Nor should they. The pursuit of equality has been replaced with a demand for equity and the talking heads espousing this demand have become sufficiently skilled at publicly shaming companies and individuals that leaders have decided that acquiescing and silently taking on the bill involved in prioritizing in-office demographic makeup over all else rather than ending up on Vox & co. and being publicly tainted forever.
On an individual level, it is career suicide to go against the corporate narrative supporting the above, particularly when you consider that the most ardent supporters of the narrative are empowered to also have some of the most significant impact on your career (HR).
This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.
The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)
The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.
We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.
So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?
Look at other previously male dominated positions like doctors and law where you now in Sweden have more women graduating those fields than men. Something changed there. I doubt software development has been more hostile and conservative than for example law.
The thing is that women are studying at university at a larger degree than men in Sweden but they are not selecting STEM fields, especially not computer science.
Maybe it will change with role models, culture and different initiatives but I suspect that most young women right now think it is a boring as fuck career (at least those I talk to).
It would be like someone asking me if I would like to study to teach kindergarten. Maybe I as a male have been conditioned not to see that as an option and maybe many more would choose that career if we were raised differently but for me it just sounds like something I would really really not like. I respect the work but for me taking care of tons of kids all day sounds incredibly boring and rough. The idea that there is discrimination (which there is and some men suffer from) is not near my mind.
Most women I talk to express similar thoughts about software development.
Why do you think those two things are mutually exclusive? What if women are choosing to leave computer science because it's somewhere between subtly discriminatory and outright hostile?
I'm sure it's cultural because: in the US women in CS was ~37%, today it's 18%. Why the huge swing? There have been times in recent history when many many more women chose computer science. In India, there have been years when the participation rate was above 50%. There are places on earth today where many many more women chose STEM.
So, it's obvious based on the data we already have that today's low participation rates by women in the US and Europe is not an intrinsic property of women, rates are neither fixed nor the natural state of things.
All the rest of what you said is that maybe it's attitudes, and sure, maybe it is. Maybe that's the problem?
I've spoken with women too, and anecdotally, most women say the exact same thing as most men when they say computer programming sounds super boring. Some women I know confirm that discrimination and hostile behavior exists and is alive and well, especially the higher you go in an organization.
Participation used to be higher but now it is less; despite women getting more agency, doing better at school and getting high education than men. If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.
It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is. And that more choice and more opportunities just makes other career paths more alluring.
Of course there can still be sexism and discrimination in certain cases but it is also very possible that it does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.
> If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.
That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.
You're trying to suggest that women as a group don't want computer science, by their nature as women, but to make that claim you have to deny history and ignore facts.
> It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is.
The numbers changed a lot, and there is a reason. What you're saying is you don't know the reason, and I agree with you.
> it is also very possible that it [discrimination] does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.
I think it's extremely, extremely unlikely. It's demonstrated that the choices are cultural and not intrinsic to gender. So, your job then is to show that cultural attitudes are not affected by cultural discrimination. You're setting yourself up for an impossible task.
Yes, and my point is that when those women got more power, more choice, more money and more freedom they started to become less likely to choose software development and more likely to select other professions. Other professions that had historically been male dominated.
So it could be that if you are free to choose there are certain professions that will have a larger part male or female and that will amplify in a culture of freedom. You will choose what your friends choose.
For example I don't think that you would ever have 50% men/women that are interested in working in kindergarten. I think there is some biology in that and then it is amplified by most men not wanting it making it less likely for those that might want it to actually choose.
You're cherry-picking there, and incorrectly assigning causation to correlation. Before 1984 in the US, women's choice and power was increasing, and so what their participation in CS. In some other countries, women's participation rates in STEM have continued to increase as they integrate with the workforce. So you could use the very same argument you used to come to the opposite conclusion.
> You will choose what your friends choose.
Totally agree there! That may or may not have to do with discrimination, but you're right about that.
> I think there is some biology
This is the root of it. You've decided that women intrinsically don't want to do math or engineering.
