"There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions."
>"they looked at hiring practices. That's an extremely narrow view of the problem domain."
While true, the hiring process itself has an outsized influence on the problem domain because everything else depends on it.
If you discriminate during the hiring stage you can confidently assert you aren't discriminating elsewhere by sheer merit of not having hired the kinds of people you are charged with discriminating against in the first place.
Not at all. If the employers let their pants down already at the interview stage, where everyone is at their best behaviour, it gets much worse down the line.
I'm not surprised. Woman who behave like man are often praised, considered better. Man who behave like woman are often moked at, considered less. (I meant like man and like woman as our society expects them not as that those beliefs are justified)
I have a developing conjecture that in order to address the perceived problem of higher male per capita in certain occupations, attracting males into occupations with higher female ratios is as important as incentivizing female participation in high-male occupations.
I'm no mathematician but I see it in terms of system numbers: Given a set of occupations with different sex ratios, to change the ratio of any specific occupation the ratios of other occupations must also change.
Incentivizing a specific sex population into an occupation may work for a while; they can boost the overall population in that occupation over the occupations the incentivized population would otherwise enter. However, the true outcome is an overpopulation in the incentivized occupation and underpopulation in others. The difference between incentivized and "natural" population size for an occupation becomes headwinds for any person to enter an occupation resulting in reduced incentive efficiency.
In a simplistic rational "Homo economicus" world some portion of the male population that would enter the female-incentivized occupation would move to other occupations and the sex ratios would change. If it is true that males are discriminated against in occupations with high female ratios, then this would represent an even higher hurdle than the factors that result in sex ratio variance in occupations.
I've not been able to wrap my head around this issue. What is the thinking behind the desire to even sex ratios in various profession? Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. Is a perfect world when every construction site, hospital, and dreary programming job (lets be honest most of them aren't fun) has an even mix of the sexes? What is the benefit? Can someone explain this in logical, non-political, terms. Surely there's some benefit to individuals or society but I can't figure out what that might be. I don't want my daughters sucked into dangerous oil field work prone to boom and bust cycles. Why would that be ideal?
It all starts with the dubious (to say the least) premise that men and women are exactly the same. Both sexes on average want the same things, like the same things, are interested in the same things, and have the same priorities and proclivities.
Therefore, in a just world, we'd see an exact 50/50 ratio of men and women in every possible occupation, because there are no differences between men and women, therefore the only possible explanation for non-parity anywhere is because some kind of "systemic" factor is unfairly preventing one of the sexes from achieving the career results that they obviously want.
And if men and women don't want the same things on average, then that itself is a symptom of some kind of systemic problem. Because biology plays no role in human psychology; we're the only species in the animal kingdom to come into this world with no pre-programming and absolutely everything that we do is the result of cultural conditioning. So men and women could be exactly the same if only more parents would let their sons play with Barbie and their daughters play with GI Joe.
There are some extreme but isolated examples of people who are disposed to this opinion, but more commonly the objection to fields being dominated by one gender or the other is because those workplaces, as this study points out, can't seem to stop themselves from discriminating and gatekeeping against those of the other gender. While it should in theory be no problem that a workplace is 90% men and 10% women because they live in a platonic ideal where they've been free to attain to their true ambition that is influenced by biological traits related to sex, in reality, once one gender gains enough dominance in a field or workplace, sexual discrimination, harassment, and gatekeeping end up deepening the imbalance. This feedback loop ends up pushing out people of the non-dominant gender who want nothing more than to work in that field but are constantly and systemically met with prejudice and disenfranchisement.
It would be nice to deftly and precisely ameliorate this issue by just being able to say “stop acting in a sexually discriminating way because you're impeding someone's will,” and have it be so. But there are still far too many people who are willing to abet the discrimination either silently or willfully, writing the disparity off as a “natural outcome of biology.” So the alternative way to establish justice is the sledgehammer approach that equates the unequal representation with inequity. Because that is _also_ true.
> While it should in theory be no problem that a workplace is 90% men and 10% women because they live in a platonic ideal where they've been free to attain to their true ambition that is influenced by biological traits related to sex, in reality, once one gender gains enough dominance in a field or workplace, sexual discrimination, harassment, and gatekeeping end up deepening the imbalance.
The assumption that an industry that has a large gender imbalance will inevitably end up discriminating against the minority gender is incorrect. Plenty of studies have shown tech companies to actually favor women in hiring:
There are policies that can eliminate bias: Strip names and identifying information out of resumes before recruiters see them. Modulate voices in interviews to eliminate ability to infer gender or foreign accents, and use no video so as to prevent people from identifying races. The problem is that this often doesn't produce the results people are expecting.
The comment you're answering to is talking about harassment and gatekeeping.
Hiring is one gate, but if you're hired just to reach gender goals or to satisfy the lust of your new manager, you will not have the same experience at the company than someone from the other gender. Like getting raises or being promoted.
How do we quantify "discrimination and gatekeeping"? Focusing on hiring makes sense because it's the gate that you need to pass through to join the company. It's by far the most important form of gatekeeping, and the one with the most influence over the representation of the company. It's also where I see the most focus on attempting to "fix" the imbalance, but introducing policies to favor underrepresented groups. I've worked at multiple companies with overt affirmative action programs in favor of women.
Other factors like harassment are important, but again the evidence doesn't seem to suggest it's responsible for gender imbalances. Engineering has one of the lower rates of harassment among professional industries (32%) less than plenty of industries with more balanced gender representation like healthcare (35%) and media (41%) [1]. And this is just among white-collar industries, service industries and blue collar industries are by far even worse [2].
I'll concede this probably does happen to varying extents in some (but not all) workplaces. But since it seems we're in agreement that it isn't the only factor at play, I'm sure you can see why using unequal outcomes as the sole evidence of discrimination in any specific workplace or industry is flawed.
Furthermore, I would argue that even in cases where discrimination is actually occurring, "stop acting in a sexually discriminating way because you're impeding someone's will" can be the only just solution to the problem. The alternative of actively and intentionally discriminating against other people in the majority group who did nothing wrong is unacceptable, both because it does nothing to address the root of the problem, and because discrimination on the basis of irrelevant factors like sex is wrong regardless of who the target of that discrimination is.
What's worse is when people use unequal outcomes as the sole justification for actively discriminating against majority groups, because now not only are you perpetrating these injustices in the pursuit of an ideal percentage of men and woman in the industry, but you're also running the risk of being wrong about what that ideal percentage is in the first place, actively pushing men and women into roles they wouldn't naturally choose in an ideal world where unjust discrimination didn't exist.
“Stop discriminating,” by itself frequently doesn't cut it, though. And when it doesn't, playing to the numbers is another tool to use to attempt to reach a just equilibrium. It gives the minority gender a means of establishing networks of power, gaining positions of authority that can shift the culture and reduce the gatekeeping. While it may be true that deliberately aiming for a ratio stands the chance of disenfranchising some qualified people, the existing situation quite possibly does the same but we don't know it. Survivorship bias and default bias make it very difficult to discern whether the existing ratio is appropriately reflective of the population's nature.
I understand the point you're making that ratio targeting seems immune to indications that a different natural ratio exists that differs from the imposed one, but I argue there is sensitivity to negative feedback. If there really is a natural sample ratio that differs materially from that found in the broader population, businesses will eventually be unable to hire according to the ratio. The danger is of course setting up a system that's wholly immune to that possibility and risk coming to lay upon a Procrustean bed. But I think profit motive is sufficient to dampen that risk. Businesses who are simply unable to find and hire qualified candidates who fulfill their target ratio will abandon that ratio by degrees.
> Because biology plays no role in human psychology; we're the only species in the animal kingdom to come into this world with no pre-programming and absolutely everything that we do is the result of cultural conditioning.
I suspect when these people finally cede on biological differences between the genders, they will just argue that these biological differences themselves are a product of our sinful and fallen world. Don't underestimate the incredible portability of these folks' goalposts.
Nope. All evidence shows that human psychology is a mix of biology and culture. That’s why you often see sisters and brothers being very different even though they were brought up the same way. Also, you can’t make somebody have a high IQ through culture. It is a biological trait. And your IQ has a high impact on how you perceived the world and learn.
> Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios.
I think some people in the technology field unfortunately take everything at face value and are not really thinking about the various power plays in motion when it comes to persuasion and influence. I would point out that some people stand to make money and gain power off of promoting these views, and of course some employers stand to make a hell of a lot of money off of promoting these views.
I'd say that until there's a societal movement to even out the gender imbalance in boilermakers, roofers, deep sea fishers, oil drillers, and other difficult but very profitable careers, that distrusting the motives of those that claim to want to even out the gender imbalance in the workplace is fair game.
it's hard to give a non-political answer because it's really about money and who gets it. on average, men make more money than women. a lot of people (especially women) consider this to be unfair. software engineer is one of the highest paid roles for someone with only a bachelor's degree. most software engineers are men. if your goal is to decrease the income gap between men and women, it probably seems easier to get more women into the lucrative subset of male-dominated professions than to increase the wages of female-dominated roles above market. no one is particularly interested in increasing "representation" in poorly compensated (or dangerous, see "oil rig") roles.
