Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

There's one important datapoint in this article: "The Bamboo Ceiling".

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.

This is the allegation of the Ellis, Pease, and Wisuri lawsuit against Google - that Google does okay at hiring women, but slots them into lower positions and gives them fewer promotions than men. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-... The NYT's report on the leaked #talkpay spreadsheet seems to show that pattern: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salarie...

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.

> you can still maintain the discrimination

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.

Less competition? Discrimination can be perfectly rational.

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.)