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Re:My positive experience as a woman in tech by kazinator on Friday December 18, 2015 @01:56PM (#10760185)
Probably this has to be just be looked as simply avoiding being bad. To avoid being bad, you don't have to overcompensate; that just creates reverse biases. Just don't have a bias: for instance, don't make a decision because someone is a woman, or Asian or whatever. Any decision: hiring, awarding a raise or promotion, etc.

A discriminatory bias cannot be measured by simple proportions, like how many women work at Company X out of the total, and therefore it cannot be eliminated by something naive like a hiring quota or similar. Such a program necessarily involves making decisions based on gender, and so on and so doesn't avoid being bad.

The concept of "workforce diversity" is basically rooted in poor understanding of statistics, together with a willingness to apply a corrective discrimination. Even if half the software developers in a country are women, and there is no bias anywhere, it can still so happen that men constitute, say, 80% of the developers in some organization. Such an event has a certain nonzero probability which allows it to happen.

Re:My positive experience as a woman in tech by leaverou on Friday December 18, 2015 @03:39PM (#10760781)
“Just don’t have a bias”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. The problem is that it’s very hard to know when biases are affecting your decisions. You cannot just decide to not have them. Agreed though that fighting bias with bias is not a solution. What is the solution then? I don’t know. :(
Re:My positive experience as a woman in tech by Balgair on Friday December 18, 2015 @02:51PM (#10760545)
great points on the stats. BTW, re: your username; zisteau?