Comment by chowells | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chowells | Hacker News Reader

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Nope. That's exactly my point. The fact that they aren't somewhere around 50% is sufficient to show it. Filtering does not happen solely at the interview. It happens at hundreds or thousands of steps along the way. It's a systemic problem.

Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)

So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.

Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.

You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.

>Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.

>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.

But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?

This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.

How is it anything other than out of whack if observed reality isn't statistically aligned with potential? Simple economics tells us that we get the best outcomes by aligning those. (And... motives and incentives are part of the systemic biases. As I said, you don't need to identify them to observe their results.)

Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.

Except "fixing" this problem involves deliberate hiring bias. As per your other comment [1], the solution involves direct sexism in the form of gender discrimination in hiring. Direct sexism, in order to fix the "sexism" that most normal people just call "choice" is not something many would support.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604394

>How is it anything other than out of whack if observed reality isn't statistically aligned with potential? Simple economics tells us that we get the best outcomes by aligning those. (And... motives and incentives are part of the systemic biases. As I said, you don't need to identify them to observe their results.)

The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.

>Also, did you know that language changes?

Please, don't be snide.

>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.

It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.

Sexism has always referred to both institutional and personal violations.

> You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)

This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?

That's a non-sequitur.

No? You write that hospitals are discriminating against women because they want to increase their representation of men. I respond saying this is illegal (because it is).

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