Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

When the whole fuzz about gender discrimination started, Microsoft and Google published numbers, claiming women got the same pay at the same positions as men. Knowing there's discrimination from personal experience/feeling, I theorized, that women are discriminated in a different way: they don't receive promotions.

Under otherwise similar circumstances having children does not feel to be enough to explain why of 100 women hired in tech on professional roles less are promoted to higher positions, than of 100 men. That trend is (at least anecdotally for me) observable even before people become parents.

This "Bamboo Ceiling" shows the same effect for another potentially discriminated group of people.

The neat thing about this form of discrimination is that you can claim to be fixing "the pipeline" all you want and you can still maintain the discrimination, because the leak is after the pipeline. The dominant group isn't threatened by competition if they fund efforts to increase the number of underrepresented groups in grade school or college STEM education, as long as those college graduates aren't later competing for senior jobs on a level playing field.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19476221/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5110041/

Stop rocking the boat, thank you!

But what is their incentive to "maintain" discrimination. Even under a charitable interpretation, it seems to imply there is a group at the top which actively hates women and wants to suppress their influence? Maybe there is, Google is pretty scary and is in bed with the government https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782..., but I think it would be good to dissect that statement to see what it points to.

It’s amusing to see these comments fluctuate wrt karma so quickly for the simple thesis that women might have traits that allow them to be better managers. I even come with study citations!

My condolences to those of you who might work somewhere where your livelihood is threatened for freedom of thought. The job market is great right now FYI.

Check out the literature on "implicit bias". While there are problems in some social sciences, this particular research area has a lot of high-quality reproduced studies. Of course, it is only the start of the conversation and there are many caveats, but I believe it will address your comment.

But "reality" does not seem to be sexist, rather our biases and tribalism is sexist (and racist and plenty of other -ist). When high-quality reproducible research has observed phenomena like "stereotype threat" and "implicit bias" it is worthwhile to spend some of our idle time on thinking how to address this unfairness. Even if we do it simply so that we have a wider applicant pool from which to pick high-quality employees.

You can try strawman arguments like "they are not equally qualified" or "reverse sexism" or "they are doing it to themselves by not negotiating", but a cursory look at any reproducible social sciences review disproves those (laziness to not use google or google scholar is a tiresome excuse).

"equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised.

These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..

I am aware of that, good to point out though. However I was wondering because the wording "you can still maintain the discrimination" implies awareness and perhaps conspiracy. For example if I was talking about "implicit bias" I might have said something like - "it doesn't modify existing implicit biases and institutional constraints, which have been responsible for ...". But even then it would be good to see what exactly those biases and constraints are at Google.

On the topic of "implicit bias", it's also useful to add that it doesn't have to be just a personal "implicit" bias, it could institutional as well, incentives and rules that combine to exclude certain groups more than others, in this case women. Though then it's not clear how they would fix it, given that it's implicit. Maybe hire an outside consultancy which will be able to identify it better (since they are not part of the culture and not affected by same incentives)...

Just because brogrammers want to promote other brogrammers does not make them whatever-ist. Claiming that implicit bias is a type of whatever-ism is just BS doublespeak like "if you're not the solution you're the problem".

Differences should never lead to inequality - women are better at some things, conversely so are men, but you need to treat (and pay) people equally - and this next part is the most important part - you also need to ensure that you have positions for all kinds of people in your organization - and that culturally, you allow for diversity, and have an organization that allows people from diverse backgrounds an experiences thrive.

The latter part is a key flaw of geek culture (most often seen in engineering organizations) - we often fail at inclusivity, because we've spent our whole lives being left on the outside, so we develop a fundamental distrust of people unlike us (look at the interplay between sales and engineering in most old line companies), and have not learned the skills to create an inclusive environment.

Because of this we tend to create 'old boys clubs' that are full of people who are remarkably like us.

But, we can do better, and should - however shutting down the discussion is not how you solve these problems, it just makes them worse in the long term by creating a new culture even more intolerant of dissent.

If you do find a scientific reason to reject the null hypothesis, hopefully such an analysis will come with some specific number other than 50/50 - and we can see if Google's processes match those numbers.

The parent comment to yours was poorly worded and snarky, so you have a right to be upset. But still, I think your reasoning is flawed. People are generally promoted by their competence and their negotiating/office politics skills, and you can't claim that those are the same across all genders. Why would women, who are fundamentally different than men, have the exact same competence and negotiating abilities as men? There's no reason the two genders should be equal.

If you really have two equally skilled engineers, one male, one female, and only the male is promoted, that's sexism. But two engineers are never the same, so you can't make that argument.

