Any situation where you have two candidates and hire one because of irrelevant characteristics you won't be hiring the best.
You want sexist and racist hiring policies, but only when it suits the genders and race's you want. Do you here outrage from white people about being under represented compared to Asians?
Did I say I did?
I want meritocratic hiring processes. I just happen to suggest -- and I believe evidence is strongly on my side -- that a process which produces lopsided gender/race ratios is extremely unlikely to be meritocratic. I also do not believe many of the other sound bytes people inevitably throw out in this argument (example: "that group just isn't interested in our field" / "they just prefer other things", another classic which will, I'm sure, rear its head in this thread sooner or later).
What is the strong evidence for this statement that you claim exists?
It is very unintuitive to me, as I have always thought the problem existed earlier in the pipeline than the actual interview/hiring process. I am always open to my view being changed, so I would like to see this evidence that is strongly on your side.
Here's an example: look up the historical gender breakdown of computer programmers. Hint: once upon a time there wasn't a "pipeline problem" to use as an excuse, and for-profit free-market competitors were doing just fine with a very different gender ratio than they have now.
It is unlikely that, in the (short -- less than a generation to transform the industry) period in question, women magically became unqualified to work as programmers. Especially since many of them already had worked as programmers and nobody had found reason to complain about their work.
Or, more bluntly: the sudden disappearance from a field of an entire category of people, whose only distinguishing characteristic is being of a gender historically denied economic opportunities, is unlikely to be explained by a similarly sudden catastrophic decline in their qualifications. The continuing absence of people of that category is equally unlikely to be explained by their lack of qualifications.
Here's another example: take a look at what happens to other fields when they introduce effective blind interviewing (in which interviewers cannot discover the gender/race of the candidate prior to making a hire/no-hire decision). It once again does not suggest that previous processes were anything approaching meritocratic.
Specifically, it's the Julie Landsman story, where a fantastic French Horn performance of great power and force turned out to be produced by a small woman, and the people hiring lost their shit when they found out.
A funny side note is that, to be a CEO, typically you have to be a TALL white man. Now, in tech, I could see there being a bias for large HEADED people of whatever gender or color, on the (unjustified) assumption that raw brain material volume would help. But surely, the distance from the ground said head is, can't have much to do with it! And yet, it's another 'meritocracy' fail.
AI will be a lot better at this sort of thing (while perhaps inventing its own meritocracy fails). But we're not there yet.
As for your example, it is not "strong evidence". Historical breakdown doesn't mean much since very few people were computer programmers at all back then. You can't extrapolate from that to the distribution of people who would become programmers decades later once it would be a super mainstream profession that a huge fraction of the population would enter.
Programming was a different affair too. You have to be much more detail-oriented to deal with punch cards and spaghetti goto code; this means fewer people get to be big-picture focused.
Going back a couple decades further, computers were huge halls where women did small calculations by hand; someone (Oppenheimer, Feynman or some such) did the big picture work and divvyed it up much like physicists now give Matlab or Fortran work to do.
Also, your second paragraph amusingly makes a different form of my argument for me (if you can't assume that the ratio at one point in time is indicative of general facts about qualification as a function of gender, you also can't assume that it is at a different point in time -- it may be that a decade or two from now there will be an order of magnitude more programmers!).
Sure, for example, boys being encouraged to become computer programmers. There's an article on NPR that discusses this[0]. Also, when you say "the process", I'm not sure you're adequately describing the evolution of programming and its related skillset demands. A strong increase in competition would naturally lower the ratio of women to men:
- time invested in programming correlates strongly with skill
- historically men have been able to put more time into careers than women(who often need a better work-life balance to manage a household).
- the historic SMAM[1](mean age at marriage) gives men an extra ~2-2.5 years over women even if you assume equal parenting responsibility, before men must also make parenting concessions.
[0] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
[1] - http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldmarriage/...
The only possible third alternative is "the women who were programmers at that time constituted most or all of all living women who were interested in programming", which reduces to "women aren't as interested in programming as men" which in turn reduces to being able to prove all sorts of known-false things by asserting that a forced lack of options (through social and legal discrimination) was in reality an innate "preference" of women in general for or against certain things.
You can have effects working both ways at once.
A lot of world-class woman scientists seem to wind up working in either brand-new or highly interdisciplinary areas; certainly statistically more than you would expect. I hypothesize that, based off my own (anecdotal) experience, this is (in part) because many of the major departments are eye-wateringly bigoted, sexist environments.
Male-dominated environments playing power games are, largely, pretty awful places and one of the power games which gets played a lot is sex discrimination up to sexual harassment. You see the kind of egregious shit you see in Silicon Valley just as frequently in academe. It's pretty awful.
