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Comment by meghan-maternie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah you know what is not a great body of objective evidence? 40 years of women being told we have an equal chance of success at anything we want to do, and yet, in October 2017 discovering that actually the vast majority of us have encountered some gross shit from men we work with.

Please, for a moment, imagine the time and energy it might take to fend that off. How it might make you timid about taking meetings, asking for more, it might just wear you out.

TLDR I’d like to see the study that controls for sexual harassment, that many male partners expect women who work to also be the primary caregiver for children when home, the fact that being incompetent but confident is not viewed kindly in women as it is in men, etc.

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Sexual harassment and having babies are separate issues, so please don’t try to discredit what I said with something completely unrelated. In any case, women aren’t alone in having to deal with arseholes on a daily basis. It’s a fact of life. No one seems to be making anywhere near the same amount of fuss over the number of boys and men who have their penises mutilated against their will or are bullied or raped in schools, prisons and work on a daily basis.

What I said is that I have still to see any proof that the encouragement of gender balance in any field, and in particular in programming, contributes to market success in that field.

It is contradictory for a woman to say that she wants to be treated equally to men, and then say that she expects to be given an advantage in hiring based on her gender. It is a very feminine point of view to believe that one has intrinsic, objective value.

By definition, the current state of the market at least in programming implies that gender balance does not provide any benefit. Given that the merit is a game of language and is completely subjective, if a woman believes that most randomly chosen companies would benefit either from increasing gender balance or hiring solely based on her own definition of merit, then it is up to her to show this through her actions, such as starting, or participating in the management of a company following that spirit, rather than lobbying the government to enforce her own or others’ subjective beliefs around hiring or merit.

" It is a very feminine point of view to believe that one has intrinsic, objective value."

I think you need to take a while and consider why you believe that statement is true, and how it might be impacting the rest of your view on this topic.

Have you contemplated that you might be in the wrong here, and that your approach on this topic is very, very heavily based on your first person view?

It's extremely hard to control for the success of corporations vs. any single factor, much less "gender balance". For example, more male-founded startups get funded - but it's been shown that's in large part because they're male (not to mention their investors usually are), not because of any inherent merit of their business. Similarly, consumer startups often have an easier time getting funded because they're easier for partners to explain the rest of their firm, but it doesn't actually mean they're better investments than an niche enterprise play that's harder to explain to a layman.

More starts = more exits, more role models => more male founders and more all-male startups. Nothing in that cycle actually proves that that men are better at founding or running tech startups, and say "show me the data" is a poor response, given that we don't have an alternate universe where there's no gender bias feeding into those patterns.

I’ll assume that you agree that objective value is not possible to define and that therefore no one has objective value. Are you taking issue with my view that women are conditioned to believe that they have inherent, objective value? Why do you think Instagram is so popular with them, where it is sufficient just to post a photo of oneself to be valued?

Also what do you mean by inherent merit? It doesn’t exist, just like objective value. It doesn’t matter that a study has shown that men are hired or receive funding because they’re male over inherent merit, when the study has already necessarily failed at defining inherent merit.

You’re either being intellectually dishonest, or you need to read what I wrote again.

Yes, I completly disagree with your sweeping characterizations of entire genders, on both sides of that discussion.

A key part of the problem is that society often propogates such sweeping generalizations to children, reinforcing existing biases based on stereotypes rather than individual merit. This is part of what diversity policies are intended to address.

Language and the market are generalisations. These are the only ways in which humans can interact. The market is neither right nor wrong. It is the status quo. Women put more selfies on Instagram than men. It's a generalisation and also a fact.

You're still propagating the idea that individual merit exists and can be defined. It can't. If you think that hiring based on your subjective, generalised idea of merit would lead to grater gains, it's up to you to show it with real results. You clearly stand to make a lot of money. Until then, the status quo remains.

I'm not surprised you don't think you've seen any evidence...because women AREN'T AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF BUSINESS IN ANYWHERE NEAR A NUMBER THAT IS REPRESENTATIONAL OF THE POPULATION!!!!!

This is like Trump saying climate change isn't happening because it's really cold in the United States.

Also re: being contradictory...I am beyond asking for equality. The fact that that was even a debate at one point speaks to how fucked up things truly were.

What I am yelling about is that people like you need to stop for a second and consider that even though the world has slowly awoken over the past 30-40 years to the idea that women can be smart and have careers and might want to do things beyond take care of your home/kids, we still have nowhere near the number of women achieving at the highest levels of business. A good scientist would wonder why that is.

If you just think it's because women aren't smart enough or aren't trying hard enough...you are being lazy.

Lastly on the topic of femininity and intrinsic value, please take that up with Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….”

you are assuming that women must be in perfect ratio without considering that they may not choose those roles for many reasons

if they were qualified and competent and chose to do those jobs then they would already have those jobs because businesses like to make money

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