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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Quotas are tough for people right now, but they serve a longer term role. Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech. That's a fact.

Some dumb-ass dudes may tell you: "oh you're here because of diversity quotas, not for your inherent quality", and it will be annoying for you. But the purpose of the quotas is that the next generation of students can look at the distribution and tell themselves: "oh, actually this field is not only populated by bros, there is a lot of women in it, maybe I'll give that a shot".

Ok, it's not meritocracy, but come on, meritocracy is only unbiased if the culture is unbiased...

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Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of doing what they're interested in? Perhaps that's the real issue at the root of all this.

Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it.

It's not about this generation; it's the next.

Is there any evidence of this? I hear it talked about a lot, but I have never seen anything that actually proves this is the case.

You might find this[1] interesting.

[1]] https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1...

Do any image search of the homebrew computer club that established much of the scene from the mid 70's and tell me what gender ratio you see: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=chakra&q=homebrew+computer+club+ph...

It looks like advertisers in the 80's had a demographic they were marketing too, they didn't create one. That article start with the assumption that everyone studying a field is interested in it as opposed to wanting a career and goes downhill from there.

Sounds like a problem those people need to get over then and realize that "feeling welcome" isn't about what you or others look like. If it was then wouldn't homogenous groups be the most welcoming anyway? So these people should actually want complete segregation between race and gender?

If this was really a problem, then every field that was slightly skewed would only trend towards the extremes but that hasn't happened. This constant need to balance groups without any understanding that people are different just comes across as nonsense.

>> Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of doing what they're interested in?

That cuts both ways. Many people will not hire someone who "doesn't look the part" because they think that means they can't do the job.

That's a different problem and falls under opportunity actually being denied, and those people are wrong for doing so. They should be educated to change their ways, or removed from that position if they fail to do so.

> Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech

Did you read the article? Aline claims that a completely blind application process lands more diversity in tech.

Quotas are never good - regardless of whether it is for diversity or something else. Even when you are writing code and if you are doing quota for something, it's a signal that you have a crappy design and quotas is going to only make it more crappier. The solution to crappy design is to attack the root problem and make sure your algorithms are fair so there is no need to impose quota.

> "Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech. That's a fact."

Fair enough. Besides the obvious "diversification" of the company's populace, what other success factors can be directly attributed to quotas?

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