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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you're being down-voted, you're right. I haven't met anyone, even in the insanely left and progressive university circles that I run in, who advocate for equality in outcome. It's equality in opportunity that's important. It's about letting 'your freedom as an individual to choose your own destiny' actually be 'free' from the start and not constrained by social mores, ingrained biases or discrimination, and/or other external factors.

The freedom in outcomes argument is 100% a strawman used by far right pop culture icons to drum up views and clicks.

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Isn't the idea of underrepresentation of certain minority groups or genders basically that? we hear that there are only xy % of women in tech or PoC in tech and that the goal is to get for example 50/50% women/men. Isn't this basically a discussion about equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. 50%/50% is basically equality of outcome. We can see for example in scandinavia that you get unequal outcomes if you amplify the equality of opportunities.

I mean, if you just take it at face value, then it could be interpreted that way. I think the problem is that there isn't an easy soundbite that companies can put out to identify how they will impact equality of opportunity, so they take the easy way to seem 'woke' or whatever other adjective you want to put on it, and attack with equality of outcome. I'm not trying to have a 'no true scotsman' sort of thing, but profit-driven companies are not a great measuring tool for most social issues.

I guess, what I'm saying is, that the outcome being 'only xy% women in tech with a goal of 50/50' is an easily digestible way of saying, women do not have the same opportunity as men to get into tech. But it's harder for companies to outline the steps to ensure those opportunities than it is for them to proclaim that goal.

>We can see for example in scandinavia that you get unequal outcomes if you amplify the equality of opportunities.

Absolutely. (I actually had to look through my post history because I wondered if you were another person who brought up that statement!) What I said to them was, "And that's fair. My argument isn't that it needs to be split and completely equal. It's that the freedom to choose needs to be equal, and the playing field needs to be level, so that who is and who isn't in 'field a' is, in fact based on merit and not arbitrary classification at birth such as gender and ethnicity."

I've encountered a slightly more nuanced equity position that comes in the form of supporting equal opportunity, but simultaneously claiming that inequitable outcomes are indicative of unequal opportunity. If the goal is to fix inequality and inequity is assumed to be evidence of inequality, then that's just a roundabout way of pursuing equal outcomes.

I'm not saying that this is your position. It's just a position I've encountered with fequency.

Inequity is not evidence of inequality. Evidence of inequality are things like: sending identical resumes save for male vs. female names and measuring the difference in response rate, anonymizing candidates' voices and measuring changes in interview performance, or other tests that see changes in output directly attributable to aspects of the candidate's identity.

I agree. How do you propose measuring it if not using the 50/50 metric? Are we already at the point of equal opportunity? If not, why?

>How do you propose measuring it if not using the 50/50 metric?

If I had that answer, I honestly think I would be a billionaire. Really though, I have no practical ideas, because it isn't something I work with regularly. It seems like a sociologist could come up with something, some way to measure sentiment among youth, or something to that effect, but that's beyond me.

>Are we already at the point of equal opportunity? If not, why?

I don't believe so. Even the often touted Gender-equity paradox can be boiled down to gender stereotypes manifesting in individuals' decisions (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31063).

All I know is that I see nearly no women enter STEM majors at the institutions I have worked with, whereas education and social work is almost 100% female. That is lopsided enough to tell me that something is at play here. I just simply am not educated enough to know what, how to measure it, or how to attempt to fix it.

Have you looked into that study? That seems kind of shady to me. They are using math attitudes to say there's a stereotype. It's not even asking stuff like 'do you think boys or girls are better at math' etc. It's just stuff like "Math is important for my career" etc. Well if they already have ideas about the careers they want to perform, then obviously the study is looking at the outcomes and not the drivers - why did they choose those careers? So it seems we're back at square one - that women as an aggregate choose fields that aren't as math centric. It seems like a leap to assume some implicit meaning behind those general questions on the survey.

"If I had that answer, I honestly think I would be a billionaire."

If we can't even define the problem and the underlying causes or measure the outcomes, then how can we fix it? Even if we try things, we would have no idea if they are actually beneficial because we don't even know what to measure.

"I just simply am not educated enough to know what, how to measure it, or how to attempt to fix it."

If we can't measure it and don't know how to fix it, then do we even know that a problem exists?

