The power of role models

Society is only the collection of individuals, you are ascribing features to it, and implying some sort of moral order when there is no such thing.

The society is not judged by anybody and there is no universal moral rule that distributes outcomes to demographics. There are only people interacting with other people.

As a human, I am concerned about the personal freedom of individuals. I will do whatever it is in my power to make sure any human being truly has the individual liberty of pursuing life and happiness. I know from personal experience how difficult is to fight for one's freedom alone, so ethics compels me to join the fight in anyone's struggle. I instil in my children moral guidelines that I believe preserve individual choice and individual freedom because that is the world I want to live in and the world I consider just for my children.

At absolutely no point groups of individuals have intrinsic moral rights, and the whole idea of gradually shifting vocabulary from individuals to groups until established terms such as "gay's rights" and "women's rights" form is nothing more than a subtle effort of obscuring the original drive behind class struggle. Suddenly established language shorthands become legal concepts and the whole ethical struggle about ensuring individual freedom becomes a debacle about demographics.

It is bad to discriminate black people because it restricts the individual freedom of every black person, not because there is some intrinsic moral charter that codifies blacks. If I were a black person I would not want to be discriminated against, so my ethics make me fight against any specific examples of discriminating against blacks.

It is bad to discriminate gay people because it restricts the individual freedom of every gay person, not because there is some intrinsic moral charter that codifies gays. If I were a gay person I would not want to be discriminated against, so my ethics make me fight against any specific examples of discriminating against gays.

It is bad to discriminate women because it restricts the individual freedom of every individual person of feminine sex, not because there is some intrinsic moral charter that codifies women. If I were a women I would not want to be discriminated against, so my ethics make me fight against any specific examples of discriminating against women.

And so on ad ad infinitum.

However we can talk about black people, gay people, or women purely as groups of individuals where the rights of the group (if we can talk about such things) is the collection of the individual rights of its constituents. It's an extrinsic concept that arises from the way we look at groups through generalisation. We haven't imbued any distinct, intrinsic right to the group. The group does not exist outside its members, and its members are concrete living human beings, not abstractions.

Forgetting this crucial fact is a insidious strategy to make people take decisions that infringe upon individual freedom in the name of the freedom of some group.

> As a developer, it seems pretty clear to me that there is implicit bias going on in our industry.

It doesn't seem clear to me at all. I have seen and lived through, or had many close acquaintances who lived through many specific example of discrimination, including sexual discrimination (in both directions!) but I would not dream of generalising from them. Even if many, or most of them were of a truly appalling nature. Deep prejudice with very damaging effects; nothing subtle of subjective about them.

All instances were very different in details, but all that could be deduce from it is that people abuse other people, news at 11. It's very tempting to pretend that assholes, or social darwinism, or ruthless capitalism are examples of class warfare, but usually they are not. That is not to say that everything is perfect the way it is. Certainly there are specific problems, some including specific groups that I would want addressed.

> I don't know how or why, but I don't believe that men are inherently better than women at the skills it takes to succeed, so I'm not sure what else would explain the discrepancy.

Emphasis mine.

Why do you think "to succeed" means, or should mean the same thing to everyone as it does to you? You really think that people outside your socially-defined neighbourhood did not succeed? There are many ways to succeed, but success is something defined by each individual for himself. It has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with employment, and certainly nothing to do with the industry you are part of!

Do I think it would be bad for women to succeed less than men in general? I think it would be, but I have no data whether it's true or not in western societies, nor have any way of measuring it, so the point is moot. What I do know, is that whatever the answer to that question is, it has nothing to do with women in tech. That is to say, that even if there's deep injustice going on with women in the western world (no disagreement that there are many societies where women are abused), the solution (or part of the solution) surely is not promoting them without merit in high-tech organizations.

> Why?

Why what? Why do I fight injustice and sexism? Or why do I think sexism branded as feminism is a such a colossal problem?

The former is pretty obvious, I think few people in the west think sexism is a good idea, personally I subscribe to a pretty mainstream individualist moral stance. I wrote some thoughts about this in some parallel comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13737987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13737437

As for the latter, that's a much longer discussion for which unfortunately I do not have the time to get into sufficient detail. Nor do I think this is an appropriate forum for this discussion considering all the downvotes I am getting (no complaining, just stating a fact). Oxitendwe (in this thread) has briefly touched the crux of the issue, however. Mainly that is an attempt of a power grab over society, one that fundamentally has very little to do with women, and in the end it will cause more harm to women than men. I, and most likely my children and friends are directly affected by this power grab.

You're confusing being a good writer with being polite.

Western organisations like Google or universities are spectacular at this. They fill their rooms with asians, women, black people, gays, lesbians, phds of all subjects, and yet they all act and talk like western white males. Yes, even the women.

Coming from a country at the boundary between east and west, poor and developed, civilisation and 3rd world, I find it fascinating how there is less diversity of thought at Google (where people come from all over the place, have all the colors and sexual orientations) then a random group of old people in some fundamentalist rural area in my home country.