> it's hard to give a non-political answer because it's really about money and who gets it. on average, men make more money than women. a lot of people (especially women) consider this to be unfair.
I doubt women are significantly more inclined to think this arrangement is unfair. I believe social progressives think it’s unfair, and the media would have us believe that women and racial minorities are largely socially progressive when in fact they aren’t (consider that only a small minority of blacks support defunding the police and women’s and men’s views on abortion are very similar).
In any case, not all compensation is monetary, and it’s widely understood that women prioritize flexibility and other perks over money directly, while men optimize for monetary compensation. Further, much of the money made by men is spent by women anyway—in married households, women spend the majority of the money.
This may not be the case in Europe. Sw engineer profession is roughly as male dominated, but I think you'll need a msc/PhD level in EU and with that kind of diploma IT pays vastly less than in US.
This has always struck me as strange. Software is surely one of the most easily exported commodities, so surely Europeans can easily play in the same global software market as Americans and moreover, I’m of the impression that software engineers in Europe are largely unionized so one would think they’d be able to bargain more effectively for better salaries.
For Finland. Even if they are unionized, the unions only set the minimum rates and very reasonably inflation raises. Ofc, there is some perks negotiated, but these really aren't too major things.
With IT the actual wages are much higher than union rates, and employers will have hard time to find anyone outside fresh graduates at those rates.
And this system has broken down this year, so things might go different.
> of the impression that software engineers in Europe are largely unionized
That somewhat varies by country (i.e. a bunch of Swedish developers I know are, just because it's so common there for entire companies to have blanket union contracts for everyone), but in general: no.
>Can someone explain this in logical, non-political, terms.
Probably not, because it's ultimately a political phenomenon. In left-leaning circles it's popular to deny that there can be significant statistical differences between demographics for any reason other than discrimination. Based on that logic they view all unequal gender ratios as problems that need to be solved.
This is does not quite fit the general "left-leaning" belief that I have heard.
I would rephrase it as "it's popular to deny that there's an underlying preference at play when jobs which used to be female dominated, like programming, became male dominated shortly after they became lucrative."
Bringing it back to the subject of the article, this entire discussion is really about tribalism. Humans tend to look favorably on their group and askance at other groups. Where people get into trouble with this is assuming you know from the outside what groups someone thinks they belong to (e.g. do you see yourself as a man who happens to be a programmer or a programmer who happens to be a man).
I've heard a lot of people argue that women and men would have identical preferences, and their different preferences are entirely attributable to differences in socialization from a young age.
As for the "jobs became male dominated when they became lucrative" observation, it seems like very weak evidence for discrimination. If I were a betting man, I would guess that as the field became lucrative, the number of jobs in the field rapidly outpaced the supply of qualified women (how many women were literate in math or programming in a time when it wasn't common for women to go to college at all).
Moreover, women achieved parity with men in fields like medicine and law in the 80s and 90s when discrimination and harassment were pervasive, explicit, and severe by today's standards. What's going on in tech today that only 20% of our workforce is female despite many, considerable advantages:
* Explicit sexual discrimination and harassment have been illegal and taboo for decades
* The overwhelming majority of US tech jobs have been concentrated in the most ideologically progressive counties for decades (one would expect lower levels of harassment and discrimination in these places)
* Every sizable tech company has a dedicated DEI department and quarterly DEI seminars
* Most tech companies have diversity hiring and retention targets
And not only that, but there appears to be a pronounced inverse correlation between gender equality in a society and the careers that women select into. In other words, the societies in which women are the most free are often the societies that have the least even gender/job distributions and vice versa.
All of this is to say that your perception of "left leaning beliefs" is hardly better than the parent's.
> ... when jobs which used to be female dominated, like programming, became male dominated shortly after they became lucrative.
Programming was never female dominated. What we call "programmer" now (writing algorithms to compute artillery trajectories or whatever) would have just been "scientist" back then. "Coder" (and before that, human "computer") were indeed female-dominated positions but there's no analog to that in the modern world; we've completely replaced those jobs with assemblers/compilers and electronic calculators respectively.
I think it is a matter of perceived status. Whenever I see complaint about lack of diversity in some field, it is something that is not only white-male dominated but also high status relative to similar endeavors. People who want to increase representation in higher status areas are trying to improve the perceived status of their cultural group. A type that I encounter is persons of some demographic who want to see greater presence of their kind in areas like the sciences or classical music, but who themselves have no interest in those things. For them, it is not at all about labor economics.
I think this line of thought could fruitfully develop. It is inline with Chris Aranade’s theory of dignity changes in the US. There is a great Econtalk interview about it:
Photographer, author, and former Wall St. trader Chris Arnade talks about his book, Dignity, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Arnade quit his Wall Street trading job and criss-crossed America photographing and getting to know the addicted and homeless who struggle to find work and struggle to survive. The conversation centers on what Arnade learned about Americans and about himself.
> People who want to increase representation in higher status areas are trying to improve the perceived status of their cultural group.
If status here means “respect” rather than “wealth”, there are precious few groups with lower status than that of white males these days. At least in many places, “white male” is practically a slur.
The simplistic version of the premise is more like: women are under-represented in occupations which have more money and/or power, and also within the more senior positions of all occupations (which also tend to correlate with more money and/or power), which must be because they are either discriminated against when seeking those positions, or because they are discouraged from seeking those positions by an expectation of discrimination.
This is simply not true. There are a highly paid professions in US that are dominated by women, like that of veterinarians (as I wrote on another comment it pays better in US than programming) or some fields in medicine or law.
Because diversity is productive. If your constituents are similar with similar backgrounds, upbringing, sex etc, they will tend to have similar ideas, biases etc and that will lead to groupthink. In other words, they will be more likely to get stuck in a local minimum.
Diversity in general is good because you'll get different ideas into the mix and will be more likely to be able to envision and explore different possibilities.
Has this been proven? If so based upon what specific factors? "Background" and "upbringing" encompass a multitude of meanings. I also have not personally ever seen a job ad for "Data Scientist with rural WV / trailer park upbringing" yet that cohort is likely to have a near zero representation. I have seen things offered by "race" and sex. Race seems to be determined by melanin level and self identification, not DNA sequencing.
My reading is that diverse teams are seen as more productive and innovative. Another angle could be that given how impactful technology is, women need the seat at the table to take part in shaping it.
Any evidence for this or is it just wishful thinking? The more diverse a group is the harder it is to communicate because of culture/language barriers. So it doesn’t seem to be obviously true to me.
The parent comment uses “seems” so doesn’t claim certainty. I attended a seminar by Amy Edmunson [0] that cited studies indicating that teams of higher diversity were slightly lower performing on average but had higher variance. The takeaway was that a route to a higher performing team was increased team diversity plus psychological safety can lead to improved results by keeping the top end of the variation range.
It doesn’t match my experience. The most successful teams I have worked on were not diverse at all. And the worst teams I have worked on were very diverse. It is hard enough to understand each other and communicate clearly in a team without also having to overcome language/culture barriers.
> I don't want my daughters sucked into dangerous oil field work prone to boom and bust cycles.
Are you implying that it is ok for your sons to be in such a field?
To answer your question though...
To establish a baseline, women get paid, as a whole, less than men for a particular job title (women doctor paid less than male doctor, women electrician paid less than male electrician). This is on a statistical basis when normalized for experience, location, etc. It may not be that eg. a particular iTunes team at apple has this imbalance, but across all industries, across all companies, across all locations, this statistic emerges. This is wrong, because men and women are equally deserving of money. Thats not politics, that's human decency. To quote an SNL skit "she made the unfortunate choice of career after getting a law degree. Instead of working a lawyer, she chose to work as a female lawyer".
Beyond this, women also tend to occupy jobs that pay less than men (teacher vs lawyer, nurse vs SWE, etc). This means, again, that as a whole, women in society have less money than men. People tend to be skeptical in the issue here because of the perception of choice a women has over her career. I (a man) have heard from countless women in engineering school and later as a professional that women are made to feel like they don't belong. My own mother (who has no reason to lie to me), an engineer, made the newspaper for being one of the first females licensed in her field. She told me countless stories of men passively trying to make her feel like she didn't belong. This sense of not-belonging means that the "choice" to work a lower-paid job is less of a truly independent choice and more of a societal nudge.
Now that there is some established evidence of why women make less than men, I'll let the reader decide if its wrong.
Now that we've decided it is wrong that women are paid less without choice, we should try to fix it.
How should we fix it? Lets get women into higher-paid job that's don't have many women! But which ones? Like you said, you don't want your daughters in oil fields, but surely you'd be much happier with your daughter in an office building somewhere typing at a computer? Maybe something with good WLB? Maybe without the need for a decade of education (and loans!)?
