Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If you can't meet DEI without compromising on merit, your country must have serious fundamental problems at every stage of your education system.

And even that's if you need a significant fraction of your nation's elites — given observed problems such as "failing to install bolts correctly" and "management deliberately ignoring raised safety concerns" and "there's no automatic cut off timer for something which will damage the aircraft if left on for more than 5 minutes" don't even need elites, if you really believe what you wrote, you need to campaign for much better fundamental education starting decades ago. Boeing doesn't hire a significant fraction of the USA, so this must, if you were right, be basically endemic across your nation.

Your response neglects simple facts. You are missing that certain vocations are not as popular to women as they are to men. I doubt this is inherently an issue with the education systems. I think what corporate America has been focusing on heavily recently was DEI, which is fine, but it seems that has caused management to lose focus on other matters impacting quality. I've seen this first hand where a high ranking VP announced his highest priority is diverse hiring, again this is fine, but it's a choice in priority setting that sends a clear message if tradeoffs need to be made down the chain.

I am not against DEI or blaming diverse hires for issues. I think management in corporations sometimes does poorly identifying metrics that measure what success means to a company. Is it a 50/50 mix of women and men or to uphold the highest quality standard.

> Your response neglects simple facts. You are missing that certain vocations are not as popular to women as they are to men.

Would need to be a ~3.3σ difference to justify the claim for Boeing. That's not so much "neglecting simple facts" as it is "ignoring irrelevant ones".

Boeing has 145,000 employees, the USA has 331.9 million people.

You need to be better than this.

Boeing does not exist in isolation. There are many other companies in the labor market. What I am referring to is a well understood dynamic. It's unclear to me what your counter point is here.

But Elon said so!!!!! /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com