There's data that shows otherwise, but it is indeed difficult to prove anything concrete. Nonetheless, we have strong indicators that today's ratios are not natural. And why would they have settled yet? It's barely been 3-4 generations since women were allowed to even vote. It's clearly still in flux, so suggesting that biology explains today's difference is obviously stretching.
Bottom line is I don't doubt preferences are at play, and what I'm saying is that biology can't explain the current preferences in the US or in Sweden either. Biology is not fluctuating on the 100 year time scale, and cultural norms are. Assuming that the known, documented sexism during the last century is fixed now and that cultural attitudes have settles and job choices reflect intrinsic gender differences... well it's my opinion, but looking at all the facts we do have, that seems so unlikely I believe it's impossible.
This is a very bold assumption on your part. For one, representation of women in technology was actually higher when discrimination against women was more prevalent, during the 1970s and 80s. This inverse relationship between gender equality and representation of women in technology is reproduced today. Countries with less gender equality actually see higher rates of women in tech as compared to countries with more gender equality.
The notion that discriminating against men will somehow end discrimination against women is similarly naive. When discrimination in the workplace occurs, employees are aware of it. Putting women in a situation where the majority of their coworkers know that they are being held to a different standard is an exceedingly easy way to foster a toxic workplace.
> So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?
Rethink whether there's anything that needs to be fixed. We should see women as individuals capable of making their own career choices, instead of as objects to be herded into one field or another.
Also, it creates a situation where people are aware that non-diverse employees are held to a more selective standard. This can increase impostor syndrome among diverse employees who may feel that they would not have been employed if they weren't of a specific gender or ethnicity.
1. The position that it's OK to fight discrimination with more discrimination is very different from the idea that discrimination is inherently bad.
2. The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.
If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.
Conversely, if genders don't have a different intrinsic, permanent distributions of interests, then not using some affirmative action to correct the situation amounts to preserving the status quo of known cultural discrimination.
The problem with what you said is that we already have data, the distributions of interest have changed dramatically over time recently, and they are currently different from country to country.
That's pretty clear, hard evidence that the gender differences in occupation choice we have today in the US (for example) are not intrinsic to the genders. So, what does that leave as possible causes?
The most fascinating fact here is that the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!
It's easy to interpret that as when you're rich enough to pick the career that actually interests you, rather than the career most likely to keep starvation at bay, people follow their interests more.
> the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!
What if gender stereotypical career choices is an indicator that our society is not gender equal, and that we're patting ourselves on the back prematurely?
BTW, not really true that there's a correlation between gender equality metrics and stereotypical career choices. To come to that conclusion, you have to ignore some periods of time and ignore some countries in the world.
This is very controversial among political activists, but established fact in the relevant sciences.
Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a good introduction.
I didn't ask if the distributions are different. They are different, that's a fact we know, and what many people believe is the problem.
The question is, what evidence is there that the differences are intrinsic? For that, there's very little evidence in favor and strong evidence against. Specifically, the differences in the distributions of preferences among women over time and country by country are larger than today's differences between men and women in the US. That's pretty solid evidence that the distributions are cultural and not intrinsic to gender.
If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.
The established way to classify people's personality traits is the "Big Five"/OCEAN model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Systematic gender differences show up across all cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...
Your second non-answer to my question is to point at the updated version of the Myers-Briggs test, right after saying ‘but, science’? Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?
This only repeats your previous argument, it shows that cultural differences currently exist. Again, we already know that. It does not show that intrinsic sex differences exist. I recommend reading all of that article carefully before assuming it’s helping your argument in any way. The conclusion of the section you shared on gender differences says:
“It is important to recognize that individual differences in traits are relevant in a specific cultural context, and that the traits do not have their effects outside of that context.”
And Big Five is “established” as a personality test. Personality tests are pseudoscientific, even if Big 5 is ‘more scientific’ than Myers-Briggs.
“Like the Big 5 model, any personality or behavior assessment can’t know things you haven’t explicitly answered in the questionnaire, Stein says. Sometimes commercial personality tests ask odd questions—like, Do you identify with snakes? or How do you react to a certain color?—and try to draw inferences from your answers. Those kinds of conclusions venture into the pseudoscientific, Stein says.“
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-...
https://qz.com/1201773/we-took-the-worlds-most-scientific-pe...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#...
