Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities.
This is only a dilemma if you completely ignore the history that precipitated such efforts.
In Norway years back they promoted a program for women to study engineering disciplines. They increased a lot.
So at some point they thought they could stop doing it and percentages came back to where they were before after some time I recall.
If it was a cultural thing... they would have stayed. On the way u had discrimination by sex (AFAIK men were not paid for choosing engineering and women were paid FOR choosing, a privilege under any circumstance since noone forbid them to choose that).
All in all what happened is that some ppl saw a chance (incentive) in dtudying cheaper or whatever. But was the real reason to choose those degrees bc they really liked it?
I really think promoting good stuff is nice. But distorting it via positive discrimination is not the solution.
if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back.
sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture. and that includes possible ongoing discrimination against women, only that the financial support helped some women to enter engineering despite the discrimination happening.
it is possible that this program was the wrong approach. (where it comes to discrimination, i believe it matters to teach everyone to change their attitude towards women in engineering) or that it simply wasn't active long enough. it takes time to change peoples attitudes. maybe after a few decades people get used to women in engineering. (that worked in china, they have a lot more women in engineering)
the problem with liking it is that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the field at hand. i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture, and that alone would be enough to rather work in a job that i don't like where the people are nice than the reverse.
Yes, that is what happened.
> sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture
This reminds me of "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. The culture was not changed probably because there is more than just culture underlying human choice... at least that is my belief. Of course, not all is biology, but not all is culture. It seems that in this case things tend to indicate that there is more than culture behind these choices.
> it is possible that this program was the wrong approach
why not just convince people why they should choose X or Y? Why you have to reserve money or resources actively? That, you know, means that some people that are more valuable than others, will lose their chance... is not that discrimination? Is it not that what they are fighting? You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side...
> i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture
Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? I might not like in a sis culture, right? I mean, the problem exists... no, the problem does not. Things are the way they are and we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others. If you work somewhere, you cannot pretend the world will change immediately around you just bc we think it should be something different. We need to deal with that, and trying to force everything into our ideal just leads to frustration. Instead we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem.
then why try at all? if we believe this goal should be achived then we should keep trying until we get there.
You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side
that is a reasonable argument, but plenty of counter arguments exist. some are being discussed on this page.
Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite?
oh sure, however, teaching is an entirely different problem.
as a parent i want my children to be exposed to male and female role models (what teachers are to them) in equal measure. therefore for the sake of children i want gender parity in schools to be enforced by law.
but you could make the same argument with other professions that are dominated by one gender. nurses are probably a good example where men may not feel comfortable.
we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others
why not?
one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?
what we want is gender equality, that is equality of opportunity (not necessarily equality of outcome)
so that means we want more opportunities for women in engineering. for that we need to understand what is keeping women out of engineering, and how can we get more women into engineering. (and then replay that for any profession and respective gender)
and if access to financial resources is a reason, then it absolutely makes sense to provide additional financial resources to women.
again, i have no idea what happened in norway. access to university is free in norway, so i don't know what they would need money for.
if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change. how do we get them to change? possibly only by exposing men to more female coworkers. but that means forcing the issue, and pushing women into engineering until men learn to treat women as equals.
i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching), but i strongly care about women and men being treated equally, and a large part of that is men learning to treat women as their equal and respect them professionally.
we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem
you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.
but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.
It is good to try, but we already tried a million times. It just does not work. This is like trying to jump from the top of a building and trying to not get hurt when you smash the ground. Reality has a certain shape. Some people try to fight reality based on the fact of "things should be like in my mind" ignoring all psychology, antropology, biology and other aspects behind it saying it is just a cultural thing.
As I said before, it this was just cultural, numbers would not have come back to the starting point. This is a very clear signal that we should not be doing that, but something else. Or probably nothing! Because doing that creates side effects. I am ok with promoting women to study engineering, as my parents did with "what do you like better?", "wanna try this?", for which I and them payed the cost in time and money. But I am totally against arranging public resources systematically so that people that are valuable cannot enter a place because of a stupid quota. That should be, literally, illegal, under the premise that discrimination is forbidden for reasons of gender, race, etc.