Going back to the subject of this article, we generally find it morally permissible for a country to have employment / visa policies that strongly incentivize companies to find qualified but mediocre employees from the same country instead of hiring exceptional workers from other countries, even if the foreign workers would be better for profit / GDP / economic growth. (That is, the country might decide to have more or fewer visas based on whatever policies it wants to implement, but we don't think that the zero-visas option is immoral.) And the overt and stated intention is to protect the employment opportunities of the countries' own citizens.

This doesn't seem fundamentally different, to me, from discrimination on sex / race / whatever to protect the employment opportunities of members of the more politically powerful sex / race / etc. - it's just that we tend to find it morally impermissible to discriminate between a countries' own citizens on those categories if we believe that membership in those categories is irrelevant to aptitude, but we find it perfectly permissible to discriminate between one countries' citizens on another despite knowing full well that citizenship is pretty irrelevant to aptitude. (I am personally leaning towards the viewpoint that actually both are morally impermissible, and protectionism in visas is justifiable only as the lesser of two evils as long as it's necessary for a country's economic stability, and no longer.)

This strikes me as kind of like saying that evolution is pseudoscience because 95% of professors in the field are not evangelical Christians, or something.

There may be other reasons to believe that implicit bias is pseudoscience, but "People who believe certain things about it tend to end up with personal worldviews that are consistent with their research" doesn't seem like one.

Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury....

(Also, there are no shortage of barriers against women participating in high-mortality jobs - take the rules against women in combat for a particularly obvious example.)

Just intuitively, longer working hours (which may correlate with higher pay) and later average retirement age (which may correlate with higher paid jobs, especially with less physical demands), may contribute to greater probability of death from non-work causes, including age-related causes, happening while at work.

Women want children earlier (because menopause) and are more affected by them (because giving birth) than equally family-minded men. As a result, women are more motivated to prioritise having children/family.

In addition, men derive more advantage from more money/power than women, so they're more motivated to climb the corporate ladder (or take risks and fund companies) than women.

I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.

Yup, sounds completely reasonable.

Hey, how come so many more women become doctors now? High stress job, takes a long time, I don't think it's any more "attractive" then being a nurse.

I'm gonna go ahead and say that this line of thinking is sexist. I'm not trying to attack you I just think it needs to be said because I think it's actively harmful. It ignores any other reasons behind the gap, and it's a terrible line of thinking for anyone who manages women. "I don't know if I should give her this role, women aren't really suited for leadership".

But they do research that should be repeatable and thus it doesn't matter.

Unless you think they have implicit bias.

> As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.

Are you trying to mkae some sort of point?

I was mostly referring the point about women. The slots in the management hierarchy will get filled anyway, and I can see how people can have implicit biases, but it seemed the comment was more about an active and explicit suppression.

Based on what I've heard about Google, and I have been critical of it before, it still just doesn't seem like a company with a pervasive active sexism with managers suppressing women because they need to empower their own gender (male) group.

> (I am personally leaning towards the viewpoint that actually both are morally impermissible, and protectionism in visas is justifiable only as the lesser of two evils as long as it's necessary for a country's economic stability, and no longer.)

Agreed there, especially on gender, race, sexual orientation. But not sure completely on nationality. Ideally citizenship would be just a passport and a label and people with matching abilities and skills could freely move and find better lives elsewhere. I think that is the idealized version the term "globalization". However it eventually ended up meaning that only multinational companies and wealthy people get to travel and take advantage of regulatory and labor cost arbitrage.

As long as countries exist, I don't see each country trying to protect its own citizens first as a terribly bad thing. In particular in this case, the people seem to get great offers at home in China. I kind of like seeing China do well and being able to offer such opportunities. Perhaps at some point US will find itself falling behind and will have to work harder to compete, and that's not a terribly bad thing either.

women need to have children earlier.

I don't see 70 year old men eagerly having kids all that often. Most people want to live to see their grandchildren.

> I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.

"I have black friends"

For more digestible information look around their website.

I guess it is my turn: What debunking are you talking about besides the more extremist men's rights advocates (which are different from the moderates that have very valid concerns)? "Implicit bias" is indeed only the start of a discussion, as one needs to consider its predictive value in non-test conditions, but if you are sincerely interested in pursuing this conversation, the website above is a good starting point.

You aren't allowed to reference social science studies because their aren't enough conservatives to make those fields "fair".

But say I'm doing a project in Java and they are about equal, I keep giving Al the meaty work then use it justify a promotion, which I can't justify for Marcy. It's not that she's that much worse, I just never gave her the chance to prove it (blah blah peter principle, perform at next level, etc...). That just might be a bit sexist.

