> You’ve probably heard the following statistic: Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.
Ah, I had not. Landing a job I don't know how to do 2/5ths of sounds awful.
> Landing a job I don't know how to do 2/5ths of sounds awful.
Then don't be an engineer?
Seriously, an engineer's job is to invent new things that no one has done before, and tell other people how to reliably build more of them. If you start a project with a 100% clear vision of how to get to the end, then you are already behind your competition.
Not knowing how to do 40%, and not being intimidated by 95%, seems like about the right mix.
I have held enough different jobs to know that for some types of job posting, the listed requirements have almost nothing to do with the actual job duties and everything to do with imposing an arbitrary cutoff on the number of applicants to screen for it.
Job advertisement: Immediate requirement for an illusionist/escapist. Must have 15 years experience in inverted underwater lockpicking. Nice to have some experience in juggling chainsaws.
Job reality: You do coin and card tricks at children's birthday parties.
Even if the job does require something you don't know, it is very likely that--no matter what it is--you could spend a few hours on the Internet learning how to fake it well enough to fool anyone short of an actual expert until you get the real on-the-job experience.
If it's just a programming language thing, those are easy to ramp up on, within weeks or months. Every job that I've had so far has involved a lot of extra learning. Even in the cases that I already knew the development language, there's been a large preexisting codebase, essentially providing its own in-house-built framework.
The next position that I'm waiting for a written job offer for: I don't know the language, haven't ever developed on the OS, and I'll be looking at 15 years of legacy code. It sounds like an exciting opportunity to expand my knowledge on someone else's time and do something I haven't done before.
Granted, I never would've applied on my own; they contacted me through LinkedIn. But that kind of thing is how I expect I'll find all my work in the foreseeable future.
Anecdotal evidence. I used to feel more strongly of the 100% qualified and I know many other men who have as well.
There was a point in college that I didn't apply for a scholarship because I didn't have the 3.0 GPA requirement at the time, I had like a 2.95
About 7 months later I found out that a student with a 2.2 GPA had received the scholarship because so few people had applied, they were able to give them to everyone who applied, regardless of qualifications. That was the moment I realized that not everything is written in stone and even if you don't stand a chance, you still should make an attempt at pursuing things.
Indirectly, since then I have encouraged all my friends, both men and women to apply for jobs or things that they are interested in, regardless of qualifications. Sometimes interest/passion alone can help get you a job, or perhaps they will create a more junior position just for you; it is not unheard of to do such a thing.
Since I learned the lesson, there has probably been at least 7 different times in my life, that a rule/qualification was bent or changed that benefited me, because I simply tried for it.
Yep, this is a good mentality to have. I applied to a job after graduating from college that asked for 2-5+ years of experience. I was able to cite some project experience from school and from a 4 month co-op. Was enough to get an interview, and I took it from there to get a job offer.
In many pursuits, from romantic to professional, let those in charge of choosing make the decision, don't decide for them.
As the saying goes, fortune favors the bold.
Even in the trivial. Whenever some cashier asks me if I have a coupon, I say, "No, but you can give me one if you want". It pays off enough to be worth the ten seconds it takes to say.
Since I learned the lesson, there has probably been at least 7 different times in my life, that a rule/qualification was bent or changed that benefited me, because I simply tried for it.
If you are "the wrong kind of person," the rules are much less likely to bend for you. If you are the wrong skin color, wrong gender, wrong religion, whatever, going for it can get the rules thrown in your face while everyone accuses you of being an asshole who is trying to break the rules while, at the exact same time, they make exceptions for "the right kind of people."
So, maybe consider that is what a lot of women are complaining about when they decry male privilege.
> going for it can get the rules thrown in your face while everyone accuses you of being an asshole who is trying to break the rules while,
I don't doubt discrimination exists, and if this has been your personal experience, I'm sorry.
It just seems foreign to me that someone would actually do this for a private role.
If you don't match the skill set the algorithm will filter you out before anyone even knows you exist. If you get by it clearly the reviewer saw something they liked anyway.
What recruiter is going to berate someone and call them an asshole for applying to a job they aren't qualified for? And if that was the case, I'd view it as a dodged bullet.
I was making a more general statement. I assume no recruiter would actually call you an asshole to your face, but that does not stop them from thinking you are an asshole who is trying to break the rules, while they fail to see that it works just fine that way for (insert whatever category it works for).
I have made other pertinent remarks in this same discussion that support the idea that what keeps women out is not straight up sexism in terms of "No girls allowed in the boys club." But that doesn't change the fact that women do, at times, get excluded due to their gender and it is maddening when people try to act like that simply isn't a thing at all.
The rules do get applied differently for different people. This is not just losers making excuses.
I had to convince female I know to apply for a position she wasn't exactly qualified for. She did and got the job. Women are socialized to not be as aggressive here in the US, which is a shame because there are lots of bad people in jobs just because a better woman never thought to apply.
Hate to sound like a strawman, but: why should this my problem? Unfortunately that's the nature of the game. Many software roles are like that. You just have to apply anyway. Other hidden biases women face, OK, got it, but this is a problem that occurs before any dialogue takes place.
Now whether or not that advice gets properly dispensed is another issue.
If you want to hire the best person for the job, why wouldn't you want to do what you can to avoid discouraging good candidates from even applying in the first place?
If they are so timid as to not even rise to the challenge of applying for a job with some uncertainty, how can you expect them to deal with uncertainty in the field?
Because that's a nonsensical strawman; those things aren't even related.
Personally, I see any employer advertising for a position with stricter requirements than what they'll hire as advertising their own dishonesty. It just makes them look bad.
It's mildly dishonest, but it does help you as the employer get closer to the ideal fit for the position. Especially one that is likely posted to a public forum.
The fact that candidates that pre-select themselves out of being chosen is not really a big concern. Why should it be? The way around this is knowing exactly who it is you want for the job, but in that case I wouldn't be posting the job in a public forum. It's kind of what recruiters are intended for.
They assume the job requirements are real expectations. That is not uncertainity, that is taking people by their word.
I would also point out that many good programmers don't like uncertainity (notably those with asperger), it is one of few jobs where it is a good thing. Not implying they are all rock stars, just that un certainty here is red herring.
Chief among these requirements is likely the "years of experience" line. I categorically ignore it in every job post i read. Every job post i write leaves it consciously absent.
A candidate's ability should be judged strictly on what are their abilities today and what is their perceived ceiling. While you can argue that years of experience correlates to those details, it certainly does not inform them.
Anecdotally, my most recent developer job post had an exactly 50:50 male to female applicant ratio. Without exception the women applying were juniors. If this article is to be believed, my putting even "1+ years of experience" might have arbitrarily rejected some number of otherwise qualified candidates.
Here's a question: what if I don't want to hire people like that? If you know something about underwater basket weaving I absolutely expect you speak up when we're considering switching to twine from seagrass. I don't want you to keep quiet and let us make a bad decision because you're concerned your knowledge is invalid.
Tech interview would be an answer. Quiz applicants whether they know what they claim to know. Slashdot crowd will complain and maybe write a medium article, but so what.
but what ng is saying is that if someone is lacks too much confidence they are not useful. His example shows this --- the under confidant but knowledgable person does not contribute their knowledge when needed so they are not useful despite their knowledge.
Could it be argued that not enough care is being taken by the team to solicit the thoughts of the less shouty members? If an organisation didn't want to hire or deal with said folk, perhaps it's a good thing for those looked over?
