Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 660 posts

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#291

Post by smsm42 »

rayiner wrote: post #212
smsm42 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now Wikipedia says: One in four (26%) Iranian researchers is a woman, which is close to the world average (28%). In 2008, half of researchers were employed in academia (51.5%), one-third in the government sector (33.6%) and just under one in seven in the business sector (15.0%). Within the business sector, 22% of researchers were women in 2013, the same proportion as in Ireland, Israel, Italy and Norway. Quotin…

The Forbes article is talking about majors, not practicing researchers.

OK, you are right. Seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Iran... however also does not reveal anything about 70%:

The most popular in 2013 were social sciences (1.9 million students, of which 1.1 million women) and engineering (1.5 million, of which 373 415 women). Women also made up two-thirds of medical students.

Also, practicing researchers probably would be much better metric than students - if the student graduates as STEM major but then does nothing of the sort, then it's not really so relevant for participation anymore. If we had such situation in US, we would reasonably ask what is preventing those student from entering the labor market and consider situation where the distribution is 70/30 outside of university and 25/75 on the labor market abnormal.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#293

Post by tptacek »

humanrebar wrote: post #276
tptacek wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…

> ...other fields, in particular medicine and law Women were literally not allowed to be doctors or lawyers, either by law or by certification boards. Programming has never been a field requiring certification.

There was persistent and powerful bias against women in medicine and the law long after women were officially allowed into the field. The fields themselves did things to correct these problems.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#294

Post by haberman »

tptacek wrote: post #250
humanrebar wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is objecting to special pleading in a different direction. In other words, there's another train of thought: 1) Sexism exists 2) ??? 3) Differences in representation are explainable by sexism I think the original article was making a more nuanced argument allowing for an interconnected set of factors explaining the gender imbalance.

For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…

I feel you are misrepresenting the male/female balance of various disciplines.

Here are male/female distributions of bachelor degrees across many majors. Few of these sit right at 50%:

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

Are you arguing that every field that doesn't sit right at 50% is sexist against the underrepresented gender?

(I don't dispute that sexism in tech exists. I just dispute the expectation that representation will always be equal absent sexism.)

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#295

Post by bitlax »

CalChris wrote: post #257

Trump didn't get that much support. He lost the popular vote by 2.9M.

Hillary feared losing her mandate by winning the electoral college and losing the popular vote, so she over-campaigned in states like California and New York which would be a lock for any Democrat. She "won" the popular vote but lost the only real race that was being run.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#296

Post by sjg007 »

freshhawk wrote: post #154
santoshalper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that as well. I find it interesting that the alt-right has started to embrace so much of modern feminist/liberal terminology and tacitly accepted so many of the premises. The modern alt-right conservative: "I don't believe in safe spaces, but please stop bullying me!"

I'm not surprised by it at all, because I think it's not that they have started to embrace the premises but always did and used them as the foundation for their ideology. It is, to generalize, a group of white, middle class people who were raised in this modern feminist/neo-liberal framework that struggled to translate very academic ideas into a pop culture suitable form. Those poor approximations got mutated by inte…

Could you explicate the last part a little more? I'm interested in understanding the argument but I don't quite follow.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#297

Post by ithkuil »

princekolt wrote: post #163
smsm42 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with the "???" step is that it's unrigorous handwaving. Probably because nobody actually knows right now what actually causes the differences and how. The case that is caused exclusively by entrenched sexism - somehow driven by people graduating from the same institutions who have been fighting sexism for decades now, and by the same people who repudiate and denounce sexism on every corner - also does n…

Well, overall, the share of women in computer sciences has been decreasing for the past years, but it didn't use to be like that. Up until the mid-80s the share was in line with (or higher) than other study areas. NPR talks a bit about the subject, including how personal computers were initially marketed at young men. It's a good read. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Perhaps because it used to be (or be perceived) more like a science back then?

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#298

Post by ak_yo »

remarkEon wrote: post #236
door wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh yeah i'd rather trust people who study society for a living for their opinions on social theory than some computer science major who has never taken a soft science class in his life

So your comment is (rightly) getting downvoted. I think readers here tend to reject anecdotal arguments and rely on data. The critiques of sociology and anthropology are legitimate: those fields are not like technical fields and they lend themselves to weird conclusions that don't get peer reviewed in a way that's different from, say, math or physics.

A substantial amount of academic sociology is based on quantitative analyses of survey data. For example, here's an (open-access!) paper describing gender divides in US doctoral education: https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v4-6-123/

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#299

Post by renaudg »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #269
renaudg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to consider that Gizmodo has acknowledged having stripped the essay of several hyperlinks, probably lending support to his claims. This comprehensive recap could be one of them : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

Yes but that's still the soft science of sociology and the author of the OP should tread carefully before asserting this as literal fact. It remains a conclusion of incomplete results. Obviously better than complete speculation but still no stronger than the technology used by the culture this OP is rallying against.

It's arguably the culture that the OP is rallying against which relies on the "soft science of sociology" as a theoretical basis.

The OP's point on the other hand finds most of its supporting evidence in evolutionary psychology and biology.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#300

Post by SamReidHughes »

door wrote: post #268
noddy1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who knows anything about biology or genetics knows that it is absurd that there would be zero phenotypic difference between males and females. There are simply different factors driving each gender's reproductive success, and therefore the XX and XY chromosomal difference will push different traits. Sociology and anthropology depts can't handle this because they aren't interested in science.

both "myths of gender" and "delusions of gender" were written by scientists. the fact that you still think of sex as a binary difference between xx and xy shows how far outdated your ideas about the science of sex differences are. even "biological sex" (not even gender) is a spectrum influenced by a variety of different factors

Sex is in fact a binary difference, transgender folk are a tiny proportion of the population.
Post reply on HN