The reason why people get board seats is again one of those misunderstood discussions. It has absolutely nothing to do with qualification as in non-at-all. What it has to do with is the board members access to network, political power, special experience etc.
So as long as you and other keep insisting qualification is somehow important in this discussion, you are actually the ones making the noise.
Qualification has nothing to do with this.
If you're having a problem getting a job 'cause you're old in SV, I'm sorry. I have no such age discrimination problem in the UK, loads of jobs here but not any where as well paid as the US. I might point out that you had 20 years to make a ton of bank. If you want to fix age discrimination, campaign for it, but leave it out of this thread.
As for companies being boys clubs, to me that's clearly unacceptable, it's simply wrong to say that a "company culture" can be male only as that's clear discrimination.
If you think that discrimination's ok, it feels as if you want to take it out on women because you want to go back to living in a man-cave, replete with pizzas and then a late night coding sessions followed by a game of Quake, where women don't fit because they spurned us at high school. And if they want to join in, they better start their own company.
Do that with your mates, that view doesn't belong in a company, shouldn't belong in a company. It's not a male-only social club.
But if you agree that's wrong, you and I caused this problem, and we're the ones who have to fix it, have the opportunity to fix it. Perhaps our Dads and Grandads told us computers are for men only, but they aren't and we don't have to wait until your kids are growing up to fix this. We can fix this now, and positive discrimination is a way that works.
Tech is growing up and we need to fix the gender imbalance we helped cause.
But it's now clear that without strawmen you have no arguments just insults and claims about my person you can't back up. But I guess that's kind of symptomatic for this discussion isn't it?
Old white male coders in SV, which it now turns out you have no personal experience of and just making stuff up about:
Try being +40 in Silicon Valley
Try and get a job in SV after you turn 45.
Examples of you saying women can't be part of our club, because they didn't play with the right toys when they were 12:
Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact
men also takes the most high paying jobs because more of them were interested in technology early on and are better at selling themselves
is that less women start companies or get into tech early on
Examples of you saying women can't be a part of existing tech companies, they should form their own:
get more women to start a tech company
More women will hopefully start companies and I hope some of them will hire only women
Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks
In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards
Those are not arguments they are facts you can educate yourself about them which is obviously not in your interest.
Furthermore I would suggest you learn the language of the country you live in. None of those quotes mean what you claim they mean.
You've just cited an anecdote to try and counter mountains of scientific research.
There could be all sorts of nefarious stuff going on. Could he have been refused a promotion and now blames women? What's the back story? Has he gone on record? Is there a real problem or is a misogynistic manager using it as an excuse to him to cover his own incompetence?
And yes it is an anecdote, so no there's no citations, but most posts in this discussion don't cite citations either.
What if women are just not as intelligent? What if they could be as intelligent, but are lazy?
I appreciate you think you're being rational and reasonable. You're not.
Women do make different choices we know that for a fact. Women aren't tech nerds as much as men are we know that for a fact. Women start far fewer companies than men we know that for a fact.
We also know that women score way higher grades in school which we also know for a fact doesn't matter in real life.
So maybe women (in general) are just prioritizing life differently. That doesn't mean they aren't as intelligent, smart etc.
If you can't make your argument without pushing for strawmen then you don't have one yourself.
It's just trying being polite about it. It's still an irrational bias, no matter how you dress it up.
[1] http://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-...
Also, can you clarify what you mean when you state that pediatrics is "an example that's a biological function primarily to do with women." Are you stating that women are innately (in other words, due to their gender) better suited to administering healthcare to minors as compared to men?
64% of practicing gynecologists are men, but only women have vaginas.
You don't have to give birth to children to be a pediatrician or a gynecologist.
There is a world of difference between someone having spent their entire life coding and someone only starting at university. Or someone having learned to draw from the age of 5 and someone who starts way later in life. That applies to men as to women.
Being not as good is about experience and knowledge having put in the hours. It is not about intelligence.
The only way to reach truth is to be willing to look for it.
You're just "ask"-ing if women are as "not good/stupid", or that perhaps they "aren't interested/are lazy".
It's just a gender stereotype dressed up as a question. It's an insult dressed in an insinuation.
Please stop making these unqualified statements on very touchy subjects
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...
This is hardly the only study. There are many more.
My favorite was the law students from second tier schools where males who signaled coming from middle class backgrounds had a huge statistically disadvantage from males signalling wealth.
The kicker? Wealth killed opportunities for women.
https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...
Bias and prejudice are real and evaluating people is hard. To make things worse, your brain likes to save energy by substitution rigorous evaluation with heuristic evaluation and then convince itself it did the rigorous work.
The problem isn't gender discrimination is rife, it's that thousands of forms of discrimination is rife because heuristic-based discrimination is what we excel at, not rigorous evaluation.
I hope that didn't make it more touchy.