Research seems to suggest that a more diverse workforce (of all varieties) leads to more successful businesses. And my own personal experience leads me to believe that skilled folk come in some weird and wonderful packages. I know which path I would choose.
As a man who struggles with low confidence and self-esteem, I hate the way women are given special attention over this stuff.
I frequently don't apply for jobs I see that I could probably do, for all of the reasons listed in the article. A couple of times I have even pulled out after a successful first round interview due to anxiety about continuing.
This is an example of how the "women in tech" movement alienates men who would otherwise be potential allies.
Instead of focussing on women, why not leave gender out of it and focus on "low-confidence candidates" (or whatever you want to call this cohort of people). That way if it's true that women are more likely to be "low-confidence" then you'll end up helping more women anyway, but you'll do it without alienating men.
Ignoring the root cause and jumping straight to helping women is exactly what what makes feminists look like man-haters.
I'm sick of the stereotype that because I'm an oh-so-privileged white male I must have had a ridiculously easy life and be full of confidence.
> I'm an oh-so-privileged white male I must have had a ridiculously easy life
Been waiting for that privilege to kick in yet... however, after reading all those articles about women in tech and realizing that a) I tend to not negotiate and avoid conflict b) terrified (for my family's wellfare) of confronting my boss when I feel I'm being unjustly compensated\treated, c) shitting my pants when the next round of layoffs is leaked and d) being an introvert makes me not speak up as much in meetings to 'establish dominance', maybe I'm a woman after all?
Do you have any idea how insulting and dismissive you sound? You know nothing about the circumstances of his hiring, how can you possibly say his real and concrete experience was easier than that of some hypothetical woman?
One of the key points in the article was that confidence isn't the whole story.
> According to the self-report of the respondents, the barrier to applying was not lack of confidence. In fact, for both men and women, “I didn’t think I could do the job well” was the least common of all the responses.
All of the responses listed in the questionnaire loosely relate to confidence, and that's the sense in which I was using it.
Confidence means not being afraid of bluffing your way through an interview when you only have 60% of the required skills, for example. Note that more men than women didn't apply to jobs for this reason.
That's not what privilege means, it's not an on-off switch. It's just about recognizing factors out of your control that might give you slight advantages over other people. When people talk about "white privilege" they don't mean your life must be great because you're white, they mean regardless of your situation, you have more opportunities because of your skin color, which increases the odds of having a better life.
Some people take it too far, but the next time you hear someone talk about privilege, try to interpret it to mean "marginal advantage" rather than "privilege=wealth", because that's probably what they mean.
Also, "alienates men who would otherwise be potential allies" doesn't really make sense. Your support for gender equality in tech should not depend on how inclusive and understanding feminists are, it should depend on whether or not you think women deserve equal rights and access in the workplace. Obviously the world is a better place when we all work together and get along, but I think you should strive to make sure your beliefs are not affected by how much you dislike other people who share those beliefs.
This approach may work (I say "may" because most of the time it's not actually backed up by hard evidence free of confounding variables), but it's also lazy; there are vastly more accurate predictors of a priori success rate than race or gender. It's especially lazy for organizations that have access to those more accurate predictors, like universities, to use race and gender instead.
More accurate predictors include parental education, family wealth, social connections, etc. Mostly what people would describe as social class.
You don't have to pick just one though, right? Gender clearly has an effect even if it's less predictive than other factors, so why not try to account for every factor you know of?
> Your support for gender equality in tech should not depend on how inclusive and understanding feminists are
who appointed you the gatekeeper of what another thinking, feeling human being ought to think or feel?
maybe you should interpret this as a call to introspect certain trends in feminist politics and communication strategies. if someone tells you "I am feeling alienated because of X" rather than thought-police that person and tell them "no you're wrong and you WILL feel the way I tell you to feel" perhaps it would be of greater utility to consider what the other person is telling you.
I of course do not have any say over other people's feelings, and I think it's obvious that asking someone to strive for something is not the same as forcing them. But the belief that women deserve equal rights is also not just a feeling, it's a core principle that you either agree with or you don't. What I am recommending (not demanding) is that people try to separate feelings and principles, so that your morals aren't determined by who has been nice to you recently.
but what you said is "you SHOULD feel this way" not "I have a vision of a better world were we all strive for greater equality". your word choices matter.
also, while we're on the subject of communication, I would like to point out that there has been enormous and widespread political backlash that is due in no small part to the poor communication strategy by many leftist movements.
many (most?) people absolutely do agree with the proposition "women are humans just the same as men and deserve to be treated as such." a lot of those people, however, really do care about how they are spoken to. tone and language choice matters. it is not effective communication or politics to be constantly making accusatory remarks. people really do respond based on their emotions and will oppose those who have been "mean" to them recently, just because of that mood affiliation.
I mean we're all human, we all have biases, and we're all affected by interactions, so I get what you're saying. I care about how I'm spoken to as well, I don't mean to act like some superior being unaffected by human emotions. To use your phrasing, I would like to live in a world where equal rights is such a fundamental moral truth that the communication style of its supporters doesn't really matter. I too am frequently annoyed and angered by people marching under the flag of feminism, but I try my best to judge everyone's arguments on their merits rather than their fans. I think everyone would personally benefit from this, it makes life more pleasant, and that's what I wanted to say in my comment.
I would also like to live in a world where people give each other the benefit of the doubt. When you read my initial comment, did it really seem more like that I was trying to police someone's thoughts, rather than just recommending a different way of thinking? Especially on a casual internet forum, I generally try to interpret a comment in the best way I can. If someone is really intending to be an asshole then it'll become clear soon enough.
I approach stuff like this from a position of cognitive liberty. People are free and will think and feel whatever it is that they think and feel. Those thoughts and feelings inform their decisions and thus their behavior, and the behavior is what we ought to care about. Speech is a type of behavior and we ought to care about it because it influences culture and politics and everything else that arises from acts of communication.
I make one assumption, which I think is well founded (based on utility), which is that it is impossible to persuade people through direct confrontation. Effective persuasion is based on presentation of facts and ideas to those who are receptive to them, but nobody ever became receptive by being confronted directly, and that can be counter-productive. It can make a potentially receptive person become closed to persuasion. They will, in essence, deny facts (even to the point of rejecting empirical proof) and go entirely with mood affiliation and tribal loyalty.
When trying to do political communication of any kind the decision becomes a decision between trying to persuade someone or trying to "other" them and therefore signal to your in-group that they are an enemy. American political communication has really stopped trying to persuade anyone of anything and is now focused entirely on "othering". When I read your initial comment it came across as "othering". You spent a lot of words telling someone that their interpretations were wrong, that they should think and feel differently than they expressed thinking and feeling, and that their disagreement with your position was fundamentally unreasonable.
The premise of cognitive liberty is an assertion that our own thoughts and feelings are just that: our own. They may or not be rational or reasonable or even useful. They might indeed be bad ideas, that do more harm than good. Still, we are free creatures, and we are free to have those thoughts and being criticized on the grounds of what you think is an untenable argument to make because it denies that fundamental freedom.
All of this is just a long-winded way of trying to motivate my next sentences. Disagreement is natural and unavoidable and I believe it is beneficial to tolerate it in most circumstances. Othering and/or thought-policing those who disagree with us is actively harmful, and we've seen the consequences (his name is Donald). The tacit assumption that "my worldview is the best one and my morals are unassailable and those who disagree with me are irrational and/or immoral" is a serious problem. I've seen worse examples of it than your post, but your post was an example of it.
