If you've removed possible bias from your hiring process, then you have to accept an imbalance is either a result of uneven retention inclusive-or something operating earlier in the process of training your candidates.
The point is to remove as many obstacles as possible. We want the best to get the jobs, but if the are barriers based on gender or race or religion that's potentially denying us a brilliant woman, or black man, or Muslim.
It doesn't necessarily mean you end up at 50/50, I'm quite willing to accept that the sexes might be biologically different in brain structure and that this might mean one sex might have different average aptitudes, but I won't accept a societal construct on top of that.
You should never hear that someone shouldn't try to do something because of their sex. Never.
Well unless it involves the more obvious anatomical differences. The average man is going to have some difficulty becoming an effective wet nurse.
I wonder, though, how companies' hiring processes alone are supposed to fix the societal biases. Isn't it a false choice when given only the two explanations: A) We fix biases in the workplace/hiring process and get a 50/50 distribution in the workplace or B) There must be biological differences.
I'm personally rather convinced of a third alternative: There is some bias and even outright discrimination in some workplaces, but gender norms in society as a whole create such a big difference in the distribution of applicants/talent pool that it becomes impossible to correct as late in life as the hiring process. I think the gender norms are very deeply rooted and entwined through most aspects of life and that if we truly want to fix the problem, as opposed to get good PR and pay lip service, we need to change gender roles drastically. And that starts pretty much from pregnancy and goes way beyond recruiting.
I had to scroll down too far to find this comment. Diversity hiring is treating the symptom, not the disease of segregation at birth into distinct gender roles.
I think it's bad to write "woman, or black man, or muslim'. Being a woman or a black man is something that is determined before birth. Your religious views are adopted after birth. That's why I think it is bad to speak of muslim people, as if that defined them the most. That leads to seperation and distrust, we-against-them. Your sex and skin colour is given, your religion can change.
> You are generalizing in a way that will create animosity
> I think religion is a cancerous meme
My underlying point was that people with faith don't see their faith as a choice about the existence and character of their god (or other non-deist beliefs). It's not objective or accurate to say religion is different because it's a choice.
If anyone is offended by my point, I would challenge them to rethink their assumptions about how tolerant and accepting they are.
I wouldn't say that your point necessarily offends anybody. My point is that it might be not clever to present it like that. One way to get rid of enemies is to befriend them.
> How do we correct for the bias if we don't know what the unbiased state would look like?
The goal isn't to choose some specific gender balance and then take whatever steps necessary to produce it, it's to eliminate unfair bias. The way to do that is to find it, not indirectly by looking at ratios, but directly by actually finding it.
High school teachers who say things like "women are no good at computers" to young women should be reprimanded etc. Poll women who didn't go into tech and ask them why not, and if any of the reasons are unjust then change them.
If no one can find anything like that then the gender balance at that point is what it's supposed to be. We're obviously not there yet, but the way we know is because we keep finding things like that, not because the gender balance is uneven.
I agree. But I notice that most discussions on sexism in technology companies focus on the outcomes; gender ratios and pay gaps. It would be interesting to try to measure the bias directly. Hide a bunch of microphones in offices and see if the number of sexist comments is larger at Google than it is at a law firm or a hospital.
Perhaps somebody has already done this. What would be the correct search terms?
> But I notice that most discussions on sexism in technology companies focus on the outcomes; gender ratios and pay gaps.
It's a specific instance of the more general manage-by-metrics disease. The thing you actually want is hard to measure, but it correlates with something that is easy to measure. So instead of doing the hard work to understand what is actually happening in detail, they measure the easy thing and optimize for that instead. Even though doing that frequently breaks the original correlation.
The result is the bureaucracy edition of a paperclip maximizer. You get what you measure instead of what you really want. Or bang your head against the wall, if the thing you measured is actually stickier than the real problem.
> t would be interesting to try to measure the bias directly. Hide a bunch of microphones in offices and see if the number of sexist comments is larger at Google than it is at a law firm or a hospital.
To some extent this is just the same disease. Is sexism supposed to be alright if it turns out there are equally large amounts in both places? Should we be satisfied that it's the root of the problem if there is very little at Google but even less somewhere else?
Stop trying to measure things against other things and just consider them in their own right. Sexism is bad regardless of how common it is. You don't fight it because there is more of it over here than over there, you fight it everywhere because it exists when it shouldn't exist.
Frankly I do not see how 50/50, or any fixed number, can be a representation of the unbiased state. The unbiased state is unknown.
If you look at what the orchestra did and remove factors you know are irrelevant for the applicants then you should move towards a more unbiased state independent of what the number actually is. The problem is to find out what bias you have. One way is to compare the people who apply with the people you hire. You can see what traits you select on, then you can decide if you think those traits are good or bad.
You ensure a fair process (without attempting to overcompensate/correct for other processes out of your control), and whatever comes out is the unbiased state.
You can't escape the fact that (assuming any innate differences whatsoever) equality of opportunity will mean unequal outcomes, and equality of outcomes requires unequal opportunities.
The point is to remove as many obstacles as possible. We want the best to get the jobs, but if the are barriers based on gender or race or religion that's potentially denying us a brilliant woman, or black man, or Muslim.
It doesn't necessarily mean you end up at 50/50, I'm quite willing to accept that the sexes might be biologically different in brain structure and that this might mean one sex might have different average aptitudes, but I won't accept a societal construct on top of that.
You should never hear that someone shouldn't try to do something because of their sex. Never.
Well unless it involves the more obvious anatomical differences. The average man is going to have some difficulty becoming an effective wet nurse.