> one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?
The goal is that people should be happy and doing what they want. You do not need a grant to give an engineering to someone bc she is a woman. That is not true. You just need to encourage them. Yet they do this, why?
If some people are not happy by how the world looks in their mind (I think we all find things we do not like), that is not a reason to start public scholarships and stuff like that to do things that clearly do not work, or at least, have not worked before. If I try a business, or something to promote something positive to others, I am not entitled to make 3rd parties pay the economic and discrimination (they get out of the system bc of quotas). The second thing is even worse than the economic part, which is not good either, anyway, IMHO, bc it violates the right of people to their property/effort.
> if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change.
Where did you take that men discriminate women in engineering? Please show me the facts. This is so silly. I have worked with women in engineering, for me they are just my mates. This is like saying I am discriminated when I am a man and date bc girls look more at certain aspects of me than what I pay attention from them.
It is just different interests, you cannot do anything against that. And there is nothing bad in it. If it bothers someone, it is that person who has a problem accepting reality. They pretend the one who has the problem is reality. This is highly absurd...
> i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching)
Me none. I do not care almost 70% are women in Spain university, as long as there is no incentive to promote girls and leave guys out. If things are like that, there must be a reason, and the reason is not discrimination, at least in Spain. That is silly. The only discrimination I saw is the fact that they are actively bribing girls to study certain degrees, but when a degree is full of women, they do not do the opposite. That said, I am against this kind of briving in either direction. If you want to study something, it is bc you have a natural motivation in the first place: shifting the cost to third parties should be illegal, as I said.
> you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.
The problem is that they do not, at least it looks like no when they run public programmes. What they do is to try to maximize the votes like when a scammer tries to sell you a broken product or service. Their interest is to maximize the benefit for them, not for us. This, unfortunately, is the nature of politics (and of humans, in general): we do what benefits us the most first, and later, yes, we are not super bad and we have a heart there. But we go first. It is like that. There is plenty of literature showing all this...
> but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.
There is not a problem. It is not a problem that most girls are teachers or most guys are engineers. Look how easy it is: you talk to men and you tell them why they should be teaching. You talk to women and you tell them why they should do engineering (higher wages, blabla). If they do not want to choose it, there is nothing you can do, you have to respect it and not starting an artificial war that just has bad side effects: kicking out people that genuinely wanted to study something bc of a quota, creating an artificial incentive and have people with zero vocation on a job... things like that.
You just make things worse when you do this. Honest opinion: the problem does not exist. Bc "we want more men, women, black, white, whatever" in place X is just a wish of the mind that should not be a real goal just bc of our taste for symmetry. It would be nice? Probably for some. But you are making others pay the cost. Noone is entitled to shift the cost of things they do not pay for to 3rd parties. I will always be against that, and it should be illegal (in theory it is..., at least in Spain, but in practice they do it).
it is nothing like that for 3 reasons
1. first and foremost the "white only" schools was legally required segregation, it was imposed by law and the elimination of that required law to reverse. These laws have now been absent for decades
2. Primary education is where this battle should be fought, even today there are still battle that need to be fought when it come to resource alloation, school choice, etc. You do not attempt to fix a bad casting after the poor you need to fix the mold.... We do that by fixing primary education which is being used by various political factions on both the left and the right to push political agenda and not education.
3. Once we get to adulthood, using discrimination to "fix" historic discrimination will not resolve the underlying problem (see #2) and will likely create more discrimination against the very groups you are attempting to assist, it is in all cases a general net negative.
The fix was to forcibly integrate schools: explicitly mandate not just that black students be allowed, but actually that they are integrated in significant numbers, including by providing special facilities (school buses) to take them to the better schools that were farther away from their homes - the policy known as "busing" [0]; a form of (positive) discrimination.
Of course, as the article notes, this can also have negative consequences, so any such measure is far from easy to apply.
"Diversity" is empty HR speak, please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation.
To keep an open mind I did a thought experiment and found a few: entertainment, fusion food, music, those things I'd imagine benefit greatly from diversity.