I understand what you're saying, I guess I just disagree on the significance. For me there is very little meaningful difference between "I think murder is wrong because x" and "you should think murder is wrong because x". I don't see "you should" as trying to force a thought because that would be ridiculous, it's obviously impossible to forcibly change someone's thoughts.
What I think is a much bigger problem is "you are a bad person because you don't believe x", which is quite common American politics and is very counterproductive. There's a big difference between "I hate your beliefs" and "I hate you because of your beliefs".
Basically, I agree that confrontation is not useful, I just find it hard to believe that "you should" is enough to make reasonable people close off. At least in my experience, if you're having a polite conversation with an average person, these minor phrasing choices are not very important.
Finally, as a genuine question, are "who appointed you the gatekeeper" and "maybe you should interpret this as a call to introspect" not just as if not more confrontational than whatever was in my comment? I'm not making an accusation, I had no problem with your phrasing, I just want to understand exactly what you're talking about so I can communicate better.
I was being confrontational and not trying to be persuasive. My point wasn't to change your mind but to signal to other people reading the thread that your post had some issues. I could have been more delicate about it. I'm sometimes a bit of a hypocrite. C'est la vie.
Sadly, you are showing with this post that you actually would not be a good potential ally. Seriously, by focusing the discussion on this point and in this fashion, you are literally stalling progress.
If there are problems that can be fixed, fix them. If you have concerns that we are leaving more feminine men in the back ranks, address those. But to turn the discussion into chastising people is to hurt the debate.
And I am fully sympathetic to your point. I feel that way for a lot of things. I have come to realize that at best you are falling victim to "perfect being enemy of the good" and at worst you are allowing yourself to be a weapon that the those actually abusing power use against those they are abusing their power against.
I think that good start would me not to imply he is feminine for having low confidence. For that matter, not to call guys feminine ju because they have something in them that is more likely to be found in women. It is like calling women masculine just because she likes hardware.
I think that this matter if your goal is equality. People being afraid to show side of them that is not stereotypical matters.
I appreciate your comment. I also wanted to mention the "feminine" thing but feared it would look overly sensitive. Personally I don't think confidence is a masculine or feminine quality at all.
I wouldn't call being worried about "feminine" over sensitive. I would argue it is misguided.
You may not think confidence is a masculine quality. Just google "confidence gender" and see that it is a well established thing that men are more confident than women.
Still, if you were insulted by my implying you are a more feminine man. My apologies. Insult was not intended. I do urge you to move beyond those views, though. Feminine men should be no more an insult than masculine women. Descriptions that offer no value judgement.
You are implying that feminine is somehow a bad trait. That is terribly misguided.
That is, if you want progress, stop seeing "feminine men" as somehow a derogatory statement. If you see women arguing for things that you feel you don't have as a man, realize that there is something that would have to set you apart from many men for this to be true.
Now, should overconfidence be a masculine trait? I'd argue not. But I would not place confidence on anyone claiming it is not seen that way in the present world.
It's not about whether feminine or masculine are positive or negative traits. They are labels that are being misapplied, and in this case not relevant. They do imply bias on behalf of the user, especially in a discussion oriented around male/female roles.
Better to use the terms provided, 'low confidence individuals', etc.
If we're saying that losing out on good but low-confidence candidates is a bad thing for a company, and we want to fix it, why don't we adapt our processes to favour the people being disadvantaged? If this ends up helping women more than men, then fantastic.
But why bring gender into our solution at all? Focussing on one gender just because we think they are more affected by an issue just introduces more unfairness. Focus on the issue itself.
Evidence shows that it does affect one gender more than the other. There is no "thinking" involved with this. Raw data showing that we pay women less than men is plentiful and fairly conclusive.
So, my logic here is your debate is to simply get people arguing that are on the front lines. You are the one that "thinks" you are just as affected as women in this. If you truly feel that you want to help, drop your self persecution and help.
Again, do I think you are purposely sidelining actual progress? No. I doubt that. However, I do think discussing what are feminine and masculine traits is a distraction. And the most likely outcome from the position you are advertising.
I'm sorry for your situation but articles like these are looking at trends across groups. They're not meant to insinuate that every man is in a better position than every woman. The article talks about surveying 1,000+ men and women. Undoubtedly, some of the men in that sample had less confidence than some of the women. It doesn't make it invalid to analyze statistics across the group overall.
why doesn't it make it invalid? there are many situations where considering the mean is so deeply distorting as to make any conclusions drawn from it either unreasonable or outright false.
I think calls for greater clarity and attention to detail when doing data analysis are well-considered and we should be _deeply suspect_ of claims made based on statistical aggregates, and particularly the mean average which is one of the most distorting and lossy aggregates there is.
I don't argue that statistical analysis can be distorting, in fact, of course it can be. All data collection of any sort is at best a limited picture of what we think is reality. But that doesn't make aggregates useless because outliers exist. Just because Stanford freshman swimmer Katie Ledecky is faster than some Olympic gold medal-winning mens relay teams [0] doesn't invalidate the observation that the average man is a faster swimmer than the average woman.
In the GP, I don't think he's making a "well-considered" call for "greater clarity." He's using the fact that because he lacks self-confidence, that focusing on women as a group is bullshit, as if the purported problems that women face are only substantial once it can be proven that all women are worse than all men.
>as if the purported problems that women face are only substantial once it can be proven that all women are worse than all men.
This is a total misrepresentation of what I'm saying. I'm more than fine with women being helped. What I'm saying is, don't do it in a way that excludes men with the same problem.
Where does this article exclude men with the same problem? You're mad because this article focuses on what the author found interesting in her survey of professionals, a survey she conducted because she was initially skeptical of a widely-quoted aphorism from pop best-sellers like Lean In?
The article's author decided to challenge that belief with a systematic analysis and she reports that it is not confidence that is the main factor. Yet you choose to interpret the problem as self-confidence because you, yourself, feel a lack of confidence. Furthermore, you accuse the author of excluding men, because you choose to see her efforts as a zero-sum game.
Lots of men have a shitty time in the workforce, in life, or whatever, and individually they probably don't do as well as a given woman. But that's not the point.
None of these broad trends mean anything when you look at an individual. The individual is a molecule in a gas.
(And I can't quite figure out why someone would read a piece on trends and immediately go to "but what about MEEE?" ... the whole thing is based on large-scale data, not the individual, so what about you? Nothing about you. This isn't about you.)
Both variations are insightful; I like using Wolfinger's because it is an accurate observation that all data start out as anecdotes, and are influenced/distorted by the collection and filtering process. Still, this also implies that one outlying anecdote is not enough evidence alone to dismiss the aggregate findings across all of the other anecdotes.
Gender has a bit to do with it currently tho. I have met people who openly questioned my choice of career based on gender and stopped only when I proved myself - that made me assume I am less likely to suceed by bluffing like many guys do. I still think so.
You don't have that factor, through your condition sounds pretty bad.
Rather than being upset that the focus is on women, why don't you be grateful that there's so much attention given to the problems people experience due to low confidence and self-esteem, and use the various bits of advice given "for women" to help your own situation too?
Trying to help one group doesn't mean you're trying to hurt another group. Focusing on women doesn't make someone anti-men. That's what groups like "all lives matter" fail to understand, and what you don't seem to get here.
It's much easier to make a study comparing women to men than one comparing "low self-confidence people" to "highly-confident people".
