Do you really think there are young people in the US who could be NBA players but are held back by lack of resources, lack of training, and lack of friends/family members who play basketball? I think that's a key difference between the "diversity problem" in the NBA and the diversity problem (no scare quotes) in tech.

Diversity quotas are making this situation actively worse by giving a bad image to those who pass. In German there‘s even a compound slur word for one such cases, „Quotenfrau“ (quota woman). These kind of outcomes were once unforeseen but are very easily to foresee now after lots of experience with that kind of thing. I firmly believe that as a society we should try to make people of all shapes be interested in the most productive and needed professions, but the pushing and pulling should end there. If you want equal, just go ahead and install actual communism, I actually might be on board with thst more, at least with modern technology it should be doable such that people can all live well enough.

People like to say this is a major problem, and I don’t know of any quantification of the effect one way or the other, but I am skeptical. Annecdotally I do know my mother was told (by coworkers and her boss) she was a quota hire in 1975 and it was still the start to a successful 42 year career in sales. She was only with that first company about 4 years. I imagine many other people overcome the stigma associated with getting an “undeserved” opportunity or being told they were hired thanks to a lower standard due to their race or gender.

I personally try not to hold it against my fellow white male entrepreneurs from prestigious schools and affluent backgrounds that I know we had an easier time raising capital and hiring people because of our race, gender, and social connections.

Yes. Jeremy Lin has spoken on multiple occasions of the discrimination he has encountered entering and during NBA, and god knows how many more Asian Americans are kept from a NBA career by these discrimination. (Hint, there are very few Asians in NBA).

You don't solve the upstream problems by doing the exact same wrong that made the problem to begin with. If the institutions that preceded yours bred inequality and bias then yes, you get a biased candidate pool, whether you are the NBA or Google. But the solution is never to get an input of biased applicants and select not the best candidate but the one that meets a racial quota to try to make yourself feel better about racism in the world.

In both cases I imagine there are capable young non-black men who don't pursue basketball because its a "black sport" and there are technically minded young black women who don't pursue software because its a "nerdy white man industry". Regardless of if the NBA is actually biased, or if tech companies are actually sexist, what matters is the average normative cultural perception of that industry or discipline. If you are told your whole life by opinionated outsiders that only white men can program of course you are going to have a hard time finding the willpower to fight that presumption as a young uninformed anything.

women form a majority of new entrants in certain medical sub specialities that were historically male dominated e.g. pediatricians, psychiatry etc.

rather than any of these organizations being overtly discriminatory, can we acknowledge certain groups might just be self-selecting into professions as a part of culture identity and work-life balance or risk/reward preferences. and that's okay!

That's a good point. There are many fields that are dominated by women or non-whites, yet there is virtually zero attention paid to those. Why is that?

There’s plenty of interest in getting more men in nursing.

http://blog.diversitynursing.com/blog/topic/male-nurse

I'd be surprised to see a major hospital system telling their recruiters to purge female nurse applicants from the hiring queue.

Does nursing do a lot of navel gazing about the reason why so few men are in nursing is because everyone currently in nursing is sexist?

There’s no attention in getting men teaching. Where 80% teachers are females.

And we still wonder why boys ragequit school at unprecedented levels: There’s only 1 man left for 2 women at university now. And it keeps deflating. Could it be too much effort placed on getting women to succeed, and too much misandry from teachers? and men defending their side of equality systematically being accused of masculinism? No, men can’t be discriminated against, because discrimination only touches women, by definition.

>There’s no attention in getting men teaching. Where 80% teachers are females.

That’s not true.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/22/male-teacher-...

What's the median salary for those positions?

Registered nurses: 90% women, median $68k

Nurse Practitioners: 92% women, median $107k

Veterinarians: 83% women, median $88k

All data from BLS.

This is good, but is easily explained by the reflected percentages with various doctor specialties. What's the technology equivalent?