Yeah because lower class women do much better compared to lower class men. The study is flawed. It used male hobbies for both males and females. Rich females don't generally sail. I think their stereotypical activity would be humanitarian efforts.
And if it wasn't flawed, what conclusions do you draw from the study? Lower class women did 5 times better than lower class men. The lower class is many times larger than the upper class, so only a tiny percent of men enjoy the the upper class privilege while most men are doing terribly.
Looking at the big picture by aggregating the lower and upper class, women do better than men.
> http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-....
I'll give this some legitimacy but it's one study and not completely convincing. It can't be generalized outside of science research positions.
One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.
On the disparate power dynamic, I doubt the males with power care about the wellbeing of the other 99.99% of males. They will look out for the interests of super high class males which may not overlap with the interests of lower class males.
I think that non high class females benefit much more than non high class males from the power of super high class males. The super high class males will spend time around females and make transfer payments in the services industry. Sugar babes, prostitutes, strippers, webcaming, regular waitresses, etc. They are more likely to enjoy the wealth of high power males and have a much easier time forming a relationship (romantic or platonic) with a super high class male.
Most structural issues are gone today and those that are left benefit women as much as men. In Norway where they have quotas all that happened is that now there is just also an old ladies network with the same women sitting on many of the boards.
Are you saying the study is flawed because women got more hires in this context and that doesn't reflect the larger aggregate trends? You realize this study doesn't reflect society as a whole, right? It reflects the resume screening habits of a sample of people from a cross section of law firms.
Rather than dismissing a study because it doesn't yield results that fit your worldview, how about you try understanding the context is was done in and reflecting on the culture where it happened? Don't give it a fleeting thought. Really consider the many possible stories it could be telling you, but don't settle on a favorite. Hold the many possible stories in your head instead, ask questions and try different stories.
People have all sorts of biases. I've known my share of bros who only hire pretty girls and other bros with common interests, taste and upbringing. If they were being studied, their numbers would probably yield similar results. Some of the bros I know would call in like-minded bros and then they'll call in the women for an interview to see if they're hot. If they were part of a similar study, their screening habits would definitely skew the numbers toward this trend. If it was up to me, I'd be counting how many of the pretty ones made into round two. (Let's just say they excel at recruiting and only hiring pretty girls.)
This is one small study that reflects an aggregate of biases of a sample of participants in one industry. It does not reflect the world. It doesn't reflect their industry. It doesn't reflect one bias. It is literally a snapshot in time of a sample of a cross section of society. We don't know how if those biases (there are many) were well-distributed or concentrated. Repeating the experiment may even yield very different results.
All that doesn't matter in the bigger picture, because for that slice of time & sample, we have enough evidence to suggest gross discrimination for that sample and time.
It's a reminder that the world is a complicated place and that there are all sorts of ways people discriminate against each other. What it reinforces is that superficial discrimination happens for all sorts of complex reasons, rather than simply saying everyone is guilty of one form of discrimination.
> One bias that I'm concerned about is that most gendered social experiments are hoping to find bias against females. It's a big echo chamber as the manifesto guy would say.
Let's not be obtuse about accepting or dismissing these studies. People have a tendency to either overstate or discount their results when it serves their purpose. I gave you a very small sample and merely suggested that discrimination happens in the world and that discrimination can be complex and nonlinear. Take it with a grain of salt.
Yes we have biases all of us but they are certainly not by any metrics confined to only women. Try being +40 in Silicon Valley, try being black or latino male on WallStreet, try making it as a hip-hop artist as a black guy. Try being fat in the fashion industry, try being a nerd in high-school.
The world is rife with bias and prejudice against all sorts of "these are not like me" but the solution is not and have never been to force quotas through whether in board rooms or on the job market.
If you want to change things changes them at their root cause. Push your girls to start their own companies to build their own networks so that they are less depending on existing ones. Teach them not to excel at school as that doesn't really matter but to learn how to sell themselves. Teach them that if a job posting names 10 skills and they have all but two it's still a job for them.
These are the real barriers to entry not modern day companies light biases.
It's like claiming climate change isn't real.
Or how exactly what are you arguing?
Because some men do more dangerous jobs, totally different men should get all the high paying ones? Perhaps for each man in coal mining, oil rigs, the army or deep sea fishing, we get a plushy finance or tech job exclusively for men?
Or tech workers should be paid less than coal miners?
I don't follow you?
The simple counter argument to this, and what changed my mind utterly, was that the number of woman on boards never changed. "Women will setup companies" was what they said in the 70s, 50 years ago.
It never worked until we started forcing it. There's still a ridiculously small percentage of female chairs. There's still a ridiculously small percentage of female board members.
If they're just as good, as you say, and I also believe, why didn't it change? Because gender discrimination is rife.
Without positive discrimination, the status quo did not change, will not change.
Doesn't matter anything you said above, it's all noise. It doesn't correct itself like you say it will.