> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte
I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.
I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.
The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.
I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
> The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.
Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms
Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.
I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;
I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.
Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".
> He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.
> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...
You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.
> This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.
“Memory hole” is a term that should be reserved for things everybody actually forgets. This is more of a thing lots of people probably remember, but they don’t bring it up all the time.
No, lots of people willingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the abuses that were happening. See Brigida v Buttigieg for a particularly egregious example around the hiring of ATC.
The FAA, on an official test that ATC candidates were required to take, would disqualify applicants if they didn't answer questions like "what was your worst subject in school" with answers like "math" or "science." This explicitly was to increase racial diversity, which is both patronizing in the extreme and really stupid.
When I bring this up in SF, people accuse me of making it up. It's not that people don't remember it, it's that political polarization has blinded us to our side doing batshit crazy things. Another similar example was "defund the police" which is a crazy slogan on its face, yet for a year Democrats felt compelled to sanewash it.
I am about as blue and pro-DEI as someone could reasonably be and I think that this stuff is small potatoes compared to a president who has been continuously trying to send the army in to crush Democratic-leaning cities. That being said, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are suspicious of DEI because we do not have a good track record of auditing these programs.
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
Why does an hard working non-legacy white boy deserve less of a shot than a non-legacy black one? Why should he be penalized because someone else’s father with a comparable skin tan was accepted 25 years ago?
43% of all white students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, directly related to faculty, or have family that donated to the university. That number falls to 16% or lower for black, latino, and asian students.
75% of that aforementioned group of white students would not have been admitted had it been based on merit. 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories.
Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
> Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter. Suggesting that preference for legacies be removed is a fine topic on its own, but it's orthogonal to explicitly discriminating against individual applicants based upon the color of their skin.
Since you clearly feel strongly about this topic, I'll ask again. Why should the poor white kid with no legacy relationship get cast aside for some other non-legacy kid with a tan?
> Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter.
Exactly. We shouldn’t treat similarly situated people differently because of group averages. That’s the definition of racism.
It’s also irrational in practice. If you want to compare whose grandparents had it harder, Indians and Chinese are clearly entitled to the most affirmative action.
>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.
So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.
A lot of the contemporary formal scientific process is done incredibly badly, for a variety of reasons including overt political bias on the part of individual scientists working in the academic system, pressure to publish any results including poor ones, and outright laziness and fraud. In general we shouldn't assume that if a bunch of public scientific studies purport to show that some phenomenon is happening, that that phenomenon is actually happening. It takes substantial time, effort, and experience to evaluate whether a claimed scientific result is valid; and all the moreso when that result has immediate political policy implications.
It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between.
If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.
There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?
What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?
The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.
I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.
Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”
As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.
The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.
> As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%.
The least single industry was 3%. And each single industry is a very noisy data point, based on a couple companies and needing more data points. By the time you aggregate into more solid data, like those bigger categories, it's more than 3%.
But the whole thing could use better methods and more data for sure.
> The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison
In comparison to this specific resume effect it's pretty big, but that was just a basic example, not an attempt to list the biggest issue.
In comparison to the fortune 500 CEOs the overall effect here is smaller (no I'm not going to look at 5th decile in isolation).
Also even after this bias was applied, they're admitting a below-population-average amount of black students and a far above-population-average amount of asian students. So there's a bunch of other data necessary to properly analyze what's going on and how bad it is. Should there be a super tight correlation to academic decile? There are huge differences in school quality that muddy the signals, and those differences often correlate with race.
I'm not saying they did nothing wrong, but I'm saying it's unclear what the numbers should have been.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".
That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.
That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.
I fail to see any difference between "congress passing a law that is in violation of another law" and "federal regulations mandating that laws be broken". Can you explain how these situations differ quitely, other than that "regulation" and "law" are different words?
The difference was an incentive grant program that was found to be discriminatory, versus regulations which dictate how private entities act. This a pretty big distinction.
It's an especially big distinction when the question was for sources of DEI advocates handing out instructions to corporate decision makers no how to break the law. It's not even remotely connected.
Actually it took me almost an hour to re-do a portion of the research and lay it out, which I did further down the thread, if you care to look.
Also you didn't ask me to link you to my sources, you asked me what my sources were. I answered your question directly in the best way I could at the time.