"Even the often touted Gender-equity paradox can be boiled down to gender stereotypes manifesting in individuals' decisions"

But if it's their own free choice, then why should we interfere with that? It's like saying my mom doesn't want me to play football because I might get hurt, so I'm going to base my decision on that. That is up to the person to decide if they want to use that as part of their decision making. Nobody is forcing them.

The study had a question about if being a house wife is fulfilling. If a person finds that fulfilling, should we prevent them from doing that? I ha e a STEM job and I don't feel fulfilled. Judging by the number of disillusioned posts on HN, it looks like an engineering job is not something that is fulfilling. I don't see forcing people into it as a fix for anything. You're talking about swapping social norms that value family (fulfillment as a house wife) for the social norm that making more money, even at the expense of fulfillment, is what society values.

> Isn't the idea of underrepresentation of certain minority groups or genders basically that?

Not really, but it's a bit nuanced.

I'm not taking a position here on what is correct, but advocates for this sort thing will state that inequality in current distribution of outcomes is due inequality of opportunity in the past. If you accept that as true, you have a problem from a policy level as to what to do about it, if anything.

One approach would be to attach the opportunity side only, and assume that in time a more equitable distribution will arrive over time. The problem is for something like this "in time" is probably measured in generations.

Another is to try an tip the scales a bit to correct to impact of opportunity on those people effected, or on your company (or other institution) or both. A problem with this approach is you by definition don't really know what the correct distribution should be, so you are likely to be a bit hamfisted about it.

Quotas guarantee opportunity they don’t guarantee outcome.

I have met many people in left and progressive circles who literally advocate for equality in outcomes and dismiss meritocracy as various internalized not-giving-them-what-they-wantisms.

My impression is that progressives and conservatives seem to disagree about what constitutes "outcome" vs "opportunity". For example, imagine a tech company found that 20% of it's employees were female and 80% were male, and decided to try to change this by instituting a new program exclusively focused on recruiting women.

A progressive might argue that this program gives women a better "opportunity" to succeed, whereas a conservative would say that the program was created for the purpose of influencing "outcomes", and that by focusing exclusively on women the program is intentionally creating unequal "opportunities".

That seems like a very fair observation. I think I am inclined to agree with that assessment.

The left regularly trots out statistics as "proof" of racism. That something isn't equal directly indicates racism (or some other -ism). So inequality of outcome implies inequality of opportunity. It leaves no room for the possibility of equal opportunity and different outcome.

Probably the biggest of these going on right now is the inequality in pay. Women are paid less (they are). This immediately implies sexism because no other explanation is even possible.

Isn't equality of outcome used to measure equality of opportunity?

Hell, if you want to take it to the limit, even Karl Marx didn't believe in equality of outcomes.

You don't know any communists in your insanely left and progressive university? I find that hard to believe. I went to a fairly right wing university and the place with lousy with communists. They mostly got better, but still.

It's a core belief of progressivism; those who claim it isn't know it is but are interested in protecting a movement that gives them a means of attacking those they dislike.

It absolutely isn't. Progressives, when they see inequality of outcomes at the group level, correctly identify an inequality of opportunity. There's no progressive in the world that thinks that everyone should have the same outcomes.

That's different from wanting similar outcomes between groups of millions of people, because those almost invariably come from inequality of opportunity.

I don't know of any left tendency that believes in equality of outcomes. Even communists don't believe in equality of outcome.

> That's different from wanting similar outcomes between groups of millions of people, because those almost invariably come from inequality of opportunity.

Can you cite any evidence that this is the case? It seems you are simply defining inequality of outcome to mean the same thing as inequality of opportunity at the group level.

Unless you believe there are innate differences between the ability of these groups, then yes the two are logically equivalent. If you don't believe so, I'm not going to get in this debate today.

Or there could be equal ability, but population-wide differences in preferences, demographics, or other factors. Is it your position that men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing because these fields are highly biased against men? Likewise, there's a significant overrepresentation of Asian in tech. Does the fact that tech hotspots like the Bay Area and Seattle metro have higher than average Asian populations have no role in this disparity?

Claiming to support equal opportunity while simultaneously asserting that inequity necessarily indicates unequal opportunity amounts to a long-winded way of saying that the goal is equal outcomes.

And saying that unless someone believes in equivalency between equity and equality, then they believe in innate differences between groups is very reductive. There are plenty of factors here: culture, preferences, geography, and more.

