they were too attractive. If they were hired, they were purportedly told they would be a distraction to the men, who would be unable to get their work done.
No sane person genuinely believes just as many woman as men want to work on oil rigs, or that it's even close. That's a very surprising case, yet very American, lawsuit though.
If it's surprising to you that there are women who want to work on oil rigs, and want that badly enough to go through the trouble of making a case out of it, then you may need to update your beliefs about what it means to be a woman.
I unfortunately think you are undermining your own argument here with this focus.
It's clear that institutional biases and societal biases exist, and that some of these biases may act as steering currents for certain people to go into certain careers. However, there always will be some cases of people who like to "steer against the current" and work in a field that's outside the society-traditional bias in one way or another (gender or otherwise).
A good goal, I think, is to ensure that merit is the chief qualification for employment. Statements such as (paraphrasing) "oil rigs are a man's club" and "pretty women would be a distraction" is way too sweeping -- lazy group collective thinking at its most absolute, playing on stereotypes of both women and men. Humans have a wide range of abilities and behaviors and it doesn't always divide neatly in binary form.
From a personal standpoint, I would call this biased group-think sort of hiring practices as far from optimal. If someone can do the job well, they should do it if they are good at it. I do know someone, for instance, who's a female welder. Apparently, only 5% of welders are women. Well, she's one of them and from all indications she's good at it. Luckily, the place she works at doesn't have a "welding is a MAN's job" sort of attitude.
(Note that this bias can also apply in reverse. Think of the current societal bias with men teaching elementary school, for instance.)
Now, whether or not government enforced action (eg, to what degree, and what tools, governments should use to challenge the bias) is a good thing or not, I think that's more of an open question. The truth is, in some cases, some people hold onto stereotype so heavily, that they will literally threaten people who challenge this "norm" with harassment and violence. Clearly in this sort of case, the government should be involved.
However, for something like standard hiring practices, I'm a little fuzzy as to how much government should dictate anti-discrimination policy, if any. I wouldn't mind seeing more data in this regard; at this point, I don't know how effective various tools have been at eliminating lazy hiring groupthink, or whether they aren't terribly effective at anything but increasing resentment.
>A good goal, I think, is to ensure that merit is the chief qualification for employment
I agree with you
>It's clear that institutional biases and societal biases exist, and that some of these biases may act as steering currents for certain people to go into certain careers.
We agree on that, too
>If someone can do the job well, they should do it if they are good at it. I do know someone, for instance, who's a female welder. Apparently, only 5% of welders are women. Well, she's one of them and from all indications she's good at it. Luckily, the place she works at doesn't have a "welding is a MAN's job" sort of attitude.
That's good. I would never want to work somewhere that had an attitude that "this is a man's job, only men can do it"
>Now, whether or not government enforced action (eg, to what degree, and what tools, governments should use to challenge the bias) is a good thing or not, I think that's more of an open question.
I agree with you there as well. Even though I wouldn't want to work for a company that refused to hire women due to some illogical bigotry, I don't think it's government's role to force results on to who companies can hire.
Look, we agree on almost everything, but I think you and others are missing my point because this is an emotionally sensitive topic for some people, and one that the media has also blown out of proportion. The idea that there are no differences between people is totally fraudulent. When are we going to sue the NBA for discriminating against Asians? What's the point if we don't? There are huge differences even between men and women. Serena and Venus Williams claimed they could beat any man in Tennis, and so they ended up playing a 203'rd ranked player "after he had a case of beer and a smoke," and neither could barely score a single point against him. There are differences between people and that's the way it is.
If any of these people arguing against this actually cared about human rights or civil liberties they'd have said so by now. What they really care about are their feelings. That's what this is about - that, and lawyers cashing in on new diversity laws.
You are insane if you think auto mechanics, miners, truck drivers, plumbers, construction workers, landscapers, or working on fishing vessels, or other physically demanding, laborious jobs, are not preferred more by men than women.
Yeah, and girls prefer pink... How much of this is because of how women are brought up, believing that these are mens jobs, rather than by nature? Women do plenty of physically demanding jobs, just not generally these stereotypical "mens" jobs.
Hell, if you look at poorer countries, you see women doing all kinds of physically demanding stuff like carrying water for miles. Its not that they can't or won't do them when they have to, its that when they have a choice that they don't and I believe that's because from a young age and in media these things are portrayed as very un-womanly.
In poor countries, there are plenty of women doing physically exhausting jobs, but also plenty of women pursuing engineering careers. On the other hand, in many rich countries most jobs have huge gender disparities. It all comes down to the freedom of choice given to people -- if you're rich and you're free to choose what you are going to do, you'll choose whatever you like the most.
