Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against.

Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.

It's difficult to have a factual debate around workplace discrimination because anyone who suggests that women are being favoured, is instantly attacked by social justice activists who rely more on moral outrage rather than facts or logic. A lot of the discussion on this thread today would not be something that people would say out loud near coworkers.

I brought up dynamic systems to point out that this isn't and won't be a three-step process of "the extreme, the other extreme, the golden middle". This phenomenon is continuous and oscillating; more than that, it can be dampened, stable or runaway, and which of those it is, depends on a lot of factors. If we manage to dampen it down, then we'll have made progress.

For those who slept through the philosophy class, what these stages are?

Hegel, when discussing his dialectic, ascribed it to Kant. Presumably to keep philosophy majors on their toes.

So, you're a boring white male who works in one of these industries. You're told constantly that you benefit from "white male privilege". Your experience, the statistics, clearly show this to be bullst.

What do you do? Do you trust anything that other authority figures tell you? Of course not. So you stop your kids getting vaccinated and vote for your country to leave the EU because it means 350 million a week more for your National Health Service..

This is the trap progressives - whose number I count myself in - must do better to avoid if they want to progress towards a fairer and better world.

It's inherently hard. After all, statistically 9 out of 10 will match your expectations, but you should embrace the outliers, help them understand, that they're perfectly okay, and capable of doing whatever they think they want, be it guns, C++, teacher, nurse, etc.

People throw this accusation around all the time, but it doesn't make much sense. Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity.

If you're seeing one group getting lesser outcomes, there are only two possibilities: Their opportunities are being artificially limited somewhere, or one of the groups is simply better than the other. So if you really believe this is a meaningful distinction to draw — that measuring outcomes can't tell us about opportunity — what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

It's theoretically possible that women just generally suck at computers, but if that's someone's argument, I'd prefer they come out and actually make the argument instead of throwing around smokescreens about "equality of outcomes vs. equality of opportunity."

> Then again, it could just be that, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions, rather than whatever labor economists recommend. And those passions don’t always lie within science [or technology].

I had an ex-girlfriend who could code, but had no interest in doing that for a job. I'm currently married to a woman with 3 degrees, one of which is a PhD, and she also can code, but says she feels sorry for me, because it's my job.

If someone isn't interested in programming, they don't "suck" at it. They just don't do it.

This article is about a comprehensive review of salaries at Google that concluded that overall, women who achieved the same job levels as men were being paid more.

The opportunity vs. outcome question is applied to the question of representation. How many women should we expect to see at Google, across job levels, if the process for selecting and promoting people is fair?

This is weird. That's not how I read what leereeves wrote at all. Yet you repeatedly insist that's what he's saying. Are you perhaps projecting an opinion onto leereeves? Preferences can very much influence the outcomes of a training pipeline for a field. (I say this as someone who taught a class attended by Chic Tech students.) That's just common sense.

> When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

Are you willing to walk up to his face and tell him that he "sucks" because he doesn't work as hard and doesn't have the same TC as I do?

To be frank, your posts are pretty denigrating to people who choose to have better work life balance. Not everyone sees their self worth in terms of dollars.

Outcome: The women working as programmers at FooSoft make on average 10% less than the men working there.

Possible reasons:

1. Lack of opportunity (e.g. people in power at FooSoft have bias against them makes it harder for them to have their contributions valued)

2. They just aren't as good as the men

3. They...have different interests in some way that apparently doesn't make them worse but does make them deserve to be paid less?

A quick search suggests that only 20% of programmers in general are female, but 30% of Google programmers are female. I'm not certain these numbers are accurate, but if they are, female programmers are over represented at Google.

That would mean Google hired a greater percentage of female programmers than male programmers. That is, if Google hired the top 0.1% of male programmers, they hired the top 0.15% of female programmers.

If we assume two groups have identical distribution of qualifications, the female programmers hired would have lower qualifications, as an obvious consequence of a hiring policy that favors women. That's not saying women are less qualified, it's saying that Google hires women who are less qualified because they want to hire more women than the 20% that sex-blind hiring would result in.

Going by the "logic" of outcomes being the "only holistic measure" this would indicate that Google is biased against male programmers within the context of the pool of available candidates. Yet if we change the scope of our consideration to that of the general population, Google would be biased against females.

Seems like the "only holistic measure" has some kind of issue with logical consistency. One has to be careful with how the population sample relates to the specific pipeline of available candidates. If one isn't careful, then the interpretation of the numbers might as well be fiction. You can't just stop at, "Does it match the general population? No? Then BIAS!"

That would be expecting Google to hire untrained people as programmers, which would be absurd.

If we compare with the general population, any bias found wouldn't be at Google, but in the school system, children's entertainment, parenting, or some other group that influences people long before they apply to Google.