I think it's better to compare whole labor subgroups:

[1] Computer and mathematical occupations (engineers, programmers, etc):

> 4,804k jobs, $78k median, 25.5% women, 7% projected growth

[2] Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (doctors, nurses, technicians):

> 9,141k jobs, $63k median, 75.0% women, 18% projected growth

If we imagine the ideal scenario of employment across all jobs being 50/50 men/women then we need to add 2.3 million women to tech and 4.5 million men to healthcare. Arguably, the lack of men entering the healthcare field (good-paying jobs, growing need) is at least as important as the lack of women entering technology, but why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/home.ht...

[3] Percent women info: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

> why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?

Who is we? HN? If so, the answer to that is obvious.

Your comparison needs more nuance, in my view. If health care had 100 people, 80 nurses (70% of which are women) and 20 doctors (10% of which are women) then you'd have a breakdown like the following:

Women: 56 nurses, 2 doctors

Men: 24 nurses, 18 doctors

If you said the median doctor has a salary of 200K and a nurse 65k, men are paid 5160K and women are paid 4040K. In other words men are paid 56% of the total healthcare salary despite only representing 42% of the workforce. So despite the majority of health care professionals being women, men are still overrepresented in terms of salary, and in a way, influence. This example obviously uses fake numbers, but is the crux of the problem.

Money allocation is more accurate than job allocation imo. Moreover, if you were to total men's salaries/wealth and compare it to women's wealth it would be overwhelming in favor of men. Discussions surrounding specific job types and their gender allocation are irrelevant and a distraction. If men and women represented the same amount of total wealth in the US I think these discussions would be more meaningful, but the disparity in wealth is reflected influence and consequently opportunity. So, yeah, more men will be reflected with higher percentages of the higher income opportunities. This is reflected in the BLS data:

Employees vs. Managers

Nurses vs. Doctors

Teachers vs. School Administrators

Business owners

etc. etc.

The issue has never been that men have more of the jobs. The issue is that men have all of the money. That's why people are talking about tech, and say, not education. The job discussion (particularly within tech) is just a way to attempt to solve a tiny aspect of the problem.

I don't doubt thats the reason - but I've always felt it wasn't exactly a compelling argument. (Potential) Discrimination is perfectly fine, so long as the job is average. Welders, car mechanics, nurses.... Aren't we somehow presumably stifling the interest of large amounts of kids to enter these jobs based on gender biases? I would assume so based on the numbers.

Quite high for veterinarians, which, at the college level, is as dominated by women as CS is by men (80%). They aren't dominating the work force yet, since in the past men became vets much more often they do now, and we still have those older male vets in the work force, but their numbers are steadily decreasing.

All good options.

But don't forget to represent people of different body types by weight and height as well.

As a very short, fat, and white dude who can't jump...but has a decent jumper, I still want my shot at Lebron James in the NBA.

If I understand it correctly, it is only discrimination if employer cannot demonstrate the criteria are needed for work performance. Race and gender are not related to performance in most work categories. In the case of body types in sports, they are.

And so are problem-solving skills, relevant experience and education in STEM. Is it anyone's fault that white/asian males happen to have more of it than other groups?

I get relevant experience, but are saying that general problem solving skills are race based?

Experience is not the same as problem-solving skills. And I never said they were "race based".

Black people are severally underrepresented among swimmers in general, not just among competitive swimmers. The BBC had an interesting article about this a few years ago [1].

This is a serious problem, leading to unnecessary deaths of black children. Here's an article by the founder of an organization trying to address this called "Black Kids Swim" [2].

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11172054

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-stereotype-is-k...

I'm not sure that's an equivalent relation. I wasn't able to read the article, but NBA representation has a lot to do with skill and performance.

Right, the "path" to be an NBA player starts in high school. You ideally get scouted by a college with a top team and after four years you get an offer to play for an NBA team.

This is very similar to how we do admissions for most college education, except now imagine the basketball scout saying "You crushed it out there, but sorry, we have enough %race players this year".

So what?

You seem to be assuming that Black people simply have more skill and performance than others. You do this in Basketball but not in other areas.

Currently, hiring males for programming jobs is due to skill and performance, because far more men chose to go through this type of education than women. Huge numbers of men and women don't enjoy straining to grapple with abstract concepts for long stretches of time, sitting hunched over a keyboard, and so on. But, more men do than women, at the moment. So does that mean things are just fine the way they are, as your comment suggests about being Black and skill and performance?

