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0 pointsgshulegaard9y ago0 comments

To build off your comment, I went ahead and found the glassdoor study:

https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2...

And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.

The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed.

For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis.

One way to look at this is:

* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors

another way would be:

* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors

But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation.

Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?

I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it!

Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...

[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...

0 comments

alainv9y ago

You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort."

One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable.

Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech workforce is 83% male because A) there is "no causal influence, insidious or otherwise" and there is perfect freedom of choice or because B) there are systemic factors at play?

That is the only question.

gshulegaardOP9y ago

Not sure I am in a position to say it is or is not a straw man argument since I am the one who made it...but it is more or less a fairly well known "classical liberal"/libertarian[1] position:

https://youtu.be/QcDrE5YvqTs

[1] This description taken from the Wikipedia citaiton of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's characterization of Chirstina Hoff Sommers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers

intellegacy9y ago

oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline.

So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason

fatbird9y ago

Given a multitude of other results showing that equalizing for pipeline problems shows women competing equally with men, the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving.

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handojin9y ago

And they hate being doctors too. Except they don't. And deconstruction of what was a frankly pervasive culture of sexism in medicine and law has resulted in much higher participation of the second sex in these fields.

Willful blindness is what it is.

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jakelazaroff9y ago

There's been plenty written about how "the pipeline problem" is a myth:

- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...

- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...

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0 pointsgshulegaard9y ago0 comments

To build off your comment, I went ahead and found the glassdoor study:

https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2...

And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.

One way to look at this is:

* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors

another way would be:

* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors

Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...

[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...

0 comments

alainv9y ago

You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort."

One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable.

That is the only question.

gshulegaardOP9y ago

Not sure I am in a position to say it is or is not a straw man argument since I am the one who made it...but it is more or less a fairly well known "classical liberal"/libertarian[1] position:

https://youtu.be/QcDrE5YvqTs

[1] This description taken from the Wikipedia citaiton of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's characterization of Chirstina Hoff Sommers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers

intellegacy9y ago

oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline.

So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason

fatbird9y ago

1 more reply

handojin9y ago

Willful blindness is what it is.

1 more reply

jakelazaroff9y ago

There's been plenty written about how "the pipeline problem" is a myth:

- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...

- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse