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turc1656 ◴[] No.15010817[source]
"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."

Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. By doing this you treat both sexes fairly and give everyone an equal chance. Otherwise, you end up with "reverse sexism", which the author does not explicitly say, however she does essentially admit to in her description of the hiring loop:

"After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to"

The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that is she hired at least a few women over men which she thought were better candidates simply because "we have to". That's a problem.

Overall, though, I thought her piece was well written and she seems to get at the real issue and even has a possible solution that doesn't involve just hiring women for purposes of optics only - fighting the battle far earlier and getting girls interested young so that they choose to enter these fields at a higher rate than they currently are doing.

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Nomentatus ◴[] No.15011226[source]
The central point is proven unconsciously bias, which makes "hiring the best person" only possible with blind hiring, and blind marking in University which isn't likely to happen any time soon - to see unconscious bias ignored or passed over is discouraging since it is the problem.
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mpweiher ◴[] No.15011582[source]
What evidence do you have for this?

What I have read is that the "hiring a lab manager" experiments actually only found an effect for candidates that were (a) mediocre and (b) identically qualified. For exceptional candidates, they did not find bias. If there was a clearly better candidate they did not find bias.

Furthermore, the most commonly cited study on this was hiring for a position in a Psychology department. A discipline that is majority female. Other studies have shown that grading tends to be biased towards the gender that is less well represented in a particular field.

And of course there's the Ceci-Williams study that showed a 2:1 advantage for women in STEM tenure track hiring.

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1. Symmetry ◴[] No.15013016[source]
I always assumed the hiring disparity was due to previous steps in the pipeline being biased in some way, as in this PG essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html