Great! SWE is a job that pays well, is safe, and has a generally "easy" way to enter - just a bachelors degree, and amble internships. Bonus is that all the equipment you need to learn is a computer (which most people have), so that's a lot easier to supply to poor kids who may have more trouble getting lessons.
Other jobs that are high-focus for female-occupation are doctors/lawyers/finance. Those jobs also pay well but have higher education requirements, or worse WLB, or are harder to get. But some (like doctors) have huge prestige. Who doesn't want their daughter to have a safe, high-prestige, well-paid job? No one is trying to get their daughter (or son!) to work on a crabbing boat - one of the most dangerous jobs in America!
TLDR: Why do we as a society focus on ending the professional gender ratio mis-alignment on certain jobs? Because no one wants those other jobs (for any gender really), and the goal is to get women equal opportunity for salary or equal prestige, and that is easier in some fields.
> This is on a statistical basis when normalized for experience, location, etc. It may not be that eg. a particular iTunes team at apple has this imbalance, but across all industries, across all companies, across all locations, this statistic emerges. This is wrong, because men and women are equally deserving of money.
It is a misuse of aggregate descriptive statistics to ascribe moral right or wrong since the state of the world for this dimension, “income,” is the result of 7b+ choices that might still add up to “wrong” even if all those choices were “right.”
It would be helpful if the ideas of Judah Pearl [0] were more in the minds of people, in particular the identification of causes.
A woman is interested in computers and gains skills in that area, then tries to get a job in the field. People making hiring decisions like their boys-club culture (maybe even subconsciously) so the woman doesn't get hired even though equivalently qualified, and somehow thinks or figures out that this is somewhat due to herself being a woman.
Then the woman makes actions to fix this for herself and future women.
If you're going to assert that tech companies, by and large, discriminate against women you should try and back up such a claim with evidence. If anything, the evidence indicates the opposite: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Nearly 900k applications analyzed, with the conclusion of preference in favor of women.
This is simply not true. Tech companies are leaning backwards to hire woman. I myself have gone out of my way to hire female software developers. And have hired quite a few who were excellent.
I do. High-stress high-stakes careers dealing in the macabre tend to result in dark/inappropriate senses of humor as a coping/bonding mechanism.
Although not predictive on an individual level, the (perceived?) general trend is that men are more accepting of that kind of environment than women are.
I've seen people make the argument that a woman shouldn't lead an infantry platoon because it would prevent grunts from coping with the death and destruction they face every day. Similar for defense attorneys. Nobody wants to risk being reported for sexual harassment because they laugh at something that happens in a rape trial; they also don't want to be forced to be 100% serious at all times behind closed doors.
I'm not convinced these ideas have merit, particularly due to self-selection. Most women don't volunteer to be infantry officers unless they want to be part of the infantry culture. But that does seem to be the operating perception.
Why is it that the US military has different physical fitness standards for men and women ? Shouldn't standards be gender neutral ?
Men must complete a three-mile run within 18 minutes to get a maximum score on that portion of the PFT, while women younger than 40 have up to 21 minutes.
For Marines between 17 and 20 years old, men must do 20 pullups to get a maximum score; women must do seven.
On the CFT, men must lift a 30-pound ammunition can between 106 and 120 times within two minutes to get a max score. Women must lift the can between 66 and 75 times for a maximum score.
If the standards are un-equal discrimination is natural.
> Men must complete a three-mile run within 18 minutes to get a maximum score on that portion of the PFT, while women younger than 40 have up to 21 minutes.
Former active duty Marine here. I'm on your side in this 100% for several reasons I won't go into, but the 18 and 21 minutes you stated is off by quite a bit. It's roughly 28 (male) and 32 minutes (female) for 3 miles - it may have changed by a minute or two since I've been out. This still aligns with the basic premise of your statement.
For reference, 3 miles at 18 or sub-18 minutes is getting to an elite level of running, while low to mid 20's is average.
There is an observation that men typically like to work with things while women with people all other things being equal. There are speculations that it depends on hormonal balance during pregnancy, but what ever the reason it exists. So by that software development naturally is dominated by men (code is the thing) while professions like veterinary (that pays higher in US than programming) is dominated by women (as most time is spent talking to pets owners).
Note the average here does not translate into an ability to predict performance of a particular person based on biological sex as the variation is too high for that, but statistically the effect is rather significant.
So I suspect if a profession require a lot of social interactions, the observed discrimination is simple reflection that men may perform worse on average in those professions.
It is an possible theory, but in my view I tend to agree to an quite old theory that I saw referenced in an other Swedish study conducted by the department for higher education. They asked why so few men end up in the teacher profession, and the primary theory presented was based on a (if I remember right) 1950 study.
A person on average tend to be more comfortable and confident in decisions if its mimics behavior of people that look/are similar to themselves.
The teaching profession in Sweden actually start out with almost 50/50 during the first year at university. What the Swedish study found was that as students had setbacks, the students that decided to quit was mostly men. By graduation time a large portion of the male students has quit. Same thing occurs when people start seeking jobs, after the first year, second year, third year and fourth year. At the end the wast majority of men are gone from the profession, most citing "culture mismatch" and not feeling that they belong.
I find this theory much more plausible explanation than hormones, and it also explains why removing gender roles might increase gender segregation. If a person is uncertain where they fit, making a similar decision to other people in the same situation will on average feel safer. It also explain why mentor programs are one of the most effective tactics to combat gender segregation.
That theory has a predictive power of saying which gender will dominate in a highly pay profession in a country where the gender discrimination is fought for real.
My own anecdotal observation for Norway matches this. Norway is the top of charts regarding gender equality. Yet for example, family lawyers, a highly paid profession, here are mostly women, a complete reversal of situation that was 50 years ago.
In software development the gender inequality increased during the last 20 years especially if one accounts that many women in IT here are immigrants. They find it is easier to get a job without good knowledge of Norwegian (in IT in Norway English is typically enough) even if such jobs are not something that they prefer all other things considered equal.
> citing "culture mismatch" and not feeling that they belong.
This is an interesting low-blame description of a phenomenon that might otherwise be described as discrimination because of a hostile work environment.
Software development was dominated by women in the early days because men supposedly deemed it low class job.
I actually think the real issue is that men are not always professional when working with women that they find attractive. Time for personal anecdote: Every woman I know in tech has been hit on by coworkers, sometimes multiple times even though turning down the man. Depending on the guy, it can get real nasty. In addition, they all hear the same thing at least once "Wow you know programming/hacking/linux, pretty cool for being a girl". Imaging hearing that shit over and over again, of course you will quit.
My point is, there are many factors at play here. Sadly, I don't think there is a good solution to this problem.
> Given a set of occupations with different sex ratios, to change the ratio of any specific occupation the ratios of other occupations must also change.
Logically there is an alternative: one sex can withdraw from the labor market.
Male labor force participation is declining.[1] Female labor force participation is declining at a slightly lower rate.[2]
Agreed and I also wonder if decreasing workforce participation in males is related. At the same time, since male-female workforce mix is relatively stable, there may be no relation.
“that, at least in Sweden and the occupations we study, hiring discrimination in entry level jobs is primarily a problem for men in female-dominated occupations,”
That's interesting. I work in a female-dominated occupation (libraries), but, it's only female dominated at the lower levels. Historically, at least, directors/managers and the upper level folks tended to be men, and those are of course the only jobs that pay very well. So while there's waaay more female librarians, there's way more male library directors. I think that's been slowly changing recently. I don't see that they look at libraries in this study, nor do they mention managers.
The study in the article looked at hiring discrimination. The study focused on the tested and established method of correspondence testing to measure active discrimination, in this case response rates to job applications.
Gender segregation, ie what fields are dominated by which gender, is related but quite different. For Swedish numbers I can strongly recommend the primary source (https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/arbe...), collected by the Swedish tax agency and published by the government agency for statistics. The only major drawback is that it is a lot of information and its hard to locate the exact thing (Just choosing the right database interfaces can be hard).
That said, in this case, we can mostly identify the correct numbers. Librarian is a female dominated professions with a ratio of 2:1 (found through the database interface that lists profession and gender), with a similar gender ratio in favor of women for manager levels in the government sector (https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/arbe...).
It should be noted that Sweden has a very high level of gender segregation, and that segregation occurs based on multiple attributes.
I wonder how much of that is a factor of era-started for the directorial positions. Directors have usually accrued decades of experience in the industry, and thus started their careers earlier when culture was more sexist. I think male-dominated senior positions are going to be phased out much more slowly as a less homogeneous workforce matures.
One factor that may be contributing to this, especially in the art world, is survivorship bias driven by higher male risk tolerances. Men have much more boom or bust outcomes in their lives and careers due to lower risk aversion.
