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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

It is still descrimination.

"Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually" - Merriam Webster Dictionary

Please don't bend what the word means just because others do. If we have our own meanings for every word, than the words mean nothing.

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Fair enough.

But it's discrimination with a higher purpose.

I'd like to share a perspective based on an anecdote. The first company that I'd worked for had come to our college to hire interns. They wanted 2. I'd find out later that the CEO had intended one male hire and one female hire, but they ended up hiring 3 (all men) including me. Two of us that got hired were from financially poor background, had lived in tier 3 cities, went to underfunded-corrupt schools with bad educators (as was common in the region we were from), had taken out huge education loans and were possibly the only source of retirement income for our parents (I'm based out of India, poor people have to rely on their children's success here). There were around 10-15 women in our batch. Most were from well off families, had well-educated parents who were also bankrolling their daughters' education, were from tier-1 cities and were exposed to tech long before us. They'd had better opportunities for growth even before joining college and only equal opportunities after, like the rest of us. In retrospect I feel that I had been lucky in a certain sense. Thankfully the recruiters weren't people with the >`But it's discrimination with a higher purpose.` mindset. It would've been a very difficult road to recovery for me otherwise.

I would urge you to reconsider the notion that affirmative action is a sustainable solution for anything. It's hack. You only need to look at the current state of India's government, which over the course of more than 50 years of affirmative action (and other varying factors) has managed to convert the government sector into a cesspool of corruption and bad management.

This is probably the most reasoned counterargument I've seen here.

I'm going to step away and do some more reading on the subject before responding. Since this thread will likely be stale by then, I'll put up a blog post or similar with my updated thoughts.

>You only need to look at the current state of India's government, which over the course of more than 50 years of affirmative action (and other varying factors) has managed to convert the government sector into a cesspool of corruption and bad management.

This seems to imply that India's government fifty years ago was NOT full of corruption and bad management. The Raj was definitely corrupt but I know little about the two decades after India got its independence - were things really that good fifty years ago? Or was it just that it was less obvious?

No, not implying that. I used `more than 50 years` as a range, as these policies were also proposed as part of the Raj's secession. The introduction of affirmative action wasn't a single event, but a growing set of reservations and quotas included in education, govt sector hiring and other places. Even today, the left leaning political parties use this topic as a leverage to increase their vote bank.

well said.

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