I suspect – again, based off what I've seen and what I've heard from people who were there – something similar may have been going on in the early days of programming. When it was a wide-open new field, there was less in the way of straight-up power games because there wasn't wider societal prestige to be won. So it was more hospitable to out-groups than the other professions fishing in the same hiring pool, e.g. wider engineering and science. But then, over timer, perceived prestige came in, and with it came the status games you find everywhere perceived prestige is, and... vicious cycle.
Incidentally, for anyone who hasn't observed this kind of phenomenon before, this is pretty much how patriarchy works. Interlocking systems of power create perverse incentives which, in turn, reinforce those same systems.
As far as I'm concerned, speaking bluntly, these days there are people who get intersectional feminism and there are people who are just not paying attention to how things work. There's not much middle-ground.
I don't expect that to be a hugely popular viewpoint on HN, but, y'know, I'll live.
These things have their place and if you get lucky (unlucky?) you get a Steve Jobs or perhaps a Travis Kalanik or Jeff Bezos, and you get a predator culture where the company is galvanized to beat the other guys up. Or you get a collective culture where this behavior is all you want and the main thing to reward…
However, looking at it on the larger scale, the more open systems (say, the birth of the personal computer industry that produced a Jobs and Wozniak) could be seen as less competitive, more 'feminine' boom times where cooperation and networking weren't eclipsed by raw power. In those 'less male' times more overall progress was made and the foundations were laid for the big dick-swingin' companies that would come to dominate. Perhaps without times like that, you don't even get the Jobs and Bezos and Kalanik.
Pretty strong argument in favor of open development: though even that will inevitably find ways to turn competitive and be directed by the most dominant. But if the principle is one of extending a common body of understanding, that remains more broadly available.
And we can find drastically changes in gender distribution (and gender segregation) in multiple professions. Is those three choices, A, B, or C, the only possible reason for those? Data from Sweden say over 85% of women and 85% of men work in professions which has serious problem of gender segregation, a problem which only got worse in the last 100 years. Which of those tree choices explains why 1917 had less gender segregation in the work place than 2017?
And what happened since 1917 to 80% of the profession in the job market to cause half the population to suddenly get less status from being employed there?
(same account as roghee0I)
Then you have the wrong process in mind. AFAIK the breakdown of employees is very similar to the breakdown of graduates (and hence applicants). So there's no bias in hiring, all the bias is coming before (socio-economic status? personal choices?).
Principle of charity.
There is no charitable interpretation of this reflex.
The only possible way to interpret it is as a naked statement that groups currently disproportionately underrepresented in the industry, or at specific companies, are made up of inherently inferior people. Otherwise, a process which "hires the best" would hire more of them, and hiring more of them would not "lower the bar".
The intuition being expressed is as follows: Say you work at a factory, filling boxes of widgets. Widgets of varying quality stream past you, coming out of the widget stamper, such that you only have time to grab, on average, one widget out of every ten. Your job is to grab the best widgets you can spot, and put them into your bin. that's how the factory sorts widgets into different grades of quality. Further down the line, other failed startup founders toil away at other bins, snagging the ones you miss, from best to worst.
Most of the widgets are sort of a greyish mucky colour, but about one out of twelve will display a splash of original colour from the plastic that was recycled into widgets. You think nothing of it, but one day your pointy-haired manager comes and tells you that the "colourful" widgets are extra-popular and people are trading them. The company can sell boxes with at least 1/3 coloured widgets for ten times the price of regular widget boxes. Your job is now to ensure that at least one out of every three widgets that you grab is "colourful."
As a consequence, the average quality of widget in the boxes that you pack declines.
There are a lot of wrong and simplistic assumptions behind this understanding of "changing hiring processes." The knee-jerk assumption that doing that means implementing a naive quota system is not the least of these, but there are many others.
Furthermore, it is much more likely to be put forth by not-very-tactful people who have nothing to gain (and perhaps something to lose) extraneously, from greater workplace diversity; these are the people who are the most likely to both be sympathetic to, and express, views that seem at best borderline-racist.
This does not, however, mean that there is no charitable interpretation to the 'reflex' you are describing. It is not a cunning excuse to perpetuate *-ism in the workplace. It is what they believe to be a serious and valid objection to "changing hiring processes," as they understand it.
I do not think you are going to convince me that way.
- 9,2% -- awesome, non-colourful
- 0,8% -- awesome, colourful
- 82% -- meh, non-colourful
- 8% -- meh, colourful
- 6,7% -- awesome, non-colourful
- 0,8% -- awesome, colourful
- 2,5% -- meh, colourful
I think that it's important to note, however, that the analogy functions without relying on any notion that the "colourful" widgets are inherently inferior. It was this point of your own that I was responding to.
Would you further like to consider that historical evidence indicates that when an industry claims it has meritocratic processes which naturally produced lopsided hiring with respect to gender and race, that claim has been debunked, often spectacularly, by simple tactics such as blind interviews in which the interviewer cannot discover the gender/race of the candidate?
Perhaps after considering this, you should find some other use for that reflex arc which produces "hire the best" statements whenever you're exposed to the word "diversity".