What this could look like in the art world is a lower tendency than women towards a stable yet income-capped career like art teacher, and a higher tendency towards a risky yet unlimited potential path as an independent artist. A small fraction of independent artists become rich and famous, or even have a sustainable career, but you'll hear about the few that actually make it. In this scenario there may be more male success stories, but there will be an even greater number of failures.
Note the hypothesis about risk being a predominantly male trait is also consistent at the other end with men making up 90%+ of prison population in pretty much any form of government or society.
I haven't heard many feminists argue for a female quota in prisons yet.
Your comment is the kind of comment we have to stop if we are going to actually be able to push mens rights issues.
You're using divisive language with your second sentence and poison pilling the entire argument by attacking feminists.
This doesn't have to be a feminist vs whatever war, it needs to be a conversation around male issues and we need everyone at the table to make things better.
Speaking as a feminist - spot on. Feminism isn't about just swapping gender roles and just giving power to women. (As much as Sheryl Sandberg seems to believe it is)
Which means that yes, the incarceration rates are (or should be, it's not like there's a feminist cabal I speak for;) concerning for feminists
Not in the sense that we should simply incarcerate not women, but in the sense that we should desperately look for the systemic issues that result in this outcome.
There's a good chance that a strong gender binary and an idea that it's somehow "men vs women" actively contributes. (E.g. because we stereotypically assign more social behavior to girls, and reward/excuse antisocial behavior in boys)
Trying to frame this as an either/or debate is directly detrimental to ever achieving equitable outcomes.
Males are biologically more aggressive that females. Pick any random male and female and there is a 60% chance that the male will be more aggressive than the female. You can study this and speculate as much as you want but you are wasting your time. Last time I looked males can’t give birth to children but females can. Is that also a cultural bias that we can somehow change to be more “even”? Good luck with that.
Anti-male bias in the justice system, which has been shown to be around 6x higher than the anti-black bias in the justice system.
> reward/excuse antisocial behavior in boys
We do not. Society strongly discourages not just anti-social behavior in boys, it nowadays discourage a LOT of boy behavior that isn't actually anti-social. Boys are seen as defective girls. And of course the education system hugely discriminates against boys. Unabashedly so.
> Feminism isn't about just swapping gender roles and just giving power to women.
Nobody looks at the imbalance in incarceration rates and assumes that police and the justice system are systemically sexist against men, but they certainly draw that conclusion along racial lines based on the same outcome.
My theory is that nature runs experiments with males to varying degrees depending on species, mostly in mammals. The continuation of the species only needs men to provide sperm, so the species can afford for unfit males to not have offspring. Females have a more important role, so you should optimize for consistency and reliability.
Women attempt suicide two to four times more often than men.
(However, men tend to use more violent, and effective, methods of suicide, so succeed more frequently than women.)
Are you suggesting that women are too incompetent to kill themselves?
The less sexist explanation is that women generally use suicide attempts as a way of asking for help while men generally use suicide attempts as a way of escape.
Stated in those terms, both groups are very competent at achieving the end goal.
Easy, tiger - you may want to consider switching to decaf.
Each component of what I stated in response to the comment above is accurate, and an appropriate explanation of the implied assumption in it that suicide lies more commonly with men than women (a common misconception arising from what I explain).
I wonder how true this really is, and how many attempts by women were mostly just looking for attention. Not to downplay the seriousness of it, it just might be a different class of self harm.
Claiming that feminism does not talk about these issues is at best a sign of naivety about feminism and at worst being disingenuous.
One may disagree with their conclusion that the origin of these problem also has to do with patriarchy, but to claim that these forms of suffering that disproportionately affect men are ignored by feminists is false.
Oh, usually when one corners them in a debate they will grudgingly mumble something about the draft, but find me a spontaneous protest that the draft only inducts men, or about circumcision! They can be badgered into it but they have no actual vigor for it. I did find the various -- when the idea that the draft would apply in the US to women -- responses of "This isn't the kind of equality I wanted" very amusing in a bitterly cynical way.
The draft is very low on most people's protest agenda because it's a coercive thing. Very few people will argue for more coercion, and especially not towards violence.
Meanwhile, women have fought long and hard to be accepted as equals in the (voluntary) military.
And you will find many supporters if instead the selective service, you'd support e.g a year of mandatory social service.
You'll also find support to abandon the draft. (it's a highly unnecessary measure in the face of a professional military). You might even find support to have an egalitarian draft if we move further away from a professional military and instead institute mandatory military service.
But "here's a really bad idea that disproportionality affects a specific group, we should double down to affect more groups negatively" just isn't a proposition appealing to many people - male or female.
> The draft is very low on most people's protest agenda because it's a coercive thing. Very few people will argue for more coercion, and especially not towards violence.
But this is pretty much the same reason that we don’t see outcry about the lack of women working on garbage trucks: it’s not a desirable thing.
Mainstream feminism and the activist reporters ignore the issue. It's inconvenient to the narrative they adhere to.
The Google gender pay gap lawsuit was covered extensively a few years ago. It's outcome (men were actually underpaid based on the data) that resulted in a large number of male employees at Google getting payouts and salary boosts was essentially ignored.
You're obviously right, as "feminists" is way too broad (as is "patriarchy", really).
It's still unsatisfying at some level though. Reading left-leaning news (say the BBC), you're far more likely to read a story about desirable equality that doesn't mention the undesirable side. To be clear, I'm not opposed to equality at all. The discussion often just doesn't seem to be nuanced.
This is likely a factor, the other factor that tends to account for these differences in fields where individual performance directly determines outcomes is that men have a wider bell curve than women do, although there is significant overlap for individual performance on pretty much every facet, men have more outliers at both the best end and worst end of the curve. This is true against nearly every facet of human performance, the variance is just higher. Higher variance combined with survivorship bias means that the top-most performers in fields that are driven almost entirely by individual performance (athletics, independent artists, authors) are dominated by men at the top, even though the vast majority of men, even those with interest in that field, would fail or be average.
Men tend to work themselves to death in much higher frequency than women. Women benefit from social fabric when they are at the bottom, even homeless women are housed (at unfixed address) while men really are on the street.
I’m of the impression that we can’t reduce gaps without introducing the threat of social declassment of women when they fail.
Did it occur to you that a better alternative is to provide a safety net for both men and women, instead of taking the response "if i can't have it, you can't either"?
Engaging in a race to the bottom, ensuring everybody is equally bad off, is maybe not the best strategy to ensure equal treatment. (yes, it works. It's just not very productive)
"do not want" isn't "isn't possible". It takes work to effect that change, but it isn't impossible.
As for the second statement: Removing a safety net from somebody else for equality's sake is the equivalent of a three year old smashing their toy so their brother can't play with it either. Yep, equal outcome is guaranteed now, but there's a more adult way to handle it.
I don't think I've ever seen a well functioning organization that gives a leadership position to someone who hasn't already demonstrated leadership qualities by proactively taking on a leadership role.
Usually people get promotions like that after the prior leader has quit and they have spent some time filling in in the interim. Or they apply for jobs that have leadership responsibilities as the next step of their career ladder until they get one. In both cases seeking the role comes before actually being granted it.
It's very rare for organizations to grant leadership roles to anyone not already seeking it (usually by performing that role or applying for that job) in some capacity.
No, I'm confident there are gender-based biases. But the degree of the problem needs to be considered accurately, which means understanding all of the exceptions and how frequently they occur.
Library directors would look like the entry-level workforce 20-30 years ago, right?
One of the major faults in these analyses is to not account for cohorts — and so they discriminate against men in the here and now (fresh hires) to “balance” historic issues that haven’t aged out yet.
That purposeful (and misguided) bigotry is the basis of a lot of modern movements, like “anti-racism”.
There are at least a few spheres where purposeful discrimination is explicitly the intended goal, because advocates truly believe the solution will not be solved unless such things happen.
The example of this is affirmative action. If you could wave a magic wand that perfectly equalized yearly pay between all races of people in the US, you would still see wealth disparities persist for many years (possibly generations, and possibly not get any better), because wealth and financial literacy are passed down through families and interracial marriage is somewhat uncommon. Affirmative action (explicit discrimination on the basis of race) deliberately and purposefully seeks to counterbalance against this effect.
Now, I think that that issue is better solved by higher inheritance taxes, mandatory personal finance classes in schools, and more equitable school funding, but the point is that it's not always a lack of understanding of age cohorts that drives such policies. It's possible to understand the real logic behind such policies and still disagree with them.
It's nonetheless useful to have rigorous evidence to justify what 'everyone knows' because inevitably, some people will vigorously assert the opposite regardless of how obvious it is.
Upon reading the headline I immediately wondered if childcare and cleaning were in the set of the female dominated careers.
My hypothesis is that men are considered much much riskier hires for certain roles.
The reason I thought of these two roles in particular is because socially I've often heard expressed worries that men in daycare are more likely to be sex offenders, and for cleaning I've often come across the sentiment that men are more likely to steal (in Sweden). If those beliefs are pervasive the discrimination should be reflected in the data too, as employers steer away from hiring men.
