When I said "if I were a woman" I was talking about me. My personal opinion. I know that there are people that think differently.
I prefer to work for a company that was able to see my skills than other that hire me because other reasons. I think I would be happier and achieve more things this way. (Again, this is a personal opinion)
I think they're saying that unless you are a woman at job-hunting age (having been influenced by your environment for 2-3 decades by that point), making a claim about how you might feel if you were, is of little value in the discussion.
We can also just project into a field where were are a minority. So maybe a man can't consider what it is to be a diversity hire in tech, but he could consider being a diversity hire for a number of other industries which where the majority of employees are women.
Yes, I think that's more likely to be useful to think about, but I do think reality and hypothetical considerations are just so different when it comes to forming a valuable argument.
I have faced discrimination in another areas of my life. So I think I can have an opinion about it. I have also talked with woman that think the same as me.
Are you discriminating me to give an opinion because I am a male? I don't think it is fair. I could also say that you shouldn't talk about gender equality if you don't live in a country with high gender equality and so you argument doesn't add any value with the discussion.
I'm trying to clarify the point made by another user.
And I suspect that yes, they were suggesting that giving an opinion as a hypothetical female, given that you are male, is of limited value. I think people of both genders make real-world decisions very differently to hypothetical decisions. When there are bills to be paid, and potential bias is mixed in amongst countless other factors, I can say I wouldn't ditch a career as a chemistry teacher to start producing drugs, but who knows what pressures there are influencing that decision slowly at the time, and in the years leading up.
This is a non-sense to me. My opinion about what a woman would do does not have a value because I am not a woman, but you are talking about men and woman and I should take into account you opinion? I don't think you are both a man and a woman.
> I think people of both genders make real-world decisions very differently to hypothetical decisions
based on your reasoning you cannot say that because you cannot have an opinion about what the other gender would do.
The fact is that a lot of women reply to my comment saying that they would do the same I said I would do.
Respectfully, I'm still not sure my point is coming across.
I agree with you; and I think everyone else does, that they'd rather work for a company that was able to see their skills.
But, what if you knew there was bias that would keep them from seeing your skills, and would keep you from being hired because of it? What if your only choices were to be hired through a diversity program, or not be hired at all?
If it is either die or survive without choose survive, obviously.
Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.
> Why are you so sure the bias is there? Countries like Norway are one of the most equality countries but they have the higher ratios, which doesn't make sense because they have the less bias.
This sentence is a little garbled so not quite sure what you're going for, but I like to point people to the example of the Danish parliament. A gender quota was established some decades ago to ensure that female members could get the job, because obviously half the population is female and so they need to be represented. Now that they have an equal number of men and women, they're getting ready to remove the quota because it served its purpose, and it's not needed anymore. There are enough qualified and experienced women with strong reputations available that they don't need the help anymore.
Norway has had "gender points" in relation to acceptance at university for several studies, especially in the STEM related ones. The gender gap has closed a great deal in most of the STEM studies, but not that much in CS related ones.
Some of the studies have become nearly 50/50, and an interesting event is when they tried to remove the "gender points" from one of the studies, and the female acceptance rates fell to almost zero. Females in Norway generally have better grades, so one could make the argument that the difference is because of interest.
There is a documentary called Hjernevask from Norway that had a lot of controversy because of the topic. It is good to see different opinions of experts and what happened there:
That is a fantastic outcome, and the sort of end goal that affirmative action should seek. But it doesn't always end that well.
In India, affirmative action has basically served to deepen the lines between castes/religions etc. More and more sections of society demand that they be included in quotas. The people who do get in using such programs rarely succeed in suppressing the nagging question of whether they earned it (and that questioning stays with you all your life). Meanwhile, people forge identity documents to make it through such programmes, and the abuse of the system means that no one trusts that it is doing any good overall. In fact, by now, it has become a tool for politicians to appease fractious sections of society.
That's really too bad. Maybe something like the blind auditions they now use for orchestra positions could help. All applications done blindly or over text, using knowledge tests, something like that.
Exactly! If you want to remove gender, race or some other aspect from the decision making process you have to actually remove it. You can't just try to fix discrimination one direction by creating discrimination in a different direction.
In fact, I agree with your original post wholeheartedly.
You start with an "end date" (say two decades). And you make that date difficult to change, so that the "let's kick the can down the road" option is not easy.
The "end date" will never arrive. If you told a set of people they can get seats at plum places doing 1/4th work the remainder of the population, and you did this with 4-5 generations of their populace, its impossible to do away with this sort of entitlement after a while.
And not to forget there will be enough politicians to fight for them as long as they vote for them.
These sort of things are pretty much one direction. Once done are irreversible. Its impossible to roll back what people think is a right they were born with.
That is an excellent idea. The only trouble is, the people who make this policies do not see the problem that you and I do. Their problem is to get more votes, and ocassionally to appease violent hooligans. What they have been doing fixes their problems perfectly well. SNAFU.
I prefer to work for a company that was able to see my skills than other that hire me because other reasons. I think I would be happier and achieve more things this way. (Again, this is a personal opinion)