Expecting an internet stranger to spend an hour digging up sources for you, when you don't ask respectfully or with any inclination of curiosity comes off as combative - I am not here to debate, I am here to discuss. If you are genuinely curious, take 30 seconds to scroll down and find the other comment I made that took me an hour to put together.
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
That's fine, of course you don't work for anyone else! But you are also not going to convince anyone else by being vague and refusing to give any specifics.
Usually when somebody makes broad vague assertions of evidence but refuses to back it up, I find that they are either mistaken about their experiences and that their take aways do not really follow from their primary evidence. Though usually it's those on the more DEI side that say "I'm not responsible for educating you" that make these mistakes! In the past year I'm seeing it from people that think DEI is about discrimination, so it's an interesting evolution. The argument is still unconvincing, no matter who says it. And again, I'm not saying you must produce anything for anybody else, I'm just saying that you end up looking like you don't have anything to actually produce.
Actually, I work for many people: My customers, my colleagues, my family. I just don't work for strangers on HN.
My mistake was answering judahmeek's question directly. They asked "What are your sources?" and I answered with the truth, that my impressions came from reading the regulations myself. Instead I should have just not replied at all, because I didn't have the time then to go re-do the research and find all the links. It's not like I save every link I visit when exploring my own curiosity. I am not trying to get some paper published here, just trying to understand whats going on and occasionally share what things seem like to me on HN. Also if they had said something like "This is shocking to me, can you point me where to look into this for myself" I would have probably waited and made a more constructive response.
I hope you appreciate that I just took time out of my day to do this for you, primarily because I found your response (in contrast to judahmeek's) reasonably respectful.
What I noticed when I looked into this last year was that regulatory implementations of the affirmative action executive order 11246 continuously increased and seemed to hit a couple inflection points. I think one was in 2000 and one was in 2021, but there may have been more. I didn't save all the sources that I read to give me the impression I got last year, but after spending about 30 min trying to find at least some of them, it wasn't hard to start to see the picture again.
Note that there is a lot of disparate facts here that paint a picture, and they will paint different pictures depending on the stance the reader starts with before engaging. When I explored this last time, I came at it with curious skepticism. The picture they painted for me, was that something that was well intentioned (affirmative action) came with an assumption: if organizations hire blindly based on merit, over time the distributions of their workforce will match the distributions of the pool of applicants applying to work there. To implement affirmative action these organizations need to include everyone in the pools of applicants, which may require disproportional outreach to invite minorities. Based on this assumption, recommendations were made into outreach programs and requirements were set to measure outcomes. Over time the outcomes didn't match expectations, so regulatory pressure was increased. As the regulatory pressure increased, it put more pressure on all levels within these organizations to take action beyond just outreach programs. So what was federally mandated across many industries specifically was race, gender, sexuality reporting and making plans to reach distributions representative of the broader population. Given this accountability set by federal regulations, and decades of efforts to try to solve the problem with outreach and merit based hiring not leading to the expected outcomes, efforts naturally expanded beyond outreach into all relevant decisions (hiring, promoting). That is how you get people being hired and promoted based on race, gender, sexuality instead of merit. (The exact opposite of the original intention).
What I remember from last year as most shocking were Department of Education regulations and NSF incentives, but I can't find those primary sources now. The NSF website seems gutted. What I recall was that NSF set criteria in grant awards to incentivize institutions to have a diverse workforce. I can find evidence of this from secondary sources, but not the primary source I remember seeing last year. Similarly what I remember, is that the DOE mandated DEI reporting and planning and tied it to federal funding/support. The effect was that leaders would put pressure on the organization beyond just job placement recruitment/outreach. The reporting and accountability focused on diversity and representation throughout the entire organization, and so the "plans" and more importantly implications would extend beyond just outreach and impact placement decisions from hiring, to special training / career acceleration programs and promotions.
I think it crossed a line for some people in the years following 2021 (EO 13985) when these regulations were expanded to include factors related to peoples sexual orientation and preferences. Once some manager who was just trying to get through their quarter and hire the candidate that will the do best job has to forgo what seems like the best candidate in favor of some other candidate because of how they chose to identify or who they like to have sex with, well... yeah it was getting ridiculous.
