And I've heard hiring managers say racist and sexist comments on prospective employees all throughout my career. And neglect to mentor or promote them. And freeze them out of the team. I suppose the strawman you've set up outweighs the actual racist and sexist discrimination in hiring, which only seems to exist to you as some abstraction, rather than real people losing their livelihoods because of sexual harassment and racist bullying.
> Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.
Ah yes, the highly regarded International Journal of blog.interview.io. How did I miss this groundbreaking research?
What you call a strawman is exactly the kind of discrimination that exists at my current employer and at my previous employer. This is reality. And the discrimination isn't small or subtle. We're talking about aggregate 2-3x times less likely to get a phone interview as a diverse candidate. Is harassment or bullying equal to or greater than the impact of this preference in hiring? There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.
Calling the latter "frothing", "breath-takingly racist" is an incredibly hostile thing to say, and it makes me question whether people actually want to discuss the impact of discrimination in hiring or want to shut down discussion by making it taboo.
Also interviewing.io actually conducts interviews on a large scale, and is probably one of the best positioned organization to conduct this sort of experiment. Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?
And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism. And rather supports the breathtakingly racist claim above.
> Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?
Forgive me, I didn't realize they were the leading authority on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought a publication by psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts to seek out, not a blog post.
> And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism.
Right, they are different. The latter makes people uncomfortable or alienated at their job. The former keeps people from getting jobs in the first place on the basis of race and gender.
Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.
> Forgive me, I didn't realize they were subject matter experts on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts, not a blog.
This reads like a total non-sequitur. Interviewing.io compared non-anonymous interview performance of women to anonymous interview performance, and found that there was little discrepancy (in fact it found a slight positive bias in favor of women). Why are you referring to sociology and psychology in a study focused on anonymous vs. non-anonymous interview performance? Also, why would African American Studies relate to studying potential gender bias in hiring? It seems like you just assumed that this study was focused on black candidates, when in reality it was studying potential bias with respect to gender.
> So, you're saying racial slurs are better than diverse hiring?
I answered this question:
> Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.
> Thanks for definitively putting the "Are you a racist?" question to rest. I think we're about done here.
This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion. You're branding people as racist for looking at the world from a different perspective.
If you met an Asian man who graduated from a boot camp and failed to get phone interviews while his diverse peers got interviews and jobs, would you tell him to his face that he's racist if he thinks he's getting a short end of the stick? If he felt that having a job, even if it meant additional bullying or harassment, was better than not having a job at all would you genuinely tell him that being unemployed and Asian is better than being employed and black, female, or Latino?
Let me turn this question back to you:
> So, you're saying racial slurs are preferable to diverse hiring?
Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.
Not to mention, non-diverse people are subject to slurs too. I've witnesses more hostility towards Asians than any other race, yet diversity hiring penalizes them hardest.
> This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion.
Ah yes, the old "You're intolerant of our intolerance" chestnut. Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently denying the realities of racial biases in hiring, and portraying any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism. Oh, and look: more strawmen.
> Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently glossing over the realities of racial biases in hiring by painting any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism.
If this is your takeaway, then I don't think you've been getting the message that I've been trying to convey this whole time.
There are benefits and drawbacks of being diverse in tech. You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.
Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.
And the "strawmen" are real diversity hiring polices I've encountered. If you're a boot camp grad and you applied to Dropbox between 2014 and 2019 you only got an interview if you were diverse. Dismissing the things I've personally witnessed as strawmen makes me think your opinion comes from a perspective that is not aware of the extent of diversity hiring. Perhaps you'd think differently if you worked at my current and past employers and witnesses our hiring policies.
> You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.
It's actually pretty clear which of these has the greater impact. Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech. Which I've already stated above.
And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...
> Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech.
They often are. At Dropbox women made up over 23% of tech roles in 2018 while recruiters estimated that the Bay Area average is 19.2%. That's an overrepresentation of ~20%. At my current employer, last year 50% of engineering hires were women - 2.5x the industry wide representation (though that was an anomaly - it usually averages ~30%).
> And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...
At this point you seem to be offended by the notion that one can even try to compare the impact of racial or gendered slurs or harassment with denying White and Asian men employment opportunities on the basis of their race and gender. There's really nothing to say except that people will compare these two things regardless of your objections, and some of them reach the conclusion that the former outweighs the latter.
Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?
And I'm offended because it's wildly offensive. You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are somehow worse. And seem to think some amount of explanation on your part will make it seem like it's a reasonable stance instead of a deeply and reprehensibly racist one. Instead it just makes you look like a verbose clan leader.
> Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?
So tech companies should strive to be 50% women even though the tech industry is only 20% female (or slightly less)? This would mean that women in tech have to be hired at 4x the rate as men in tech. Ultimately how you choose to frame equality is up to you, but I'm confident in saying that most would not consider a company that hires 50/50 men and women when the industry is made up 80/20 of men and women to be offering equal opportunity to men and women. It creates an outcome representative of the general population, but at the expense of creating massive inequality of opportunity within the tech industry itself.
> You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are far worse.
Identify where I've said this? Because I've been very consistent in emphasizing that which is worse is a matter of perspective. In fact, I've specifically pointed out that it is not reasonable to say one is worse than the other because these are subjective judgements.
And lastly, trying to equate harboring different opinions on affirmative action in employment to being a leader in the KKK is really not called for. This is getting to the point where I'm convinced that this conversation is going nowhere.
> So tech companies should strive to be 50% women even though the tech industry is only 20% female (or slightly less)?
You seem to not understand what the term "representative" means. Or notice the circular logic implicit in your argument.
> Identify where I've said this?
You mean the last several posts of yours, where you've said it repeatedly, that you're now hilariously trying to backpeddle? You're welcome to re-read your posts. And the quotes I have of your posts, claiming racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring is worse.
> And lastly, trying to equate harboring different opinions on affirmative action in employment to being a leader in the KKK is really not called for.
It's not that the opinions you expressed are different, it's that they're repugnant. There's a difference.
> You seem to not understand what the term "representative" means.
So the answer is yes? Companies should strive to be 50/50 men and women tech roles even though the ratio in the workforce is 80/20? Representation is inherently relative, and that what I'm getting at here. Is your idea of an equal workplace one that is representative of the population (50/50 even though workforce is 80/20?) or one that is representative of the workforce (80/20 if the workforce is 80/20)? I know full well what representative means, but I'm asking you: representative with respect to what?
> You mean the last five posts of yours, where you've said it repeatedly, that you're now hilariously trying to backpeddle? You're welcome to re-read your posts. And the quotes I have of your posts, claiming racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring is worse.
Let's see:
> Who is getting the short or long end of the stick is not something I aim to answer, or even purport to be able to answer. This is a matter of perspective. I'm a Hispanic person that attended an elite university and have household names on my resume. I'd have a good chance of getting interviews regardless of my gender or ethnicity - and when you do take ethnicity into account it probably helps me even more. I'm largely indifferent towards this kind of discrimination in hiring. But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
Here I explicitly say that I don't aim to answer whether one outweighs the other, and that people can find valid answers for either.
> There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.
Again, I point out that all I'm trying to convey is that there are people who think differently than you on this topic and that it's not valid to dismiss these perspectives as racist.
> Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.
Here is the only instance where I actually state my personal opinion, which is actually agreeing with you.
> Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.
I think I've been very consistent in emphasizing that people with different lived experiences can arrive at different answers to these questions.
Weighting diversity against equal opportunity is something that this industry struggles to do effectively. We can't have a good faith discussion on this topic while simultaneously claiming that the notion that these policies create an environment that is more disadvantaging to non-diverse people as compared to diverse people is racist and likening people who think so to clansmen.
> So the answer is yes? Companies should strive to be 50/50 men and women tech roles even though the ratio in the workforce is 80/20?
The answer is: "No, I do not see the obvious circular logic." The tech sector is 80/20 due to hiring bias in the population that defines the workplace demographic. It could be 0% women and your fallacious argument would still conveniently hold.
And you follow that up with quotes of ...yourself. And commentary on your self-quoting. You don't seem to get that it's not that I don't comprehend your premise. It's that your premise, and by extension you, are being reprehensible and racist. You do not seem to understand that saying racist things is racist. And that you are racist. And reprehensible. For being so racist.
> The tech sector is 80/20 because of hiring bias in the population that defines the workplace demographic.
And evidence of that is...? Graduates in the fields of study that feed into the tech workforce are 80/20 - why do we conclude that the industry is biased when it is representative of the population that chooses to go into tech? A valid response is to say that men and women's choices of study are the product of a biased society that pushes men into tech and women into other fields. But at this point, what we're saying is that tech is representative of the workforce, and the workforce is representative of the people that choose to try and go into tech. This is not one, but two layers of indirection and many are not of the opinion that broader societal trends that produce unequal rates of men and women choosing to work in technology should be counteracted with discrimination in the workplace to push this representation towards parity.