I agree with what you say. My point is just that "whatever you like the most" is biased by your upbringing, culture and media. Hence my "girls prefer pink" comment - that's not nature, its nurture - because we're brought up to associate pink with femininity.
Did you know that young monkeys of many species (rhesus, bonobo) have pretty gendered preference when it comes to the toy choice? Female monkeys prefer soft toys like teddy bears, while male prefer mechanical toys, like cars on wheels. Google "monkey gender toy preference", there has been tons of research on it.
This means that even if preference for pink was purely by nurture (which I also consider unlikely), the data on toy preference strongly suggests that preference for certain jobs or activities is not purely nurture, and has at least some nature aspect.
Now, it is difficult to quantify how much exactly is the split between nature and nurture, one of the reasons being the fact that lots of what you would call nurture would never take place if a nature didn't provide people with preferences in the first place. However, blaming everything on "upbringing, culture and media" is certainly incongruent with reality.
Of course it is. Our country has spent 14 trillion on wars in recent years while we can't provide everyone with healthcare, or even clean drinking water. This issue is not about civil liberties or human rights. This is about people's feelings who have political representation. Lawyers who can profit off of it. And an increasingly authoritarian, surveillance, human rights abusing, police state that wants to control the people it rules over. Harrison Bergeron, we will be seeing you soon in our future.
>“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
― George Orwell, 1984
If people were really so equal, the NBA should be sued by Asians. There have been 2 (2!) women in history who have been able to dunk a basketball in a NCAA game. I could dunk a basketball in high school. Give me a break, the whole thing is ridiculously fraudulent. I would not want to work somewhere that had some bigoted, awful idea and attitude that a 'woman can not do a man's job,' I would never want to work somewhere like that -- but that's not the role of government to decide. We need people in government who are going to fight for civil liberties and human rights, people who will progress humanity off this planet and into the stars. People who will fight against corruption. Instead we get people who want to take advantage of people's feelings for their own profit or security.
"You are insane if you think auto mechanics, miners, truck drivers, plumbers, construction workers, landscapers, or working on fishing vessels, or other physically demanding, laborious jobs, are not preferred more by men than women."
Then why developers are mostly men?
And why there is more and more female football/soccer players?
It might be harder for females to get muscles, compared to men but it does not mean they do not want to do and can do physically demanding jobs.
The heaviest thing an auto mechanic typically lifts is a tire. Everything else is going to be lifted by a hoist, because no human, male or female, can pull an engine out of a car. Auto mechanic is, in fact, a skilled job involving a mental model of a very complex system, diagnosis, testing, research, and tool usage.
Modern mining is done primarily by machines which are tended to by mechanics. Ever wonder why there are so few mining jobs these days? That would be automation improving the efficiency and taking away manual jobs.
Speaking of which, truck drivers... will be obsolete soon. Even so, driving is not a task that inherently favors upper body strength.
OK, so the physical argument holds no water. What's left? Prejudice and social expectations -- which is to, say a prevalent institutional bias.
You are sounding like you have never worked in a job like this. I have worked for a carpenter and an automechanic. Ever seen someone unable to even get the heat shrink wrap off a pneumatic tool and replace the lines? I saw someone unable to do it and end up gashing their hand as they were trying to cut it off. Ever work under a hot engine bay for 8 hours? Holding your hands above your head the entire time, and developing pain in your neck? Ever used an angle grinder? Should I trust you with one? Ever lifted 300lb pieces of granite, cut them to size and polish them? That's hard work. Do you think you can do it?
Besides, by focusing 100% on this physical aspect you're nearly just attack a straw man argument and ignoring the substance of everything else. Not every person is exactly the same and it doesn't matter. Get over it.
Seen someone screw up because they weren't trained: yup.
Work under a hot engine bay for 8 hours: no, but I've worked outdoors carrying construction material during heat waves, and I've worked indoors in cold data centers.
Holding my hands over my head until pain develops: yup. I don't recommend it to anyone.
Used an angle grinder: no. I have used lots of other power tools. Should you trust me with one? Not until I'm trained on it.
Lifted 300lb pieces of granite: no. We have these things called wheels, you might have heard of them? Using wheels and levers and ropes and pulleys, I have moved much heavier things. I recommend using appropriate tools. Hoists? Cranes? Block-and-tackle?
I'm curious as to how you would address the industries that are heavily female with males being underrepresented. Is there institutional bias in those instances?
This line of reasoning sounds just like the people who said there was no need for women's sports programs because the vast majority of women don't like sports. You are confusing cause and effect.