Helping in the form of advice to the job seekers: as Mike said, the advice applies equally to the men in the same situation.
Helping in the form of making employers aware, so they can optimize their job descriptions: It incidentally helps men of low self-confidence too. Notice, tough, that being socialized into assuming a requirement is hard instead of "not really" isn't the same as not being confident. And that some commenters here are defending that a candidate that lacks the confidence to even apply for a job isn't worth their time considering.
Let me ask the opposite question: why does it bother you that they bring gender into it?
As for why they do it, it's because women have historically been oppressed, and a lot of people now try to pretend like it's all over and done with when it clearly is not.
Does it even matter why? They do. It's there. You can be thankful for what they're doing to draw attention to problems you face, or you can be upset that they haven't explicitly included you in the group they focus on. I don't see why you'd pick the latter.
The article says the exact opposite of what you are complaining about. It says women do not lack confidence, they lack good information about how hiring works.
I did read the article. Maybe I'm using a loose definition of "confidence" but it still all comes down to confidence. Applying to a job when you don't strictly meet the guidelines is a form of confidence.
Side note: I noticed the article was quoting tired old tropes like "women are socialised to follow the rules", without evidence.
I am generally sympathetic to your view that a lot of women do things that actively alienate men, but you come across here as having baggage and just wanting to vent, not discuss the actual points of this actual article.
So, I think this is sort of the pot calling the kettle black.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but can you provide examples of how privileged men are? Specifically, can you provide examples of how the person you responded to is privileged without meeting them? Can you also please cite reputable sources?
This is the other source of alienation. Enforcing guilt onto someone based on how they were born (e.g. Gender, race). The last time I checked, this is outright bigotry. How about this, instead of trying to say that everyone is guilty, highlight that everyone has potential to be guilty, and a few are utilizing this so called birthright of privilege to exploit minority groups. Men have been lining up to be allies, and groups are right alongside them telling them they are not good enough.
the phrase is made as an accusation. "you benefited from privilege" which means "you have unearned advantages" which means "you don't deserve what you have".
There's an overwhelming amount of evidence, you could put the slightest bit of effort into looking it up. Being privileged isn't something that takes effort or one is guilty of. Let's say I'm 6' 4"; it's intrinsically easier for me to reach things high up. That's a privilege. I'll spend 3 minutes on Google then I need to get back to work.
There is no guilt involved. The whole concept of "privilege" is about factors out of your control, nobody should feel guilty for being white or male or anything else, and I'm sorry if someone gave you that impression.
And as I said in another comment, it's not an on-off switch. "Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life. There are obviously many other factors in and out of your control, so just being male is not enough to guarantee comfort and happiness, but it's still worth recognizing the marginal advantages.
As a concept "privilege" is useless except as rhetoric to get what you want against your supposedly more privileged enemies.
I think your defending language is sloppy here: ""Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life."
That's not what it is supposed to mean at all, it's supposed to mean men on average (not you as a man on average) have better opportunities etc., and that on observing that you are a man, knowing nothing else about you, I can infer in a bayesian way that you are more likely than not to have better opportunities etc. There are many things I can infer depending on what my priors are and what I learn about you. But when dealing with individuals, priors on such broad factors like race/gender/religion become useless very quickly since you learn so many more specific details about the individual that are far more important than those broad attributes. Additionally not all attributes have the same distribution. So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average? Distributions matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet
Drilling into the concept, "privilege" is nothing more than "attributes" we happen to find external positive correlations for. There are many, many such attributes, people are multi-dimensional complex beings, and there are many attribute combinations that interfere both constructively and destructively. What annoys me more than "privilege" advocates focusing so much on broad attributes like gender (and trying to instill feelings of guilt -- you might not do it but it is very common) is ignoring the equally valid concept of "detriment" (except sometimes in the special case of having "not this privilege"), i.e. attributes for which you can find negative correlations. Note that many attributes have both! Being tall is nice because you can reach high things, but sucks because flying anywhere is basically mini-torture. And there are many more positive and negative correlations I can list, just for being tall. This gives me prior information for inference when I observe a tall person, but my inferences should not be very strong because of all the other attributes I don't know about or am not considering.
I agree with pretty much everything in this comment, except the word "enemies". We're discussing emergent trends in society that can't be blamed on any group of (living) individuals, it doesn't have to be framed as a conflict.
I guess I don't really see where we disagree. Of course there's more to life than your gender, of course other things matter, of course these various attributes are complicated and aren't purely beneficial. None of this means we have to stop talking about gender, it's not like nobody talks about class and education and culture and whatever else. All of it matters, we should talk about all of it.
Can you expand on this point:
> So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average?
I haven't really done any statistics since high school so I'm probably missing your point.
Where we disagree is probably in using the language of "privilege" and related concepts. I see no point to it, and it's probably harmful in the long run. It's imprecise (typically dealing only with vague averages), ignores detriments, ignores privileges when they imply the existence of detriments (i.e. there is certainly female privilege, but it is often ignored because that implies that some male privilege could be counter-balanced to some extent by some male detriment, i.e. not being a female), applies poorly to individuals (because they are so multi-dimensional), ignores complicated combinations in favor of simple ones that seem only to infer positive correlation (white cis male etc...), and is championed most loudly by means of pathos appeals. Why bother with that framework?
I don't think we should stop talking about gender, or class, or race, but we ought to be more careful about it, especially when we try to assign causes, and especially when we talk about individuals. Focus more on ethos and logos. Use full data sets, talk about positive and negative, talk about interference both constructive and destructive. Make predictions and update when your predictions are falsified. Make predictions about data before you look at the data to see if your priors are well-calibrated. Talk about consequences more than feelings.
For the last point, it's mostly a complaint about using a (mean) average for everything without considering whether the underlying distribution makes such a statistic worthwhile to use or not. Consider a block of houses valued roughly the same amount, then some rich dude comes in, knocks one down, builds a towering mega-house that hits the limits of what is legally allowed, and then sells it to some other rich dude. His house has bumped the (mean) average house value of the neighborhood up considerably, but no house in the neighborhood is actually worth the average. Talking about the (mean) average is then pretty useless, and no one is (literally) going to buy into one of the normal houses being worth the average of the neighborhood. The median average is much more useful, at least for property values. But even then you'll want to look at the full distribution to say whether the median is really more useful or not, and when you're buying or selling a specific individual house, you're going to want even more details about that specific house that could drastically change the valuation one way or another.
Do you have any suggestions for how to communicate this stuff better? I certainly understand objections to a slogan like "equal pay for equal work" or "check your privilege" or whatever, but I also understand that there are real issues affecting millions of people and discussing statistical nuances is probably not the most efficient way to solve them. I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm honestly wondering if you've seen any more effective approaches or have any ideas.
If the goal is communication and truth-seeking, communicating and arguing through logos and ethos work better than through pathos, so try to move things in that direction if you can, personally I just try to not produce emotional discourse in the first place and try to not engage with it when I see it.
