> arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.

You make it sound like there are people out there saying to themselves, "I know I should stop discriminating against under-represented minorities, but I just can't seem to stop myself" as if discriminating were addictive like smoking. If somebody used to discriminate and wants to stop, the solution is to stop discriminating, not discriminate in the other direction. But this isn't somebody who used to reject people under vague euphemisms and needs this "nicotine patch" to help them kick the habit - this is somebody who's creating new euphemisms to discriminate in a way that's socially acceptable.

Rarely are people deliberately discriminating. Instead they have erected systems that, for one reason or another, lead to biases. You cannot stop discriminating while continuing to use these systems.

If they did exist they were accidental. But now there are overt discriminations being baked into various initiatives including recruiting.

Not so much these days, but back in the day I came across plenty of very explicit, very deliberate gender and racial bias. Talking to my mother, her whole career as a teacher was shaped by it.

The way I see it, there is very clear gender and racial and other minority under-representation in some areas of tech and employment. Some of the reasons for that might be benign, others might not. It makes sense to me to poke at this problem and explore it and push against it's boundaries, obviously in a non-damaging way.

This seems to me to be a positive way to do this. If women going to coding camps typically find themselves in a small minority among a big room full of guys, that isn't necessarily ideal for them. It's not anybody's fault, it's not like anybody has done anything wrong, but it can be an obstacle for those women to overcome. So why not try to minimise that obstacle?

Are you seriously suggesting no one intentionally discriminated against women or minorities? It was legally enshrined for centuries.

That's not exactly what OP means. What's actually going on is that we have certain expectations around candidates' behavior and the wording they use on their resumes and the way that they respond to technical interviews. These are behaviors that are ingrained for most white men but tend to be less ingrained for women and non-white men. So our hiring processes are subtly biased against anyone who isn't like us.

The interview process is all about being biased against certain candidates. But what often happens is that the biases we hold when interviewing and working with candidates don't matter to the job but happen to exclude people who would otherwise do quite well.

It's not like interviewers are all twirling their waxed mustaches and snickering about how many women they've excluded. But what they do is listen to how someone describes a problem or how they behave during a whiteboard interview and interpret that negatively simply because it's different from what they were expecting. And so they don't hire the person because they're a "bad culture fit." Some women have been trained by our culture to use less assertive terms to avoid showing dominance in a discussion. And they tend to wait for you to finish before they talk.

Or suppose that the people at the company tend to wear a certain gamut of colors because they're all white and blue-ish and grey-ish colors tend to look better on white guys. So when someone shows up with a redder shirt that person might be taken as "too flamboyant" when in reality they're just picking a good neutral color for their skin tone. It just happens to be a significantly different tone from the rest of the office.

It could even be as subtle as discomfort with inexact or flowery speech. I had a lead who would get very uncomfortable when I would talk in metaphor and use metaphors and different words to describe things in terms that he wasn't used to. He would try to get me to tone it down. But everyone else on the team was perfectly okay with it so I kept doing it. That's another form of useless bias, because I was understood and could do my job but probably wouldn't have been as hire-able if I had talked like that during my interview.

My point and OP's point is that discrimination is frequently not overt. We have to look past these superficial differences and really think about whether someone can do the job. And we also need to be exposed to more candidates who are not like this. So a program like this stuffs the pipeline and gets us more exposure, and it's now up to us to challenge our existing biases and try a more diverse array of people out.

>non-white men

I assume Asian men are actually "white men" for the purposes of your example?

Can you explain a little more what you mean by this or where the disagreement is? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Thanks!

It's not quite true to say tech startups are made up of predominantly white men, but also men of East Asian and Indian descent. So you can't just use "white men" as a euphemism for the dominant culture of tech start ups.

Journalists do it all the time so you obviously can[1]. Google is less white than the US is and journalists talk about their diversity problem. The definition of white is shifting as has been obvious for decades[2]. Asians are white when convenient and not when not.

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/google-diversity-problem-in-...