You can say that "saying racist things is racist" all you want - my point is that putting opposition to affirmative action in the workplace under the category of racist informs me that your usage of the term "racist" largely equates to "people who have an opinion contrary to my own:, that discrimination in hiring is more disadvantageous than bullying or harassment in the workplace". This is a reductive strategy, and it's not unique to people who support diversity hiring. There are plenty of people who say, "discrimination on the basis of protected class like race and gender is illegal and racist - discrimination, regardless of the guise of 'diversity hiring' is reprehensible, full stop" and it's just as reductive. How would you respond to someone who said that quote to you? I'd probably write them off as being too entrenched in their view to have a meaningful exchange, and that is unfortunately the conclusion I'm left with here.
Actually, what you've been doing is already beyond bannable, and we've had to warn you more than once in the past. Please stop this and don't do anything like it on HN again.
Fair. But as long as I keep coming across racially insensitive comments like in the original post, and commenters who strongly believe these kinds of comments are a legitimate perspective, I'm not going to be able to just leave them as is. And I don't see a way to constructively engage with those kinds of comments that doesn't end in this type of exchange.
Consequently, I'm going to request that you delete my account (...If that's a thing that you can do on here. I'm not really sure. Otherwise a ban seems close enough.) I think just lurking on here would be a better option under these circumstances.
> Yes, underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias.
It's literally not.
Men account for 90% of convictions for homicide and other serious forms of violence in the US, and the overwhelming majority of countries abroad. Is that evidence of overwhelming misandry and bias in criminal justice? There's been demonstration of some bias, IIRC men tend to get 40-60% longer sentences. But that's nowhere near enough to account for this disparity. The reality is men do commit more violence than women and the disparity of men in prison for violence so this overrepresentation of men is not the product of bias, but rather men's own decisions.
Similarly, women make up the majority of professions like speech pathology, education, publishing with some of these over 90% female. Do we conclude that this is because of rampant bias against men? Perhaps, but in order to prove that we'd have to prove that these institutions prefer female applicants over male applicants. A non-bias explanation is that 90% of applicants are female, because 90% of people who want to go into these jobs are women.
Not only is underrepresentation not evidence of bias, the lack of underrepresentation does not absolve a group of bias. For instance, say a tech company decided it wanted to have an engineering workforce representative of the general population with respect to gender. 20% of the applications it gets are from women, so the company randomly throws away 75% of the male applications to make it so that an equal number of people go on to the phone screen, and subsequent on-site. This produces an engineering workforce that is perfectly representative of the population's gender distribution. But it is overwhelmingly biased against men and in favor of women. Obviously real-world tech companies are rarely this extreme - I've personally only seen OKRs calling for 33% at most. The point is, force equal or closer-to-equal outcomes in spite of unequal decisions made by people often entails the creation of bias, rather than its elimination. Do you really think that a company can achieve 50% women in tech without biasing their interview process in favor of women? The only company that even gets close to 50/50 practices explicit quota hiring:
Ultimately, at this point I think your conception that bias has a 1:1 relationship with representation relative to general population is fundamentally different from mine in a way that makes it difficult to productively explore the value of affirmative action in the hiring process.
>Do you really think that a company can achieve 50% women in tech without biasing their interview process in favor of women?
I strongly recommend looking up the word "bias" in the dictionary.
Systemic and institutional bias in tech hiring isn't disproven by of the existence of female-dominated fields. Yes, some fields are female dominated while others are male-dominated. (Such a revelation!)
It sounds like you're angling for the "male nurses are oppressed by the matriarchy!"
trope, or some kind of gender essentialist nonsense. I'll be sure to adjust my insults accordingly, now that you've moved on from blatant racism to sexist dogwhistles.
Do go on, I'm curious to see at what point you move on to full-blown misogyny. I'm looking forward to seeing how many words you write insisting that you're not misogynistic either, while making offensive guesses as to the root cause of these biases in hiring.
> I strongly recommend looking up the word "bias" in the dictionary.
From the fist Google result [1], "prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair." Representation is not mentioned at all.
> Systemic and institutional bias in tech hiring isn't disproven by of the existence of female-dominated fields. Yes, some fields are female dominated while others are male-dominated. (Such a revelation!)
The point is, do you think it's valid to say that female dominated fields are biased against men with no evidence for bias aside from the disparity in representation? This is what it seems like you're claiming when you write that underrepresentation relative to the population is the same thing as bias.