For logos, the parties involved need to understand statistical nuances and basic probability theory if they hope to use data and studies as evidence of anything in a serious manner, otherwise they're just using someone else's authority -- which isn't necessarily bad but it's important to know yourself when you have understood at least some of the details and can see the logic yourself versus taking the study authors' word for it, or worse the media's representation of it. Brighter folks should especially understand that deductive fallacies are not necessarily probabilistic fallacies (often they can be turned to probabilistic theorems) so that discussions can flow without someone raising a fallacy and declaring victory, ruining the conversation. Another important skill is the ability to assume the other side is right, or to assume their solution is implemented, and work through what you think the consequences are, the state-changes to the world, and see if you can find something that isn't desired or perhaps to your surprise cannot find anything really distasteful. This requires a solution to be sufficiently detailed, which is also helpful -- something to help clarification is to taboo words. When I see someone use 'fascist' in any context I just replace it with 'bad'; if I were actually arguing with them I'd ask them to taboo the word 'fascist' and describe their thing without that word. In tech I've seen some PMs throw around "machine learning" like it's some seasoning that can be applied to create their product, the engineers end up having to taboo "ML" in order to figure out what exactly they're implementing in order to do what.
Ethos is important because it will clarify everyone's relative personal experience, and if it's clear that's what is being done then we can stave off remarks like "anecdotes aren't data!" Similarly it can clarify people's moral perspectives. I don't find anything wrong with having vastly less (or even vastly more were that the case) women in STEM than men, knowing that you could avoid certain lines of argument and pursue others in some related discussion, but more importantly a conversation to tease out moral views lets each party know what the other considers a real issue or not and the level of urgency perceived. It would also be useful to try working out moral consequences to various actions. If you could implement some policy that would seem to benefit the welfare of ice rink sweepers everywhere right now, you might do it, but what if you had evidence from the future that the welfare of ice rink sweepers had actually decreased pretty steadily in the decades since the policy was introduced? Did you work through consequences, logical and ethical, out to at least one generation? (I always thought the Iroquois' seven generations was a bit excessive...)
If the goal is efficiently solving what you see are the big problems, you need to have power to implement a solution or influence over someone who does. You're mostly wasting time talking to small fry like me on the internet. Even if they might help come up with solutions, everyone's got solutions to things already, even if most of them won't work. But no matter, if you think you have a shot at fixing your issues, you need the ability to do the fix, even if you aren't confident what your fix is yet. Arguing through pathos works very well to get a large mass of people on your side, and having a large mass of people on your side is an effective way to get and use power. Then you either implement what you think is good or take some time to talk to the rational folks about wh...
The "privilege" slinging used to belittle the accomplishments of people based on birth attributes _is_ rather obnoxious. To pretend that, for example, women are universally less privileged than men is of course ridiculous. Paris Hilton is clearly more privileged than a low-income boy growing up in Flint, Michigan.
Obviously true. Women as a group are shorter than men as group, but some women are taller than some men. That seems so trivially obvious as to not bear mentioning.
But, there's a substantial amount of evidence that if you pair up a woman and man in the same situation, the man in contemporary society has a lot of intrinsic advantages. He has easier access to relevant education and social networks. His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
>But, there's a substantial amount of evidence that if you pair up a woman and man in the same situation, the man in contemporary society has a lot of intrinsic advantages.
Are there no advantages women possess in contemporary society?
>He has easier access to relevant education
Women are significantly more likely to go be college educated than men. What "relevant education" are you referring to?
>His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
I agree! This is a complete embarrassment (especially in STEM fields).
edit: I want to be clear—I am in complete agreement that there are many problems women face in society (especially in the workforce). My grumble is the over-simplification of it. I think we'd be more effective in addressing these problems if we spoke accurately about them. Complaining about the privilege of people based on their DNA is not helpful.
You realize there's actually a severe gender imbalance in who chooses to go into STEM fields in college, right?
Privige has nothing to do with it; for whatever reasons, women don't actually want to study tech fields. I actually find it pretty ridiculous and patronizing that people like you insist that there's something wrong with the world because women don't make the career choices you think they ought to.
Would you please not take HN threads on generic tangents? That, combined with combative snark, guarantees an unproductive flamewar. The issues are important and deserve thoughtful discussion from personal experience. When you post like this, you make that impossible in exchange for scoring ideological points—a bad trade.
What held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process.
This is critical, because it suggests that if the HP finding speaks to a larger trend, women don’t need to try and find that elusive quality, “confidence,” they just need better information about how hiring processes really work.
This fits exactly with my experience in terms of being female seems to have somehow denied me certain kinds of information, skills and experience that are critical to getting things done. If I can somehow access that info, then I start getting stuff done more on par with the guys.
It has nothing to do with suggesting women lack confidence or are filled with anxiety. In fact, the article is basically rebutting that idea.
The "old boy network" isn't just literally about knowing the other "old boys" (though that's obviously important), it's about a shared understanding of how things actually work, as opposed to how the publicly-exposed information says things work. So just networking with people isn't enough--you need to know the unspoken reality of how to make further progress.
(This from someone who has painfully learned not to take any rule or process literally in the real world. There's a reason I like computers.)
I agree. But in a predominantly heterosexual world, simply being female makes it hard to access that info. Many of the men who have that knowledge only want to talk to me in order to determine if I will sleep with them. (So if they are faithfully married, they may just not want to talk to me.) That's a genuine barrier to gaining that knowledge.
But I have found it helpful to focus on finding a way to get access to the information I need rather than just bellyaching about "sexism."
My comment wasn't directed at you, but at people who seem to feel that simply exposing someone to the literal subject matter of an industry, whatever it might be ("Learn to code!" "Get an MBA!" etc.), is sufficient to bring them in.
In reality the "in" crowd can't just do that, pat itself on the back for being so "inclusive" this week, and continue with business as usual. Overcoming unconscious cultural biases to actually bring people into the "success network" requires a lot more commitment than that.
The good news is, some people are really trying. But there are still plenty of people who are too lazy, don't understand the problem, or don't care.
This is why job descriptions shouldn't require a hard set of qualifications, but preferences (e.g. strong background in scripting, exposure to database systems, comfort using git, deep understanding of object-oriented development).
Potentially strong employees don't want to get where they are by lying or stretching the truth.
I mean every single qualification I put on my job reqs. I also know from experience I'm not going to find that person. If I hire you, I'll pay you to learn the rest of the things.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAh, I had not. Landing a job I don't know how to do 2/5ths of sounds awful.
Then don't be an engineer?
Seriously, an engineer's job is to invent new things that no one has done before, and tell other people how to reliably build more of them. If you start a project with a 100% clear vision of how to get to the end, then you are already behind your competition.
Not knowing how to do 40%, and not being intimidated by 95%, seems like about the right mix.
Job advertisement: Immediate requirement for an illusionist/escapist. Must have 15 years experience in inverted underwater lockpicking. Nice to have some experience in juggling chainsaws.
Job reality: You do coin and card tricks at children's birthday parties.
Even if the job does require something you don't know, it is very likely that--no matter what it is--you could spend a few hours on the Internet learning how to fake it well enough to fool anyone short of an actual expert until you get the real on-the-job experience.
The next position that I'm waiting for a written job offer for: I don't know the language, haven't ever developed on the OS, and I'll be looking at 15 years of legacy code. It sounds like an exciting opportunity to expand my knowledge on someone else's time and do something I haven't done before.
Granted, I never would've applied on my own; they contacted me through LinkedIn. But that kind of thing is how I expect I'll find all my work in the foreseeable future.
There was a point in college that I didn't apply for a scholarship because I didn't have the 3.0 GPA requirement at the time, I had like a 2.95
About 7 months later I found out that a student with a 2.2 GPA had received the scholarship because so few people had applied, they were able to give them to everyone who applied, regardless of qualifications. That was the moment I realized that not everything is written in stone and even if you don't stand a chance, you still should make an attempt at pursuing things.