Let me be extremely clear that I don't condone discrimination. I think we should do our best to support everyone to thrive. We just have to be careful about confusing responsibility with privilege, and respect how hard it is to design incentive systems that actually produce the desired outcomes.
You can look at the evidence that I am presenting here and call it weak and argue against it. Or you can consider that I dug this up in 30 min on my lunch break as a favor to you, as someone with no motive other than curiosity and concern.
See Brigida v Buttigieg, if you want a spectacularly dumb example of how bad a DEI program can get. These are not hard examples to find, although I will concede that the "post-truth" anecdotes from the anti-woke camp can lead to a lot of cruft to sift through.
> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.
Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.
(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.
I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).
My thought is, if this sort of problem was happening at a company as big and influential in the industry as Google, that's already pretty bad. The backlash may not be warranted either way but the other position (that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done) isn't necessarily correct either.
The solution to "DEI has run amok!" is not "Ban DEI!" but "better define what DEI means and what is within bounds/outside bounds". But, the latter doesn't fit on a campaign poster, so here we are...
> that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done
That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
> That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
> Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
> Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
My point is just that it seems to be a real problem worth discussion and consideration, not just something made up for concern trolling. Whenever you have potential incentives to violate the law, there is reason to be somewhat concerned. It doesn't always manifest, but sometimes it does.
(P.S.: It is true that nobody is advocating for illegal hiring practices, at least not in good faith. Still, disregarding the apparent connection between DEI initiatives and illegal hiring practices they can incentivize just terminates the discussion.)
I would estimate illegal DEI was happening at more than half of top 100 firms. I’m not as familiar with corporations, but I would be checked if it was less than 25% of Fortune 100s. The HR folks all attend the same conferences together. And the big corps set the permission structure for how everyone else acts.
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused. And yes, that would be quite odd.
The rationale for racial preferences in 2025 is not that they are a benefit to individuals who were personally harmed by racial discrimination. The institutions engaging in these practices insist that they are otherwise engaged in race blind practices. If such practices existed, DEI as we know it would be unnecessary. We could simply just enforce the existing laws in a race-blind way.
> To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused.
No, this is a consequence of your ideology, which assumes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act and etc. (Hence “we could simply just enforce. . .”) Mine does not.
Note that the metaphor as stated by 0xDEAFBEAD, which you already said was good, did not include this additional generational gap.
It’s not just “my ideology.” The universities and corporations that practice DEI do not believe they discriminate against people in the present. They see it as a remedy for historical discrimination.
It’s also not even an ideological matter. It’s a testable fact. There’s very little evidence that universities and corporations are discriminating against non-whites/asians.
So if admission rates are below population averages, is it your contention that:
1. Fewer minorities *want* to go to college -- what do you think causes that bias?
2. Minorities want to go to college, but due to factors of their environment are less able to make it to college -- what do you think leads to that inability?
3. Minorities want to go to college, and their environment is just as supportive of that goal as for white, but minorities are less capable (on average) of achieving that goal -- what are we to make of this?
4. Some other explanation I haven't thought of?
My contention is that the evidence of discrimination against (non-asian) minorities in universities is non-existent. I don’t have an opinion to what’s causing admissions rates to be different than population averages. If someone proves that it’s caused by discrimination against minorities, then we have laws to address that and I’d support enforcing those laws.
If we have the fact of lower admission rates, it is incumbent on us as a society that cares about all our members to figure out what's going on. You've refused to express an opinion. Of course, others have proposed rationales, and the solution proposed is unacceptable to you. So what are we to do with that?
By this logic we should stop giving college scholarships to women. They are over represented in enrollment compared to men, so that can only be sexism right?
Society faces many problems—individuals don’t need to have an opinion as to the causes of all of them. I’m not an education expert, so I can’t tell you what causes lower admissions rates. If you think the reason is universities are discriminating, then it’s incumbent on you to build a case for that. I’m sure I’d support enforcing the laws against discriminatory conduct that you can show is happening. But I’m not going to support indicting people without evidence of wrongdoing.
You're asking too much of society with such vague complaints. We should focus on getting basics right: prosperity, jobs, reduce crime, reduce road death, and so forth before navel-gazing about "abuse by society". In any case, even if society does somehow "address the abuse", it shouldn't come in the form of randomly abusing other people. But that's what you appear to be advocating for: Because some people were discriminated against, we should now randomly discriminate against some other people.
