Comment by yawaramin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yawaramin | Hacker News Reader

The site seems to be experiencing the 'hug of death' right now, Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170808013732/http://quillette....

Prof. Schmitt gets it right here: gender differences don't have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform any job--even physically strenuous jobs, with the right training. Certainly for information work, bringing up gender differences is just going down the wrong rabbit hole. It's like asking a job candidate if they're American when all you need to know is if they're legally authorised to work in the US.

The other scientists unfortunately go down this rabbit hole. Prof. Miller especially consistently asks the wrong questions throughout his piece. First, he establishes biological sex differences but doesn't ask if they have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform a job. Second, he goes off on a tangent about his pet 'paradox' theory about the American public, arguing that gender equality would make diversity moot from a business advantage perspective.

Let's just clarify why we want diversity in the workplace: it's not because minorities will bring different skills and traits to the table; it's because (a) excluding minorities is inhumane, and (b) because minorities will (hopefully) keep the organisation from making dumb mistakes like leaving out the main protagonist of their new film series from a major marketing campaign ( https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15960372/hasbro-star-wars... ), sending Kylie Jenner out with a Pepsi to mend race relations ( http://time.com/4726500/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner/ ), and pushing for a Game of Thrones-style show about a modern-day Confederate America which won the war and kept slavery intact ( https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/no... ). These are just three things that come immediately to mind, you can imagine how much shit there is out there that hasn't even reached national level yet.

> gender differences don't have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform any job--even physically strenuous jobs, with the right training

That seems just plain wrong considering so many women fail Marine fitness tests:

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/284252-report-6-out-of-7-f...

And FDNY had to relax physical fitness requirements in order to hire more women firefighters:

https://www.bustle.com/articles/53536-fdny-wants-more-women-...

Women also have to be separated from men in professional sports, otherwise in many sports it wouldn't even be close (e.g. the aged, #203-ranked male tennis player walloping both Williams sisters in their prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch).

There's nothing wrong with admitting there are basic biological differences between men and women relating to strength.

Sure. That's why I said women are capable of performing those jobs. Some women pass the Marine fitness tests and firefighter physical requirements. Hence, women are capable of performing any physically strenuous job.

But again, this is completely the wrong rabbit hole in the context of this discussion. It has nothing to do with the fact that men and women have equal capacity to do any mental work.

Why does it all have to be equal? Why can't we acknowledge that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses in different areas? The whole point of diversity is not to make everyone the same, it is to appreciate the differences everyone brings.

Like I keep saying in this thread--you've misunderstood the point of diversity and have gone down the wrong rabbit hole. You can acknowledge and celebrate everyone's differences. You just need to realise that those differences don't make a solitary bit of difference in their capacity to perform a job.

So differences exist, but those differences don't make any difference?

Do any differences ever make a difference in performance? Like a particular tribe of Kenyans utterly dominate distance running events, west Africans utterly dominate sprinting events what accounts for those differences?

What's lost in all this and that I have seen zero evidence presented for is that I am in no way convinced that the population groups that are "under-represented" as software professionals have much interest in being software professionals.

Whatever differences in capacity that may exist among groups the differences in interests are surely just as big or bigger.

I think it's a pretty bad false equivalence to liken physical sports to ability in the workplace, purely because one is specifically _the peak of human ability_ and the other is outcome driven.

Taking your example of say, sprinting - the outcome is to cross the line 100m down the track. I would say pretty much everyone is capable of doing that one way or another. When you apply a performance lense that says you need to do it in X seconds, then you're saying "we only want our definition of the best to do this task".

Bringing it back to the workplace, a lot of jobs in tech (and other sectors too), suffer from trying to apply a one size fits all performance lense over the actual outcomes. "Sure this person did their job, but did they do these metrics that we've decided we value". A large part of diversity is acknowledging that the lense that you view people through is not going to apply to everyone, and accepting that you need to focus on the outcomes.

So on several readings of this, it sounds like you're saying that corporations should function as some sort of jobs program and that should take precedence over their function as a profit making enterprise and that some groups should have lower expectations placed on them.

