Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?

How would you measure the effectiveness?

I think they have, based on reading through a dozen or two discrimination court cases, the EEOC guidelines (the EEOC "is a federal agency that administers and enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination", quoting Wikipedia), and comparing historical accounts of the workplace environment to the modern one. (For example, the detailed EEOC policy guide on sexual harassment is at https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/currentissues.html . See https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm for an overview of the age related issues.) Plus many offices have EEOC training so people are aware that these laws and restrictions exists.

Your point about finding a "lawful excuse" is a bit of an oxymoron. If it's lawful then it's not a violation of the relevant civil rights laws, so it's not really an excuse.

People do use an excuse which they think is legal, and would be legal if the person affected weren't part of a protected class. (For example, Disney had a costume policy that employees were not allowed to have a beard. Sikhs wear a beard as a reminder of their commitment to their faith. This gives a protected status that does not apply to most beard-wearing people. See http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/10/news/sikh-turban-beard-disne... .)

However, most employers don't really know the relevant laws, and go more on what they think is justifiable rather than what is actually legal. That's why there are successful lawsuits.

Regarding rationality, people simply are not 100% rational. The last decade or two of behavioral psychology has convinced me of that. If people are rational, then why do you think discrimination exists at all?

Otherwise, if you don't believe that discrimination exists, then I think it's pointless to continue any conversation.

You ask for empirical data. That's of course a hard thing for many laws, with gun control laws, minimum wage laws, and education policies like charter schools being three of the more notoriously debated.

My experience when I see people ask for empirical data is that no matter what evidence I can provide, it's insufficient. That is, they use it as a way to externalize their doubts, without saying what level of data would overcome their objections.

I'm not saying you are like this, I've just been burned too many times by others doing this. So before I look for empirical evidence on this topic, can you point to other social policies you think there is sufficient empirical data to justify them? What would valid empirical data look like to you?

Slippers, cardigans and golf clubs are the sign of the 50 year olds of the generation before you. They are not something you take on when you get to your 50s. (As a clearer example, Chloe and Emma are popular names for girls. 100 years ago they were Mary and Dorothy. If you know someone's name you can get an idea of age based on its popularity. But today's Emma will not be changing her name to Dorothy when she becomes a centenarian in the 22nd century.)

Modern 50 year olds have a different set of preferences than their parents. Most do not wear the clothing and hairstyles of modern 20 year olds.

Will Smith on some interview for Suicide Squad talked about tattoos. All of the younger cast got tattoos. He, as a 40+ year old father of three, didn't feel comfortable doing that. I didn't find that specific interview, but it's also mentioned at https://youtu.be/u3MgN0NimjY?t=220 .

I can imagine that the 25 years olds of a modern startup might get a tattoo together. Would you join them?

When I was in my 20s I would try out all sort of new technologies, for fun. Now I rarely do that, because I think most of it is churn, redoing well-known concepts but with a different flavor, and I think I understand the underlying concepts well enough. But the 25 year old me might look at my lack of experimentation and judge that I'm set in my ways.

I can easily believe that a modern startup with 20 somethings might think the same thing about me now, and prefer to hire the 25 year old me than the 45 year old me because of it. At the very least, I'm more likely now to speak up and criticize a technology choice, based on experience. That can easily be interpreted as being a killjoy.

I know, because it's happened to me.

Oh they make a difference. Young white heterosexual males are now even better to hire than before because you can fire them without the risk of a lawsuit if things go sour. There's no risk! We get our foot in the door easier than ever! Thanks, Civil Rights Act!

Neither are race or gender an active consideration for the vast majority of hiring managers. Just because it isn't among the criteria that they actively apply when filtering candidates doesn't mean the bias doesn't exist.

> "Does the risk of a discrimination lawsuit cause managers to shy away from protected classes?"

I do not understand. A company with a pattern of shying away from a protected class is in violation of the law, and risks a lawsuit. How does a manager know which is more likely to incur a lawsuit?

> "or due to the general change in society that prompted the laws in the first place"

The laws themselves could also have changed, or accelerated the change, in society.

> we don't know if it's due to the laws

There can be, because state laws may have additional protected classes, up to and including California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which is I believe the broadest such law in the US.

However, as the minimum wage law issue points out, even when such studies are done, the results are still contentious. This is why I asked you to describe what would be sufficiently good evidence before I start looking. If it's unrealistically high, then there's no point in me wasting my time.

This is also why I asked you to point to laws regarding social change where you think the laws actually made a difference and have a empirical support. That lets me know where you are coming from. If you can't point to any laws with sufficient empirical evidence, then I'm not likely to find something which satisfies you.

> "many offices are trained on the law, but then shortly afterwards you say that most employers don't know the relevant laws"

Yes, I can see the apparent contradiction. It's a matter of the depth of required knowledge and numbers. For an employer to work around the legal prohibitions requires a high level of understanding of the laws. Most supervisors do not have this knowledge. While for an employee to protest an illegal employer action requires a much lower understanding.

When I say "many offices", I mean numbers like 10% have good training (eg, a friend working for the state government had really good EEOC training), more (say, 40%) have mediocre training of perhaps a couple of hours by HR when starting with the job, and the rest have none other than a poster in the breakroom describing their rights. These numbers are pulled out of my ass, but roughly equal to my understanding.

This means that most supervisors don't have real knowledge of EEOC laws, other than the few hours they might have gotten years previous from HR when they started as an employee.

Suppose supervisor S fires employee E due to an illegally discriminatory reason. S might talk to a couple of people before making the decision. E, on the other hand, likely complains to friends and family about the decision. Suppose 10% of the people know the action might be illegal. If 3 people were involved in the decision, then there's a 75% chance they don't know it might be illegal. If S talks to 9 friends, then there's only a 33% chance that none of them realize it's likely illegal.

> "[ADF] cultural sensitivity training"

How is this relevant? Cultural sensitivity training is not the same as anti-discrimination laws. Australia is not the US. People can have anti-X sentiment, and even increased anti-X sentiment, and still employ people who are X in a non-discriminatory fashion.

Are you only pointing out that it's possible to carry out studies on people regarding questions of social policy?

Also, the introduction to that non-peer-reviewed paper says "Both the Evaluation Board of the Australian Army Journal, which reviews these articles, and my staff, have a number of opposing views on this article’s content and its reflection on the lived experience of Army values. ... This article is one view, of one cross section of our people, undertaking one component of our preparation for operations". Angus J Campbell and others don't seem to think the empirical evidence given is persuasive.

> "people who are truly discriminatory"

I do not understand what "truly discriminatory" means. We have plenty of lawsuits where companies have been found guilt of being discriminatory, so that's about as true as it gets.

It feels like you have another definition which is far higher than, say, an Archie Bunker level of general bigotry, and reaching more the levels of a villain in a melodrama. Are you really saying that only people who have successfully worked around the law are truly discriminatory? Because that sounds like a rather meaningless label for policy decisions.

In practice I imagine there are people who want to work around the law, but the cost (mental and financial) of figuring out how to do so is too high. That makes them practically non-discriminatory even if their true self would like to be discriminatory.

You again talk about "people who are rational". Do you have empirical evidence that people are rational? The empirical evidence from behavior psychology, which I alluded to earlier, shows that people are not rational. Do you not believe in those results?

If people are not rational, then your argument goes out the window.