41–50 of 66 posts
It took us 4 months to hire a woman to our team while we wasted the time of over a dozen qualified men interviewing people we knew we would not hire. I found this deeply distasteful.
Great. Now balance this against a century or so of injustice pointing the other direction, and just honestly consider whether it might be worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and that's debatable. You can make an argument that women today are still being discriminated against or are in a disadvantaged position because of past discriminations against women. Therefore the women they hired was an appropriate beneficiary. As research shows, there is still bias against women in hiring, especially in the resume selection process. And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs bec…
> Yes, and that's debatable You said it, ok, but what do you wanna debate about? Data shows that, at best, some people in some categories are being hired. > And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs because of historically induced cultural biases. Doesn't imply that women hired today have ever been discriminated or come from families that were. My family was anti fascist and discriminates during fascis…
> Balance it against nothing. The beneficiaries are not the same people as the victims.
This makes two claims:
1. That the woman that was hired is not at risk of discrimination.
I challenge the truth of this statement, because as the research I linked shows, it seems likely there are still biases against women in hiring processes even today.
2. That women are no longer disadvantaged when it comes to their likelihood of pursuing a STEM career and getting into the field.
I challenge the truth of this statement, because some research also shows there are still socio-cultural biases that turn women away from the field.
Now it's not because I challenge the truth of those statements that I claim to know the truth myself. I don't know the truth.
To me, right now, it appears that:
1. Women still face bias in hiring
2. Women are oddly not pursuing STEM careers
3. Socio-culturaly you can see that it wouldn't be as attractive to women to do so
4. There's a nature vs nurture question mark, but it's hard to say women naturally don't like STEM as much, given there's clearly socio-cultural influences at play, so how do you isolate that variable?
When I take all this, I feel there's a lot of reasons you might want to try to balance things out.
You might want to balance out the still existent hiring bias.
You might want to balance the discrepancy in gender in the field.
You might want to balance the socio-cultural influence, to try and reverse them, making STEM more appealing to women.
Now I say "you might", because it'll depend on your values, but if you value equal opportunity for women, wanting to try and balance those things seem logical to me.
> Should I get some kind of preferential lanes, even thought nothing of the sort ever happened to me?
Possibly yes. There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered. If some of those have affected you as well, you wouldn't have gotten the same opportunities as your peers whose family wouldn't have been discriminated against. Maybe the ripple stoped short and you weren't impacted at all, but we can reason some cases where it wouldn't have, and children of discriminated ancestry would even today be impacted by those second order effects.
> What about truck divers' industry, where what you are claiming as discrimination is undisputable?
I don't know anything about the truck driving industry, so I can't speak to it. But if there's bias and socio-cultural influences that affect people's opportunity I'd probably think the same.
Several years ago, at a previous employer, a colleague whose technical ability I had deep respect for confided in me that he was only interviewing women until the representation on his team reached >50%. When I pointed out that was probably illegal and certainly unethical and lowers the chance of selecting the most qualified candidate, he said selecting the most qualified candidate was less important than "levelling…
It's rampant in society, prevalent in most bureaucracies. It's minority essentialism, a subordination of entire minority groups to everyone else under the belief that these people, by virtue of their identity, cannot help themselves.
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The lawsuit would flop if there’s more men than women in the group being hired for, since it’s absolutely permissible to correct diversity imbalances. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
I’m pretty sure that the law doesn’t allow discrimination to correct diversity imbalances. DEI initiatives are about driving recruiting efforts and targeting towards underrepresented groups (e.g. having recruiters reaching out to qualified women, running recruiting drives at colleges with high minority populations, etc.) but the ultimate hiring decision cannot exclude anyone on the basis of a protected class.
- United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 443 US 193 (1979)
- Johnson v. VTA; 480 U.S. 616 (1987)
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The lawsuit would flop if there’s more men than women in the group being hired for, since it’s absolutely permissible to correct diversity imbalances. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
> (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.) Good thing you're not a lawyer and this not legal advice because what you're suggesting is in a legal gray area at best.
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The lawsuit would flop if there’s more men than women in the group being hired for, since it’s absolutely permissible to correct diversity imbalances. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Just wondering when diversity is balanced. I guess the first part would be deciding how to measure diversity. Maybe put people into different buckets based on their skin color, sex, gender and disability status. Then, the next part would be deciding if we want an even split or counts representative of the field (unless that's incorrect too) or maybe based on demographics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great. Now balance this against a century or so of injustice pointing the other direction, and just honestly consider whether it might be worth it.
Nothing to balance here. Discrimination is wrong or it isn't. If you're using race or gender as a factor when hiring you're in the wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.) Good thing you're not a lawyer and this not legal advice because what you're suggesting is in a legal gray area at best.
Take care not to mistake “not your lawyer” as “not a lawyer”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's debatable. What was the impact of the biases against women towards them working STEM jobs? Could it still linger today in having created the cultural environment which is why few women pursue STEM and why it's still predominantly men? > Research has shown that women are no less capable than men in science and mathematics. But, according to the AAUW, external factors, like a lack of role models, cultures that t…
It's a fallacy to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination. But then that isn't the only fallacy you're promoting is it...
There are all kinds of well understood factors that influence women to avoid many typically male populated environments that are caused by the men and not by the women's simple innate disinterest in the topic.
They are voluntarily choosing to avoid being abused and insulted and disrespected, not voluntarily choosing not to be engineers or competitive gamers or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's debatable. What was the impact of the biases against women towards them working STEM jobs? Could it still linger today in having created the cultural environment which is why few women pursue STEM and why it's still predominantly men? > Research has shown that women are no less capable than men in science and mathematics. But, according to the AAUW, external factors, like a lack of role models, cultures that t…
It's a fallacy to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination. But then that isn't the only fallacy you're promoting is it...
A fallacy is when your arguments don't actually prove that the conclusion is right, yet convinces people that it is. It's an error in reasoning that leads you to believe the conclusion derives from the premise, when it doesn't. It doesn't even mean the conclusion is wrong, just that it doesn't derive from the premise and arguments and as such hasn't actually been proven right.
So you should say: "It's wrong to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination".
Because"that X can be fought with a variation of X" isn't fallacious, this is a logical possibility. A variation of X could in some circumstances be used used to fight X. There's no error in logic here.