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#FFFFFF Diversity

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Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#71

Post by mpweiher »

wpietri wrote: post #53
mpweiher wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Quotas get introduced because there are brilliant minority developers who get passed over because they're in the minority. Any evidence (other than anecdotal) for this claim? The only reason I have ever seen for quotas is that the overall distribution is skewed, and therefore it must be discrimination.

There is plenty of evidence for hiring discrimination of all sorts. Oceans of it. For example: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.

2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#72

Post by [deleted] »

azima wrote: post #68
lucozade wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about quotas. They're a political tool usually. I'm talking about the well researched and well documented advantages of diversity for an organisation. You appear to be assuming, somewhat ironically, that there is only one point of a diversity programme and that that is to have some kind of impact on society as a whole. A worthy goal, sure, but not the only one. My point is that an organisation may hav…

Not considering it important is ignorance. Cheers

[deleted]

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#73

Post by spoiler »

tone wrote: post #29

"I can’t support a conference that doesn’t seem to understand the value and importance of intersectionality and representation." Doesn't this just promote the idea that people of different ethnicities really are that different? Why on earth is skin colour "representation" an important factor anywhere? I mean don't discriminate but how is this an argument? This just promotes the wrong idea that people of different eth…

> This just promotes the wrong idea that people of different ethnicities bring drastically different things to the table in one breath, and argues that race or gender do not affect technical ability with the next.

> How this insane person has people listening to them or why a completely backwards article on the right site gets linked here is beyond me.

These two are exactly what bugs me, too. This actually reminds me of how Feminism turned from an equality movement to this modern-wave bullshit where it's a woman-supremacy movement and it's got nothing with equality.

It seems like 2015 is the year where people started being offended by everything, and they constantly look for opportunities to be discriminated. "Black women in IT."

Fucking Hell, by the time it's 2020 we'll reach a "homosexual Black Christian women wearing polka dot clothing in tech indistry" that are being discriminated.

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#74

Post by scintill76 »

azima wrote: post #59
scintill76 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is really related to the comment you're replying to. Whether or not discrimination exists is not the same as whether or not "the value and importance of intersectionality and representation" (article quote) is something we should consciously pursue. How does that not carry a bias towards reverse discrimination? I agree with the OP, I'm scratching my head about how the article simultaneously argues…

Be inclusive and not just try to hit quotas.

Those could be contradictory. If you're consciously categorizing people in order to "be inclusive", you are discriminating ("make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people or things"), and probably instituting your own mental quotas to monitor the balance.

If you just mean don't throw "Latoya's" job application in the trash just because she sounds Black and you don't want any of those, few here are going to disagree, and few here would do that either, so it's not very helpful.

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#75

Post by petercooper »

Kiro wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who think it's perfectly logical that the speaker ratio is the same as the ratio of the tech population? Of course we should try hard to find minority speakers just to be proactive since we do have a diversty problem. However, when you go to a conference you want to see the best speakers and then it's only logical that a minority is less represented since, you know, there are less good speakers to c…

Just my opinion, but the idea of "50% women speakers" isn't out of some sort of over-representative fairness to a "minority", but a reflection of real world demographics.

In any case I can think of, roughly 50% of people in a given conference's catchment area are women, and since tech is an industry in which anyone could excel, having "50% women speakers" is promoting and encouraging a desired ideal to both the industry and potential participants in that industry. (I must note that "failing" at having 50% women speakers at a conference is by no means a fatal flaw, but having the ideal there and the principles in mind can still effect long term change.)

The idea of having 50% "trans" people at an event would be a very different one given less than 1% of people are trans, allegedly (although given the stigma still attached, I think being trans needs to become more acceptable in society as a whole before we'll know the true number. They're probably a lot higher than we'd suspect, as we saw with homosexuality through the 20th century).

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#76

Post by hamstergene »

onion2k wrote: post #28
paulojreis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if we forcibly try to overrepresent every minority where do we end up? "50% black trans women speakers"? I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too hig\ You end up with hiring quotas in companies, where a less-than-competent candidate can be hired instead of a competent one because he/she belongs to a minority. Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater g…

That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring practises among some companies can be discriminatory. There are hiring managers out there who won't hire a female developer because they're just outright sexist. Quotas get introduced because there are brilliant minority developers who get passed over because they're in the minority. All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that peopl…

The choice can't possibly be "always between two or three competent". Less competent exist, and they have to pop up somewhere. With quotas, once most competent from the lesser set get taken, only less competent will remain available. It's a trivial mental exercise, not something that requires gathering evidence to figure it out.

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#77

Post by dijit »

azima wrote: post #44
dijit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the hiring process is completely opaque, so this can never be proven or disproven. ideally, we'd have a system where we have a balance sheet that gets tallied up- but interviewing is an important part in gauging competence and culture fit (yes, this is a real thing, I know some developers who don't wash and I would not call them culturally fitting), so it's not something that can be solved easily. We all, inherently…

Inclusion like in speaking at tech conferences for one...

that doesn't change the fact that quotas are a shitty solution, perhaps having people vote publicly on topics that are on an agenda, while witholding the author's name?

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#78

Post by deong »

wpietri wrote: post #56
deong wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common sense would tell you it does happen. It only takes one guy who'd rather hire a man than a woman and one qualified woman applying for that job. I don't think it's a meaningfully large part of the explanation for the skewed distribution. I think there are deeper systemic issues for that. However, I don't think I've seen more than a handful of people say that quotas are in place because of discrimination either.…

That's a good list, but I think you have left out subtle discrimination. Things like the IAT show that there's a great deal of implicit racial bias in the US. [1] I also have never heard of a company actually having quotas. What I have heard is people gathering statistics and saying, "Hey, this looks pretty bad. What are we doing that might cause this? What can we do to fix our [generally unconscious and unnoticed] b…

You're right, I haven't heard of actual quotas either. I just got a bit loose with using the parent commenter's terminology.

I agree on the subtle and implicit bias issue as well. I wasn't trying to be exhaustive, but that's a big enough issue that it ought to be specifically mentioned.

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#79

Post by newmana »

mpweiher wrote: post #71
wpietri wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of evidence for hiring discrimination of all sorts. Oceans of it. For example: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.

2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

That study has many flaws especially in self selection:

http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...

Re: #FFFFFF Diversity

#80

Post by wpietri »

mpweiher wrote: post #71
wpietri wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of evidence for hiring discrimination of all sorts. Oceans of it. For example: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.

2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

As newmana mentions, there are issues with that study:

http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...

And there are other studies I find more persuasive. E.g.:

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/stu...

In particular, I think the "switch the names" sort of study under realistic conditions makes it clear that bias is an issue. And it certainly matches widespread anecdotal opinions of nondominant groups in STEM fields.

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