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A comment on Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'. Parent comment

Re:Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', ... by tsimionescu on Sunday October 09, 2022 @10:06AM (#33141178)
A big problem is that work is a cultural phenomenon. Most people choose career paths early in life, and do so to a great extent based on role models and general cultural attitudes. This is before adding explicit biases in such fields (in my country at least, I have heard several older professors at university claiming that female students that got better grades than their male counterparts were probably cheating, and docking them a few points for it).

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.

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Re:Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', ... by throwaway894345 on Monday October 10, 2022 @11:02AM (#33152234)
Affirmative action wasn't necessary to open the medical, legal, etc fields to women in the 80s and 90s (in the USA) and those fields were far more misogynistic than STEM is today. Moreover, I don't see much of a difference between your professors who say "girls are probably cheating" versus our wider society who contend that "boys are only successful because of privilege". Both seem wrong. Further, it's not clear to me that affirmative action is known to be successful. I've read several reports recently that indicate that corporate DEI initiatives (which I think is roughly revamped affirmative action) may increase discrimination because people believe that minorities are benefiting from their identity rather than their qualifications. Lastly, it's not clear to me that we need exactly 50% of a given field to be female--it seems like we need enough representation to ward off sexism and so on, which shouldn't require very much considering men don't act as a class (they don't advocate for "men's rights" and so on).
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