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0 pointsdidibus3y ago0 comments

Yes, and that's debatable.

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.

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peoplefromibiza3y ago· 2 in thread

> Yes, and that's debatable

You said it, ok, but what do you wanna debate about?

Data shows that, at best, some people in some categories are being hired.

> And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs because of historically induced cultural biases.

Doesn't imply that women hired today have ever been discriminated or come from families that were.

My family was anti fascist and discriminates during fascism, more than that, they were persecuted.

Should I get some kind of preferential lanes, even thought nothing of the sort ever happened to me?

> got taken over by men, had only men's in it, men became all the professors

this is at best unprovable.

in the worst case it is simply bad faith.

What about truck divers' industry, where what you are claiming as discrimination is undisputable?

didibusOP3y ago

I'm responding to:

> Balance it against nothing. The beneficiaries are not the same people as the victims.

This makes two claims:

1. That the woman that was hired is not at risk of discrimination.

I challenge the truth of this statement, because as the research I linked shows, it seems likely there are still biases against women in hiring processes even today.

2. That women are no longer disadvantaged when it comes to their likelihood of pursuing a STEM career and getting into the field.

I challenge the truth of this statement, because some research also shows there are still socio-cultural biases that turn women away from the field.

Now it's not because I challenge the truth of those statements that I claim to know the truth myself. I don't know the truth.

To me, right now, it appears that:

1. Women still face bias in hiring

2. Women are oddly not pursuing STEM careers

3. Socio-culturaly you can see that it wouldn't be as attractive to women to do so

4. There's a nature vs nurture question mark, but it's hard to say women naturally don't like STEM as much, given there's clearly socio-cultural influences at play, so how do you isolate that variable?

When I take all this, I feel there's a lot of reasons you might want to try to balance things out.

You might want to balance out the still existent hiring bias.

You might want to balance the discrepancy in gender in the field.

You might want to balance the socio-cultural influence, to try and reverse them, making STEM more appealing to women.

Now I say "you might", because it'll depend on your values, but if you value equal opportunity for women, wanting to try and balance those things seem logical to me.

> Should I get some kind of preferential lanes, even thought nothing of the sort ever happened to me?

Possibly yes. There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered. If some of those have affected you as well, you wouldn't have gotten the same opportunities as your peers whose family wouldn't have been discriminated against. Maybe the ripple stoped short and you weren't impacted at all, but we can reason some cases where it wouldn't have, and children of discriminated ancestry would even today be impacted by those second order effects.

> What about truck divers' industry, where what you are claiming as discrimination is undisputable?

I don't know anything about the truck driving industry, so I can't speak to it. But if there's bias and socio-cultural influences that affect people's opportunity I'd probably think the same.

peoplefromibiza3y ago

> This makes two claims

It makes only one claim: that the people being hired now are not the victims of past discrimination.

Which arguably very probable, unless proven otherwise.

> I challenge the truth of this statement, because as the research I linked shows, it seems likely there are still biases against women in hiring processes even today.

there are biases even against men. There are biases against almost every category you can think of.

Look t the layoffs, it's men in majority.

The reason is obvious, still the statistics don't lie, right?

I'll ask you again, why isn't that a problem in the truck driver industry, were it's only men?

And if that's true, why is it so hard for companies to find women to hire.

A thing that is evident to anyone working in tech, there are simply much less women candidates than men, companies that need employees should or shouldn't be allowed to look in the largest possible pool?

Last but not least, tech is not STEM.

Tech is simply a job, you don't need a PHD or a thesis on the theory of everything to participate.

In US in the 50s and 60s women accounted for 40-50% of computer programmers, according to research by Claire L. Evans. In the 80S it was 36%. Now it's 26%.

What changed is not discrimination, but that the industry first started asking for prior experience with computers, which men had more than women.on average, also professors started to ask more from their students, thanks to the boom of personal computers, programming classes were in high demand and the number of seats was still very limited. The real divide became between who had a computer at home and who hadn't. So many men too had no access to tech jobs or higher education in tech, it's not only women.

A fun fact: I was born in Italy in the 70s, I had a C64 as a kid that my sister hated, not because it was for boys, but because she thought it was boring. She liked books. She has become a scholar of literature.

Fast forward to my teen years, I was playing volleyball and had no interest for computers or programming, I was a sports guy.

Then in high school there was a limited number course for the final 3 years that taught CS and programming that I enrolled to given I had very good grades because if I was admitted I could stop studying German and Geography, that I had no love for. We were half boys and half girls in my class, the girls simply had no interest for computers, except a couple that went to study CS at uni with me. Boys were even worse, they could only think about soccer. I was very hood at it, I don't think that's because I'm special, it's simply because I studied and did the exercises at home. On paper before buying my first PC! But AFAIK many of my classmates, men and women, are now working as some kind of programmers because the request is so high that even the not so skilled have a good chance of being hired (yeah, some are doing Cobol...)

> There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered

I disagree.

There are other effects that are more important than me and my family: fascism was defeated and nobody suffered again because of it.

Which is exactly what my family wanted.

Being a victim is not a full time job, you are a victim only if you are one, not if you think you are.

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