Indirectly, since then I have encouraged all my friends, both men and women to apply for jobs or things that they are interested in, regardless of qualifications. Sometimes interest/passion alone can help get you a job, or perhaps they will create a more junior position just for you; it is not unheard of to do such a thing.
Since I learned the lesson, there has probably been at least 7 different times in my life, that a rule/qualification was bent or changed that benefited me, because I simply tried for it.
If you are "the wrong kind of person," the rules are much less likely to bend for you. If you are the wrong skin color, wrong gender, wrong religion, whatever, going for it can get the rules thrown in your face while everyone accuses you of being an asshole who is trying to break the rules while, at the exact same time, they make exceptions for "the right kind of people."
So, maybe consider that is what a lot of women are complaining about when they decry male privilege.
I don't doubt discrimination exists, and if this has been your personal experience, I'm sorry.
It just seems foreign to me that someone would actually do this for a private role.
If you don't match the skill set the algorithm will filter you out before anyone even knows you exist. If you get by it clearly the reviewer saw something they liked anyway.
What recruiter is going to berate someone and call them an asshole for applying to a job they aren't qualified for? And if that was the case, I'd view it as a dodged bullet.
I have made other pertinent remarks in this same discussion that support the idea that what keeps women out is not straight up sexism in terms of "No girls allowed in the boys club." But that doesn't change the fact that women do, at times, get excluded due to their gender and it is maddening when people try to act like that simply isn't a thing at all.
The rules do get applied differently for different people. This is not just losers making excuses.
Now whether or not that advice gets properly dispensed is another issue.
Personally, I see any employer advertising for a position with stricter requirements than what they'll hire as advertising their own dishonesty. It just makes them look bad.
The fact that candidates that pre-select themselves out of being chosen is not really a big concern. Why should it be? The way around this is knowing exactly who it is you want for the job, but in that case I wouldn't be posting the job in a public forum. It's kind of what recruiters are intended for.
I would also point out that many good programmers don't like uncertainity (notably those with asperger), it is one of few jobs where it is a good thing. Not implying they are all rock stars, just that un certainty here is red herring.
A candidate's ability should be judged strictly on what are their abilities today and what is their perceived ceiling. While you can argue that years of experience correlates to those details, it certainly does not inform them.
Anecdotally, my most recent developer job post had an exactly 50:50 male to female applicant ratio. Without exception the women applying were juniors. If this article is to be believed, my putting even "1+ years of experience" might have arbitrarily rejected some number of otherwise qualified candidates.
Could it be argued that not enough care is being taken by the team to solicit the thoughts of the less shouty members? If an organisation didn't want to hire or deal with said folk, perhaps it's a good thing for those looked over?
Research seems to suggest that a more diverse workforce (of all varieties) leads to more successful businesses. And my own personal experience leads me to believe that skilled folk come in some weird and wonderful packages. I know which path I would choose.
I frequently don't apply for jobs I see that I could probably do, for all of the reasons listed in the article. A couple of times I have even pulled out after a successful first round interview due to anxiety about continuing.
This is an example of how the "women in tech" movement alienates men who would otherwise be potential allies.
Instead of focussing on women, why not leave gender out of it and focus on "low-confidence candidates" (or whatever you want to call this cohort of people). That way if it's true that women are more likely to be "low-confidence" then you'll end up helping more women anyway, but you'll do it without alienating men.
Ignoring the root cause and jumping straight to helping women is exactly what what makes feminists look like man-haters.
I'm sick of the stereotype that because I'm an oh-so-privileged white male I must have had a ridiculously easy life and be full of confidence.
Been waiting for that privilege to kick in yet... however, after reading all those articles about women in tech and realizing that a) I tend to not negotiate and avoid conflict b) terrified (for my family's wellfare) of confronting my boss when I feel I'm being unjustly compensated\treated, c) shitting my pants when the next round of layoffs is leaked and d) being an introvert makes me not speak up as much in meetings to 'establish dominance', maybe I'm a woman after all?
Look at yourself. You got the job, right? You don't want to admit this to yourself, but it was easier for you than a woman.
Based on what evidence do you make this claim? I'm not saying this isn't the case, but can you provide evidence?
Been working like an ass my whole life. If I only knew how easy it actually would have been.. :(
> According to the self-report of the respondents, the barrier to applying was not lack of confidence. In fact, for both men and women, “I didn’t think I could do the job well” was the least common of all the responses.
Confidence means not being afraid of bluffing your way through an interview when you only have 60% of the required skills, for example. Note that more men than women didn't apply to jobs for this reason.
If companies work to eliminate the low-confidence barrier in hiring it will benefit you as side-effect.
Some people take it too far, but the next time you hear someone talk about privilege, try to interpret it to mean "marginal advantage" rather than "privilege=wealth", because that's probably what they mean.
Also, "alienates men who would otherwise be potential allies" doesn't really make sense. Your support for gender equality in tech should not depend on how inclusive and understanding feminists are, it should depend on whether or not you think women deserve equal rights and access in the workplace. Obviously the world is a better place when we all work together and get along, but I think you should strive to make sure your beliefs are not affected by how much you dislike other people who share those beliefs.
More accurate predictors include parental education, family wealth, social connections, etc. Mostly what people would describe as social class.
who appointed you the gatekeeper of what another thinking, feeling human being ought to think or feel?
maybe you should interpret this as a call to introspect certain trends in feminist politics and communication strategies. if someone tells you "I am feeling alienated because of X" rather than thought-police that person and tell them "no you're wrong and you WILL feel the way I tell you to feel" perhaps it would be of greater utility to consider what the other person is telling you.
also, while we're on the subject of communication, I would like to point out that there has been enormous and widespread political backlash that is due in no small part to the poor communication strategy by many leftist movements.
many (most?) people absolutely do agree with the proposition "women are humans just the same as men and deserve to be treated as such." a lot of those people, however, really do care about how they are spoken to. tone and language choice matters. it is not effective communication or politics to be constantly making accusatory remarks. people really do respond based on their emotions and will oppose those who have been "mean" to them recently, just because of that mood affiliation.
I would also like to live in a world where people give each other the benefit of the doubt. When you read my initial comment, did it really seem more like that I was trying to police someone's thoughts, rather than just recommending a different way of thinking? Especially on a casual internet forum, I generally try to interpret a comment in the best way I can. If someone is really intending to be an asshole then it'll become clear soon enough.
I make one assumption, which I think is well founded (based on utility), which is that it is impossible to persuade people through direct confrontation. Effective persuasion is based on presentation of facts and ideas to those who are receptive to them, but nobody ever became receptive by being confronted directly, and that can be counter-productive. It can make a potentially receptive person become closed to persuasion. They will, in essence, deny facts (even to the point of rejecting empirical proof) and go entirely with mood affiliation and tribal loyalty.
When trying to do political communication of any kind the decision becomes a decision between trying to persuade someone or trying to "other" them and therefore signal to your in-group that they are an enemy. American political communication has really stopped trying to persuade anyone of anything and is now focused entirely on "othering". When I read your initial comment it came across as "othering". You spent a lot of words telling someone that their interpretations were wrong, that they should think and feel differently than they expressed thinking and feeling, and that their disagreement with your position was fundamentally unreasonable.
The premise of cognitive liberty is an assertion that our own thoughts and feelings are just that: our own. They may or not be rational or reasonable or even useful. They might indeed be bad ideas, that do more harm than good. Still, we are free creatures, and we are free to have those thoughts and being criticized on the grounds of what you think is an untenable argument to make because it denies that fundamental freedom.