I gave you a Pinker book to read and a well footnoted Wikipedia article on the science. I've spent enough work trying to educate someone who gives all the signs of just not wanting to change their mind.
> Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?
Nothing, and I never claimed it had.
> Personality tests are pseudoscientific
The big five is the established scientific fact of 2019. Denying science because it doesn't fit with your ideology doesn't put you in great company.
I’m sorry I made you angry, there’s some miscommunication going on here. I’m not convinced we’re talking about the same thing because you haven’t brought anything to this conversation that demonstrates there’s evidence of intrinsic sex differences when it comes to career choices, you’ve only pointed to known cultural differences.
I agree with you that there are cultural differences.
> If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.
So your standard of proof here 1000 years of studies, until you can agree that there is a chance this could be true.
Obviously, nothing anyone can say convince someone with such firm beliefs.
I agree there is miscommunication. I've been as clear as I can be, and I don't think any amount of me restating things can reach you.
I’m ignoring your ad hominem, but FWIW it weakens your argument because it demonstrates you didn’t understand mine. It has also become clear you didn’t fully understand my question. So, yes, you could keep restating that cultural differences exist or bringing up other irrelevant things like personality tests, and yes, that will continue to fail to show that intrinsic sex differences exist.
Its certainly not controversial that _some_ of the discrepancy is caused by discrimination. It is very obviously true historically for many careers. Consider medicine, where women were relegated to nursing because they couldn't cut it as physicians. Today that idea seems absurd, and of the brightest people I met in medical school, there was a fairly even split of men / women. So far medicine was more challenging than the typical programming job I"ve held, which is at least partially relevant.
To be clear I am certainly not arguing that 50/50 is the natural distribution of men/women among programmers. I have no idea what it is. But I'll bet it is higher than 98/2, which is about the ratio in the last 4 programming jobs I've held.
Lastly, I have two young daughters now. Its been a bit shocking to me to see how early they are inundated with messaging steering them towards being pretty, dressing like a girl, etc. I have no doubt the lingering stereotypes and cultural pressure steers women into so called traditional roles from an early age.
Yeah, the smartest women go into medicine and law instead of programming. I claim it's largely because they find working with people more interesting than working with machines.
Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female, and that is who they genuinely are.
Please think carefully about what happens if your claim turns out to be wrong. If males and females turn out to have equal interest in people and things, then your argument that you're spreading here is unintentionally a cultural gender based bias, in effect unconscious sexism.
Well two in particular went into pathology and radiology, so its definitely not the social aspect (they don't regularly deal with patients). Also, what do you claim of the equal number of men who go into law and medicine?
> Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female,
They aren't interested in much of anything yet -- they are 6 months and 2 years old.
https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollmen... https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/12/19/women-a...
Breaking down the medical fields by gender distribution also follows expected patterns:
https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profil...
I'm not saying these facts proves anything in particular, but they're good to be aware of.
The symmetry you're trying to imply doesn't really exist. Victims of cultural discrimination in history have been killed, enslaved, raped, harassed, etc. There is no analogue to that for the receivers of affirmative action. It's frequently quite difficult to show who's being materially harmed by affirmative actions as a group. It's common to say that giving a job to a women or black person because of affirmative action is discrimination, but it's not always zero-sum, it doesn't always mean someone else lost the job. And you just can't forget that if someone did lose the job, they still, as a group, already had unfairly high numbers of that job.
Another problem with your judgement is that the whole idea with affirmative action is to favor whoever is the underdog and only until they no longer are, where cultural racism doesn't change sides.
> when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.
This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
> The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality.
Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working? When has it worked better than affirmative actions?
To make a more subtle and deeper point about the irony of what you're saying, how do you actually "discourage" racism without in some way, shape or form giving preference to the downtrodden group? Isn't "discouraging" racism discriminatory against someone? If all discrimination is deplorable, is "discouraging" racism then deplorable because it's discriminatory against racists?
> But even if you do nothing, it's strictly better
Disagree. And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.
