> Research has shown that women are no less capable than men in science and mathematics. But, according to the AAUW, external factors, like a lack of role models, cultures that tend to exclude women, and persistent stereotypes about women’s intellectual abilities, reinforce a wide gender gap.
- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/06/women-in-stem...
Now I'm not sure if trying to hire more women can really reverse this, but I do think there's at least an argument to be made.
Factor in that there's also still resume bias against women: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/uncovering-hirin...
Where it's shown that women need higher GPAs to be perceived as equaly qualified as lower GPA male equivalents.
And you could also make an argument for needing to fight the still existent hiring bias against them.
I guess what OP is saying is that the beneficiaries are largely not people that actually suffered discrimination, they are just people that tick all the boxes.
Otherwise it wouldn't take much to find them.
You can make an argument that women today are still being discriminated against or are in a disadvantaged position because of past discriminations against women. Therefore the women they hired was an appropriate beneficiary.
As research shows, there is still bias against women in hiring, especially in the resume selection process.
And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs because of historically induced cultural biases.
If you discriminated against women in the past so that the profession got taken over by men, had only men's in it, men became all the professors, men became all the role models for the profession, it shouldn't be surprising from a sociological level that women today don't find STEM appealing because it's all men dominated and doesn't seem friendly or inviting to them.
How do you break this cycle is a separate discussion, and there's a seperate argument that affirmative action doesn't work.
There are all kinds of well understood factors that influence women to avoid many typically male populated environments that are caused by the men and not by the women's simple innate disinterest in the topic.
They are voluntarily choosing to avoid being abused and insulted and disrespected, not voluntarily choosing not to be engineers or competitive gamers or whatever.
A fallacy is when your arguments don't actually prove that the conclusion is right, yet convinces people that it is. It's an error in reasoning that leads you to believe the conclusion derives from the premise, when it doesn't. It doesn't even mean the conclusion is wrong, just that it doesn't derive from the premise and arguments and as such hasn't actually been proven right.
So you should say: "It's wrong to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination".
Because"that X can be fought with a variation of X" isn't fallacious, this is a logical possibility. A variation of X could in some circumstances be used used to fight X. There's no error in logic here.
Let's take as a given that there was discrimination in the past. Unless you have a time machine you can't go back and change that. Hiring more people of the discriminated-against group now benefits new workers of that group (who haven't been discriminated against because they haven't had jobs before) but that does nothing to rectify the past wrongs, it just creates new victims (those who lost out on jobs that they should have gotten.)
The fundamental problem here is that attempts to redress discrimination pretend that groups can be victims. Nope, victims are always individuals. Does killing a Hatfield bring back a McCoy?? (Note that the original implementation of affirmative action was needed to break the problem of the social contract against hiring blacks. That's long since been done, the program should have been dismantled 40 years ago.)
As for continuing discrimination against "women", look more carefully at the pattern--the "discrimination" is the result of having children. Taking time out of the labor market (or working fewer hours while still in the labor market) translates to less experience and thus a lower value. When you control for actual hours worked (do *not* have a "full time" category!!), actual years of experience (maternity leave is at best zero experience, likely negative experience as that's time not keeping current with changes) and actual position (no lumping similar categories--pediatrician pays less than cardiologist) almost all the supposed discrimination vanishes. Compare young, childless, degreed women and they're making *more* than their male counterparts.
What people are trying to "balance" is the unequal opportunities between women and men.
Now I'll assume that you value this goal, because otherwise we need to have a very different conversation.
I've assumed in your prior comment that "Balance it against nothing" refered to you arguing there is no gender inequality of opportunity in tech.
Now, if that was true, you'd expect to see a proportional representation of genders in the field, but that's not what we observe at all, it skews heavily male.
How do we explain this?
Based on your other comments and comments from other commenters, I saw "autism" skews male (I'm not sure about the accuracy of that fact), and tech skews autistic (I'd need data on this), and maybe that explains it.
I also saw some Nature vs Nurture, that maybe women are naturally less interested.
And I saw child bearing, but this is part of the goal, motherhood shouldn't affect your opportunities otherwise it's no longer equal since women have to give birth, and we're back at your gender impacting negatively your opportunities.
Now I'm not actually saying these couldn't be part of the explanation. They could, and if some of those were exclusively the cause, it would explain why we see a male skew in tech, and it would mean the skew isn't due to social inequalities, but women's own personal choice.
What I'm saying is that this conclusion is highly debatable, because there are other explanations that hold more or less merit.
The two I provided I backed up with research.
The gender discrepancy could also be due to:
1. Resume bias, which could indicate a greater trend of overall hiring bias, that might even expand to bias in school assignment grading, school entry application selection, parental encouragement, even women's own self-perceived qualifications.
2. Socio-cultural influences, like the lack of role models, an unwelcoming tech community environment that is intimidating to women or hostile to them, etc.
Again, I'm not saying these are the explanations for sure.
What I'm saying is that they're likely explanations with research backing.
So when you say "Balance it against nothing", you imply you know the absolute truth about this, that you just know for sure there isn't any inequality here whatsoever, and I simply disagree, you've not demonstrated the lack of inequality in a convincing manner, there are bodies of research in fact that indicate that there is still some level of inequality, and that it could be this remaining inequality that explains the gender gap.
That's why I say: "That's debatable". There are as likely, or arguably more likely explanations that would indicate lingering inequality.
