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Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

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Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#351

Post by int_19h »

School-Cotton wrote: post #318
int_19h wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company…

> DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Not necessarily. Maybe men are just more likely to be interested in tech, spend time tinkering with computers as young boys, etc.

The reasonable null hypothesis is that they aren't. Once we remove all the other factors, if we still have a bias in the results, then it would be time to conclude otherwise - but not until then.

Also note that "spend time tinkering with computers as young boys" is exactly what I mean by discrimination earlier in the pipeline - if your parents and other adults expect you to not be interested in computers as a kid on account of your gender, and don't provide opportunities to explore that (i.e. when boys get a Lego robotics kit for their birthday, but girls get dollhouses), that's already discriminatory.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#352

Post by int_19h »

geofft wrote: post #306
int_19h wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company…

> If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligati…

>> If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women.

Why not?

Statistically, at least, this should be true, provided that the candidates have been treated equally before they came to you. If they have disadvantaged in that treatment, it will skew the outcome even more against the discriminated minority - e.g. if women tend to get shittier education in certain field because their teachers don't believe them as capable as men, then of those 200 female candidates, the proportion of ones that are less qualified is likely to be lower.

If you somehow end up with the numbers that are reversed, it's not at all unreasonable to ask why - there ought to be a cause, and for a difference that big, it should be prominent. It may well be a reasonable cause - maybe you just got a bunch of really bright women in that batch, and that will be reflected in their career records etc. But it may also be sexism or other form of discrimination not related to performance.

We do investigations of discrimination against minorities based on statistics like these all the time. For example, one of the underpinnings of the ongoing push for police reform in US is the disproportionate number of black people when it comes to police interactions, arrests (esp. for often substance-less crimes like "resisting arrest" or "disorderly conduct"), and convictions. Generally speaking, this is not considered proof of discrimination by itself, but when there's corroborating evidence (e.g. you find out that some PD had a racist internal culture, based on the SMS the officers send to each other etc), it can certainly strengthen the case to the point where discrimination becomes the default assumption, and another explanation would require substantial proof.

In this lawsuit, the guy does cite several specific examples that, at face value, do indicate discriminatory approach, so dismissing such a large disparity and such a quick rate of change as "it just happens, wasn't on purpose" out of hand is not feasible - it requires evidence to rebut.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#353

Post by [deleted] »

geofft wrote: post #306
int_19h wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company…

> If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligati…

[deleted]

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#354

Post by hindsightbias »

bitL wrote: post #220
wattt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...

You guys should really fix English language. As a non-native speaker whose native language allows properly expressing gender anytime, I find this funny, being downvoted for what is a structural problem of your language :-D

Regardless of what weird world they live in, nobody refers to a singular woman as a guy or dude in the mainstream.

"guys" became gender neutral sometime in the 70's, Rita Moreno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#355

Post by int_19h »

st3v3r wrote: post #345
int_19h wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more of a question of how much leverage do you have. If everyone is discriminating against you, like Jim Crow South, it doesn't really matter how much you make, because you can't go and find a different job easily. But if discrimination is limited, and the job market for this particular job and in this particular area favors employees, then it's a self-correcting problem - people will just walk. And if a…

I fail to see why the ability to get a job easily should be taken into account whether you get to have a legal remedy or not. And quite frankly, I have no faith whatsoever that a boycott would work, or gain any traction at all. We have had numerous stories of companies acting shitty all over, and yet they don't seem to have problems hiring.

Let me clarify that.

I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people. What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people discriminated against.

If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in your market that don't have such restrictions, there's no substantial harm to you - you can just pick any of those other jobs. If this particular business can hire enough bigots (or just people who don't care) to keep them running - so what? It still doesn't harm you. So it becomes a matter of principle, and from that perspective, I think freedom of speech and association is a more important principle than private non-discrimination, and so for the lack of measurable harm, the former should be preferred.

It's not just about jobs, too - same principle applies to services. if you have 100 bakers around you that aren't bigoted, and one who is, they cannot cause any meaningful amount of harm to anyone but themselves, by driving customers away.

Of course, if other businesses take note and start discriminating too, at some point, there are enough of them that your ability to get a job or service is hampered - you can't just go elsewhere (not easily, at least). Where and when that happens, discrimination should become illegal - but localized to the affected area and/or industry.

Think of it as anti-monopoly legislation. There are many shady practices that we don't punish businesses for until they are in a market dominant position (either by themselves, or through collusion with other businesses, which sometimes can be implicit). Same principle - shady or not, it shouldn't be prohibited unless it clearly harms someone.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#356

Post by [deleted] »

int_19h wrote: post #355
st3v3r wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see why the ability to get a job easily should be taken into account whether you get to have a legal remedy or not. And quite frankly, I have no faith whatsoever that a boycott would work, or gain any traction at all. We have had numerous stories of companies acting shitty all over, and yet they don't seem to have problems hiring.

Let me clarify that. I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people. What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people discriminated against. If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in…

[deleted]

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#357

Post by int_19h »

int_19h wrote: post #355
st3v3r wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see why the ability to get a job easily should be taken into account whether you get to have a legal remedy or not. And quite frankly, I have no faith whatsoever that a boycott would work, or gain any traction at all. We have had numerous stories of companies acting shitty all over, and yet they don't seem to have problems hiring.

Let me clarify that. I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people. What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people discriminated against. If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in…

It gets a bit tricky. The problem is that a lot of this kind of stuff is really pervasive, but there's no conscious collusion. Things like "women are just not as good at tech" become pervasive cultural stereotypes, and employers apply them subconsciously, with the result being widespread discrimination that is obvious in aggregated data, but not necessarily in any individual case.

So the kind of analysis that's necessary to determine whether legal anti-discrimination measures are needed or not is rather different from what anti-monopoly watchdogs usually do.

But yes, something like that in principle. A government institution that keeps track of various metrics and accepts individual reports, aggregates them, and determines which fields, industries, locations etc need anti-discrimination enforcement with teeth. Presumably with some sort of due process where this can be challenged etc, but ultimately, the decision should be made on the basis of whether there is discrimination or not, and not on whether it's intentional or not.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#358

Post by [deleted] »

int_19h wrote: post #357
int_19h wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me clarify that. I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people. What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people discriminated against. If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in…

It gets a bit tricky. The problem is that a lot of this kind of stuff is really pervasive, but there's no conscious collusion. Things like "women are just not as good at tech" become pervasive cultural stereotypes, and employers apply them subconsciously, with the result being widespread discrimination that is obvious in aggregated data, but not necessarily in any individual case. So the kind of analysis that's neces…

[deleted]

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#360

Post by to3m »

gspetr wrote: post #330
yolesaber wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about successful communication, it's about how you present an entire group of people. Using the term "the blacks" or "Blacks" makes you sound like Archie Bunker, dude. Negative social signal.

Yet people spend time leaving comments like your grandparent, deliberately virtue signaling. I can bet dollars to doughnuts that if someone said "Whites" he would not have left a comment "More white people".

1. It was 3 words... trust me, it didn't take long to write

2. The comment would be "More white people" - note the emphasis, it's kind of the key thing

3. I always heard virtue was a good thing. And here I am displaying it, you say. With you... in opposition?

But, please, do what you think best.

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