Live data from Hacker News

Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

poseidon01.ssrn.com

181–190 of 198 posts

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of evidence needs to be very, very high to justify discrimination in my opinion.

And if people responsible for awarding research grants within tech decide not to investigate whether there is discrimination against women, or tech companies decline to give full access to their data. Then the quality of evidence that you demand can't exist - in that case, should nothing be done about it?

Maybe it is hard to generate, but without it you have no basis to justify your discrimination. I think that people specifically denied policies that allows it by intrinsic discrimination is a very good and sensible step and should continue to be regarded as the better approach.

If you want to discriminate without sufficient evidence, I am plainly not with you on this.

It is the simplest form of power play to treat people differently because it breeds jealousy. Jealously can lead to discrimination as well. You can do that as a team leader and be sure that people are more concerned with each other than holding you accountable. This is actually a common behavior in corporate office culture which had many tech flee the premises because they had a choice.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#182

The only problem with blind selection, is that, sooner or later, the race/gender/sexual orientation/religion/fitness/attractiveness/age (I'm an old fart, so I can tell you a thing or two about ageism in tech) becomes apparent. I have heard story after story from peers (around my age), about passing numerous rounds of phone and test interviews, only to see the interviewer's face fall, as soon as they walk in the door.…

This is why I actually believe there should be hiring quotas. Tell departments that at least XX% of their hires are expected to be woman, or older than 50, or racial minorities, or whatever else. Set the percentage based on the pool of applicants, minus a bit to allow wiggle room. (And if there are legal blockers, let's change the law!) It feels wrong to me too, I know it does! But if hiring happens based on gut, and…

There is an alternative explanation to the biases people are seeing here, unfortunately, and it would render gender and age confounding variables.

It's known that Valley tech firms of the type studied in this paper have a large left wing contingent amongst employees. We know that being female with a degree correlates quite well with being left wing, as does being young. In contrast being an older white male correlates somewhat with being conservative.

If the actual discrimination here is against "people likely to be conservative" - which is absolutely likely to be happening given what's going on in these firms - then setting quotas for gender and age wouldn't be addressing the underlying problems, only symptoms.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumption relies on the women getting into the field are the best women. I don't see why that would be true. The fields with many women like law, medicine or psychology are much harder to get into than computer science or engineering so most of the best women likely ends up there.

Given that as a woman you don’t benefit from the “competency bias” and constantly has to prove yourself (which is not necessarily bad), combined with the fact that many women simply walk out of careers in computer science and physics because of sexism/harassment, you could consider that the women left are indeed more competent than the average man in the industry.

That's the opposite of what happens. My own experience has been that women benefit dramatically from a "being a woman" bias that makes them much more likely to be hired - exactly what this study now quantifies - and in addition be basically unfireable even if they have severe skills or attitude problems.

The whole idea that there's a competency bias towards men is false. What's actually being observed is that women are hired even when they aren't competent, to please feminists and diversity advocates, which then by definition would make men "appear" more competent even if they were of only average competency.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#184
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get on with the times friend, we need to eliminate blind auditions now.They discriminate: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

"Blind auditions are based on an appealing premise of pure meritocracy" Damn, how did we get here?

By saying nothing years ago when "diversity" became popular and people started arguing there weren't enough women in computing. I'm as guilty as anyone, in the beginning it all seemed harmless enough. It wasn't, it was based on sexism from day one, and now we see the consequences: proven and massive bias towards women at an institutional level. And good luck trying to fix it.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if people responsible for awarding research grants within tech decide not to investigate whether there is discrimination against women, or tech companies decline to give full access to their data. Then the quality of evidence that you demand can't exist - in that case, should nothing be done about it?

Maybe it is hard to generate, but without it you have no basis to justify your discrimination. I think that people specifically denied policies that allows it by intrinsic discrimination is a very good and sensible step and should continue to be regarded as the better approach. If you want to discriminate without sufficient evidence, I am plainly not with you on this. It is the simplest form of power play to treat pe…

But there is quite simple and obvious evidence of discrimination: the percentage of technical jobs which go to women.

Not accepting this as evidence and demanding that your own standards for evidence are met (without saying exactly what that would involve, so you could later reject any other evidence that is provided) before allowing any corrective action, is yet another way that this discrimination is perpetuated.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#186
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm skeptical that this actually captures what hiring managers or recruiters care about when looking at resumes, You're in the tech industry and you honestly are skeptical that recruiters and hiring managers at most companies aren't extremely eager, to say the very least, to hire female candidates?

But regardless of whether the outcome fits your priors or not, you may wish to know whether the study has decent evidence, or is just noise. And GP has a good point. The authors have some automated scheme for grading how well-qualified people are. The recruiters also have some such scheme. If these two schemes differ, and the distributions aren't identical between the groups being compared, then you will detect group…

Yes, but the list of criteria they use for controls is pretty reasonable and more importantly, unbiased by woke ideology. We all know many firms have a very strong bias towards women that grades them as more well qualified (desirable to hire), so we'd expect a re-run using purely objective metrics to detect that. The outcome of this study isn't a surprise, the only surprise is that the bias is "only" 10%.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is hard to generate, but without it you have no basis to justify your discrimination. I think that people specifically denied policies that allows it by intrinsic discrimination is a very good and sensible step and should continue to be regarded as the better approach. If you want to discriminate without sufficient evidence, I am plainly not with you on this. It is the simplest form of power play to treat pe…

But there is quite simple and obvious evidence of discrimination: the percentage of technical jobs which go to women. Not accepting this as evidence and demanding that your own standards for evidence are met (without saying exactly what that would involve, so you could later reject any other evidence that is provided) before allowing any corrective action, is yet another way that this discrimination is perpetuated.

When I studied CS and electrical engineering we started with 120 students. 5 were women. 15 students made it in regular time from which 1 was a women.

You conclusion isn't obvious, on the contrary, there are contradictions. Where should the women in tech have come from?

Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. That is sexism.

> allowing any corrective action

If the reasoning is already that bad, I have very little faith in this corrective action.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is quite simple and obvious evidence of discrimination: the percentage of technical jobs which go to women. Not accepting this as evidence and demanding that your own standards for evidence are met (without saying exactly what that would involve, so you could later reject any other evidence that is provided) before allowing any corrective action, is yet another way that this discrimination is perpetuated.

When I studied CS and electrical engineering we started with 120 students. 5 were women. 15 students made it in regular time from which 1 was a women. You conclusion isn't obvious, on the contrary, there are contradictions. Where should the women in tech have come from? Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. Tha…

> Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. That is sexism.

Ah yes, the hallmark of good faith discussion asking a question and answering it for them.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I studied CS and electrical engineering we started with 120 students. 5 were women. 15 students made it in regular time from which 1 was a women. You conclusion isn't obvious, on the contrary, there are contradictions. Where should the women in tech have come from? Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. Tha…

> Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. That is sexism. Ah yes, the hallmark of good faith discussion asking a question and answering it for them.

A rhetorical question is not a bad faith approach to discussions contrary to leveling the accusation itself. The argument is still there if you want to have a go at it.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit... Stop and Frisk is widely believed to be proof that police are disproportionately targeting black people, and it seems interactions with police end in death more for black people than white people.

A link to a Wikipedia article about stop-and-frisk in NYC is not exactly compelling data for the extraordinary claim of one racial group "systemically killing" another. But fine, let's take a cursory look at this article: search for the words "murder", "death", and "kill". All hits yield no references to systemic murder of black people by another racial group. There is, however, a discussion about how minority groups…

Are you actually saying stop and frisk isn't compelling data for systemic racism? Damn man, that's pretty much common knowledge at this point.
Post reply on HN