Indeed the discrimination effect is significantly weaker if you look at table 1 in the 'Data' section of study while discounting these two roles.
I don't know about stealing but is it not the case that most sex offenders are men? That seems like an actual risk wherase the accusations at play in racism are just made up.
No, and absolutely not. That's the exact same argument used against black people in US("most prisoners in US are black[0], therefore it's not racist to be afraid of black people, it's clearly in the data!")
You can spin it any way you want - majority of sexual abuse happens with family members, so actually leaving a child with a stranger is a lot safer, if all you care about is statistical data /s
> majority of sexual abuse happens with family members, so actually leaving a child with a stranger is a lot safer
This is the same argument used to argue planes are safer than cars, but there is a missing component: for individuals choosing which transport to take, they can evaluate the specifics of their case. If they know they are not a high-risk driver, the chance of dying in a car accident is much lower, but the chance of dying in a plane crash stays the same.
As such, for high-risk drivers, travelling by plane is safer, but possibly so is taking a taxi.
The choice here is between male or female carers all of which are non-family members, so it isn't a consideration.
Is it faulty because of the qualifier "much"? It has to be taken with further context, this was just an illustrative example. I'm sure if, for example, you ride motorbikes a vast number of deaths are the fault of the driver.
> all care related death have been caused by "other" people
this doesn't follow from the example I gave. The point is you can't use statistical averages for a decision that likely will have far more context to it.
In this case the discrepancy between sex-offenders in the entire population vs all candidates for a carer position, the least of which is most abuse happening in-family, excluding all those example from the case of a carer that is not family.
Nearly everybody sucks terribly at evaluating their own driving performance, and I have only met one or two people who have had their driving performance properly assessed by a trained evaluator.
TL;DR: no-one knows that they're a low risk driver, and the people who claim "I'm a safe driver" are often much worse than average.
What little is known hints that female predators may be just as prominent as male predators, but people just don't believe victims who claim female abusers.
This all ties into the pervasive myths about how women are always passive, are generally good because they are women, have no sexual desire, etc.
Besides what other comments pointed out there is another problem:
It's about convictions and about press reporting which are inherently influenced by bias.
For example some years ago a couple was found to be the main heads some child pornography ring. But while the press mentioned it was a couple they basically only reported about the man, not the women. There where no indications that the women was forced into it. But due to biased-conservative thinking the press treated the man as the sole responsible person...
Similar you will probably find many cases (with varying outcomes) against male kindergarten teachers because of pedophile actions in situations where no-one really can tell if a pedophile action was involved. But how many of this cases are their against woman?
Most sex offenders are not kindergarten teachers...
Most are family members or "friends of the family".
Also there is a strong bias leading to female sex offenders being much less often convicted (partially
because they are also much less often reported).
> I don't know about stealing but is it not the case that most sex offenders are men? That seems like an actual risk wherase the accusations at play in racism are just made up.
This conclusion seems to be quite controversial, because race is correlated with certain crimes in terms of "actual risk". It's likely because of social factors (because eg. black immigrants to US aren't significantly more likely to commit crimes than white immigrants to US, even after controlling for education), but it doesn't change "actual risk".
If you argue that "actual risk" means actually "choice between two identical people, with skin color being only variable, after ideal control for socioeconomic factors", you should prove that of "identical people, with gender being only variable, after ideal control for socioeconomic factors" man is more likely to commit sexual crime.
Personally I would argue that both race-crime and gender-crime statistics are largely or completely due to social factors.
Why would you think that? The typical sex offender has a very clean façade, they are often social justice champions themselves because that makes it easier for them to hide what they do.
Every city, state, country has is it's own unique distribution of races and classes (muddled together in different ways) and each has its own level of systemic racism, even affecting different races wherever you go. I don't think you can draw any concrete conclusions about race from crime statistics.
Males, in the other hand, exist across countries, races, creeds, cultures, social and economic classes etc. We can absolutely look at male crime statistics across the board and say whether or not they're different from the statistics for females.
The problem with this kind of argument from identity politics is that job applicants aren't ergodic. The arsonists probably aren't the ones applying to be day care attendants.
Well, sure. Put another way: discrimination is highest in professions where a group is discriminated against the most, and ignoring the strongest sources makes the overall effect weaker. Not big surprises. Do we want to do that though?
The study says nothing about the underlying reasons for that discrimination though. The point of discounting those two roles in my post was to test my personal hypothesis of the underlying cause based on the data at hand - not to trivialise the findings of the authors.
Discrimination again Man in certain jobs (like kindergarten teacher) is long known and widespread.
Even today people judging a man who want to become a Kindergarten teacher as likely pedophile is not uncommon.
I believe that given that kindergarten teachers act to some degree as role models, the lake of male ones might have noticeable negative effects on some children. Especial such which have problematic parents.
Others have commented there is a perception that male cleaners will steal valuables. And it may very well be statistically true, given men's much greater criminal behaviour in general compared to women.
Women and men are equally likely to shoplift, so I don't think there is a difference there as shoplifting is the closest you'd get to sneaking out a valuable from someone's home.
It's going on here in the USA in some male dominated occupations too.
I have a friend that is on the board of directors for a number of large companies. Not surprisingly, he says that boards are all looking for women and minorities. Publicly traded companies are naturally in competition for the best board members they can find in these categories.
In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2015), the investigators determined that faculty comittees prefer female candidates 2 to 1 over male candidates with equally strong resumes. See [1].
[1] “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | April 2015
I think its pretty common in the US. Look at law firms there are very few male paralegals and nursing as well. Same concept applies to secretarial / admin / HR style roles. I have seen a hiring manager in real life skip over male applicants for an admin role.
Yeah but that's Reddit. You never know if you're getting 99% reality and 1% fantasy or 99% fantasy and 1% reality. The platform is intentionally built to fake the appearance of strong consensus where there is none so every appearance of consensus is suspect. I'm inclined to agree with the premise but "as evidenced by Reddit" is worth exactly zero in my mind.
Also note that these are lower paid roles are subordinate/adjunct to higher paid roles dominated by men. Those above are going to be setting the expectations about those below them.
No one group is particularly more righteous, as much as the recent zeitgeist wants to lull us into this belief. Many people even believe that countries would be better off if mostly women ran it. Well, all you’d have is a bunch of corrupt women instead of a bunch of corrupt men.
This actually hits on an argument that I don't understand that is actively and currently happening around me.
I work in a place that is currently undergoing some diversity, equity, and inclusion education for staff.
One camp sees it as an attack on themselves. "I'm not racist, I can't be racist, I would never act like that."
One camp sees it as an opportunity to attack others. "My experience is that people like you are racist. My experience is that people like you treat me poorly."
I can't get the two parts of this argument to understand that ---literally every human stereotypes and uses those stereotypes to make decisions--- and that's okay, as long as you identify them, and work to NOT make decisions based solely on stereotypes.
There is no 'good' group or 'bad' group (outside of overt racists or something like that). Everyone sucks a little, but some groups have more power to turn their suck into policy. And everyone needs to know that to be able to try to fix it.
It’s fundamentally because we are trying to tackle a systemic issue (a macro level issue) at the micro level (day to day human interaction). Most people are not going to be (or even are) racist/prejudiced to each other in the day to day. Similar to how most Americans won’t ever have someone build our phones and make our clothes for pennies on the dollar if it was up to us, truly. However, systemically, we will still buy all these things, that’s simply how the system is set up.
If you take something like prejudice toward a race with respect to crime, or prejudice toward a gender with respect to competence, these things are happening at a level that require systems-level thinking. If you beef up certain communities with respect to opportunities, or funnel more people toward certain industries much earlier in their life, the outcomes will appear at the macro level. Once that happens, the reduction in those biases will manifest.
But sitting everyone down and saying ‘let’s all sit down and do our own small little part’ will not actually solve anything. But, that is most likely the reason we (humans gonna human) are doing this. It’s a form of procrastination, let’s beat around the bush. Let’s organize our folders and sharpen our pencils, but not study for the test. Let’s buy new gym sneakers and gym outfit, and actually get a new gym membership, but never go to the gym.
Oddly, it’s almost like America only does the algos part of the software interview, but never the System design part. Micro vs Macro.
By saying this, you render everything else you have said here moot. Once you declare systemic racism as an unassailable fact, all of your reasoning is simply affirming the consequent.
It’s entirely possible that racial inequity exists, and that some of it is a consequence of past and present racism, but that this does not mean that the ‘system is racist’ is a meaningful analysis.
"the p-value for the negative marginal effect for men would have been considered significant in high energy physics (p = .000000026 or, to use physicist notation, 5.57σ)"
This is done completely overtly here in Austria. Many job offers contain language like "bei gleicher Qualifikation werden Frauen bevorzugt", which roughly translates to "when applicants are equally qualified, women are given preference". Examples: [0][1][2]
While what I'm about to say is anecdotal, I think most people have experienced this, either themselves, or recounts from friends and family.