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

If you ever make it out to the bay, you’ll see that white men, Asian men, and, to a much lesser extent (though much more represented than everyone other than the first two), Asian women make up the majority of the engineering workforce here.

Which clearly demonstrates that just because you belong to a minority, it does not mean you will be "oppressed" or whatever the current narrative is. There are successful groups of people belonging to a minority, i.e. it is not the fact of belonging to a minority that is the problem, is it?

What consists of a minority is of course contingent and relative. A group that is a minority in one setting can be the majority in another. In one situation a group can be the oppressed, in another 'they' (different individuals but of the same 'group') can be the oppressors. Unfortunately that's human nature, but it doesn't mean we have to just sit back and accept it.

If course it's also possible to overcome obstacles like these. Some people are very successful at doing so, but unfortunately others are not and shouldn't really have to.

This is even the case in the midwest

> These are behaviors that are ingrained for most white men but tend to be less ingrained for women and non-white men

Do you have any reputable sources for this?

Of course not.

Look, I get it, people turn you down for jobs all the time. I am a white male, and I HATE looking for a job in my non-mainstream market, because I am constantly passed over for being a generalist/introvert/socially awkward/you-name-my-worst-social-traits-and-recruiters-and-hiring-staff-hate-it. When I get my foot in the actual door, my bosses always LOVE my work.

If I wasn't a, you know, a non-protected demographic, I could just hop on the internet and whine about how these strangers are discriminating against me for my [protected status] and that we need to fix years of bias, when it's really that they binned my resume for being too weird, too non-specialized, too X for their tastes.

The basic problem here is that there are too many confounders in why a particular individual is denied a particular position, and it's way too easy to cry "X-ism!" instead of actually breaking down the hiring process into actionable feedback for everyone.

Unconscious bias is a real thing. You can easily have a situation in which no one is intentionally discriminating and yet end up with decidedly non-equal outcomes.

One of my favorite examples from the Boston Symphony Orchestra[1]:

> For the auditions, the musicians would be playing behind a screen, in an effort to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit based selection only - a selection that would hopefully increase the number of women in the orchestra.

> To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male.

> Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes. The reason? The sound of the women's heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators. Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50% of the women made it past the first audition.

[1] https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-prov...

Results are not statistically significant.

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

>> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round. The impact for all rounds [columns (5) and (6)] is about 1 percentage point, although the standard errors are large and thus the effect is not statistically significant.

> So, in conclusion, this study presents no statistically significant evidence that blind auditions increase the chances of female applicants. In my reading, the unadjusted results seem to weakly indicate the opposite, that male applicants have a slightly increased chance in blind auditions; but this advantage disappears with controls.

this unconcious bias stuff is unfalsifiable ideological garbage.

> equal outcomes

Equal outcomes is a truly horrible and disgusting goal.

Would you stop please stop posting unsubstantive comments and ideological flamebait to HN? Your comments in this thread have been well below the standard HN users are asked to stick to, and even well below the median comment in this pretty bad thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No, I will speak the truth as I know it and so should everyone else, now more than ever.

Any truth you have to offer can be expressed without violating the site guidelines.

I doubt it. You don't like what I say so you apply the strictest standard while OP is clearly ideological but yet, magically, not flagged or so very helpfully nitpicked on style.

Have you missed the studies on blind auditions for orchestras and the CV name switching studies? Entirely falsifiable (as well as real)

The blind cv experiments so far got shutdown pretty quickly when it turned out that with those the wrong group had even better chances.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-...

> Private companies making hiring decisions are correcting for an indefinite history of bias. That doesn't mean they're hiring unqualified individuals, simply that they're making sure they put in measure to correct for biases and can identify individuals with the great qualifications that in the past would have been past up due to arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.

Perhaps at some companies but not at mine. We do deny employment on the basis of sex and race, in order to increase percentages of women and URM. It's not just including women and URM that would otherwise be left out. It's also about making that a significant chunk of qualified white and Asian males don't get offers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944

As to #2, is it bias when the candidate pool is self-selecting? I mean, generally we're talking about an industry where a self-starter can learn, get their foot in the door and build a career. Every actual study I've seen actually indicates bias in favor of women. The fact that the candidate pool is so unbalanced to me seems to indicate an issue in education or no issue at all (self-selecting), not corporate hiring.