There is valid concern on how predictive the implicit bias test is in non-test conditions. But "implicit bias" is only the start of the conversation - it is one easy thing to measure in a sea of difficult to measure issues. If you want to jump into this rabbit hole, I have found the researches that work in this field to be eager to describe their more up-to-date work on addressing them (I do try to play a devil's advocate in such conversations and have gained much respect for their rigor). Regrettably, as usual in academia, the easies way to be exposed to those conversations is not that easy: going to talks given by those researchers.

This was a discussion a month ago. I'm mostly basing my opinion on it.

Oh but citations. Good for you, that's a good bit of research. Sure the facts seem cherry picked and don't necessarily support your conclusions. You also presented them in an entirely tone deaf manner, you seem to imply a number of negative things, you perpetuated stereotypes, and you didn't explore any possible alternative explanations, but you definitely cited some research papers. B+ for effort, F for execution.

F as in fired with cause.

Actually PG said the opposite. I used to have the comment saved, but lost it in a format.

Anyway, people also downvote because they are sick of talking about this.

By applying empiricism.

The fact that the political right is ideologicslly opposed to doing that in social science fields rather than accepting dogma (an attitude which also applies to an increasing number of areas of the physical sciences) is problematic, to be sure.

https://youtu.be/eieVE-xFXuo?t=2m50s

He also makes the argument that the issue isn't why there aren't more women in these jobs, but why are there so many men insane enough to spend 80 hrs a week doing them? Money != Happiness.

I'm not making a claim about what the political right is opposed to.

Yeah. For one small-scale example, the pay differential between the pizza delivery drivers and the in-store workers who make the pizzas. Roughly equivalent difficulty, drivers make $10-$15 an hour more due to tips and the risk of getting involved in a car accident or robbery. IIRC the gender ratio is more skewed towards men for delivery drivers than for in-store food service workers.

Have you really never worked on a project where the golden boy was the face of everything and everyone else was ignored?

Lots of things used to be uncontroversial. Get with the times.

More like go directly to S as in seven figure settlement package.

EDIT: Direct reference to Google's incident.

Also, this would imply that gay (non-bi) or asexual men, who are not seeking women as partners, would be found in high-status/high-pay positions at rates more comparable to (all) women than to straight men. This seems like a pretty straightforward hypothesis - do we have the data to test it?

- the John/Jennifer study http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat...

- the chairs study http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465...

- the police shooting armed people in VR study http://www.washington.edu/news/2003/07/08/blacks-more-likely...

- the general idea of "stereotype threat" (which becomes unrelated, not as much of an offshoot)

I am not expecting you to spend the time to vet every single of those links (and admittedly I used google, so some of the links might be overly editorialized), however I do believe these are good resources to consider for inclusion in your intellectual toolkit when you have the time.

All of them more credible than „theres a giant conspiracy against women“.

Why is that not credible?

Remember that until the 1860s, the United States literally had a giant conspiracy against black people - so much so that huge parts of the US economy were absolutely dependent on black people not having the rights to life, liberty, and property.

Women didn't have a constitutional right to vote in the US until 1920, when the Constitution was changed to add one.

Why is it not credible that there's a giant conspiracy against women? What changed in the last 100-150 years that made humankind more reasonable, given how completely unreasonable humankind was just a couple of generations ago?

(Note that I'm only speaking of the US, which is what I'm familiar with and where the US is based. It's possible that countries other than the US are more reasonable.)

Without some kind of qualifier it's a shade pointless.

I suspect that white-collar senior management jobs contribute a lot more than pizza delivery jobs to the fact that men make more money than women in total. (But probably this is also true for median or first-decile wage?)

Also, if one's sick of discussing a topic, s/he can simply don't read about or discuss it. Why prevent others from discussing it?

What you are suggesting is a world-wide conspiracy, across all countries and cultures, and across all corporations. I can't prove you wrong, but Occams Razor tells me this is unlikely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

It's how HN has always worked, and in my opinion needs to. A site that cares about discussion quality needs those white blood cells.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Affirmative action often involves discussion on reducing quality or creating self-fulfilling prophecies by have no role models at the top.

I think a deeper issue is that leadership as an idea is still "masculine" in nature, reflecting a heroes journey to conquer something in the wild and bring it home. Heroines are just females still going out on a hunt. Instead there is much and underappreciated value in the maintenance of hearth and home. In learning how to live and creating wealth and complexity out of relationships between objects and people rather than extracting some sort of value from the environment.

It's just that such types of created wealth don't have the exponential explosion of conquered wealth.