All of this is just a long-winded way of trying to motivate my next sentences. Disagreement is natural and unavoidable and I believe it is beneficial to tolerate it in most circumstances. Othering and/or thought-policing those who disagree with us is actively harmful, and we've seen the consequences (his name is Donald). The tacit assumption that "my worldview is the best one and my morals are unassailable and those who disagree with me are irrational and/or immoral" is a serious problem. I've seen worse examples of it than your post, but your post was an example of it.
What I think is a much bigger problem is "you are a bad person because you don't believe x", which is quite common American politics and is very counterproductive. There's a big difference between "I hate your beliefs" and "I hate you because of your beliefs".
Basically, I agree that confrontation is not useful, I just find it hard to believe that "you should" is enough to make reasonable people close off. At least in my experience, if you're having a polite conversation with an average person, these minor phrasing choices are not very important.
Finally, as a genuine question, are "who appointed you the gatekeeper" and "maybe you should interpret this as a call to introspect" not just as if not more confrontational than whatever was in my comment? I'm not making an accusation, I had no problem with your phrasing, I just want to understand exactly what you're talking about so I can communicate better.
If there are problems that can be fixed, fix them. If you have concerns that we are leaving more feminine men in the back ranks, address those. But to turn the discussion into chastising people is to hurt the debate.
And I am fully sympathetic to your point. I feel that way for a lot of things. I have come to realize that at best you are falling victim to "perfect being enemy of the good" and at worst you are allowing yourself to be a weapon that the those actually abusing power use against those they are abusing their power against.
I think that this matter if your goal is equality. People being afraid to show side of them that is not stereotypical matters.
You may not think confidence is a masculine quality. Just google "confidence gender" and see that it is a well established thing that men are more confident than women.
Still, if you were insulted by my implying you are a more feminine man. My apologies. Insult was not intended. I do urge you to move beyond those views, though. Feminine men should be no more an insult than masculine women. Descriptions that offer no value judgement.
That is, if you want progress, stop seeing "feminine men" as somehow a derogatory statement. If you see women arguing for things that you feel you don't have as a man, realize that there is something that would have to set you apart from many men for this to be true.
Now, should overconfidence be a masculine trait? I'd argue not. But I would not place confidence on anyone claiming it is not seen that way in the present world.
Better to use the terms provided, 'low confidence individuals', etc.
If we're saying that losing out on good but low-confidence candidates is a bad thing for a company, and we want to fix it, why don't we adapt our processes to favour the people being disadvantaged? If this ends up helping women more than men, then fantastic.
But why bring gender into our solution at all? Focussing on one gender just because we think they are more affected by an issue just introduces more unfairness. Focus on the issue itself.
So, my logic here is your debate is to simply get people arguing that are on the front lines. You are the one that "thinks" you are just as affected as women in this. If you truly feel that you want to help, drop your self persecution and help.
Again, do I think you are purposely sidelining actual progress? No. I doubt that. However, I do think discussing what are feminine and masculine traits is a distraction. And the most likely outcome from the position you are advertising.
I think calls for greater clarity and attention to detail when doing data analysis are well-considered and we should be _deeply suspect_ of claims made based on statistical aggregates, and particularly the mean average which is one of the most distorting and lossy aggregates there is.
In the GP, I don't think he's making a "well-considered" call for "greater clarity." He's using the fact that because he lacks self-confidence, that focusing on women as a group is bullshit, as if the purported problems that women face are only substantial once it can be proven that all women are worse than all men.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/katie-ledecky-is-the-pr...
This is a total misrepresentation of what I'm saying. I'm more than fine with women being helped. What I'm saying is, don't do it in a way that excludes men with the same problem.
The article's author decided to challenge that belief with a systematic analysis and she reports that it is not confidence that is the main factor. Yet you choose to interpret the problem as self-confidence because you, yourself, feel a lack of confidence. Furthermore, you accuse the author of excluding men, because you choose to see her efforts as a zero-sum game.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Lots of men have a shitty time in the workforce, in life, or whatever, and individually they probably don't do as well as a given woman. But that's not the point.
None of these broad trends mean anything when you look at an individual. The individual is a molecule in a gas.
(And I can't quite figure out why someone would read a piece on trends and immediately go to "but what about MEEE?" ... the whole thing is based on large-scale data, not the individual, so what about you? Nothing about you. This isn't about you.)
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080523225000/http://listserv.l...
Both variations are insightful; I like using Wolfinger's because it is an accurate observation that all data start out as anecdotes, and are influenced/distorted by the collection and filtering process. Still, this also implies that one outlying anecdote is not enough evidence alone to dismiss the aggregate findings across all of the other anecdotes.
You don't have that factor, through your condition sounds pretty bad.
Trying to help one group doesn't mean you're trying to hurt another group. Focusing on women doesn't make someone anti-men. That's what groups like "all lives matter" fail to understand, and what you don't seem to get here.
If we have collectively decided that helping people with low self-confidence is a good thing, why not leave it at that?
If more women than men get helped in the process, then I'm fine with that.
Helping in the form of advice to the job seekers: as Mike said, the advice applies equally to the men in the same situation.
Helping in the form of making employers aware, so they can optimize their job descriptions: It incidentally helps men of low self-confidence too. Notice, tough, that being socialized into assuming a requirement is hard instead of "not really" isn't the same as not being confident. And that some commenters here are defending that a candidate that lacks the confidence to even apply for a job isn't worth their time considering.
As for why they do it, it's because women have historically been oppressed, and a lot of people now try to pretend like it's all over and done with when it clearly is not.
Does it even matter why? They do. It's there. You can be thankful for what they're doing to draw attention to problems you face, or you can be upset that they haven't explicitly included you in the group they focus on. I don't see why you'd pick the latter.
Side note: I noticed the article was quoting tired old tropes like "women are socialised to follow the rules", without evidence.
So, I think this is sort of the pot calling the kettle black.
there isn't a single, unified thing that is "a feminist". however, some factions that call themselves feminists are legitimately man-haters.
So this is more about you making assumption
You realize you are privileged, in so many ways, whether or not you want to recognize it, right?
Agree.
>You realize you are privileged, in so many ways, whether or not you want to recognize it
Have you met the person above to make that comment?
Low confidence/self-esteem is not a gender specific problem.
How?
This is the other source of alienation. Enforcing guilt onto someone based on how they were born (e.g. Gender, race). The last time I checked, this is outright bigotry. How about this, instead of trying to say that everyone is guilty, highlight that everyone has potential to be guilty, and a few are utilizing this so called birthright of privilege to exploit minority groups. Men have been lining up to be allies, and groups are right alongside them telling them they are not good enough.
I think you can recognize being privileged without feeling responsible (or guilty) for its existence.
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500693.2015.11...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
For starters though, try this dumb little quiz (not that I expect it will change your mind):
https://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you
And as I said in another comment, it's not an on-off switch. "Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life. There are obviously many other factors in and out of your control, so just being male is not enough to guarantee comfort and happiness, but it's still worth recognizing the marginal advantages.
I think your defending language is sloppy here: ""Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life."
