The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.
Does it have to? Humans are really bad at being rational actors. The fact that some groups are less represented is a source of bias on its own. They can still be sorted out if they don't meet hiring standards in the second step, where unconscious bias is a lot less likely to affect a person that can demonstrate their skills.
Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and technical things much more than women, so it's natural than they flock to CS.
And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.
60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!
>I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd?
> And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.
... Yes? At least in countries such as US, where these people in those professions can make large amounts of money. In my country (Poland), up to very recently, doctors were poorly paid and thus large number of doctors were women.
> 60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!
It isn't as clear cut as with the CS, because women (on average) may be put off by the high competetiveness and poor life quality of law/medicine, but they are also drawn (on average) by the fact that in those fields you work with people. Whereas, in CS degree, there's literally nothing for them (on average).
> And men care about both money and technical things much more than women
Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong.
In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being for boys. They were the pioneers of the computer science world and in an era where things were incredibly technical without the resources we take for granted.
Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in things (and more interested in people) and also women, on average, are less interested in money, have a solid backing in research. They're not factually wrong.
The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).
That's also not true regarding the history of the software field. The explosion in engineer salaries is relatively recent. It was only post-2000s when it became a very lucrative field for engineers and by that point the percentage of women developers had dropped off. This was due to both companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men as well a shift in advertising for home computers and deriding women.
Can you point me to your sources on companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men? It's the first time I'm hearing about this.
In the '60s the common way programmers were interviewed were through aptitude tests. The standard at the time was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, but in the 70s and 80s that shifted to a new personality profile that inherently favored men [1] [2] [3] by Cannon and Perry. This became the new institutional standard and was used to determine who was a 'viable' programmer or not. This is where the traditional 'programmers are anti-social and hate people' thing came from and took root. In turn, advertising became male-focused, men were given more opportunity to become programmers and that's how the industry shifted. There's a bunch of very blatant advertising in the late-70s and early-80s that shows how this shifted.
Interesting. If that was truly the case and was widespread in the 80s, it died with the eighties, as in the late nineties companies came back to truly meritorous hiring that doesn't care about personality (i.e. whiteboarding/leetcoding people to death, or doing weird pseudo-IQ question such as "how many gas stations are there in Manhattan"). Why couldn't women come back in then? The argument that they couldn't, because the field was stereotypically dominated by men by then is not convincing, because the reverse wasn't true (i.e. men moved into women dominated IT in the 80s without a problem, against the field stereotypes that it's for women).
It's because the stereotype changed, like I said. The new gold standard had the average programmer be 'male, nerdy, antisocial' and that was reflected by the rise of home computing being an almost exclusively young boy thing. The stereotype shifted in the 80s to computing being an activity for men, rates of women whom were computer science majors plummeted and it hasn't quite recovered. It hasn't quite died out because people still perpetuate the stereotype that the 1960s research study created.
You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40% of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring, perception and stereotypes to catch up as people graduate, join the work force and cycle out.
No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.
Men behavior is at least partially shaped by dating dynamics. Women tend to prefer partners with higher social and economic status than themselves. Men care less. Search term hypergamy
Actually it seems that the evidence is against you.
In the most unequal societies (Russia[0], India[1]) the tech industry is much closer to gender parity than in the west.
Sweden has gone further than any other nation on earth to be equitable across gendered lines yet remains extremely unequal in the actual working model. (In my former employer 14% of applicants were women, yet they constitute 20% of employed staff due to excessive D&I initiatives).
I should be self interested, we’re talking about competition for work. It would be death to roll over. Jobs are absolutely zero sum-
However my argument is backed by statistics, so I think you need to face the reality in front of you.
Sibling already pointed some things out. Specifically for doctors, go ahead and look up what specializations men go into primarily and what specializations women go into primarily. The only high paying one I noticed being particularly female-dominated is dermatology, and it's not that much of a difference. The male-dominated specialties tend to have far more high earning specializations, and the ratios are far more skewed too.
As for lawyers, I can't speak except for the fact lawyers work more akin to salesmen and make a lot of money based on performance, and once again, historically speaking, men have always dominated on anything performance-based. Law is an exception, and it's an extremely poor one at that.
As for both, both medicine / biomedical sciences and law pale in comparison to every other field known to both pay well and do so with high security still being largely in favor of men, whereas fields with low pays and low security tend to be dominated by women. Most STEM fields women dominate aren't known for paying well compared to the ones men dominate. Comparing those fields to social sciences is a no-brainer. All of this still excludes entrepreneurship and high-paying blue collar work still being dominated by men.
None of this exempts the fact historically, women have never chased money through career nearly as much as men, and have always placed far higher value on a man's status than vice versa. There are cultural reasons why this has changed, and none of those reasons are necessarily pointing towards improvements. We can open this entire can of worms if you so desire, but it will go far too off-topic for this.
Oh please, do yourself a favor and perform a very simple litmus test. Ask how many men are willing to date homeless women and vice versa.
What's fascinating is how people are trying to avoid talking about the obvious motivator for men not present in women, and how the slow death of that motivator is affecting things.
Take a look in the mirror before trying to subtly call someone ignorant, would you?
I'm trying to see the charitable way of interpreting this but all I can see is an intent to emotionally wound someone else. there's absolutely nothing in what you just said that can be considered constructive.
the parent was at least trying to make a reasoned point, even if you don't agree with him.
This is Hacker News not Prime Ministers Questions. We're here for intellectual curiosity, some measure of vulnerability and open discussion.
Calling people bigoted or old fashioned isn't swaying anyone, if anything it will push people away because as soon as someone says "they've got a point there" and there's backlash instead of a rebuttal: you've lost another person.
That's not a problem unless you are either racist or sexist, in which case a preference for people based on their race or sex would make it a problem. But for everyone else, it's just whatever it is.
> My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian.
Most certainly. Anyone else will get paid to learn CS on the job so it would be rather silly of them to spend their own dime in college. There is no free lunch here. If you strive for diversity in the workplace it is going to disappear from other places.