I'm talking about the diversity of WW2 era Germany bringing, through great atrocity, a means for the world to not starve via nitrogen sequestration derived by the tragedies of the holocaust and the Haber Method.
It is not the prettiest example, but it fits what you've asked for.
- There was diversity
- As a result, there was innovation.
This disregards a LOT of bad things that came from this, and it doesn't validate or excuse those bad things, however it fits the stipulations of what you outlined: a time where diversity created innovation.
[EDIT] wow, you edited your whole long form reply and just replaced it with "I'm not a bot"? That's such a misleading and dishonest thing to do for everyone reading these posts from now onwards
If you hire all of the same socioeconomic strata even if they are different races chances are you will not get a wide depth of experience and world view
Demographics of this city I believe are 30% minority and 70% white. Of the 10 Homes owners closest to me (and they are all home owners no rentals) 4 of them are black.
My employer has a much larger than 30% black workforce.
Homelessness is not a large problem here, however it is primarily white men that I see homeless. probably on the order of 70% matching demographics
I am tired of the false narrative that the midwest is racist.
I sometimes think about coming up with a guessing game where you put up a description of rural areas from HN and then a description of fallout and let people guess which is which.
To put it bluntly, the level of ignorance from city folks on this site is astounding. Many of them cannot fathom people with money who don't wear it on their sleeve.
No, We have a big problem with drugs that is true, but I would not call it a "wasteland"
AS far a homelessness, it is a problem like it is everywhere but I have never seen anything like what is seen in CA in my life. I would call that a wasteland of homelessness.
We have tons and charities, and lower cost of living making our homelessness problem generally transitory, meaning a person is homeless in crisis which is largely corrected by community out reach in a few months. Long Term homelessness is much less of a problem here
Most on HN cannot imagine just how ignorant they are. It borders on the Marie Antoinette quote 'let them eat cake' (I'm aware its apocryphal).
You're right that the problem exists everywhere, it's just they don't put themselves into positions to see many homeless, but read stories of the poor and homeless in the rural area and make the mistake of thinking they have some grasp.
If there are few women in tech, and few women professors of computer science or engineering, there will be few girls taking tech courses. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, and you need explicit action to break it. Affirmative action is one of the only known ways of doing this, as it has been at least moderately successful at integrating black people into high-status positions and jobs after the centuries of slavery. Explicit programs to encourage STEM education for girls in school are another, but less proven.
This line of thinking seems logical but is missing out on the human experience part of the equation. It doesn’t address why things are the way they are today. Affirmative Action, for lack of a better phrase, does a lot of things:
1) It provides representation for the future. “Mom went to college so so can I!”, “Wow, if Susan Wojcicki can run Youtube, then I can do something like that too!” Seeing people you can identify with being successful affects how you view yourself.
2) One of the reasons diverse teams are more productive is it helps stamp out the “oddball” feeling. If you are the only person in your peers that looks like you, it can have a chilling effect on how you interact with the team, how your success is measured, and your mental well being. If you don’t believe this, go to a club where no one looks like you and see how much you feel like standing out even more than just existing there.
3) It normalizes it. The only reason we are talking about it is because people in these positions are extraordinary. Normalizing it reduces implicit bias, gets other, previously discriminated against people back into the conversation and is the path towards it being a nonissue. The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.
4) Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.
There are important reasons for these sorts of hiring decisions that have lasting consequences. And if we want to make the issue disappear we have to start at the top, not at the bottom.
The “oddball” feeling is also very real in profession where a single gender represent over 80%. It was one of the finding in a government report in Sweden why so few men chooses to enter the education profession. With a majority of people working in profession with significant gender imbalance, universal affirmative action would help to reduce the problem of people perceiving a toxic working environment. A universal problem should be solved using universal methods.
For normalizing, there is two primary strategic methods. You can treat people special as with affirmative action, or you can treat people being there as being normal by treating people as individuals. Both methods works, but they also work against each other. Treating people as special create hostility and resentment, while treating everyone as individuals has the risk being perceived as supporting statues quo.