But not everybody is a self starter. We also have a ton of people who were nudged in this direction and men get those nudges far more often. I certainly didn't learn software totally independent of other structures. Both my parents were software engineers. I had toys (marketed at boys) that encouraged creativity with computers. I had teachers who encouraged me to work in software. Etc etc.

But those nudges are LONG before the hiring process, which as I mention seems to be biased in favor of women in the field. Education and other bits take a different approach.

Media changes:

* Don't show techs/ops and programmers as interchangeable in practice * Don't make techs or programmers look uncool * Show more diverse techs and programmers in roles * Don't dumb down smart female characters (some seasons of Arrow) * Don't turn smart female tech characters out of tech (Daisy on Agents of Shield)

Education Changes:

I'm not sure here, between K-12 vs >12, as I really think better normalization in media would go a long way. I also think actual gaming with broader appeal is helping a lot too.

I do find it interesting that given college women outnumber men by almost 2:1 that the majority of STEM and more specifically CS graduates are men. I think that colleges really need to look at their own practices here more and that cuts both ways. I find a lot of modern progressive feminist extremism to be far different than any classic goal of equal opportunity which is disenfranchising.

I was searching for this and it seems like Harvey Mudd has had some pretty good success in increasing the percentage of women CS graduates: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tec...

A bit more on operations, management, development and deeper technology. I think a clearer understanding of the different roles that people play in development of technology systems is important. Men and women typically have different personality leanings (that broadly overlap), and understanding different roles and their focus would allow for people to understand and better choose towards their own interests.

In media, a lot of the time all the roles in IT/Development are interchangeable and muddled and there's almost no insight into where one role might end and another might begin.

As well as nudges (often subconscious ones) away from it that are more frequent for girls/women.

>3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.

I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.

Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.

Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.

It's generally always the same groups that receive these advantages, and other groups that never do.

So this is helping those who are already privileged, while the actual underprivileged are ignored once again.

This is an excellent comment. As it stands only the already privileged will be accepted into the program which I find to be disgusting. At least the financial status of applicants should be taken into account.

Which underpriviledged groups are never supported?

Isn't it obvious? Poor people. The politically favored are women but by opening this to all women you only help women who are already privileged not poor women living in ghettos or from other poor backgrounds

I’m not sure I follow or maybe you have a step in your head that I can’t see.

@jl is literally giving money for living expenses for women to do this program. How does that help a rich or middle class woman more than a poor woman interested in the program? If anything, I’d expect the impact of $9K to be far greater for the last than the first (and presumably able to be treated as a tax-free gift or even if not, taxed at a low rate). If that’s the case, it seems more enabling, not less.

Providing money to attend this kind of program is awesome, but there are many people who, despite having expenses paid, still could not afford to take advantage of this kind of program. The more financially stable you are, the more likely you would be able to drop your life for x weeks to take advantage of this kind of program. Its not that what she is doing is "helping rich people more", but it will still favour them.

There are so many initiatives out there supporting poor people. True, this one does not. But it seems a bit far-fetched to conclude from this one example that the poor are not supported at all.

Only 4% of Stanford students come from the bottom 20% of family incomes, while 66% come from the top 20%. That's 15 times as many students from wealthy families as poor families.[1]

The numbers are similar at other top schools, and feed into everything beyond, including startups.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

I'm not sure how Stanford's economic disparity supports that there are no programs to assist people who are economically disadvantaged. Harvard, Stanford, and Yale offer free tuition for students with family income below 65,000 a year, Princeton for below 54,000, and Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Duke for families with income below 60,000.

There's no data in the article about the income level of the students applying. Are there 15 times as many wealthy applicants? Disparity is often contextualized in terms of systems of oppression and discrimination. Individual behavior, influenced by the effect being poor has psychologically, is likely to contribute to the difference in economic diversity.