That's not what it is supposed to mean at all, it's supposed to mean men on average (not you as a man on average) have better opportunities etc., and that on observing that you are a man, knowing nothing else about you, I can infer in a bayesian way that you are more likely than not to have better opportunities etc. There are many things I can infer depending on what my priors are and what I learn about you. But when dealing with individuals, priors on such broad factors like race/gender/religion become useless very quickly since you learn so many more specific details about the individual that are far more important than those broad attributes. Additionally not all attributes have the same distribution. So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average? Distributions matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet
Drilling into the concept, "privilege" is nothing more than "attributes" we happen to find external positive correlations for. There are many, many such attributes, people are multi-dimensional complex beings, and there are many attribute combinations that interfere both constructively and destructively. What annoys me more than "privilege" advocates focusing so much on broad attributes like gender (and trying to instill feelings of guilt -- you might not do it but it is very common) is ignoring the equally valid concept of "detriment" (except sometimes in the special case of having "not this privilege"), i.e. attributes for which you can find negative correlations. Note that many attributes have both! Being tall is nice because you can reach high things, but sucks because flying anywhere is basically mini-torture. And there are many more positive and negative correlations I can list, just for being tall. This gives me prior information for inference when I observe a tall person, but my inferences should not be very strong because of all the other attributes I don't know about or am not considering.
I guess I don't really see where we disagree. Of course there's more to life than your gender, of course other things matter, of course these various attributes are complicated and aren't purely beneficial. None of this means we have to stop talking about gender, it's not like nobody talks about class and education and culture and whatever else. All of it matters, we should talk about all of it.
Can you expand on this point:
> So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average?
I haven't really done any statistics since high school so I'm probably missing your point.
I don't think we should stop talking about gender, or class, or race, but we ought to be more careful about it, especially when we try to assign causes, and especially when we talk about individuals. Focus more on ethos and logos. Use full data sets, talk about positive and negative, talk about interference both constructive and destructive. Make predictions and update when your predictions are falsified. Make predictions about data before you look at the data to see if your priors are well-calibrated. Talk about consequences more than feelings.
For the last point, it's mostly a complaint about using a (mean) average for everything without considering whether the underlying distribution makes such a statistic worthwhile to use or not. Consider a block of houses valued roughly the same amount, then some rich dude comes in, knocks one down, builds a towering mega-house that hits the limits of what is legally allowed, and then sells it to some other rich dude. His house has bumped the (mean) average house value of the neighborhood up considerably, but no house in the neighborhood is actually worth the average. Talking about the (mean) average is then pretty useless, and no one is (literally) going to buy into one of the normal houses being worth the average of the neighborhood. The median average is much more useful, at least for property values. But even then you'll want to look at the full distribution to say whether the median is really more useful or not, and when you're buying or selling a specific individual house, you're going to want even more details about that specific house that could drastically change the valuation one way or another.
For logos, the parties involved need to understand statistical nuances and basic probability theory if they hope to use data and studies as evidence of anything in a serious manner, otherwise they're just using someone else's authority -- which isn't necessarily bad but it's important to know yourself when you have understood at least some of the details and can see the logic yourself versus taking the study authors' word for it, or worse the media's representation of it. Brighter folks should especially understand that deductive fallacies are not necessarily probabilistic fallacies (often they can be turned to probabilistic theorems) so that discussions can flow without someone raising a fallacy and declaring victory, ruining the conversation. Another important skill is the ability to assume the other side is right, or to assume their solution is implemented, and work through what you think the consequences are, the state-changes to the world, and see if you can find something that isn't desired or perhaps to your surprise cannot find anything really distasteful. This requires a solution to be sufficiently detailed, which is also helpful -- something to help clarification is to taboo words. When I see someone use 'fascist' in any context I just replace it with 'bad'; if I were actually arguing with them I'd ask them to taboo the word 'fascist' and describe their thing without that word. In tech I've seen some PMs throw around "machine learning" like it's some seasoning that can be applied to create their product, the engineers end up having to taboo "ML" in order to figure out what exactly they're implementing in order to do what.
Ethos is important because it will clarify everyone's relative personal experience, and if it's clear that's what is being done then we can stave off remarks like "anecdotes aren't data!" Similarly it can clarify people's moral perspectives. I don't find anything wrong with having vastly less (or even vastly more were that the case) women in STEM than men, knowing that you could avoid certain lines of argument and pursue others in some related discussion, but more importantly a conversation to tease out moral views lets each party know what the other considers a real issue or not and the level of urgency perceived. It would also be useful to try working out moral consequences to various actions. If you could implement some policy that would seem to benefit the welfare of ice rink sweepers everywhere right now, you might do it, but what if you had evidence from the future that the welfare of ice rink sweepers had actually decreased pretty steadily in the decades since the policy was introduced? Did you work through consequences, logical and ethical, out to at least one generation? (I always thought the Iroquois' seven generations was a bit excessive...)
If the goal is efficiently solving what you see are the big problems, you need to have power to implement a solution or influence over someone who does. You're mostly wasting time talking to small fry like me on the internet. Even if they might help come up with solutions, everyone's got solutions to things already, even if most of them won't work. But no matter, if you think you have a shot at fixing your issues, you need the ability to do the fix, even if you aren't confident what your fix is yet. Arguing through pathos works very well to get a large mass of people on your side, and having a large mass of people on your side is an effective way to get and use power. Then you either implement what you think is good or take some time to talk to the rational folks about wh...
The "privilege" slinging used to belittle the accomplishments of people based on birth attributes _is_ rather obnoxious. To pretend that, for example, women are universally less privileged than men is of course ridiculous. Paris Hilton is clearly more privileged than a low-income boy growing up in Flint, Michigan.
But, there's a substantial amount of evidence that if you pair up a woman and man in the same situation, the man in contemporary society has a lot of intrinsic advantages. He has easier access to relevant education and social networks. His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
So maybe it is a little more complicated than how you present it.
Are there no advantages women possess in contemporary society?
>He has easier access to relevant education
Women are significantly more likely to go be college educated than men. What "relevant education" are you referring to?
>His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
I agree! This is a complete embarrassment (especially in STEM fields).
edit: I want to be clear—I am in complete agreement that there are many problems women face in society (especially in the workforce). My grumble is the over-simplification of it. I think we'd be more effective in addressing these problems if we spoke accurately about them. Complaining about the privilege of people based on their DNA is not helpful.
Privige has nothing to do with it; for whatever reasons, women don't actually want to study tech fields. I actually find it pretty ridiculous and patronizing that people like you insist that there's something wrong with the world because women don't make the career choices you think they ought to.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13832368 and marked it off-topic.
What held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process.
This is critical, because it suggests that if the HP finding speaks to a larger trend, women don’t need to try and find that elusive quality, “confidence,” they just need better information about how hiring processes really work.
This fits exactly with my experience in terms of being female seems to have somehow denied me certain kinds of information, skills and experience that are critical to getting things done. If I can somehow access that info, then I start getting stuff done more on par with the guys.
It has nothing to do with suggesting women lack confidence or are filled with anxiety. In fact, the article is basically rebutting that idea.
(This from someone who has painfully learned not to take any rule or process literally in the real world. There's a reason I like computers.)
But I have found it helpful to focus on finding a way to get access to the information I need rather than just bellyaching about "sexism."
Thank you for commenting.
In reality the "in" crowd can't just do that, pat itself on the back for being so "inclusive" this week, and continue with business as usual. Overcoming unconscious cultural biases to actually bring people into the "success network" requires a lot more commitment than that.
The good news is, some people are really trying. But there are still plenty of people who are too lazy, don't understand the problem, or don't care.
Potentially strong employees don't want to get where they are by lying or stretching the truth.