You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions. Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me: it's not a zero-sum game, and white people in general seem to have done fine over the past fifty years of "abuse".
>The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.
Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.
It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?
In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay.
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing?
Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have.
Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it.
Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class.
Better what makes better.
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
Because we must do better than our ancestors, we have no escuses, whereas e.g. 1880 gobal ileteracy rate > 80%.
More comfortable schools with less pupils per 1 teacher we need, fix the issue, not give painkillers.
We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.
Yep, you'r 100% right, it reminds me I once read that of all given jobs offers, 50% would be taken by someone who got introduced internally.
Out of personal exeperience as employer, that so was decided by me because it was filling the need instantly.
And out of those personal experiences, bad employees brought bad recruits, good employees brought good recruits.
Unknown recruits? half good, half bad.
Ironically chiraldic.
"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"
If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.
Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI. As an able-bodied individual, you may not feel you would benefit from those today; but if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another. When that day comes, you'll be asking for accommodations to get into public areas, and if those accommodations are not available to you, you will likely find how that limits your ability to participate in public life very unfair.
> if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another
Oh for sure, for sure. It's hard to predict exactly how the secondary effects play out. But I was referring to the primary intended effects, which I think is what the person I was replying to was talking about.
>Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI.
You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.
I am not saying disability law originated in the DEI movement of today, I'm pointing at the through line between the passage of the ADA and the modern DEI movement. From the civil rights era in the 60s, to women's rights in the 70s, to the ADA in the 90s, to gay rights in the 00s, to DEI today. The principles behind disability accommodations -- access, fairness, inclusion -- are foundational to DEI as a broader movement. The ADA was an early expression of those principles in law; DEI later extended them into other social and organizational contexts.
And yeah, the ADA has received broad bipartisan support in passage because it's well understood even by partisans that disabilities affect everyone, so it's important to have protections in place.
What's not so understood by partisans is how those disabilities manifest, so since the passage of the ADA there has also been widespread pushback on what qualifies as a disability, and what accommodations are reasonable. THAT is a whole different conversation which, as someone who is disabled and covered under the ADA, I will say can be like pulling teeth to get protections guaranteed under the law. For example, businesses are often loathe to make physical accommodations like ramps and elevators, and there is often resistance to providing accommodations for mental health conditions or neurodiversity.
But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone. This includes people who are disabled, and at no point in time has DEI not included disabled people. Maybe for the terminally online right, who only focus on gender and race, but that's not what it's all about in the real world. Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI). It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
It's not only not benefitting you but actively putting you at a disadvantage because of the way you where born.
Why do you think that? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
(Not gp but...) I believe it because diversity is not a zero sum game, where every gain for a demographic other than mine means a loss to my demographic which must be fought tooth and nail.
First, we are all enriched by having a variety of experiences and perspectives available to draw upon.
Second, I feel stronger bonds with historically marginalized humans than with humans who happen to belong to my own demographic.
> If you think "all white dudes are/think the same"
What makes you think I think "all white dudes are/think the same"? Did I say anything to suggest that?
The difference, I think, is that I'm not blind to the advantages I receive every day for being a white male. In the words of Louis CK, "If you're a white male and don't admit that it is thoroughly awesome, you're an asshole."
Reading your other comments, I was just thinking that you seemed to group everyone who look the same, together, and think about them as if they were 1 type of person you could generalize about. For example, white men, or black men, or women. - So, yes I suppose you did.
For example, if your country gets attacked, primarily the men go and defend their country and people. Is that "thoroughly awesome"? Anyway have a nice day
You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.
So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!
On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.
Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool. For example, page 64 shows that Google's APAC offices have 90.7% Asian workers, up from 90.4% a year earlier -- at the expense of all other ethnicities. Is Google doing a bad job there, or is this an accurate reflection of the available workforce?
>On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
>My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
I provided data. Not anecdotes. The data shows how the demographics of Google have shifted. The data shows how the professional prospects of minorities have shifted when it comes to Google jobs. The data does not show "no change at all".
A change from 90.4% to 90.7% percentage points I doubt is statistically significant. Phrasing it "at the expense" sounds like it's some terrible decline.
The conversation so far I believe has been about DEI in the US. Why focus on APAC, instead of the the US?
>Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool.
What does that mean? Are you saying that if the fraction of CS grads that are Black+ also increased from 2.2% to 10.0%, then Google's DEI efforts did nothing? That conclusion doesn't hold. Google has a lot of DEI efforts, including ones to increase the number of Black+ people who choose to major in CS.
> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.
Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.
(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)
Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.
All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.
The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".
Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires.
It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.
> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
The PSF grant one or a different one? In the PSF one, nobody is getting ostracized and fired for daring to suggest DEI, in fact, they are turning down a grant for a more pro-DEI stance.
You might be in trouble for actually implementing DEI programs, but it's not a taboo topic that can't even safely be talked about. Criticism of any DEI-related practice, whether it's illegal hiring discrimination or presubmits that yell at you for using an ever-expanding list of now-verboten words, was taboo in many places.
In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
I assume that many of those female speakers are transwomen, and transwomen are not underrepresented in the Python or similar programming communities (in some of them, they're conspicuously overrepresented).
Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.
Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.
The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Imo DEI should have always been based on socioeconomic status over anything else. It'd likely address the other forms of diversity, and would provide way less homogeneity in thought while at the same time providing a sense of inclusion/belonging.
No, it's not hard compared having a good combination of STEM and marketing skills. Many emigrants to the US had no or very few connections: Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, a long list of Indians, Chinese and other Asians.
There is a also merit at the individual level vs merit at the organizational level. e.g. most tech companies are male dominated, but many serve primarily women (Amazon retail, Pinterest, Etsy etc). So having more women in the companies, especially in positions to directly impact the customer experience is important even if we disregard individual merit. Ditto for products that serve primarily minority populations etc.
> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.
If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?
You can see this very visibly in things like the Marines combat fitness tests. [1] In any case where strength is directly involved the requirement for a minimum score for men tends to be near the standards for a max score for women. In that particular test the ammo can lift range is 62-106 for men versus 30-66 for women.
Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.
The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.
Every single time. You look into the source and realize that there's nothing behind the claims.
It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.
But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.
> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.
GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
That stat is basically meaningless on its own. It could mean anything from they've done an amazing job on engaging women, to they've bodged the numbers by unfairly discriminating against men, or anything in between.
Annoyingly they actually do have the data to answer which it is, because Pycon's review process has a first stage which is blind, and a second stage which isn't. So if they published how many talks get rejected at each stage, by year and vendor, then we could draw actual conclusions.
I couldn't find where they have published those numbers though so we can't draw any conclusions here.
> It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
It has two sides, one promoting, and one denying. Based on race. DEI activists are always talking about the first. How great it is. And never talks about second, to not to ruin the rosy picture. Just recently I visited a hospital in mostly white area. Inside it looked like african consulate. There are still DEI stickers on the wals. What they did they denied jobs to all white applicants.
Looks like Python foundation decided to promote exactly this. Well, you will not get a penny from me till you change the course.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
You telling certain friends, but not others, based on characteristics named in the 1964 civil rights act, as part of your job requirements, would likely be illegal.
In your free time without occupational incentive? Sure.
Spamming the same bad-faith argument over and over in this thread on an account you clearly solely created for this purpose does not make it more true.
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
I opened the link and searched for "random" and id not find anything. I thought there was going to be something like a randomized controlled trial or similar from what you said but if random does not show up on the search I am not sure what to look for or what you are referring to when you say "Randomized studies". I skimmed the article and did not spot anything that matched, but I may be missing something.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
No because they obviously deserve it for there grand grand grand grand fathers sins and we still live in a patriarchy because 0.01% of men are part of the 1% richest so it's only right to punish the other 99.99%.
> We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
Funny, I've seen the exact opposite. Nice anecdotes we have here, maybe some real data would be more appropriate in arguments such as these.
And on the flip side, if I look at the state of my (US) government, seems like we've managed to fill it up with lowest-common-denominator stupidity, and most of it is white men (with a smattering of white women here and there). And it certainly seems we're dragging everyone else down with us...
At least in the US, it seems to be the lower-educated, rabidly anti-DEI faction that seems to be dragging everyone else down with them.
> DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
Very, very curious on what basis these claims are being made. Empirical studies would be ideal, but even some anecdotes would be illuminating at this point.
> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do
This is an odd phrasing. These are exclusive categories that cover the possibility space†; it makes sense to say that "women are favored over men", but it doesn't make sense to say "men face more discrimination than women". Any number you come up with for "discrimination against men" is necessarily defined relative to the outcomes for women; you can't assign cardinal numbers to both groups.
† Not quite. The possibility space also includes children. They face far, far more discrimination than either men or women do. For example, hiring them is a serious crime.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
This is a coherent claim, but it can't be summarized as "men face more discrimination than women do". Neither (1) nor (2) is an amount of discrimination.
It could be the case, for example, that there are twenty times as many jobs in male-dominated industries as in female-dominated industries, and that men and women apply to these in perfect proportion to their availability.
(Your more specific claim, women do not face any negative discrimination in male-dominated industries, will mean that the amount of negative discrimination faced by women is lower than that faced by men regardless, but this isn't a necessary part of the way you've constructed the question.)
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
This means more women working these roles with the same capability as men, it doesn't mean replacing men with women who are worse at the job, which ironically is an attitude making up part of the reason efforts like this have to be made.
> This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
Citation needed. Certainly neither of those is "clearly".
> If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
And if it's the opposite, as the best available evidence (not that there is any really solid evidence in this space) suggests?
I'm all for ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance that reflects their skills and experience, regardless of personal characteristics. As far as I can see DEI initiatives are working against that.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
Anonymizing names and such is fine/good but the whole push for equal net worth, etc is IMO bad. Granting assistance exclusively to people below the median is equal to punishing those above the median. And if you start adding race, gender, etc it gets even worse. And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
The status quo benefits me, but I also don't see why I owe X to Y. My parents worked hard to get me educated. Their parents worked hard to get them educated. Their parents worked hard to get them their own house. You can stretch it and say they were able to do that because Ys grand...parents got exploited but it's honestly not my problem at this point. We still exploit kids mining in bumfuck nowhere and making phones, everyone cares mostly when they can make an extra buck unless it's straight up death camps.
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant..
The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime? This is what the people looking for reparations are arguing, no wrongs were ever righted because the responsible at no point considered it their duty to do so.
This means they have been generationally disadvantaged compared to you. It means they have had worse social mobility. By the time Obama rolled around there had only been four black US senators in its history.
The US's historic (and ongoing!) poor treatment of its people based on skin colour is so obvious from the outside that I struggle to understand how you don't see it. The government can snap into action for Florida but cannot find its energy for New Orleans, and many other such interesting coincedences.
> done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
> Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime?
In a way, yes. Of course, it's different nowadays in that if I don't like how country X is treating me I just move to country Y so I won't touch that too much. If we make it equal to where I get sold (how did I become property? Debt? War? Kidnapping? The country just decided to cover some debts?) to go plow fields in bumfuck nowhere, I likely won't be happy, but that's so outside of modern life I have no idea how I'd feel since people are kinda weird under stress.
The thing is that it wasn't morally or legally wrong for a long time. So it's just holier than thou modern people judging people of the past and wanting retroactive punishments for legal actions to people who have nothing to do with said actions. Sure, it could have happened faster, it also could have not happened at all.
And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
> The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway.. This is covered clearly as of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So anyone who had an issue with it could sue based on it. It's how the system is supposed to work. Not via redistribution systems based on "reverse" racism/sexism/etc.
> And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
It's better to feel punished now when your illfound gains are equalised to the people who lost out for you to have them, than to continue punishing the people who lost out forever because you don't have the humility to say "yeah my ancesters were probably wrong about this"
> No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway..
"No clue" might be the best I'll get, if you want to look it up and learn it's Duval County, Florida which integrated in 1999.
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
Yeah you know all those "women" and their "liberal views". I'm a strong republican, that's why I only want to be around men. And touch them and smell them.
DEI in practice works like this: You have a ruling class of affluent white males and a Harvard educated Executive Director. None of these have ever been suppressed in their lives.
If anyone points out that fact on PSF infrastructure, you ban them (yes, this has happened).
You create a couple of programs that are mostly ineffective but good for PR.
You never mention any economic or other injustices that could upset the corporate sponsors.
You support and promote job replacement by AI while blogging about redistributing jobs via DEI.
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.
If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.
A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):
> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.