I dispute that corporations must function as a profit-making enterprise over all other concerns. A good company's first priority is employee happiness. Happy employees = hefty profits: https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghanbiro/2014/01/19/happy-emp...

I'm confused on how an employer is not a "jobs program" - they literally employee people, and are responsible for that employees growth and career opportunities (if they value having low staff turnover and achieving better outcomes for their business).

I agree with yawaramin as well, happy employees are better performing employees, and can speak from experience with working at places that value individuality versus strict top down directing of behaviour, that the companies with that flexibility perform much better, at less cost, with much happier employees.

It's not about lowering expectations, it's about changing how you look at them - look at the outcomes and measure those, not the journey to achieve them. When you start focusing on outcomes as teams, you open the door to diversity, which leads to diversifying your ideas and solutions to problems - ultimately leading to better outcomes.

I read your wording as implying that the average woman is nearly fungible compared to the average man, with any (minimal) differences being able to be patched over with a spritz of training. Which I think doesn't give women enough credit in some physically demanding jobs, as they really have to work hard to be on par with their male counterparts.

But maybe I read too much into the wording, and regardless I agree it's a rabbithole w.r.t. programming jobs so I acquiesce.

Capability to do work does not mean you have the same qualifications to raise your level and become the cream of the crop...ie raises or promotions.

You are the one digging the wrong rabbit hole here.

By 'qualifications', what do you mean? Like professional accreditations? If so, all the more reason to help women and minorities by giving them the opportunities to earn those accreditations!

But if you mean 'innate ability to reach a higher level', then are you implying that women innately are incapable of climbing to the same senior engineering positions as men, and no amount of training or education will change that?

Just trying to understand.

I am not sure what you call this style of arguments ? You are deviating from my point and intention.

Lets take GPA for example. Do you think 2 people getting a GPA of 3.0 are of the exact same knowledge level ? Is it possible that one has the equivalent score of 3.13 and the other has 2.87 and that they were both normalized to 3 ? Same thing with the jobs. Maybe you see this at your job too. There are going to be people more skilled at what you do and people less skilled at what you do but still pulling the same salary. The salary you earn is an approximate estimate of your skill measure but not an measure of your exact skill.

It seems like you are just dancing around with the definition of "equal capacity" so that you can say things that seem to contradict the points discussed, while not contradicting them, but also not admitting that they are correct.

There are women that are just as good marines as men, and there are women that are just as physically fit as men. However, despite this, it's entirely possible that statistically fewer women pass. You haven't denied this empirical data nor tried to argue that it is purely for cultural reasons that fewer women can pass these physical fitness tests. So it's possible that fewer women end up in a profession for purely biological reasons, you are conceding?

Similarly, it's possible that there are women (many women) who are just as good or better programmers than many men, and enjoy it just as much and are equally capable. But, that when you look at the averages, fewer women prefer it. Then, part of that relative difference could be explained by biological factors.

Again, this is not a complicated argument. There's no evidence to suggest that biological factors account for 100% of the gender gap in developers but there's also not much evidence to suggest that any factor accounts for 100% of the gap. It's likely to be a combination of factors, and we should try to honestly understand how big a role each one plays.

> (a) excluding minorities is inhumane,

The author didn't propose excluding minorities. He proposed including them more by making the workplace more attractive to them. Nobody's suggesting Google should have a "males only" or "whites only" policy.

Sorry, which author? I was talking about Prof. Miller's thought experiment here about his perceived conflict between gender equality and diversity.

The funny thing is that "diversity" really implies difference. And in a very unequal workplace it makes sense to focus on beneficial traits that diversity may bring. Those traits certainly exist in aggregate, which is why it is worth pursuing at an aggregate level. But individually it is ridiculous to use gender to imply that traits exist in one particular candidate.

Yet at the same time this sounds like the only reason to hire someone is to represent their token minority. It's not an X person's responsibility to be an offensiveness safety net for the X community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com