Things such as kindergarten, secretary, a lot of jobs where you interact with the public favor female employees over males, such as receptionists. Just to name a few.
>"There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions."
Again, anecdotal, but I've seen discrimination from places like the military, construction work, police work to name a few.
I don't think we needed a study to state the obvious, but I guess it helps creating more conversations about the topic.
In a previous life I ended up in a interview for a marketing position at a smallish company. I was in a room with 8 moderately attractive women aged 25 - 45.
Before I left, I asked what's up with that. Their reply was literally: it just happened.
Frankly, I don't mind. Sometimes it's for the better. Who wants to work for a company where everyone is the same? Not this guy
The naughty part of me would have loved it there, though. At least for a while.
I'm not surprised. Gender discrimination hurts us all, this should go without saying. Man are expected to be certain things, woman are expected to be certain things. Those social expectations, implicit or explicit, effect our actual behavior, and are the root and cause of the discriminiation.
I took a quick look at the comments on this article and I find it fascinating that almost every commenter accepts the study's conclusions at face value. Having been a HN reader for several years, I know how incredibly rare that is! The top voted comment is always something like "Correlation is not causation", "Yeah, but did the authors consider <something obvious the authors probably did consider>?", or something about how the methods does not allow one to draw very far-reaching conclusions.
Even studies about gender or race discrimination always have the same kind of objections. Usually about how the purportedly discriminated against group isn't discriminated against but actually is objectively less competent and thus its worse outcome is "natural". For example, that there are fewer female than male tech entrepreneurs, I have been told, is because women are more risk-averse than men. The reason is absolutely not that investors are biased against female tech entrepreneurs.
However! In this discussion, no one has yet offered the hypothesis that the purported discrimination against men could be explained by men being objectively less suitable to work in female-dominated professions than women. Perhaps men have less "emotional iq" than women or something?
I find it very fascinating how the general take from a supposedly knowledgeable group of people (HN commentators) changes when the topic changes from "women are discriminated against" to "men are discriminated against"!
> However! In this discussion, no one has yet offered the hypothesis that the purported discrimination against men could be explained by men being objectively less suitable to work in female-dominated professions than women. Perhaps men have less "emotional iq" than women or something?
Well, I'll bite. If you really want to go down this road we could also start talking about how women being given time off specifically for their menstrual cycle or menopause (the latter is being seriously discussed in the media etc.) when there are no equivalent allowances whatsoever for men (despite the fact that men die younger than women!) means that women are 'objectively less suitable' for work full stop. Have you stopped to consider why the HN audience may have reacted as they have, and aren't you in fact guilty of the very thing you are accusing them of, that is, jumping to a conclusion about their thinking etc?
> If you really want to go down this road we could also start talking about how women being given time off specifically for their menstrual cycle or menopause (the latter is being seriously discussed in the media etc.) when there are no equivalent allowances whatsoever for men (despite the fact that men die younger than women!) means that women are 'objectively less suitable' for work full stop.
I don't follow your logic. If someone takes, let's say an entire year off for menopause, but they live 5+ years longer, don't they have better working potential?
The researchers sent out identical resumes for job applications. If the general stereotype “men have less emotional iq” is the argument, it is actually discrimination based on gender stereotypes. You didn’t offer any valid methodological rebuttal to the study.
> You didn’t offer any valid methodological rebuttal to the study.
On most studies regarding discrimination, HN readers clamor to rebut the methodology. That isn't happening here. Is the study bombproof, or is it possible that confirmation bias is at play?
No. It's because this study used a common methodology widely adopted in the field. It's not like other studies which use simple statistical analyses to attribute group wage differences to discrimination.
I think you are asserting bias in this audience. No doubt there is, on a lot of topics.
My bias in support of this article comes from many anecdotal experiences that support the conclusions of the study and none that don't.
I think your comment would indicate that I am therefore "supposedly knowledgeable" but not actually knowledgeable. I would strongly disagree: I have this scientific study and my experiential knowledge on this topic.
I think that's because the article/study doesn't provide alot of information and only reaffirms the previous study outcomes.
"There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions."
"female applicants had a 52.17 percent relative advantage"
"This study only captures discrimination at the initial stages of the hiring process at entry level jobs in Sweden"
>no one has yet offered the hypothesis that the purported discrimination against men could be explained by men being objectively less suitable to work in female-dominated professions than women. Perhaps men have less "emotional iq" than women or something?
No such thing could have happened even if that's the case, from the study: "the group belonging of the fictitious applicants is experimentally manipulated, most commonly by randomizing the applicant’s name."
"Correspondence tests can naturally only measure discrimination at the initial stage of the hiring process and may understate the true extent of hiring discrimination if it occurs at later stages of the process."
The people who have come out with viewpoints that "gender X is under-represented vs. gender Y in position Z due to the objective superiority of gender Y wrt. quality W which is important in position Z" have ... had a hard time of it.
I think this is a good reminder that if you are male and live in a Western country, it is quite likely that you are being overtly discriminated against. It even has an Orwellian name: "affirmative action" [1].
Women may face other types of workplace discrimination, as the article also says, but when it comes to hiring and college admissions there is overt and (mostly) legal discrimination against men. This is supported by data [2], procedure [3], and myriad anecdotes [4].
Some think this is necessary (even a moral imperative) for correcting historical injustices, but at the very least we should avoid gaslighting people and acknowledge in plain language that discrimination against men exists.
[3]: WSJ: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Men, Lawsuit Says https://archive.md/tl5lO
[4]: I personally know about a brother and sister applying to the same college, where the brother got rejected with a higher GPA while the sister got in.
Under affirmative action is a hypothesis: that it reduces inequality among communities. Has the application of affirmative action been measured and compared to its outcomes? It's been a thing for about 50 years now, so I'd like to see some data.
I think that’s antiquated honestly. I don’t hear that justification given now, as it was decades ago. I hear more talk of “justice” and increasing diversity merely for its own sake rather than as a means to and end. Whereas the original intent was lowering the importance of race and sex in life outcomes, I don’t think anyone would espouse such a goal today. Being “color blind” has become a pejorative in the parlance of today. Wanting a color blind society, one where a persons sex is of little concern, is derided as the hallmark of racial and sexual privilege, something in need of reform. It’s hard to pinpoint where this change occur. Maybe it was doomed from the outset and racism to end racism doesn’t actually work.
Perhaps you're thinking of Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) a case concerning affirmative action in admissions exercised by the University of Michigan Law School.
The Supreme Court decided that favoring underrepresented minority groups did not violate the 14th amendment equal protection clause. Writing for the majority, Sandra Day O'conor said "race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time," and said that the Court believed that in 25 years that limit might be reached. Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with the ruling but not with having a time limit.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what I'm talking about, so I suggest seeing the Wikipedia page:
Most of the discrimination seems to be against slave descendants. Barack Obama is the son of an educated African immigrant, African immigrants are doing very well in USA, about as well as Asian immigrants, so he is a part of the model minority and not the discriminated minority.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm only saying that the supreme court has ruled on it. Frankly I think such a basis is completely absurd. We'd need to have at least four more black presidents to really show it's effectiveness. RBG once said that only once the Supreme Court happened to be entirely women would we know that we have achieved parity. And she's right!
I see this hot take way too often and I take it that you didn't read any of your sources to see if they actually supported your claim. Because:
[1] Yes, Wikipedia confirms that affirmative action is a thing societies across the world engage in it to try to have a representative cross section of the population engaged in critical aspects of society. And yes, in America since the practice became enshrined in law that meant it has cut into the edge that white men have. But if in the future white men become under-represented for whatever reason, I would hope that it would work in the reverse to help give a boost. And in-fact this is already being seen in college admissions for white men vs. asian americans and females. Which leads to your second source:
[2] The article points out that white men are underrepresented in college but the reason given is not affirmative action, but rather cultural. Many young men just are not making the choice to go to college (for better or for worse). It even says in TFA that "The Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are putting their fingers _on_ the scale for male applicants", which is a direct refutation of your point.
[3] I could file a lawsuit against the state that says politicians are colluding with martian men to keep taco prices down. That doesn't make it true.
[4] Well I have never seen anyone _cite_ an anecdote so...
> have a representative cross section of the population engaged in critical aspects of society
I didn't realize making people click on ads was a critical aspect of society (FAANG firms use DEI tactics to preference URMs). Getting an undergrad education in engineering at a top school isn't a critical aspect either.
Instead of focusing on white men, why don't you take a look at the stats around Asian men? Or Asians in general? The Harvard affirmative action lawsuit revealed the extent to which affirmative action is a grossly discriminative policy that unreasonably raises admission standards for certain demographics to enforce a quota (and quotas are illegal according to the Supreme Court).
I somewhat agree with your first point about ad-clicking, but I think there is some nuance that you are missing, primarily the fact that all of engineering isn't web design. However, I am fascinated to find that you think that engineering know how isn't a critical aspect of modern societies? Please explain.
