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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

> We collaborated with a large commercial bank in Asia that has millions of customers, billions of dollars in assets and in revenues, and thousands of employees.

I don't know that using an Asian bank for the study is going to give you results that translate at all to the western world. Very different business and interpersonal cultures.

The study seems pretty biased from the get go. They claim that lack of female participation at the higher levels of the corporate food chain is due to discrimination without even talking about women dropping out of the workplace at a higher rate to have children (or any other conflicting points of view). Seems like junk "science".

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> I don't know that using an Asian bank for the study is going to give you results that translate at all to the western world. Very different business and interpersonal cultures.

This is by the way how most online studies look when you’re not in the US. The incredible amount of studies done in the US but presented as general facts about humanity is staggering.

It’s of course because US researchers make a ton of valuable research, it still makes it super weird when Japanese magazine rely on US results for psychological studies for instance.

> They claim that lack of female participation at the higher levels of the corporate food chain is due to discrimination without even talking about women dropping out of the workplace at a higher rate to have children (or any other conflicting points of view). Seems like junk "science".

From the article:

> Female employees, on the contrary, have the same career progression regardless of the manager’s gender.

I read it as women who don’t drop careers are accounted and don’t disprove the point.

Any time a business paper makes grand claims about the data they collected by referencing things that don't matter (billions of dollars?), it's a good sign the conclusion is BS.

> The claim that lack of female participation at the higher levels of the corporate food chain are due to discrimination without even talking about women dropping out of the workplace at a higher rate to have children (or any other conflicting points of view).

Is that not a form of discrimination? Men have kids and still get promoted.

If it's voluntary, it's not discrimination. Men have kids, but they don't quit their jobs to become stay at home dads at nearly the rate women do.

Well there's a difference between having kids and staying at home.

Even so, you can still point to the discrimination being traditional gender roles, where women are the ones who typically stay at home. Or even to the economy itself; we don't value raising kids as much as we value rising through the ranks of management at some cooperation.

> Even so, you can still point to the discrimination being traditional gender roles, where women are the ones who typically stay at home. Or even to the economy itself; we don't value raising kids as much as we value rising through the ranks of management at some cooperation.

Aren't these statements at odd with one another? When you value raising kids at or above office work, then it doesn't look like "discrimination" that women chose to stay at home to raise a family, it looks like a personal choice that's highly valued by many. I think being a CEO or being a grandparent can both be viewed as successful in our society, they shouldn't really be compared directly though.

> When you value raising kids at or above office work, then it doesn't look like "discrimination" that women chose to stay at home to raise a family, it looks like a personal choice that's highly valued by many.

Yeah exactly, the problem goes away. You don't make money being a stay at home mom though, so maybe that's why we consider it a problem, IDK.

I was just offering a couple of ways to look at it where it's still discriminatory. Not saying I agree with either. There has to be a reason somewhere that women aren't as represented in upper management, and when you find that reason you can call it discriminatory, if you think that being upper management is a desirable thing. If you don't then the discrimination isn't bad or you don't consider it discrimination, as you pointed out. Economically, being upper management is certainly good though. That's basically objective.

Also it's rather insulting to say that men progressing through their careers means they don't want to raise their children. I would say many, if not most, men rise strive for promotion for no other reason than to raise their children better...

I meant economically. We don't pay people to raise kids.

Surely a man who is successful in his career can support his children in many ways. This is undoubtedly important to many men.

But most men who strive for promotions surely have many reasons other than their children. Who doesn't want {appreciation, autonomy, status, money, ...} just for the sake of their own ego, identity, power, etc.?

It's not completely voluntary. Men are discouraged from leaving the workforce, due to societal norms, and receive less time off or accommodations for raising kids.

I think you missed the key difference where men don’t nearly as frequently drop out of the workplace to have them.

> Is that not a form of discrimination? Men have kids and still get promoted.

Worse than that, I fear that the old-fashioned stay-at-home wife and children is even an unspoken (and unconscious) promotion qualification in many organisations.

Sometimes it's even semi-formalized: a glass ceiling for people who never lived abroad on a company project assignment, combined with an informal policy to not send unmarried people because they get too distracted by the locals. The result is higher ranks uniformly filled with people with spouses that don't have a career of their own that they can't easily shift abroad (or put on hold) for the duration of the assignment.

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