That's not true. It is a false dichotomy. There are a myriad of reasons you'd find different behaviors or results in different groups of people besides either ingrained innate unchangeable differences and lack of opportunity for that group. Even if you sampled two equally sized samples of equal distribution of the same kind of people (whatever that means to you) you'd find aggregate disparity to some degree. No innate differences at all, and no difference in opportunity based on group membership, you'd still find disparity. Your dichotomy is false.

Additionally, I find this whole assertion I see often nowadays that there's some invisible force creating opportunity disparities between different arbitrary groups of people to be a bit hand-wavy and suspiciously convenient. To me it is comparable to asserting that the disparities are because it was the will of God.

Finally, your statement is a roundabout way of saying "if you don't agree with me you're a racist and I don't talk to racists" and that is extremely dishonest. Frankly, if you don't want to talk to people you don't agree with, why are you on a discussion website at all?

The trick is that life is a series of "opportunities" and equality of opportunity at any particular point of choice generally results in perpetuating any imbalance of opportunity that has occurred before that.

For the sake of illustration, assume two large groups of kids who innately would have had identical ability, but one's growth and education is (on average) more stunted because their families are more likely to be single parent families, or have a parent in jail, or just very poor (which affects a lot), so right now they don't have identical average ability because they did not get equal education and support some decades ago.

If you want to have equal representation of the groups, you'd have to artificially correct for all the previous differences in opportunity - without a time machine, you can't actually fix the differences in their skills and experience (no matter how fairly or unfairly those differences came to be), you can only pretend that those differences don't exist. And so we come to the core issue that granting equal treatment to unequally capable candidates means granting unequal treatment to equally capable candidates, there's no way around it.

And there's also a gap between treating individuals fairly and treating groups fairly. You can't/don't measure the opportunity differences on an individual level, but on a group level, and individual variation in opportunity is huge. In general, any "compensating opportunities" happen at a group level, because if one group is underrepresented under a "background-blind" schema, then it's because lots and lots of capable individuals from that group have "filtered away" and gone on to very different life paths long before applying - and any corrective action or quota system is not helping those individuals who suffered most from the lack of earlier opportunities (because they're already "out"), instead it's granting a larger (compensating) opportunity to other individuals who just happen to be from the same group but had enough opportunity to "stay in the game", while individuals who personally have had so-so opportunities get punished if they happen to come from a group that (on average!) has more opportunities.

You believe in quotas, you believe in equality of outcome.

In fact I could be inclined to agree with you in some ways; its more accurate to state that progressives don't believe in equality of outcome in much the same way as they don't really hold any disdain for racism/sexism or any of the other causes that claim to champion but they like the power that comes from doing so.

For example no progressive has any issues with an imbalance in genders in nursing; this of course contrasts brilliantly against theirs views on it in the tech industry.

I don't believe in quotas. I don't think people from every different group should do the exact same in every job. I don't think that quotas are an effective way of dealing with inequalities either.

I do believe that roughly speaking, for an equal amount of work, black and white people should have similar salaries, for example. Something that is not the case today.

This is a disparity that can't be explained away by choice, or innate supremacy, but is instead à result of inequality of opportunity. So you have to fix the opportunity gap.

I do have an issue with the imbalance in nursing. That's because there is a strong stigma against men in nursing and men in nursing often suffer strong discrimination. In a society where these stigmas don't exist but men in general decide not to become nurses, that's fine.

Same in tech. There are stigmas and discrimination against women in tech at every level. For example, different countries have massively different amounts of women in engineering. Women in countries where this amount is lower often report discrimination. So this is clearly not a question of choice, and is thus a gap in opportunities led by sexism.

It would be nice if you wouldn't assume the absolute worst possible interpretation of the argument of your interlocutor. This is against HN's guideline and generally increases the amount of noise. It's also quite rude.

If the goal is to have equal opportunity, but inequity is assumed to be indicative of unequal opportunity then that's just a long-winded way of saying the goal is equity.

> Same in tech. There are stigmas and discrimination against women in tech at every level. For example, different countries have massively different amounts of women in engineering. Women in countries where this amount is lower often report discrimination. So this is clearly not a question of choice, and is thus a gap in opportunities led by sexism.

Do you have a source for this claim? Because this contradicts the sources I have read on this topic. The share of women in engineering varies, but not by much. Most countries fall between the 20-30% range. We see no countries where women make up the majority. Furthermore, the representation of women in countries with better gender equality is actually lower than ones that are highly misogynistic [1].

