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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I support these kinds of lists. Like #BlackLivesMatter, the focus on a purportedly disenfranchised group doesn't mean that the "main" group doesn't matter -- but it's an acknowledgement that we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default. Unless you believe that there really are no barriers specific to women (and it doesn't necessarily have to be sexism) and that women just are terrible at business/tech, why see such lists as threatening to non-women?

Note: There's a (very gray) "View All" button in the top-right of the slideshow. I was just going to complain about the hypocrisy of stuffing a list of purportedly successful women into a photo slideshow in a cynical attempt to increase page views.

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There is a difference between wanting equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. Don't believe me? look at some documentaries about communism!

You also brought up #BlackLivesMatter, after 3 seconds of googling I get things like:

https://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/extreme-anti...

There is a lot of irony in this type of racism.

Why "#BlackLivesMatter"? Why not "#AllLivesMatter" or "#StopPoliceBrutality"?

All these things do is foster tribalism.

I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way.

Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait?

Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?

To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.

We don't. We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession, and are happy to acknowledge anything that might suggest a countervailing trend.

Do you have any evidence to suggest women are encouraged into our industry by this kind of tokenisation? And not discouraged by it?

I don't accept the premise of your question, that noting female founders in the tech industry is "tokenization". A token is someone selected in order to represent a cohort of people. But that's not what this list is: presumably any successful female founder would be on it.

> But that's not what this list is: presumably any successful female founder would be on it.

Is your premise is that female founders are a fundamentally separate group from founders in general?

His question is still valid if you remove that word and replace it with something more accurate.

FWIW, I think it's a great idea and a good way to encourage women to join a field that they perceive as not being welcoming to them but I don't have any hard data to support this (and don't think I need any)

So would you say sexism is the only thing that differentiates technology professions from other "cognitive non-routine professions", or is that criterion ("cognitive non-routine") perhaps handpicked to frame tech as anti-women?

"Cognitive non-routine" isn't a term I made up. It's one of four broad classes of labor, one way economists use to divide up the working world.

It's so broad a classification I'd have trouble seeing how it created biased framing. It's just a more precise way of saying "the professions" (in the traditional sense of medicine, the law, accounting, and engineering).

If it is such a broad classification, maybe it is not very meaningful then to say "tech has less women than any other non-routine cognitive profession".

Why use the classification at all, if it so broad? If you use "all professions", you get perhaps things like garbage men and miners who are worse than tech? So you can always select a filter that makes tech look worst.

I don't understand the premise of your objection. The point of the comparison is that tech is uniquely unbalanced among the professions. I'm also disinclined to try to rebut an argument that seesaws like yours now is --- first the comparison is so idiosyncratic that it must be biased, then so broad as to be meaningless. If you object to the classification of labor as "cognitive" or "manual" and "routine" or "nonroutine", you should probably take that argument up with r/badeconomics.

My question is/was: do you think sexism is the main thing that differentiates tech from other non-routine cognitive professions? That economists created such a classification is pretty irrelevant. The point about the broadness was that if it is so broad, you might as well take all professions and get a different result.

I think your original argument was worded "only thing" not "main thing". It feels like you've changed your argument slightly.

Are you sure you can not decipher the argument I am making? Feel free to either replace "only thing" with "main thing" in my first comment, or "main thing" with "only thing" in the later comment, to make it consistent enough for you to parse.

"Only" and "main" have two significantly different meanings so you actually stated two different arguments.

Sorry then my English isn't good enough for such nuances. Maybe replace all instances of "main" and "only" with "significant" or something like that?

I think with some goodwill, you could see the point I was trying to make.

Since Sweden has this handy institution that provide statistics, I have taken a nice look at different professions (recorded as part of tax collections) and their gender distribution.

How do you support the rather extraordinary claim that the technology professions have markedly larger gender imbalance compared to other cognitive non-routine professions? From the data I saw, 2014 numbers placed technology professions around the 70%-30% gender distribution which puts it directly into the majority of professions of any kind.

The two extremes: Fair distribution (40%-60% or closer to 50%/50%) has as group a rather poor 10% of all employed people. Unsurprising, it has about the same number of women and men that works in those professions.

The second extreme are those with 90%-10% or higher, and if I remember right about the top professions in that list, it was topping with midwife nurse (99.7%), nurse with dentist specialization (99.4%) and carpenters that construct floors (99%). Going down from that you got several other specializations of nurses, mechanics, midwifes, construction workers, and kindergarten teachers (94%). You have to travel really far into the list to reach professions with as high gender equality as 70%-30%. To name a few cognitive non-routine professions at the 80%-20%, we got professions like veterinarian, psychologist, librarian, and teacher, all with worse gender distribution than technology professions.

There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible.

Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks.

I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.

