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Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

bjk5.com

11–20 of 72 posts

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#11
post #8

I'm curious to know what aspects of Khan's recruiting/admission policies resulted in such a large number of female admissions. It would be nice if the authors' response included some description of their policies. As the person who stands at the end of our hiring process’s pipeline, I find “Mark“‘s idea that we’re sacrificing quality to fill some quota merely very insulting. If I were one of the women who has success…

Transparency about our interviewing process: http://bjk5.com/post/3340326040/in-any-language-you-want-kha... (which comes from the hiring cultures at Fog Creek and Google, see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... ). Transparency about all past internships, their expectation and accomplishments: http://bjk5.com/post/36067210182/khan-academy-internship-sum... http://bjk5.com/post/8826207372/k…

Fogcreek and Google's interview process both seem to yield a far larger number of male employees than females yes?

David, Dylan and Jamie are all men yes?

If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm.

No one is accusing you of using quotas and no is saying you do not value excellence in interns. What's being asked is why was there such a steep increase in the number of female interns accepted? Were there more female applicants? Were interview questions changed? How did this result come about?

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transparency about our interviewing process: http://bjk5.com/post/3340326040/in-any-language-you-want-kha... (which comes from the hiring cultures at Fog Creek and Google, see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... ). Transparency about all past internships, their expectation and accomplishments: http://bjk5.com/post/36067210182/khan-academy-internship-sum... http://bjk5.com/post/8826207372/k…

Fogcreek and Google's interview process both seem to yield a far larger number of male employees than females yes? David, Dylan and Jamie are all men yes? If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm. No one is accusing you of using quotas and no is saying you do not value excellence in intern…

And what I'm asking you is: can you come up with any possible explanations for an increase in women devs over time that should be celebrated, especially at an organization that values equal education for everyone, without first wondering if our interview questions have changed?

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#13

How can people who claim to be meritocratic immediately cry "discrimination! misandry!" when women outperform men? Yep, must have been discrimination, because we all know women can never be better candidates unless there's something else going on. And being excited about a historically underrepresented group overcoming adversity isn't the same thing as "we are favoring primarily women applications". Anyone who's actu…

Yep, must have been discrimination, because we all know women can never be better candidates unless there's something else going on. It's not that women can never be better candidates, it is merely that this is unlikely . Consider a set of applications, 20% of which come from women (fairly typical numbers, from what I've read). Assume women and men are equally skilled. If 30 interns are selected without bias, the odd…

Assuming men and women are equally skilled is a big assumption. Given that few women enter CS, and many who do leave, it would not be surprising to find that the remaining women who have not been selected out somehow are in fact more skilled than the average male engineer.

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fogcreek and Google's interview process both seem to yield a far larger number of male employees than females yes? David, Dylan and Jamie are all men yes? If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm. No one is accusing you of using quotas and no is saying you do not value excellence in intern…

And what I'm asking you is: can you come up with any possible explanations for an increase in women devs over time that should be celebrated, especially at an organization that values equal education for everyone, without first wondering if our interview questions have changed ?

Can you come up with any possible explanation period? You're dodging my question.

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#15
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it the exact opposite of a meritocracy? If someone makes something awesome, it doesn't really matter if they're 14 year olds, women, men or aliens. I know at least I'd high five someone who made something cool, regardless of gender/age/other factors.

The parent is describing the postmodern definition of Meritocracy where "merit" is just a point view. In that world all achievements/failures must be evaluated in light of the person or group's privilege/race/class/gender and sexuality. People who subscribe to this definition really don't believe in meritocracy as it's generally viewed as a way to institutionalize white male advantage. Just a heads up :)

I am not sure whether this is what the parent meant. I mean one way of looking at it is that the more people from completely different backgrounds do things, the more interesting the work gets. E.g. it is possible that some people (teens, women) have a better perspective on solving some problems that affect them more.

I generally support the success of more people from varied backgrounds in tech. Mainly because it makes for a wider variance in problems that get solved. It gets tiring to see every startup out there that solves problems for 20 something people who live in San Francisco (who incidentally might be male, asian/white...). This does not however mean that I ascribe to the idea that one should impose quotas or have lower standards for people who don't fit in these demographics.

