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U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#371

Post by wallace_f »

prutschman wrote: post #365
wallace_f wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sane person genuinely believes just as many woman as men want to work on oil rigs, or that it's even close. That's a very surprising case, yet very American, lawsuit though.

If it's surprising to you that there are women who want to work on oil rigs, and want that badly enough to go through the trouble of making a case out of it, then you may need to update your beliefs about what it means to be a woman.

Give me a break. You are insane if you think auto mechanics, miners, truck drivers, plumbers, construction workers, landscapers, or working on fishing vessels, or other physically demanding, laborious jobs, are not preferred more by men than women. 5 women and 1 court case (and no lawyer ever set up a lawsuit like that, right?) does not change all of those facts. You need to realize that your worldview and own personal politics of 'what it means to be a woman' has nothing to do with this topic. Even if it did, the vast majority of women do not want those jobs as much as men do, and you would need to prove prevalent, institutional bias, not discuss what it means to be a woman, to show that this is not true. That does not mean there is not 1 woman who does not love her job as a truck driver. Or 5 woman who love their jobs as truck driver. Nor does it mean women should be prevented from being truck drivers. That's not what this is about though. This is about political correctness and lawyers, not about human welfare and civil rights.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#372

Post by omginternets »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #369
omginternets wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you have challenged me to defend the assertion that equality of opportunity exists No, I most definitely have not. I challenge you to demonstrate that interests, cultural values, and other factors that influence professional qualification to be evenly distributed. This is a sine qua non condition for the claim that "equal opportunity begets equal success" to be true. If you want to define "equality of opportunity" a…

Good point, but please keep the conversation polite. It's one of HN's best qualities.

I don't think I'm being impolite.

Edit: perhaps you caught one of my earlier versions. I did indeed edit for tone. I'm quite happy with it now.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#373

Post by omginternets »

logandavis wrote: post #370
omginternets wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you have challenged me to defend the assertion that equality of opportunity exists No, I most definitely have not. I challenge you to demonstrate that interests, cultural values, and other factors that influence professional qualification to be evenly distributed. This is a sine qua non condition for the claim that "equal opportunity begets equal success" to be true. If you want to define "equality of opportunity" a…

I do want to define equality of opportunity that way. As you originally asked me to consider (before editing your post), the consequence that I believe would follow would be equality of outcome, give or take random sampling variation. To respond to your newly edited (four times! ack! I am scrambling to keep up) comment: I do not want to argue that all groups of people are the same. You have already challenged me to p…

>I do want to define equality of opportunity that way.

You can't have it both ways.

Either all groups are (statistically) the same in their values, preferences, etc, or the claim "equal opportunity => equal representation" does not hold.

Again, this latent assumption in your reasoning is the object of my criticism.

>You seem very touchy about this topic. Why do you feel compelled to say such mean things about my posts?

I apologize if I came off as mean. I did indeed edit my text to remain as civil as possible. The informational content has not changed significantly (it's mostly formatting and tone).

I am, indeed, touchy because it's all too easy you to insinuate bigotry where there is none. It's perfectly normal to be upset when baseless, unfair and dishonest insinuations are used to attack one's character.

But let's be honest: you know this. Frankly I find it disingenuous to act surprised at such a reaction.

With that, let's return to the matter at hand: can you demonstrate that the aforementioned factors are homogeneously distributed between, say, ethnic groups?

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#374

Post by wallace_f »

ryandamm wrote: post #368
wallace_f wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are insane to believe just as many women as men would want to work on oil rigs. There are many other examples: auto mechanics, miners, movers, truckers, construction workers, jobs on fishing vessels. I didn't "cherry pick" one example. Any gritty, dangerous, physically demanding job that assaults your senses is going to attract more men than women. Just citing a single lawsuit as your evidence that the opposite i…

> You are insane Let's not do this here, please. Also, you're discrediting yourself and your arguments before I even get to the substance of your comment.

It was not intended as an ad hominen. It's intended to be reflective of the facts available in the world.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#375

Post by moultano »

sangnoir wrote: post #342
wallace_f wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it doesn't seem like Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described: >most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want…

> Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.