> It sounds like you're angling for the "male nurses are oppressed by the matriarchy!" trope, or some kind of gender essentialist nonsense.
I agree, concluding that male nurses are subject to bias just because they're substantially outnumbered by female nurses is incorrect. But you wrote "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias." Well, male nurses are substantially underrepresented. If underrepresentation relative to the population is "literally the definition of bias" then it's hard to argue that male nurses aren't subject to bias when they are unambiguously underrepresented.
The point is not that male nurses are oppressed - the point is that they aren't oppressed and thus your definition is wrong. Underrepresentation is not bias. An institution can exactly representative of the general population but also immensely biased - like a tech company that threw out 3/4th of male applicants to make tech roles 50% women - and it can be not at all representative of the population and not biased at all - like a hospital that hires 90% female nurses because nurses are 90% women. Prejudice in favor or against one group can occur or not occur regardless of representation relative to the population.
You've been breaking the site guidelines by perpetuating this flamewar. Please stop, and please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN in the future.
It doesn't look like you have a pattern of doing this in the past on HN, and (although I've only read a small portion of this thread) I don't see how your comments deserved abuse. But it's necessary to recognize when an argument is going bad fast, and to step away from those sorts of exchanges. HN is for curious conversation, not ideological battle, and when it comes to these tedious tit-for-tat spats the crowd the right hand side of the page because neither party can let go, it really doesn't matter who wins the argument. Actually it would be better to define 'winning' as being first to let go.
> Selection bias pushes men towards high-status, high-paying fields and women towards low-paying, pink collar fields. You do realize that if one sector disproportionately hires men, then there are a disproportionately high number of women in the remaining sectors, yes?
Yes, you're right! Contrary to what you previously wrote, "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias" underrepresentation is not the definition of bias. Bias is being more favorable towards some groups as compared to others. The fact that nursing is overwhelmingly women does not mean that nursing is biased against men, because men and women make different choices. If we tried to make hospitals have 50% male nurses they would likely have to institute immense bias in favor of men to achieve representation equal to the general population.
> But beyond the statistical biases, the highly-gendered nature of tech prevents women from being seen as a "good cultural fit" by hiring managers. It prevents women from being encourages to pursue CS in school, and pushes women out of tech when then do manage to get a foothold. Whereas nursing actually encourages men to apply much more proactively because people don't get hilariously defensive if it's trying to be rectified. But I'm certain you have lengthy, sexist rebuttals prepared for how sexism isn't real, with analogous comparisons about on the job sexual harassment and diversity hiring.
Again, you've demonstrated that you fully comprehend that "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias" is not at all the case. If a tech company rejects women wrongfully then they are biased against women - regardless of whether women make up 10% of engineers at the company or 90%. Representation is not bias. Bias is bias.
If you witnessed your company wrongfully reject women candidates from the hiring process then by all means your company was biased against women. I don't claim to deny what you have witnessed. But I've witnessed my current and former companies both set up policies that explicitly bias the hiring process to push the representation of women in tech roles to be closer to 50%, even though the current representation of women in tech roles was larger than the average in our metro area. Specifically it was 19% vs 23%. Were there any women that were wrongfully rejected due to "culture fit"? Maybe. But the end result is still that women in tech were more likely to work at the company than men in tech. Is this biased relative to the general population? Yes. But is the general population applying to engineering positions Dropbox? No, only the subset of those that seek a job in tech are applying to engineering positions at tech companies.
Saying tech companies are biased against female engineers because they make up 20% of their engineers is erroneous and simplistic in the same vein that saying hospitals are biased against male nurses because nurses are 10% men. Hospitals usually only have 10% male nurses because only 10% of people that want to be nurses are men. Likewise, tech companies usually have 20% women engineers because women make up 20% of people that want to be engineers. The people studying engineering are 20% female. Are these disparities due to biases in different party of society? Probably. But saying that a tech company is biased because 20% of its engineers are women, is like saying that a hospital is biased for a 10% male workforce. They reflect the population that has decided to enter these fields. The bias, if it exists, is not in the tech company is in whatever social mechanisms to which you attribute these disparities in nursing and technology. If a hospital takes measures to make men account for 20% of the workforce then they're biasing their hiring process to favor men. The fact that biases in society may be responsible for the fact that male nurses are so rare does not change this fact.
Can you elaborate on what you meant by, "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias." Your response seems to be contracting this definition rather than supporting it.
> Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.
Ah yes, the highly regarded International Journal of blog.interview.io. How did I miss this groundbreaking research?