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Comment by jerrya | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't describe sexism, the article describes scarcity and demand:

In Silicon Valley today it's not possible to hire more women simply by recruiting them. Good engineers today have their pick of jobs, and good female engineers are being stalked like the last antelope on the African veldt.

Etsy's solution doesn't seem to be to stop sexism, Etsy's solution appears to be train more engineers, take a risk on junior women engineers out of Hacker School, and let their risk taking and boots on the ground approach serve as a signal to senior women engineers.

None of this is evidence of sexism in CS and engineering, it was a winning strategy to defeat scarcity.

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The argument is that sexism is what creates the scarcity in the first place. So by creating an environment where sexism is less of a factor you attract more women.

Yep, exactly. By funding this training program Etsy signaled that they value women as much as they value men. As a result, a ton of women applied to the program and many of those ended up getting hired.

Or maybe it's just thast they paid for their education. Getting something for free could attract a lot of people.

I also would like an update on the results in 5 years.

There is nothing in that experiment supporting that theory, though. So why push it anyway? How does people flocking to free education prove anything?

If you can't see my point and want me to elaborate, ask like a normal civilized person and I might.

What didn't you like about the way I asked?

You're asking a rhetorical question that insults my character by implying that I would fabricate a theory and then "push it" although I knew it was false. I'm fine with not being right or people having a different opinion, but don't insult me in the process.

Your other question doesn't make sense since it's factually incorrect (hackers school was free before) and puts weight on only one factor. The incentive Etsy made for women to join hacker school was of course offsetting some other factors. I'm saying that sexism or something devolved from sexism is one of those other factors.

I didn't say you fabricated it, just that it doesn't follow from the story. That there was something to offset also doesn't imply sexism was in the mix of things to offset.

See, you didn't actually say story, you said experiment. I wouldn't base my theories on a single story. Instead I've been following this experiment for a year, during which many of the people involved seem to think that sexism actually is one of the factors.

Hacker school amended their policy with "no subtle sexism", the CTO of Etsy said that it was harder to hire great women because they tend to have a history of bad experience and one of the attendees, which was later hired by Etsy, specifically pointed out sexism as a problem within the tech community.

This of course also make me think that sexism or, like I said, something devolved from sexism actually is a factor for women. It was at least definitely part of the experiment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4LExVkv4Pw http://firstround.com/article/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-... http://marthakelly.github.com/blog/2013/03/10/an-open-letter...

The number of people believing something is not a good indicator for it being true oe not. Example: billions of people have contradictory religious beliefs.

The number of independent people believing something combined with their authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency is basic information valuation[0]. Religious beliefs fall not on how many people believe them, but because they all originate from either untrustworthy or distant sources. Otherwise the laws of physics would be false, since many people also believe them.

In any case that doesn't matter since what you actually said that sexism wasn't one of the factors and I've shown that is was. We haven't even begun talking about how large a factor it was since you haven't been providing any real perspective on the matter. At this point I seriously doubt your ability to provide any value in this conversation and are therefor going to stop participating in it.

[0] https://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm2-22-3.pdf

You've shown that the organizers thought that sexism was a factor, which isn't the same thing. But you are right, since we fundamentally disagree about the rules of logic, further discussion is pointless. (example: I said truth doesn't follow from many people believing in something, you interpret it as 'everything many people believe is false'. Very basic logic mistake)

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