Generally when you control for the number of hours worked, the pay gap mostly goes away. Women on average take much more time off to bear and raise children. The disagreement is mostly over whether this is an appropriate thing to control for. Some argue that we should take steps to ensure that taking time off for childcare doesn't hurt women's careers. Some argue that women feeling the need to take more time off is exactly the problem and we should change our culture so that childcare responsibilities are more equitably shared. I don't think you'd find anyone who has studied this issue who thinks the main source of the pay gap is still discrimination.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#376

Post by nommm-nommm »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #352
wallace_f wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Equality of opportunity will never lead to equality of outcome. Our current politics around equality are fraudulent. Different people have different attributes. It doesn't mean one group is better. It just means people are different. For example, the NBA will never be dominated by players of Asian descent. Another: you will never see women asking for equal opportunity for jobs like working in the north sea on offs…

As mentioned earlier, women do in fact protest against discrimination in the oil rig industry[1]. 1. http://www.warrensiurek.com/blog/2015/04/5-women-claim-gende...

Another example http://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/07/12/A-Labrador-woman-has-...

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#377

Post by meanduck »

ryandamm wrote: post #367
meanduck wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure this has been mentioned to death. But I always find this contradictory. Companies cannot be soley profit driven if at same time they artifically reducing supply of eligable candidates. That makes no business sense. So if companies are rejecting someone that means as whole (read net), they are expecting more bang for the buck.

Illiquid markets, stable equilibria (that are not at global minima), and irrational decision making. Unless your model accounts for such things, it's too simplified. Particularly when it comes to human factors. And if your model is that deficient, it's not really providing useful insights. Modeling complex phenomena well is tough. But you need to have enough humility to understand when your toy model might be deceivi…

No one will give the amount of invasive data needed to verify a model. So we will never know which model works.

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#378

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

logandavis wrote: post #351
garanduss wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea you describe in your second paragraph is to some extent rational, too. For example, a degree from a top college means less for a black job applicant because of the heavy affirmative action advantage given to them.

What exactly makes you think that a degree "means less" for a black job applicant than it does for a white one, when a white applicant is approximately 150% likelier to have a degree than a black one is? Are you attempting to assert causation in the absence of correlation?

I think he meant the following.

Suppose that for University X, the minimal SAT requirement for white applicants was 700/700, and for black applicants was 400/400.

Suppose that the SAT scores of all white students at X are uniformly distributed over (700-800/700-800), and those of the black students are uniformly distributed over (400-800/400-800).

Now randomly pick one white student, and one black student.

Which of them is likely to have the higher SAT score?

And which do you want performing heart surgery on your child?

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#379

Post by oculusthrift »

general_ai wrote: post #322
freditup wrote: post #123

That means we so far have: * Palantir sued for not hiring enough Asians [0] * Google sued for not turning over compensation data [1] * Oracle sued for hiring too many Asians While it's possible that discriminatory processes have happened at all these places, it seems these lawsuits can be targeted at whoever one wishes. It's always going to be possible to find data that indicates discrimination, unless companies hire…

I feel like "Asians" is too broad a grouping. I think if we split "Asians" into Indians and the Chinese the stats would be a lot more illuminating. Microsoft, for instance, seems to have a much larger percentage of Indian workers than Google does. It could be because Microsoft hires a ton more contractors (some of which convert to FTE) or it could be something else. In any case, much finer grained stats are needed to…

microsoft has a large office in india and many transfer over to US offices

Re: U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

#380

Post by oculusthrift »

rudolf0 wrote: post #53
grepthisab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say anonymous, how do you mean it? As in: the interviewer meets face-to-face without a resume in front of them, or the interviewer has a resume but the interview is done over the phone, or a phone interview with no resume?

Well, for one, you can hide contact info from a resume (which is still stored in a system somewhere, with a unique ID). And you can also make the early stages of your interview email or text-chat based (or just a Google Doc, like some companies do), to eliminate any potential bias in things that can be inferred from voice like accent, region, and gender. Obviously once they're on-site for an interview, you can't anon…

communication skills and personality can be really integral to the hiring process. many would rather have a good communicator than a slightly better engineer. your way removes this.
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