Why not encourage, for instance, more Chinese basketball players to get scholarships, and increase their skill and performance? Why settle for how things are, which currently is not very diverse as anyone can plainly see?

China's basketball team has a lot of great Chinese players.

So when the NBA hires for job qualifications like height, skill and performance, that's OK. But for tech positions they should actively discriminate against skilled applicants because maybe somebody else ought to do it?

The NBA is actively recruiting/training for elite talent in China: http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/12/news/companies/china-nba-bas...

I think you TOTALLY misunderstood my point.

Which was: how come drwl accepts the status quo with NBA and not with programmers? Why do they simply assume that some qualities are more prevalent with Blacks but not with males?

I am not taking a position in my comment one way or the other, just pointing out a potential double standard so the reader can make their own conclusions by reconciling them :)

I assume you are clearly on the side of "things are the way they are because that's how biology works". So here is another one, far more politically charged. Are you prepared to endorse this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United...

"There is general agreement in the literature that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes than are whites in the United States. Whether this is the case for less serious crimes is less clear."

This statement is considered racist. However the equivalent statement for men and women is not considered sexist: men commit far more violent crime than women.

Therefore, should these things be used in profiling people suspected of violent crime?

You can go on and on about these things.

Correct me if I'm not understanding your argument. What I'm reading is that your argument is there is a "diversity" problem in the NBA and that comes from discrimination against non-blacks. And that this is the same discrimination mentioned in the article?

My argument is not that diversity should be increased nor the opposite. It is that there is a double standard.

There's a lot of individual choice involved in the NBA as well. Elite athletes will be elite athletes, but where they choose to devote their efforts early on has ripple effects long afterwards. It's something of a trope that the best US soccer players are in the NFL or NBA, rather than playing futbol like their European athletic counterparts.

Fun fact: professional basketball was once dominated by inner-city Jews

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/11/25/when-jews-d...

EVERY job position should be based on skill and performance.

This is a false equivalency.

The idea that male programmers are like professional athletes who are so far superior to women that they deserve a similar level of elevated status and disproportional representation is repugnant and indicative of the problem that needs to be solved.

>NBA is totally underrepresented by non-black Males, let's sue them.

False equivalency.

How do we encourage short people to grow taller? Or kids to grow up into a tall adult?

Coming to tech, it's possible to encourage people to work in STEM who otherwise may feel unwelcome due to various issues, including gender, age, race, workplace attitudes, glass ceilings etc. That includes trying to have role models that kids may want to emulate.

So height discrimination is not discrimination? Funny, but no, not to encourage people to grow taller, but to encourage NBA to have height classes, just as boxing has weight classes.

Not at all a false equivalency. How do we encourage artistically oriented people to be more mathematical? How do we change ESFJ into INTP? How do we increase IQ? Just hecause certain traits are mental rather than physical doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

NBA players on average are 2 inches shorter than listed height because that includes shoes. IT is 5 foot 9 and potentially shorter. Half of the best players in the league are point guards with heights ranging from 6 feet to 6'3 again with shoes. Kyrie Irving, Steph Curry, Lillard, Chris Paul, Westbrook all fall under this. Average American Height is 5'10. 7 foot tall players have mostly struggled last 5 years so you don't have to encourage kids to grow taller to play in the league.

Asians and South Asians are vastly underrepresented in the Music, Entertainment, and Acting industries and Asian and South Asian women are vastly underrepresented in Fashion, Modeling, etc, industries. Sometimes freedom of choice results in outcomes that we shouldn't try to force but it's not white and black. In STEM, gender disparity results in many problems for females, in the other industries I mentioned it's significantly due to connections, glass ceiling, a certain type of "boys club" but also due to choice. I agree with role models, and removing barriers, but I highly highly disagree with excluding individuals based on their race. That is racist and I will oppose that to the core of my being

the median height of NBA players has gone from 6'3" to 6'5" to 6'7". The growth in median height of NBA players has outpaced growth in US population median height over the same period.

Yes, its very much a natural advantage to all things being equal, be tall to play basketball. Source: Am tall guy.

Wait, so the majority of tall athletic people are black men? What is the actual argument here?