And yes, we can start at the top. Affirmative action at college applications is not the same as affirmative action at board members. Affirmative action should be universally applied using common rules, but that is sadly not how it get applied. The few times people try to make common rules for affirmative action it get abandoned quickly because the wrong group benefited from it, or it get removed based on anti-discrimination laws.
Moreover, while I believe that diversity is a benefit, I suspect returns diminish beyond 5-10% (beyond that, it's no longer "wow, a career woman! I've never seen that before!"--similarly, a team that is 50% black is probably not going to produce a facial recognition product that is 40% better than the team that is only 10% black, although the team that is 0-5% black may well make a product that performs poorly on black faces).
> The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.
I'm not sure this is true; I think it's mostly just that "gays are harmful" was a really hard position to support, and the gay rights movement didn't try to bash their opponents over the head (they weren't trying to cancel people for questioning dubious narratives, for example).
> Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.
You can't assume someone had greater social barriers based on race or gender. What is true for a large, diverse group of people (like a race or a gender) is often not true for individuals. This is just stereotyping.
* The things you were exposed to as a child. Whether or not you know/see people who look like you in a certain career path.
* Whether or not you feel like you fit in at certain classes in school.
* The biases of your mentors and whom they choose to invest in. People favor other people who they feel are similar. This impacts who gets opportunities for further training positions. Who they write recommendations for. Who gets opportunities for internships. Each of these choices compound, as people with more opportunities look better than people with less.
* The biases of your peers and coworkers. Who gets blamed when things go poorly. Who gets credit for successes.
On the individual level, it's usually difficult to point out exactly where the injustice occurs to know how to address it in real time. As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others. With that in mind, it becomes much more reasonable to essentially reverse discriminate. Given two people with the same resume, with person A being from an underrepresented group and person B who is not, the best candidate is likely A who has had the additional burden of biases.
Doing this at large actually will reduce the biases. As it becomes normal to see the underrepresented group in a career path:
* More kids will see people like them in the career, leading to more trying it
* Classes will be more diverse and welcoming so more will stick to it
* Mentors are likely more diverse as well and will give opportunities to other people that look like them
* When you don't stick out, it's more likely you'll be treated fairly by peers and coworkers
What this does is distribute the injustice evenly between the races, but this sort of concern about races (rather than the individuals that comprise them) strikes me as the very essence of racism: it's treating individuals within a race as unimportant and treating race itself as all-important.
> As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others.
We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.
> We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.
Plenty of studies have been done on this topic. I don't think it's controversial to say that disparities are due to discrimination
And by most people's definition of good and bad, this can't be incorrect. Unless they don't believe in good or bad as truthful labels, which is fair but makes things more complicated.
It is right to try to take systemic steps to equalize access to opportunity across the board. The best (but imho still incredibly flawed) way of doing this is to use "anti-biased" hueristics to increase representation of certain people. In school admissions, for example, this might mean prioritizing applications from poorer areas. In other places this means having minimum quotas for hiring certain genders or ethnicities.
Yes, to be utterly semantic, it is discriminatory. I don't know how this sits with me, but it is technically true. But, whether it sits well or not, it is virtually impossible to fiddle ourselves out of this quagmire of inequality without taking proactive _opposite_ steps. We need to somehow equalise the playing field, thus equalising access to merit, thus equalising the soundness of the so-hailed "pure meritocracy" that so many seem to uphold as the ideal.
If people perceive that some groups are getting extra at the expense of others then that is seen as wrong, but if those in need are given communal surplus that is seen as just. In the circumstances of historical injustice you have competing claims that overlap depending upon which details are in focus.
Any data to show this is happening? From what I have seen, the primary benefactors of diversity initiatives come from the upper crusts of society(mostly upperclass white women, white lgbt, and some asian sprinkled in).
I have yet to see a diversity report that bins by intersections instead of broad categories. There's a reason for it.
I think there are additional externalities that need to be considered. For example, some of these discriminatory policies are going to cause strife, hate, and resentment, etc. in the people who need to be discriminated against. I think there may be unintended consequences that we're only beginning to see.
