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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

> Are you the token woman? Are you qualified?”

> a manager at Microsoft told me I was only hired because I was a woman.

> “You must have had a lot of offers because you are black.”

I’m not in any way condoning this sexist/racist behaviour.

But statements like these reflect the fact that “affirmative action,” “positive discrimination,” quotas etc are HURTING women, by creating prejudice against them.

Some want to solve tech gender disparity by “engineering” an equality of outcome.

The harm done by these social engineers will last for generations.

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I think I agree. Often I can't really tell the difference between affirmative action and reverse racism. I'll admit that I am often ignorant, but if the quest is equality (which I am all for) then affirmative action (or essentially making two people of different races not equal for only the reason of race) seems damaging.

Those are my honest thoughts, please don't destroy me. I see you were flagged and I'm not sure why, I think you present thought provoking points, and while I tend to agree, I would even like to see the views of those who disagree, not sure why they wouldn't want to see yours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m really sad at the deterioration of the HN community into a place where reasonable and inoffensive comments are flagged and downvoted simply because people disagree on a political level.

I’ve found myself spending less time on HN. Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.

> Other discussion communities are more inclusive and more diverse - and by that I mean the only meaningful flavour of diversity - diversity of opinion.

Would you mind sharing. The HN hive-mind has started getting to me lately. If I wanted to see well-intentioned, well-reasoned but fairly unpopular conversations being flagged and shut down, and illogical popular opinions up-voted to the top, I'd rather go to FB or some other place.

> "Often I can't really tell the difference between affirmative action and reverse racism."

There is a good reason for that...its because there isn't a difference. You have to do a lot of linguistic gymnastics in order to somehow come to the conclusion that affirmative action isn't racist.

Sounds about right to me. I think that there are many terrible things that have happened and even continue to happen that stem from racism and sexism, but I don't think a solution will come from the same thing that spouted so much evil.

Despite it not being the only problem, there is a "pipeline" problem.

I believe that affirmative action can help speed up solving the pipeline problem.

If nothing else, just having X% women in tech a few years sooner can help us to hit the critical mass of women where things like "I have never worked with a woman before" become something that no senior person could say.

On top of that it provides role-models for children, who pattern match themselves against where they might be in the future.

The "pipeline problem" is a red herring.

The core problem is that for a woman working in tech is a shitty job, compared to what it is for a man. It means a much harder uphill battle for recognition, for jobs, for seniority, for autonomy in their work, for being treated like a basic human being in the workplace, etc. It's a fantasy to imagine that women don't notice this or haven't been noticing this, they do, they have. That's why so many women leave the field, and that's also why so many decide not to enter it.

You make tech an inviting and rewarding field for women to work in and the "pipeline problem" goes away on its own. Right now the story "women will be rewarded for working in tech" is a hard one to sell to little girls because substantially it is a lie.

I think little girls are more strongly affected by the fact that there are so few women in tech than the fact that it is shitty for women in tech (though obviously one affects the other). My evidence for this is purely anecdotal though.

Making it less shitty decreases those leaving and affirmative action increases those entering.

In addition, part of what has made it so easy for the environment to be so shitty is the low percentage of women (obviously rampant sexism plays a big part too, but the "I've never worked with a woman" "You're a woman so you must be non-technical" &c. are sustainable largely because of the low percentage of women).

So, centuries of active discrimination is not the main problem, but a generation of counterbalancing discrimination is?

I think it's a bit disingenuous to imply the commenter above thinks "centuries of active discrimination is not the main problem". From what I can tell, they were suggesting that programs trying to actively balance gender/race/cultural/etc ratios do more harm than good. If they didn't care for the _goal_ of rectifying gender/race/cultural/etc discrimination, they probably wouldn't be posting in a thread about it.

Your comment is a bit like the reaction one gets when suggesting maybe the department of education is a flawed institution: "So, you don't want children to be educated?"

How does this have anything to do with OP's point? If a solution is making things worse, then try something different.

All too commonly, it seems that the solution to a social issue that doesn't affect a particular person is "ignore it and that will make it go away".

Most people don't understand the purpose of "affirmative action" style hiring. It's not to implement a quota and to enforce an "equality of outcome", that's basically unworkable. Rather it's a form of "kentucky windage" to compensate for a system that has a known series of institutional biases across the board. It's a crude tool but if the alternative is waiting until all of those biases naturally bleed out of the system over generations then it's generally preferable.

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