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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Probably not?

I know plenty of tech companies that make sure female applicants get interviewed by at least one female engineer during the hiring process. They have a good faith belief this reduces discrimination rather than increasing it.

Of course, it could stray into discriminatory territory if you're doing something dumb - like sending all minority applicants to a hardass interviewer who rejects everyone; or giving certain employees a burdensome number of interviews on the basis of their race, at the cost of their other duties. But you should already be on top of issues like that anyway.

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I have been the token woman interviewing a woman and also joined teams where the only other woman interviewed me. It always struck me more as "look, we have one and she's not mouthing 'get out' so we're a good employer".

Usually once I join the one other woman leaves and the cycle repeats.

> "look, we have one and she's not mouthing 'get out' so we're a good employer".

Yes, we have done this in the past with minorities...

How else would you recommend they approach the situation? Should the other woman not have been bothered to interview you?

Maybe a more generous interpretation is that people are flawed, and they're making an effort as imperfect as it is. I I feel the alternative is a catch-22, and everybody be damned regardless of the motive, effort, our outcome - nothing will be good enough.

Having a woman in the room when other women are getting interviewed isn't discriminatory. Telling a woman she can't interview someone because she is a woman (or other protected class) is.

They both are explicitly sexist. Hard to define that away.

Maybe it's not bad; but it's sexist. Just as it would be racist if the criteria was making sure one of the interviewers was of specific race or nationality.

That's your opinion, most people probably disagree.

A common way to define racism is: negative prejudice + power

(The same can be done for sexism, though obviously on different characteristics)

From that point of view, making sure that a marginalized candidate is also interviewed by at least one member of the same marginalized community, if possible, is neither racist nor sexist.

(Because you're not negatively discriminating, and in fact to define the rule you don't even need to single out which marginalized community they are part of)

The "+ power" only exists in deep academic redefinitions of racism(where many terms are redefined away from their commonplace meaning), and leftist twitter which latched onto the former for some reason.

Most normal Americans, if asked to rank the statements "Black people are disgusting pigs", and "White people are disgusting pigs", would rank them as equally racist, regardless of whether white or black people have "power" in America.

But didn't the term originally come from academia? I'd be curious to know about the actual etymology here.

It's not uncommon for words to have a technical meaning and a colloquial one. I don't see HN getting upset that "theory" is used differently by those awful academics compared to the common man.

It really isn't a common way to define it. The colloquial definition of racism is still racial prejudice, regardless of power. This is also the way it was used historically - both W.E.B. DuBois and MLK referred to "black racists", for example. It was redefined to "... + power" after the Civil Rights Era, but it didn't really catch up outside of the more academic social justice circles.

About MLK, I presume you're referring to this quote:

"We must never substitute a doctrine of Black supremacy for white supremacy"

That's fair, but we're talking about ensuring that the interview process is not discriminatory. I.e. having some extra safeguards for marginalized people (safeguards which are not needed for those in power), a special process that you could maybe define akin to "positive discrimination" vs negative discrimination...

And MLK was totally in favour of that:

"society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro."

Affirmative action in general does not involve prejudice, although some particular instances of it do.

> A common way to define racism is: negative prejudice + power

This is an idiotic way to define racism that makes it completely subjective to give the wielding accuser of racism to be highly discriminatory while claiming not to be bad.

Idiotic or not, it's widespread in academia.

And some would argue that there are fairly objective ways to define "power"

Personally I'm on the fence about these definitions but it annoys me to see people dismiss them as "idiotic" without engaging with the level of serious thought that has been put into them by sincere people.

Disagree once you've spent a day or two surveying the subject. Or even an hour or two.

It doesn't matter if it is popular in academia. Nobody outside of academia uses it and they are trying to force a language change. Languages of course change, but it should be done naturally not by force.

I have surveyed it, and it’s still idiotic. It’s no different than horoscopes or numerology, both of which have immense depth from “experts”. It doesn’t change the fact that not of it is grounded in any kind of scientific discovery or logic.

> And some would argue that there are fairly objective ways to define "power"

Funny how elusive these “objective ways” are when it comes to actually defining them.

Even if there were an objective way to define that power, it still doesn’t change how dumb and divisive the whole approach is of making asymmetric the criteria for being “racist”. It has enabled blatantly bigoted behavior by tons of people against downtrodden “majorities” and has done more to divide society than the segregation in the 60s.

> it's widespread in academia.

This is very damming to sociology and to associate it with “academia” is a disservice to people who practice the objective discovery of science.

The law (in the US) protects everyone against discrimination on the basis of sex. Women have no special status under these laws.

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