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

> It would be nice if you wouldn't assume the absolute worst possible interpretation of the argument of your interlocutor. This is against HN's guideline and generally increases the amount of noise. It's also quite rude.

To me it seems you have gone to great lengths to clarify that you mean exactly what the original poster is referring to.

I don't believe their reading your argument at face value is in any way assuming the worst possible interpretation.

It's not a personal attack for someone to disagree with your beliefs.

Perhaps you don't, but for progressives it remains a core part of their ideology and one that can't be no-true-scotsman-ed away, now that the belief has become publicly embarrassing to have supported.

And the same goes for your opposition to the gender gap in nursing; as demonstrated by the mysteriously absent global-push to rectify the issue.

Funnily enough I seem to recall it being the countries with far poorer track records on "equality" that tended to produce the higher number of female engineers; and that (for example) scandinavian efforts towards "equality" seemed to have quite the opposite result.

There absolutely are programs for men into nursing.

Using Scandinavia as a barometer for equity in engineering for men and women is cherry-picking. Where I live, these measures were very successful and in the leading engineering-only university the rate of women graduating is now 30%. Seems successful to me.

As for this: >Perhaps you don't, but for progressives it remains a core part of their ideology and one that can't be no-true-scotsman-ed away, now that the belief has become publicly embarrassing to have supported.

The only way to get out of this conundrum is for you to find evidence that at the ideological level progressivism is based on equality of outcome. I can't prove the negative. I can give examples however of specific far-left ideologies from anarchism to communism to mutualism to intersectional liberalism do not, at the ideological level, aim for equality of outcome.

Brushing away the example as "cherry picking" because no counter argument can be given isn't convincing, particularly when the pattern is seen in developed countries in general.

As for your university efforts I'd have to know what those actually were before making a call.

And re progresivism and quotas; it isn't based on it but it subscribes heavily to it due to its utility.

I gave a counter argument - for many universities this did actually work. The example I was talking about is Polytechnique Montréal. But it's far from being the only one, though admittedly Scandinavia had a failure in this goal.

As far as progressivism and quotas, I simply can't argue on this unless you give me a specific progressive tendencies. If you're talking about US progressives writ large then the main reason quotas are so popular is because the people in power that put those quotas in place, which often weren't even progressives, found quotas to be easy to implement as other solutions are very difficult and inconvenient for those in power, though popular.

> I gave a counter argument - for many universities this did actually work.

What you assert as proof that "it worked" was, if I understood your "30%!" correctly, an increase in equality of outcome.

How does this square with your claim to favour equality of opportunity, not outcome? Doesn't it show that what worked was what you claim not to favour; why would you crow about that?

Apologies I meant what those efforts entailed; what actually was done in the universities to achieve the numbers increase?

As for the 2nd point, that's more of what I'm getting at; that core populist/mainstream progressive movement. I could certainly believe that the leaders are jumping on it purely due to, as you say the simplicity and popularity of them.

Those are a lot of absolute statements you're making, and I just don't understand. There is so much wrong with your argument. You're attributing motive and action to someone else, with zero proof, in my opinion.

>You believe in quotas, you believe in equality of outcome.

Who is 'you' here? Who said they believe in quotas?

>they like the power that comes from doing so.

Again, who is this mysterious strawman you're building? Where is this argument coming from? What is your proof? I am very progressive, and I very much have disdain for racism, sexism, and any other bigoted activities. It has nothing to do with power. Often, I am unable to do anything about this behavior because I lack any sort of structural power in my local area. So what does that mean for your argument?

>For example no progressive has any issues with an imbalance in genders in nursing

I literally work to bring men into underrepresented fields in higher education. There are programs across the nation specifically designed to recruit, assist, and help ensure the academic success of men in nursing, men in daycare/education fields, and men in other traditionally 'feminine' fields. Claiming this absolute of a statement is just absurd.

If you would follow a couple steps up the comment chain you'll note that the discussion centred around progressive ideology; you're welcome to re-read the chain and respond again once you have familiarised yourself with the context.

I followed the chain to that comment and then asked the questions I asked. Please answer them, I would appreciate it.

You seem to be building an odd little strawman to knock down based on some bogeyman theoretical progressive you have imagined. I'm trying to point that out to you.

You're genuinely going to try and claim, on HN of all places that no one is advocating for enforced gender requirements in hiring?

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