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fogcreek and Google's interview process both seem to yield a far larger number of male employees than females yes? David, Dylan and Jamie are all men yes? If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm. No one is accusing you of using quotas and no is saying you do not value excellence in intern…

And what I'm asking you is: can you come up with any possible explanations for an increase in women devs over time that should be celebrated, especially at an organization that values equal education for everyone, without first wondering if our interview questions have changed ?

As a hiring manager for over a decade, I can't recall the last time I received a resume from a qualified female applicant for a full-time software position.

Internships tend to be a bit less one-sided, but the skew is still quite high.

This sucks. I want to receive those resumes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I don't ever receive them.

Given that, I can't help but wonder whether:

1) You have a completely different applicant pool

or

2) You somehow changed your application process in a way that resulted in a 2:1 female:male ratio.

I don't think those are terrible questions to have. The answers could be enlightening.

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#18
One of the commonly-stated reasons for why discrimination persists in a field is that people making hiring decisions are biased. They might not know that they're biased, but they have some notions about the kind of people they want to see working for their company, and they disproportionately hire those people. This is quite an insidious form of discrimination because it's hard to prove, but it is possible to catch people out - for instance if they display a preference for talking to or dealing with male colleagues over female ones, or give more rewards, perks or encouragement to male colleagues. There doesn't need to be a "guys only" sign above the door for this to be a discriminatory environment.

Now, the original "Girls, girls, girls" post talks about how "super exciting" it is for KA to have hired twice as many female interns as male ones, how the women at KA network together, how there are exclusive events for female staff where female leadership is advocated. I know what Jessica was trying to say there, but damn if it didn't wind up looking somewhat like the stuff I described in my first paragraph. Now, I do not believe that KA has done anything wrong, but I don't think it's unreasonable for some people to question this.

This (as I post every time there's a sexism thread, I really should just get a blog or something) is all controversial because people are applying different ethical rules. Some people are applying deontological ethics, which says that there are rules about how to behave, and we should follow those rules (e.g. don't discriminate based on gender). They look at the "Girls, girls, girls" post and see things that look like they might break the rules against doing the stuff I described in my first paragraph. They're not actually looking at the "big picture" because they don't believe that, philosophically speaking, the ends can be used to justify the means. If bias is wrong, being biased in favour of a minority group is still wrong, in this view.

There's another more pragmatic view, which says that we should care mostly about outcomes, especially if no particularly great harms are being inflicted in order to achieve better outcomes. Although I generally lean more towards the rule-based view, in this case, I think KA is pretty clearly producing a good outcome and even if there is some bias[1] then it's not really the end of the world. But I wouldn't condemn or insult someone who thought differently.

[1] A key point about bias and discrimination is that people aren't (and often can't be!) aware of their own biases. If people from KA want to claim that they're totally without bias, that's going to make it hard to accuse other people of bias in the future. This is, sadly, just a Hard Problem and the various problems inherent in solving it are why we keep having lengthy discussions like this.

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, must have been discrimination, because we all know women can never be better candidates unless there's something else going on. It's not that women can never be better candidates, it is merely that this is unlikely . Consider a set of applications, 20% of which come from women (fairly typical numbers, from what I've read). Assume women and men are equally skilled. If 30 interns are selected without bias, the odd…

Assuming men and women are equally skilled is a big assumption. Given that few women enter CS, and many who do leave, it would not be surprising to find that the remaining women who have not been selected out somehow are in fact more skilled than the average male engineer.

Your reasoning contains no fact specific to women. Thus, it should be valid for me to substitute any other group which is underrepresented in computing:

Given that few retards enter CS, and many who do leave, it would not be surprising to find that the remaining retards who have not been selected out somehow are in fact more skilled than the average non-retard engineer.

It also still doesn't make a >60% women class remotely likely - even if women make up 40% of the top engineers, the odds of recruiting at least 60% women in a 30 person class is only only 0.83%.

(PC note: I am only asserting that women are similar to retards in the sense that khuey's argument applies to both of them. No other similarity is asserted or implied.)

Re: Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech

#20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it's well known that minority students are admitted to prestigious universities with far lower SAT and GPA's that their white/Asian counterparts" SATs have been criticised for having inherent socioeconomic bias. The validity of both SATs and GPAs, and their appropriateness as gauges of student intelligence, future performance, learning, and appropriateness for use in admissions have all been questioned.

Do you have a better criterion with which to measure?

How about proven ability to overcome adversity?
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