I agree that it isn't good that motivated and qualified people that really want to go to a top tier college are rejected. However, that is the basic fact of life when there are 10x more applicants that open spots. I think if we really wanted to tackle this issue as a society the way to start would be to increase the availability and affordability of high quality post-primary education. Let's assume that the lawsuit's basic premise is correct that Asian Americans would be accepted at a much much higher rate if race was eliminated from the acceptance criteria, and then Harvard started evaluating application as such. Harvard would become an Asian American mono-culture to the detriment of not just white people but Hispanic, Black and other under-represented minorities. Is that a good outcome???
I'm speaking loosely because I realize "Asian American" is a quite a broad cultural generalization, but I do personally admire the work-ethic and reverence for science and intellectual pursuit that has gotten this community to where it is today, to quote Drake "You came from the bottom now your whole team here". But as a White male American, I think when you are at the top of the food chain you have a responsibility to see to it that those who are not have an opportunity, otherwise that makes you an asshole.
Engineering is critical, going to a top engineering school is not. Society does not need more engineers going to MIT and then taking a job at Google. Society does need more genius researchers pushing the boundaries of science, but I find it very unlikely that those people are not already admitted to top schools even in the absence of affirmative action. You can claim people have potential but potential doesn't cut it when one candidate took some community college classes and the other one won a national math competition.
> let's assume that the lawsuit's basic premise is correct
We don't need to assume, we can look at the makeup of UC and UW schools which are legally barred from using affirmative action and are similarly ranked. They average ~50% Asian.
> mono-culture
Your basic premise is that the greater proportion a race is of the population, the more monocultural the population becomes. Not only is that racist, but coming from what I assume is a white liberal it seems very hypocritical.
> responsibility to see to it that those who are not have an opportunity
I'm happy to support income based affirmative action. As we all know, parental income plays a far larger role in SAT scores and lifetime earnings than any systemic discrimination. But racial discrimination under the guise of affirmative action is a terrible idea that doesn't actually result in better outcomes. When you admit objectively less qualified people because of a quota those less qualified people end up doing more poorly down the line in the real world.
For example, even though CMU enforces a 50/50 male/female quota on its CS admits, the makeup of high paying jobs with people from CMU still ends up around the industry 80/20 male/female split, because the 20% that would have originally been qualified to get in without the quota end up doing just as well as their male counterparts that didn't have affirmative action benefits and the other 30% struggle to keep up because they weren't qualified in the first place.
> Engineering is critical, going to a top engineering school is not
Totally agree, I would even go further and say that I think the "top tier" engineering schools are not better (actually I would argue worse because brilliant researchers aren't always brilliant teachers), they just are able to be a lot more selective with the people that they admit and that is probably the biggest factor on why they are perceived as elite. Which makes me roll my eyes at the whole "boo-hoo I didn't get into an ivy" culture that is driving all this resentment in the first place.
> Your basic premise is that the greater proportion a race is of the population, the more mono-cultural the population becomes
Yes and no. I am fully aware that just because I am white I am not of the same culture as another white person. And even more so are the differences between Asian cultures (I have lived and traveled in many parts of Asia). But if you take a general cross-section of people who look similar and live in the same geographical area, and compare them to a different group of people who look similar in the same area, you will find stark economic correlation between the two groups. This is why it is important to be conscious of the way that race is viewed and handled within a society. The argument that "I don't see color" is a very common sentiment amongst actual racists because
1. It makes them feel like they aren't a bad person
2. Conveniently allows them a free pass to not have to take a hard look at their ingrained racial biases
> Income based affirmative action
I agree, this to me seems like a much better metric for providing for affirmative action quotas, however:
1. It would result in very similar outcomes due to the economic correlation between racial groups
2. It could never happen because the American right would scream their heads off about socialism or whatever non-sense their propagandists spoon feed them.
3. Income != Wealth, and wealth is the real killer, so it also is not a silver bullet
I literally just said that you cannot label the cultural contributions of a group of people with the same skin color as a single unit and you go ahead and dismiss all that because you've "lived and traveled in many parts of Asia".
> stark economic correlation
This is completely unrelated to peoples' culture, which you claimed would become a monoculture if schools were majority Asian. If you want to be "conscious of the way that race is viewed and handled within a society" why don't you take a look at the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese WW2 concentration camps? If you take the stance that reparations should be made for systemic injustices, then you should be _preferencing_ Asians.
> would result in very similar outcomes due to the economic correlation between racial groups
I suggest you take a look at UC and UW admissions data and rethink your position. All the available evidence of unbiased admissions used in practice show substantial Asian overrepresentation even adjusted for income.
You need to take a serious look at the peoples' preferences you're ignoring when you decide to preach about the "importance" of race in society. California, where Democrats literally have a supermajority, voted down Prop 16 by a 20 point margin.
And maybe while you're at it, take a look at how racist your statements are. Implying that schools will evolve a monoculture if Asians become the majority is blatantly racist. Everything you've said thus far matches up to a tee the picture of a white liberal who thinks he knows everything and wants to dictate how people should view society. This [1] article literally exactly represents what you believe. People like you ARE the problem.
Really adds some credence to your “I’m not a racist, you’re a racist!” Argument /s
That’s actually a fantastic article, it outlines pretty well the hypocrisy of the left. You may find that there are some of us on the left that are trying to call out this bullshit too.
> You may find that some of us on the left are trying to call out this bullshit too
You should take a look at this video by John Oliver [1]. I find it hilarious how 9 years and 2 presidents later it is still relevant. You refuse to admit that _you're the one spewing the bullshit_. Any thought that you could be wrong is just inconceivable to you.
Well, I'm gonna let the personal attack part pass. Here's what I think about your points:
[1] So we agree that the practice exists, though we may disagree on whether it's moral or not.
[2] You are right in that it is in part cultural, but the effect of affirmative action also exists. (I think you would agree, otherwise, why not dismantle it and avoid the resentment that it brings about?) Also, culture is not autogenous.
[3] Again, you are right in that you can sue anyone for anything if you have the money. But I think the claims in the lawsuit have merit (although the process is probably legal). Do you believe the diversity trackers they mentioned do not exist?
[4] You have never seen someone use a footnote to share their anecdotes? :-)
Sorry if my post came across as a personal attack, it was just an observation by me that your sources did not seem to back up your claim and seemed to be more included to give your post immediate impact than to actually support it. If you actually read and picked these article in good faith I apologize (except for citing and anecdote, unless you did that for comedic effect).
Yes, I believe that affirmative action is not only moral, but also necessary for optimal functioning of modern democracy with many disparate cultures under it's governance. Do you think we would be better off with maintaining the status quo from the 50's?
I can see how affirmative action can breed resentment, I myself was resentful while getting my engineering degree to seeing the high rate of female students getting internships when I never was able to get one. It really sucks when you are working hard towards a goal and see someone else pass you up just because of circumstance (not all of which are as pure as affirmative action, such as students coming from a wealthy well-connected family, or organized cheating cough fraternities cough to get good grades). But maybe it would be better if we directed our anger towards those that are getting ahead by cheating, rather than those that are getting ahead due to society deciding that they need a boost because they come from a place in society that has been traditionally discriminated against?
Apology totally accepted. I do genuinely think that my sources support my claim, but we all have our biases. [1]
TBH, I do not have a clear understanding of how things were in the 50's, but I do not think things would go back to the 50's if affirmative action programs were discontinued.
We probably can agree that there are a lot of anecdotes about this as you have one yourself. Contrary to popular belief, anecdotes and personal experiences are not worthless.
I agree that our anger should be placed directed the system which enables corruption, cheating and discrimination. Blaming the ordinary individuals would be counterproductive and sanctimonious.
[1]: For example, the Atlantic article does not mention affirmative action at all. You'd probably argue that's because it is not a major factor, but I think it is the elephant in the room. If I could edit my comment now, I would change "data" to "outcome data", and cite this graph https://archive.md/VwSmO. I do not see anything wrong with putting an anecdote in a footnote, however.
> [3] I could file a lawsuit against the state that says politicians are colluding with martian men to keep taco prices down. That doesn't make it true.
The details of the case are pretty damning [1]. Directly instructing recruiters to only hire diverse candidates [2]. Explicit quotas on gender and race [3]. Managers telling recruiter to only accept candidates from "historically underrepresented" groups [4].
I interviewed at a hair salon once. The owner/manager was female as were all other employees. I'm a guy. Needless to say, I did not hear back. The owner told me during the interview that her clients are all females, mostly wealthy, with many 40-50 years old and she basically explained I would not fit in.
hmm, I have never really thought about it before but I don't think I have ever seen a single heterosexual male hairdresser in my life outside of a barbershop. Never really even registered I guess because that's how it has always been in my experience but interesting now that you mention it. I know there are a ton of male hairdressers just from going to barbershops. Wonder if they just gravitate towards barber shops or its extreme discrimination.