Use of the word 'never' opened me up to an 'exception to the rule' attack. It was not the most careful word choice, and so I stand corrected that there are 5 women who apparently wanted to work offshore. I'm not talking about 5 women. We're talking about trends. There are always exceptions.
OK, so convince me you're right. Ignoring your condescending, short-termpered, dismissive remark based on attacking some minutiae in what I said (that we can both agree doesn't change anything), we now have an example of one very American, money-making lawsuit, representing 5 people. Alright, so what substantial movement can you source to convince me that you are right that women are seeking equal representation working on oil rigs in the north sea? What about auto mechanics? Plubming? There's many entrepreneurial businesses such as those that require no hiring decision. Why are women so underrepresented there? The work is much less physically demanding or as dangerous as working on off shore oil rigs.
The first 5 women who are seeking jobs on an all-male oil rig perhaps have a form of bravery that is a couple standard deviations from the median.
But if they win their case and help to integrate oil rigs, it seems the next 5 women to seek a job on an oil rig will be easier to find. Fields that are not diverse are less attractive to diversity candidates, but that doesn't mean that diversity candidates wouldn't be interested in working in a more integrated environment.
> Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men
Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.
What would you say about chess, go, leading physicists, e-sports, professional sports, scientific breakthroughs, notable inventions? Do we need Magnus Carlsen to step aside for a woman 3 standard deviations below him, or a woman from an underrepresented minority 5 standard deviations below him, as is done in law school admissions? What conspiracy exists among corporations, whose existence is based on nothing more than profit, that the real priority is the #1 motivation of corporations is actually to hire men over women? If women are underpaid as enormously as Cosmopolitan claims, an all-woman business would out-compete the marketplace with a fraction of the personnel costs. That's the way the marketplace works.
Every single person should be given every opportunity as every other, but we shouldn't continue this state-forced results based on people's personal politics about how they believe the world works.
Why do we have issues with providing everyone with healthcare, clean water, and safety... We're bombing seven countries, funding jihadists in Syria, creating a surveillance police state. Some US cities have murder rates higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East. We can't provide everyone with housing, and we can't successfully protect our environment. Give me a break. This issue is not about human welfare, dignity or equality. This is about people's personal politics and lawyers finding a way to cash in on laws that may have been well intentioned but since gone out of control.
Generally when you control for the number of hours worked, the pay gap mostly goes away. Women on average take much more time off to bear and raise children. The disagreement is mostly over whether this is an appropriate thing to control for. Some argue that we should take steps to ensure that taking time off for childcare doesn't hurt women's careers. Some argue that women feeling the need to take more time off is exactly the problem and we should change our culture so that childcare responsibilities are more equitably shared. I don't think you'd find anyone who has studied this issue who thinks the main source of the pay gap is still discrimination.
Men and women aren't equally incentivised to seek high paying jobs. Dating site statistics show a strong correlation to success for men and how much they earn, but not for women. Their correlation is with attributes like age and self-care.
The social ladder and ranking is also attached to the same incentives. A mans ranking is (mostly) based on his ability to support a family. A womans ranking is (mostly) based on her ability to raise a family. As sad and depressing that is, the message it sends on a cultural level is that no one wants to be near a poor male or infertile female. On the flip side, women are not punished by society for not focusing on maximizing earning potentials, and men aren't punished by society for not focusing self care and longer lifespans.
Going even darker when looking at incentives for earning and lifespans, we can look at the link between low income for men and suicide. About a factor of about 1000% according to some studies when comparing high vs low income. Suicide is also the most common cause of death for men at ages 15-50. The negative impact from unemployment (and low income jobs) effects men more, and a natural conclusion would be that the incentives to avoid it is thus stronger.
maybe men on average get paid more because they need to be incentivized to take jobs because they're more likely to die on the job (20x more likely than women).
Yeah, so that's why they are being sued. But saying that large corporations should achieve the percentage of demographic as is present in the population is wrong.
Could blind hiring practices be a solution to the absence of equal opportunity? Or quotas are a better answer? What in your opinion can be done to battle hiring discrimination problem?
I wish I could upvote this 1000 times. I think the counter arguments (haven't read the entire thread yet, and probably never will) often engage in abstract thought experiments, which are often very simplified models with tons of unspoken assumptions... rather than dealing with the reality on the ground. Which is often really ugly for women and minorities.
Certainly not at a big corporation where there should be enough of an employee pool to have it at least somewhat reflect the general population of the region.
But then, when I listen to the stories women in tech (for example) tell, and they do tell a LOT of the same stories, it's clear we're pretty far from equality of opportunity.
And I won't even get into those experiments people've done with sending out identical resumes, some with "white"-sounding name, some with "black"-sounding names... guess who doesn't get called in for an interview.
So I just don't buy that most people even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).