The pool of programmers "In general" is not relevant for Google. They don't hire programmers in general, but are focused on a specific subset (usually from some big universities).

I think my hypothesis is simpler:

- Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole

- Google actively discriminates in favor of women

It's discrimination both times.

When Google (and other top tech companies) actively discriminate in favor of women, that causes the appearance of discrimination elsewhere in the industry, because the top tech companies have taken more of the best female programmers and those who weren't hired by Google et al are, on average, worse than the men who weren't hired by Google et al.

And when I spoke about interests, I was discussing why few women choose to study computer science.

I would expect in 2019, that the industry as a whole discriminates in favor of women, but I'm just a layperson when it comes to that. Do you have citations?

- Google actively discriminates in favor of women

It's discrimination both times.

I agree.

This could even still be true at Google, though I don't have insight into whether or not it is. It seems at least plausible that Google has put systemic biases in place to balance out more diffuse bias among individual humans, but has done too thorough a job.

"Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data." http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

[1] https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g...

Outcome: Women working as programmers at FooSoft comprise 10% less of the workforce than men working there.

Possible reasons

1. Hiring bias

2. Not as qualified

3. Less applicants due to disinterest in programming as a vocation

I'm sorry, but that's "not even wrong" as Pauli would say.

what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable."

Group cultures/subcultures can pass on knowledge, which can then provide advantages and then be transmitted to different groups. No racial or innate superiority or inferiority is needed for such an explanation. This is well corroborated by history. (See Thomas Sowell's Migrations And Cultures: A World View) An example of this is found in the German influences in Mexico, and the part of Monterrey one of my old hackerspace colleagues is from. He's quite proud of the progressive schooling he had and of the engineering culture there. (The story of German emigration has its stories of misfortune as well, including examples of German ethnic disadvantage as well.)

20th century hacker culture has its roots in the model railway building scene, which was largely a male space. There's nothing inherently male about model railway building or hacking itself, but there was something about the subculture which was. If we're to change this, then it shouldn't be done from the punitive and negative standpoint of blame, but from a positive view of transmission. No "inherent" or identitarian notions are needed at all.

Additionally, this is also affected by Simpson's paradox. Without conditioning on the correct causal effects, you may end up at exactly the opposite conclusion to the truth.

What I'm talking about is a kind of "grassroots" disparity of opportunity. It's not necessarily the same as a "systemic" disparity of opportunity. The former can often be available to people who are literally poorer than the poor. (As has been the case for Chinese immigrants at times.) Irish Traditional music contains another example of the former.

Often, disparities can be a mix of these two things.

I agree with everything you said here, but you're presenting it as a disagreement, so I'm a little bit confused

I'm glad you're feeling a little bit confused. Often, this can be a good sign!

The problem with how such disparities are talked about and acted upon, is that the complexity of the situation is often downplayed or drastically underestimated, then combined with a punitive attitude of blame and compensation. This isn't how these things are known to work. The best way to transmit cultural knowledge is through some form of competition. (Friendly and peaceful are best, of course.)

An old schoolmate of mine who was at Google before the James Damore thing happened, was saying stuff just afterwards like, maybe it's time that males got stuff taken away from them.

All I said was that if you look at a group getting much worse outcomes and declare that their opportunities were at least as good as the group getting better outcomes, it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable.

Sorry, but it doesn't follow logically. I've dated two women who can code, and who can outperform students I've taught in that, but who don't like doing it at all. Their employment outcomes as programmers would be nil, because that's not what they want to do. People keep explaining this to you, and yet you keep coming out with, "it logically follows that the members of the group are simply not capable." I got a group of two who are capable, but have an outcome of zero. Proof by example, your logical assertion is wrong. (No guff about anecdotes vs. data. You're the one who said, "it logically follows," and even a group of two is enough to refute "logic.")

Women do yoga. Men do martial arts. Which is "better"? Which is the "lesser outcome"? None. It's just a difference (in preferences and therefore outcome).

Gender roles aren't so cut and dry any more. Given that, maybe outcomes should be considered independent of gender?

Yes, but you also don't need millions. Any measures of pay inequality will be skewed by extreme outcomes (as the distribution is floored), so people who decide they earn enough and prioritize time/family over further career progress will appear in statistics as "inequality" (edit: even though it's actually good that our society is so wealthy and productive that some people can afford to do that).

It's even worse than that. According to the same statistics, a person who bought a ticket for their favourite band's performance last night is worse off than a day before, whereas their favourite band are better off. In fact, the statistics would show that inequality increased dramatically last night, the band was famous and there were 10k+ people giving away their money, whereas - let's say, five - random guys got "significantly richer" at the same time.

The value of the emotional uplifting and sense of life after the gig? Nah, not an asset to rely upon in "strict" statistics.