Note: the word "neoliberal" has nothing to do with social justice or even modern left wing movements and activism. It describes an economic policy that discourages regulation and government oversight.

> Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?

No, it is more like giving them separate awards, like the mens 400m and the womens 400m.

Your analogy breaks down due to the lack of a "men's 400m" event in technology.

May be more necessary than usual – I got the feeling that women were overrepresented in the "Founder-does-something-terrible" articles, at least on HN.

Some was certainly deserved, although I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article.

Some was offensive, misogynistic, backwards bullshit that I can only hope is highly correlated with the writer's chances at next year's Darwin awards – like about 90% of anything ever written about Ellen Pao.

Some was in between – Marissa Meyer comes to mind.

I have no idea why about a third of men feel threatened by the whole idea, but I believe those are problems that need to be addressed offline. I've seen a few cases where some measures to reduce discrimination succeeded even with some initial scepticism. 1:1 talks seem to work quite well, as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country). Once you get a team above a certain threshold (around 35% women I'd say) the whole dynamic shifts. Suddenly there's picnics and Tuesday morning runs and journal clubs etc. That's something that everyone notices and I believe it has dramatic impact.

The effects continue with any other measure of diversity you can introduce: having a few different nationalities around is an improvement, having someone with a completely different background can be a plus (met a 75-year old office manager once who was beloved at her startup) etc.

I suspect if there is a bias toward criticising women who fail in technology, this might be a direct backlash to the many articles that fetishise women in technology.

That's not to condone the backlash, of course.

But perhaps we ought to stop focusing on identity politics - and start treating women as people, not tokens in our social engineering project.

> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country

Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally.

None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do application blinding where possible, as far as I know. All of them however are very eager to promote movements like Girls Who Code because it's generally good PR and (I think) because it increases the available labor pool for them.

There has also been a study showing tech interviews went less favorable for women when their voices were masked as male voices.

As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

>>My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

I can't think of many scenarios that would give you that impression. Did google personally reject you for being a man?

For the last two years I have only seen ads with exclusively female engineers from Google, for example the "I look like an engineer" series.

I haven't seen any effort to attract male talent. Of course having more women on the team will probably make a company more attractive to men, but I doubt that is the only thing they should bank on to attract men.

I think over the past two years I've seen a sum total of one video about working at Google, and it featured a woman and a man. From what you're saying I can only assume I stumbled on a super rare video. Is that accurate?

I'll include a link to my paper where I use the method of autoethnography to show how Google has turned into a misandryst megacorporation.

Just kidding - I didn't write a paper about it, nor did I conduct a rigorous study. Most of the Google Ads I have seen came via various Google Twitter accounts, like https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle (Life at Google seems to be dedicated to hiring people for Google).

So my filter bubble might be to blame. I haven't seen the video you mentioned which features a man.

(Edit: I just scrolled through the first several dozen tweets from "Life At Google - I think there is definitely a bias to only show female engineers there.... However, it is of course only one Google Twitter account dedicated to hiring, I don't know how many others exist. Maybe it was created explicitly to target women and minorities, but then maybe they should somehow say so).

I'm still not sure why you had the impression that Google is not interested in hiring male coders anymore?

Have you looked at the life at google tweets?

Yes.

Interesting

Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-sized bank.

At FB and Google I'd guess "career advancement" is more susceptible to biases. As company tries to create "shallow hierarchies", the risk of competition devolving into the law of the jungle increases (but, as I said, only guessing. Have no experience with them).

> Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

How about blinding during resume screening? Replace female or male names with a number or made up names. Phone screening even maybe, using some kind of audio processing. I have never heard of these companies using any such process.

Edit: Looks interviewing.io did such a process, here are the results – https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

> I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article.

Out of interest I googled the hits on HN for Holmes and 2016's other medical industry bête noir, Martin Shkreli. Holmes wins by 325 to 141, although I'd personally be hard pressed to say which of them was more terrible.

Not the same kind of story at all. Holmes first became famous (As a unicorn), then fell from grace. Shkreli never was admired, or was he? He was just scorned right from the start.

While that's factually true fail to see the causality. It's like: "These are completely different stories, she was born in Canada and he is an excellent tennis player".

One grabs peoples anttention more than the other. The original claim was because they are both in pharma, they should receive the same attention. But being in pharma is not the only aspect of their stories.

It's like arguing apples should be the same as oranges because they are both fruits.

You're either lucky or inexperienced to have never been in a professional environment by 2016 where you and/or other men had to grit their teeth because they couldn't criticise a woman's ideas because of your gender (and her's). We all know the tactic of emasculation you're using: "are you not man enough to handle competitor from women?!" As you can see by the other comments in this thread, you can see most men have learned to ignore the ad hominem in these cases and focused on rational cause-and-effect approaches.

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