I had a mate that trained at Vidal Sassoon in London. There are plenty of heterosexual men in hairdressing, and they aren't exclusively in barbers, at least in the UK. As it happens you can have a pretty reasonable business with it if you have a dash of entrepreneurial skill and drive - the pay at VS as an apprentice was pitiful but this guy left school with basically no qualifications whatsoever but ended up owning several salons. There can be lots of work handling the emotional ups and downs of a group of younger hairdressers though... Lots of hormones etc flying about!
From my experience, there is such a big difference in style/culture of womens vs mens hair fashion that the respective hairdresser/barber business become v culturally differentiated - e.g. Hairdressers branching out into many other fashion items such as nails, pedicure etc; which barbers becoming v "manly" e.g. branded "manish" beard care products, sweary hip-hop music, offers of whisky/alcohol as you wait.
FWIW there is a difference in certification to be a hair dresser vs a barber in most states in the US. So one has to specifically choose to be a barber or a hair dresser when they go through said process.
> Granberg and his colleagues found that women had higher positive employer response rates than men on average, an effect that was primarily driven by female-dominated occupations. There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions.
Duh?
The only reason that organized misandry isn’t taken seriously is the pervasive misandry in HR, education, and other female dominated fields.
Education has been female dominated for forty years — and becoming less equal. Universities are currently 60% women and 40% men.
Have you heard of a single scholarship to help men reach “equity”? …anyone?
I worked with a senior female colleague (featuring on lists of Most Influential Women in XYZ at the national level) who would regularly say things like "I only want to hire women to work for me" in meetings.
Apparently that's something you can say with impunity.
Way to spin it: more evidence for the wage inequality between man and female caused by the patriarchy which forces woman into low paying jobs and men into high paying ones. The few man who were willing to accept a low paying job were actively redirected towards higher paying ones.
"The patriarchy" has no problem giving men low paying jobs. How many restaurant dishwashers are women? Furthermore the data found no bias against women in male-dominated professions. Instead, the data here suggest that prejudice is not gender-specific but universal, and gender disparities naturally lead to people pigeonholing you and those professions (gender stereotyping).
Why is that a problem? There are countless other "immutable" characteristics on which an employer can discriminate candidates. It ultimately comes down to finding a good fit for the particular culture of the particular workplace. For every candidate that is discriminated at one workplace, there is another workplace which would welcome them and discriminate members from the first workplace.
What if one workplace becomes the next Google? Suddenly, those favoured by that workplace have a large advantage over those discriminated against.
But it's usually sectors, rather than individual organisations, that blow up like that, and sectors tend to share culture. Don't think Google; think the entirety of Silicon Valley. You're an [immutable characteristic]? Tough; settle for lower working conditions, or retrain for another job.
>Why is that a problem? There are countless other "immutable" characteristics on which an employer can discriminate candidates.
Why should there be social equality?
Equal opportunity has enabled egalitarian societies to be tremendously successful. You are fundamentally able to use greater talent base per capita than a society which doesn't. The results will force everyone to do this and this is a great thing.
A problem arrives in which people arent in equal positions. So for us in Canada we have the legal right to discriminate against people so long as we are doing it to benefit a group defined as 'disadvantaged'. However, that doesn't account for anything. So for example hairdressing which is dominated by women can discriminate against men. Reverse sexism is legal. They call this 'leveling' but it is actually harmful.
What you get is a situation in which the 'disadvantaged' are no longer disadvantaged and the advantaged are the disadvantaged.
" a profit maximizing firm should not discriminate between workers of equal productivity based on immutable characteristics "
Gender is an immutable characteristic? That's debatable. But whether it is or isn't doesn't seem to make discriminating by it better or worse. That makes immutability a poor discriminator of tolerable discrimination.
> Gender is an immutable characteristic? That's debatable
Actually I don't think anybody's debating that - transexuals say that they were born as whatever gender they identify with, they just say it doesn't match what their body looks like. Everybody seems to agree that it's immutable, even if there are people who can't seem to quite agree on how it's identified.
Which assumes there isn't a biological motivation behind the gender most people wish to identify as. Or that we have some sort of free will independent of what motivates our choices.
Many other characteristics are technically mutable - you can change your place of worship, you can chemically alter your skin color somewhat, you can have surgery to look younger or older, etc. However, we still consider them "immutable" characteristics insofar as we consider that employees should have zero right whatsoever to request that people change them unless they themselves want to.
"should" here refers to predictions derived from rational behaviour, I think. In other words, if you want to maximize profits, you pay the same for equal-productivity workers. (If you paid two different wages you could just lower the higher wage, since you're able to hire equal-productivity people at the lower wage.)
I believe the idea with gender being immutable is that people who transition to another gender are doing so to align their gender with what they believe it should be. In this way it is immutable; a person assigned male at birth, who later transitions to female, is no less female than someone assigned female at birth since neither truly chose to be female.
I'm not disputing the article. Discrimination happens. Humans are human.
But let's not lose sight or minimize that women are (currently and historically) discriminated against on a scale that dwarfs this - in hiring, salary, and society at large.
Are you sure? At least here in Germany women are getting retirement earlier and tend to be living longer. There are also studies of health complaints by women taken more serious by doctors than health concerns of men. And I don‘t remember women of my generation having to work one year for almost free in military giving women one year professional experience head-start.
Historically, completely agreed. Your other points of hiring, salary, and society at large I would not agree with outside of some edge cases that still need to be cleaned up.
Even historically speaking, that's a stretch. For a long period of human history, survival meant being able to plow fields, wrangle horses, chop down trees, hunt wooly mammoths, fight lions and all the other things that my ancestors would be ashamed of me for not being able to do. Men were expected to, and did, protect and provide for women because most men find those tasks easier than most women. Not even the hardest feminist would call that protection "discriminatory". It's only been relatively recently, on a grand scale, that most women could perform the tasks that needed to be performed to survive. More or less as soon as that happened, most of civilization became egalitarian almost overnight. There was some pushback in the 70's but as Bill Maher pointed out "we couldn't understand what you were rebelling against! Men in my father's day used to say 'I'll be damned if any wife of mine ever has to go to work!'"
Why would acknowledging that men are discriminated against minimize the concern for discrimination against women? Its ok to focus on more than 1 thing. Discrimination is wrong, never really understood the purpose of 'whataboutism'.
But there are many (typically men's rights orgs) who seize on stories like this to say that 'enough is enough and truly it is us men who are being marginalized [in ways beyond what the article says]' and thats not at all true.
Well, if I ever want to be marginalized I want it to be like how women are marginalized, specially in the West. Only marginalized group to have better education and healthcare funding, lives longer than their oppressors, have more legal rights than their oppressors plus vast majority of tax benefits directed towards them as well.
Yeah, historically men were forced to work 12 hours in coal mines, oil rigs, garbage dumps, forests, in deep seas with next to nothing safety equipment and with no regulations while women were forced to stay in their homes with their children. Where can I sign up for this kind of discrimination?
Now that this thread has fallen off the front page, and there are no more comments, we can see that you did not answer any commenters here. Either you never planned to do this, and just wanted to stir up trouble, or you were wrong about there being such comments, either from throwaways or not.
Men are marginalized in many ways beyond what this one article says - education, criminal justice, mental health to name but a few broad areas. Anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and should have no voice in this conversation.
> Anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and should have no voice in this conversation.
This is the same intolerant gatekeeping that I loathe in the feminist camp. Everyone has a voice, anyone can participate, no one-person gets to define "the" problem, let alone label/dehumanize people as being problems.
Well of course, this is not a dictatorship and I'm not a dictator. I'm stating my opinion on a forum.
In the same way flat-Earthers have no place teaching astronomy, someone who believes the pay gap is women getting paid less for the same work has no place teaching sociology. That is intolerant, but so it should be.
Gatekeeping is inevitable and necessary, the problem is that the wrong people currently hold the keys. You can find yourself locked out for stating that the wage gap is one side of a compromise, or that men get harsher criminal punishments (for the same crimes), or that female-perpetrated sexual abuse has been grossly undercounted (my personal grievance). If we want to confront these issues, then the existing gatekeepers need to be replaced, not tolerated.
It's perfectly OK to "gatekeep" against falsehoods and those who spread those falsehoods. In fact, a functioning society depends on weeding out falsehoods, otherwise everything goes down the toilet.
In other words, there are some MRAs that minimise discrimination against women, so you must do the same in opposition? Why not instead lend support to MRAs that don't do this, and attack all marginalization?
So call out articles from those organizations that are creating a false narrative. "Getting ahead of the curve" on articles like this only serve to muddy the waters even further and create more opportunities for bad faith arguments.
as society change, its discriminations do too, we need to move from the idea of women being weak and good angels bcs a lot of womens in the first world can and will use their power as they want (not always in angelic ways)
"There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions."
Sweden, though.