I didn't make that claim. I explained what I was talking about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469850

I also see balancing out the disadvantages of children, teenagers, and young adults from poor families as way more important than balancing out the disadvantages of well-off women. I totally agree that we have a long road ahead of us in this respect, as the Stanford numbers clearly show.

Still, your claim that nobody cares about the poor is not justified. Also, there are many just causes, and we can work on all of them in parallel.

I didn't make the claim that nobody cares about the poor, that was a response to my comment and I added some relevant information.

The groups I was talking about, the ones that "nobody cares about" might not come to mind immediately, precisely because one rarely hears about them, but there are so many examples of disadvantaged people who are never the beneficiaries of such efforts.

For example: numerous physical traits other than sex or skin color. Invisible minorities like eastern Europeans or middle eastern Christians. People who grew up in rural areas.

It's probably absurd to expect to define categories and provide special help to every group that could be defined. Instead, people should be judged as individuals, each of whom has faced a variety of obstacles and benefited from a variety of privileges, and whose potential can only be evaluated by considering the whole person, not a few checkboxes.

People in the sex offender registry. And no, not only rapists are in there, consider https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/16/nyregion/10-year-old-s-cr... and https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/when-kids-are-... for example.

To be clear, nobody is giving money to Lambda School.

Jessica is giving people money directly to help them be able to participate.

Lambda School is also making the course work available for free.

Lambda School is not being paid by anyone, and no money is changing hands, other than Jessica literally giving money away.

Overcorrecting for bias is not the same as removing bias.

You never heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right?"

You're the one calling it an overcorrection. To me it is a weight scaling correction

Obviously I now can’t prove it as I didn’t take a screenshot, but when I wrote my reply their comment specifically used the word “overcorrecting”. Clearly, they have edited their comment.

I was quoting that commenter.

What do 'reverse sexism' and 'reverse discrimination' mean?

I would understand reverse sexism to mean consciously giving preferential treatment to women, all other things being equal (because sexism, bizarrly, means discrimination against women, not just discrimination based on sex/gender). But, of course many versed in feminist theory would disagree with such definition.

Discrimination benefiting historically under represented or discriminated against groups.

Sexism and racism in favor of a group which is usually hurt by sexism or racism. Or equivalently, sexism and racism against a group which usually benefits from sexism and racism.

I'd like to think HN is a place where people can have debate without resorting to saying things like "very stupid point" ;)

You're absolutely right that free market doesn't mean your choices are exempt from criticism. That isn't my point, nor where I applied 'Free Market'.

My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes.

> My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes.

This is trying to eat your cake and still have it though.

If you ask a staunch free market person whether we should have laws restricting private activity or freedom of association, they say no. If you want to have a private organization and only invite women or only invite men then have at it.

But if you're going to have a law against that, over their objection, then it should at least be enforced consistently against everyone.

Objecting to the lack of consistency is different than objecting to the original principle.

That's a very intriguing point!

Can you help me understand it better? Are you saying that it is currently against the law for @jl to donate to Lambda School to sponsor 40 men to attend for free? I don't think that is your point, but I'm having trouble interpreting it any other way.

I'm not going to pretend to know the specific details of every law in every jurisdiction regarding what organizational purpose or member threshold or funding source or the like is required before sex discrimination is unlawful, but I'm fairly confident there are a number of laws to that effect on the books.

Maybe none of them apply in this case. But given the complexity and somewhat arbitrary nature of the requirements, that seems more like happenstance than some reasoned choice to have this specific type of thing excluded as opposed to the others, and we probably ought to be more consistent one way or the other.

For example, if MIT (a private university) wanted to have a program like this, should it be allowed in this case but not in their case just because their institution does some unrelated publicly funded research or whatever the restriction is?

But then you're also opening them up to being an entirely or almost-entirely gender segregated school if they want to be. So which one is it?

There are plenty of other words, and you're breaking the site guidelines. Please read them, especially the one about calling names: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html