Discrimination causes problems that can take a long time to emerge and a long time to address. We're STILL seeing the effects of this on many minority groups - but the solution IMO isn't to do it all over again.
It feels BAD to be discriminated against.
As a migrant from dirt poor family from ex-Soviet Republic, I seem to forgot to collect my generational merit, where and when can I do that? And can I add it to my own merit?
Counter that by providing less privileged people with more opportunities, not by changing the definitions of merit.
It's basically impossible for anyone to become a chess grandmaster without exposure to competitive chess when you're less than 10. This obviously favors the children of the well off, but you can't deny that these children end up being better at chess.
The same goes for education in general. If elite preparatory schools didn't offer a better education than public schools, nobody would pay for them. You shouldn't use their doing better on standardized tests as an indictment on standardized tests because they're genuinely better educated. Asians tend to have the highest SAT scores of all races, and they're the least likely to drop out. Black people tend to have the lowest SAT scores, and they're also the most likely to drop out. This is a sign that the SAT is a good metric. Yet, the far left frames this two examples of racism: that both the SAT and colleges themselves are systemically racist.
By principle, I actually am in favor of affirmative action, but I'm tired of all the anti-merit rhetoric used to justify it.
Which is why this sort of slacktivist approach to everything, where the "if we change the meaning of words then reality will change with it" is so popular today on social media.
It's easy and low effort.
But it's not. It's being applied with the same level of knee-jerk emotional reaction and sloppiness of classic "I don't like people of skin color x" racial prejudice - which is what it is.
The theory that you're describing is quite different from what is being applied in the real world.
Rather than fight to make the system equal and fair, you favour tilting it in your direction assuming it will never tilt the other way?
Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it by hiring a different woman in some other job because humans aren't fungible.
California brought in a law banning all male boards in 2018 because the problem is so endemic. Not 1988, 2018.
A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.[1]
So this is still happening now, and for decades most boards just had a token woman at best.
For me personally, when I found out about how unrepresentative corporate boardrooms were, that changed my mind about positive discrimination.
It showed me clear evidence that network effects were too strong, meritocracy is a farce and it had to be broken by forcing a cultural change, i.e. positive discrimination was the right solution.
If you go back far enough in my comment history here you'll probably find me arguing against it. But I learnt about the persistent gender and minority inequality on boards a decade or two ago and changed my mind.
You should too.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requi...
>A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.
is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).
If a person making hiring decisions says that the next candidate for such-and-such role should be a person from such-and-such group (a woman, a person of color, etc.), then the criterion of being the better candidate doesn't apply. Or, rather, it gets adjusted such that belonging in the desired group is included in the list of what makes a candidate better.
I completely agree with you, which is what makes all these recent trends in hiring all the more fascinating to me. If the only concern of a company were the bottom line (which I would expect it should be), then there wouldn't have been any conversation about marginalised groups etc., because, for companies, a candidate's demographics would have been irrelevant. The only thing that would have mattered is which candidate is expected to be the best fit for a given position. That it doesn't work like that suggests that companies are also political creatures, and are concerned about their public image and, possibly, about things like ESG scores. It may even be that the public image and things like ESG scores are a strong contributor to the bottom line.
In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves.
Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill.
It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.
If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.
But the reality is that the vast majority of tech jobs are in the first category. There are far more people building web sites than kernel network stack hackers.
I know it's monkeys, not people, but experiments have been done:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
> We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization.
You can look at who buys military history books vs romance novels on amazon (something that's a far more voluntary, personal choice than a job which has financial and local incentives). From that you wouldn't be surprised men are far more likely to want to be in the military.
It's funny what society selectively decides to deem controversial and important to change, while ignoring the million other ways that same phenomenon exists uncontroversially everywhere else in society.
I don't think people care that women aren't interested in technology, they just want to see more women with x popular good paying jobs, then blame the industry for it as if there's some giant conspiracy to not hire them.
It seemed like a cultural issue to me, like it was just too boyish and bro-ish for women to want to enter the programme. Sausage party effect.
Judging from the department photos of graduates from past years, you could see that there were way more women in CompSci the 70s and 80s.
I wish people would understand that.