The issue isn't positive vs negative discrimination or else the "fight racism with racism" camp wouldn't cry foul when positive discrimination is applied toward whites or men (in those rare cases when it actually is) nor would there be so much overt negative discrimination toward men and whites (the use of "white men" as a slur, the accusation that men are rapists and need to be trained not to rape, the propensity to blame all problems on whites/men, the existence of work groups and meetups that specifically exclude whites/men, etc). It's pretty clearly that there is some notion that certain genders/races are more deserving of both negative and positive discrimination than others.
> This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
The confusion is understandable; I should have used a different term. I coined "postive racism" to mean discrimination (specifically negative discrimination, per your definition) toward some group that is perceived to deserve it--those who advocate for the discrimination see it as righteous, hence 'positive'--for the sake of a somewhat familiar, concrete example, Antifa advocates for negative discrimination toward whites, men, etc. I should have used different words since "positive racism" sounds too similar to "positive discrimination" which already has an established meaning (and perhaps "positive racism" also already has an established meaning as well). I also used "discrimination" a lot when I technically meant what you're referring to as "negative discrimination"; in general, my post was ignoring affirmative action or "positive discrimination" because I don't understand it to be even remotely central to the broader national debate on race and social justice.
I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism, although I think it's ill-considered and probably produces more racial tension, division, and strife than it alleviates. The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. And while there probably are some who support affirmative action to antagonize whites, the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.
> Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working?
It's been working very well. Racism has been declining since the civil rights movement by all indicators. Equality of opportunity is at an all-time high in the history of the US, the West, and the whole world. You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values. Chief among those values is individual liberty which naturally gives way to equality, and which is the antithesis to collectivist movements such as white supremacy, fascism/nationalism/national-socialism, communism, and so-called "anti-fascism" and "anti-racism" movements that are popular today.
> When has it worked better than affirmative actions?
I speculate (speculation is all we can do for this question) that it has always worked better (and far better) than affirmative action. As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.
> And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.
Depends on how the problem is defined and one's values (hence the "subjectivity" in my original comment).
If the problem is "too much racism", then most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem--racism is deplorable.
If the problem is "certain races and sexes deserve to be treated poorer than others" then of course racism will appear to be the solution. It's an inherently racist viewpoint, and people who espouse that viewpoint are (by definition) racists.
Agreed. Whatever differences of opinion we might have, this was well said, and I agree with you there.
The last part of your comment seems like it switches back to calling affirmative action racist implicitly though? Or, maybe I can't tell. I don't really understand the distinction you're making between positive discrimination and affirmative action.
I would totally agree that hateful discrimination is a bad thing, but from the top of the thread down, all we've been talking about is affirmative action, as far as I can tell, and nothing else. When @manfredo said "such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination", by "discrimination", he means affirmative action, right?
> You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values.
Yes, true! And... this is exactly why some colleges have prioritized making sure they admit a few extra people from minority groups known to be suffering from discrimination, right?
> most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem
Except nobody proposed racism as the solution in the animous/hateful sense. People proposed affirmative action as the solution.
> As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.
It sounds like you're hinting at the mismatch theory here and elsewhere... which is a common criticism, and it has been debated and studied at some length. Might be worth looking up some of the results.
Since AA has been used a lot, I'm not clear on why you're saying that racial tension and opportunity has improved dramatically, but that AA had nothing to do with it? Why are you sure that AA isn't the reason things are now better?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Mismatching
This article demonstrates some of the positive effects of AA, and also some of the negative effects of banning AA:
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/07/case-affirmative-a...
I guess if I have a single point it's that framing affirmative action as discrimination isn't clear thinking. It sounds like that's not what you're talking about, but this is what I jumped into the fray to say. The argument used above, not by you, is trying to suggest and imply there's a hypocrisy to taking any action to prevent cultural discrimination because the action is also discriminatory. That's true only in a technical sense, but is only FUD that confuses the issue. The goal is what's important, and the goal is equality of opportunity and removal of all animous/hateful behavior. Taking actions to meet that goal have worked in the past and will continue to.