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-...