The power of role models

Even if true, the reasons for it might be interesting.

If you're going to make a wide-reaching claim like that, please back it up. Or narrow the claim by making it anecdotal. My experience is quite the opposite. I, my friends, and most of my co-workers can see the very clear disenfranchisement suffered by women and believe work must be done to counter it.

These are zero sum games

That's not clear at all. Let's take a small example. Imagine the Go community lacks influential thought leaders of the female gender (I have no clue if this is the case). Now imagine they seek to address this by urging respected but below-the-surface women to write more blog posts, attend more meetings. Who exactly suffers? You don't think we can find more chairs in the meeting room? Is the blog going to fill up?

None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics

He was pretty clear about that actually. He started with it. He said he felt, but could not prove, the high quality of his experience had to do with the diversity of the members of that community. It's fine to challenge that idea, but don't pretend like it wasn't discussed.

what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap

When I tell my kids to go out of their way to be friends with a kid who seems lonely, they fundamentally get why. They don't have these delusions that everyone starts at an equal footing and that the status quo reflects everyone getting what they deserve.

[1] if you don't see his story as a parody, intentional or otherwise, look again...

But if diversity is your yardstick, then it's surprising how much better the military services are at it than tech. Indeed, if I were an ambitious woman, I am not sure that's not the path to take for tech.

I wholeheartedly agree, elevating people above the level of responsibility/work they can handle is a bad idea, as is taking away responsibility from more qualified people.

Where you run into trouble is the people judging qualifications. Human judgment is an insanely noisy tool that heavily weights a bunch of stuff with no actual effect. For a stupid example, look at the earning difference between tall men and taller men -- it's about $800/yr/inch [1]. The effects of gender, race, and apparent country of origin (eg "foreign sounding" names) are all larger and equally useless in actually predicting job performance.

I'm not saying hire dim women over bright men. As I see it, the claim is that there are often many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error, and in those situations it's wise to pick the disadvantaged candidate because A) your flawed human judgement's probably lying to you ie they're more qualified than you think and B) if they are truly equal, elevating them will help encourage the next generation of candidates with their background, as TFA suggests. We can argue whether such a strategy will discourage the advantaged group's next generation in an equal and opposite manner, but I suspect the effect is strongly net positive on the size / quality of the labor pool.

Lastly, I realize I've made this comment quite narrowly focused on a hypothetical "hiring" scenario with a single human arbiter, but I hope HN can extrapolate the ideas to other choices we make as a society.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...