If some organization isn't meritocrous in how it promotes people and participation, the solution is to make it so. And it will take time for the effects of the previous bias to unwind.

There are a number of papers (and I'm very afraid I'm on my phone right now, so I can't cite them. I am sorry for that) which show that things like severe gender imbalance are not self-correcting systems in the case of extreme bias -- you have to push them back closer to 50/50, but then the system will remain balanced.

This makes (to me) intuitive sense -- current staff / managers will tend to employ, and promote, people "like them", creating a self-perpetuating system.

The problem is going to remain - Where do we draw the line? Where does pressure towards the center start to hurt progress because of pushback? I'd posit that much of the "Black Lives Matter" debate is actually this debate - But that the communities are speaking past one another. The places where Black Lives Matter is considered axiomatic are already past that line, while the places where it's viewed with disdain are where racism is still firmly rooted.

Developer hiring is pretty rigorous compared to a lot of fields where the process boils down to "turn up, is the candidate presentable and interested, do they avoid saying anything dumb in the interview, do they have a good CV, hired". People are asked to actually demonstrate their skills during the hiring process, for instance, something a lot of job interviews lack.

Moreover, the demand for skilled talent is enormous. All sorts of people who are kind of weird or anti-social get hired as programmers when they would struggle to get hired as, say, business analysts or salespeople, simply because people want software and beggars can't be choosers.

In such an environment, implying that the industry is not meritocratic or hopelessly biased against women is especially silly. Women programmers are sought after everywhere. They already have the playing field tipped in their favour in precise, specific, concrete ways. The idea that there's some impossible to see glass barriers stopping them from getting into programming is never nailed down with specifics, probably because no such barriers exist.

edit: we are also assuming things are an in general meritocracy in technology amd I suspect that isn't true, but that is a different but relatef discussion.

Coming from a country at the boundary between east and west, poor and developed, civilisation and 3rd world, I find it fascinating how there is less diversity of thought at Google (where people come from all over the place, have all the colors and sexual orientations) then a random group of old people in some fundamentalist rural area in my home country.

Non-diverse environments are unmeritocratic. They drive away half of the talent.

If half of the good talent is unwelcome, and leaves, then the environment by definition isn't as good or meritocratic as it could be.

Which means its measured by heuristics, and heuristics are very sensitive to preconceptions, stereotypes, etc.

An extreme opinion stated as if it's a fact. Can you show me the phalanx of companies systematically beating their competition by deliberately hiring incompetent but genetically "diverse" people?

Focusing on diversity makes your company MORE competent, not less.

And the current world that we live in is NOT meritocratic, as half of the good talent is getting driven out of the industry.

The way to promote meritocracy IS to support women. Anti diversity initiatives and environments are unmeritocratic.

Would such an environment be "unmeritocratic"?

You don't even have to be as extreme as your example (nobody could work in the conditions that you mentioned).

Things like blind resume screening have been shown to significantly reduce hiring bias, and more companies should be doing it.

Also, the biggest discrimination problems in tech aren't even direct hiring discrimination problems. One big reason why companies are not very diverse is that companies tell their employees "refer your friends!" and then they are surprised when the white men only refer other white men.

Making efforts to specifically reach out to women, and making sure they apply to your company (without lowering any bars or anything), work very well in increasing diversity.

So you seem to be simultaneously saying that 1) a system in which gender was a non-factor would be more meritocratic than contemporary systems; and 2) that a system in which women are given preferential treatment over men would be more meritocratic than contemporary systems; and 3) that a system in which women are given preferential treatment over men would be still more meritocratic than the hypothetical system.

Point 3 seems a natural conclusion given that you have argued for point 2; if point 3 were not true, it would seem logical to argue for point 1.

Am I misunderstanding you?

I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases).

Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh.

So yeah, you can work like this.

I think I'll continue to promote people who seem to do good work, regardless of their gender. If some women lose interest in computing because they lack role models, too bad for them: there are plenty of female programmers in eastern Europe and Russia who don't seem to care.

Yes, if you define "merit" as including particular genes in your DNA, then you can get away with Pike's attitude and still claim to be merit-based.

But hello, reality check, Pike is advocating for something that is not only immoral but also explicitly illegal. The law says that people should be assessed on their skill at the job and not selected due to their gender. Like, whether they write good code or not. The industry has a lot of different ways of measuring merit that are gender neutral - Pike is saying ignore those ways and promote bad coders over good, "just because" they're women.

He was contriving to engage with it; you should be less brief/concise with your talk about priors and premises in this thread.

I haven't heard any plausible theories for this. The best I've heard is plausible theories for why, given existing biases in society, more men are entering and succeeding in the field than women. That's usually used to argue that some individual company or process isn't at fault for having an imbalanced output. But that's hardly a meritocracy when you know you're leaving qualified people behind, neither for the company, nor at all for the field as a whole!

(Incidentally, the term "meritocracy" is from a dystopian essay trying to satirize the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy )

In my experience this does seem to be the case.