Quote:
Originally Posted by saw7988
CyberShark, your arguments are very much the problem I have with a lot of conservative arguments. It's fantastic in theory. The market will fix it. Supply and demand. (I personally think academics in economics, with its extremely theoretical and simple approach to solving ridiculously complex and multifaceted problems, suffers from this and also tends to have a lot of conservatives, but this is a digression)
That's just not how real life works though. You need to use evidence, evaluate what is currently going on in the world, and try to fix it.
That might be the case, since I am fresh from finishing university, maybe I will change my views once I've worked for a few years.
but as of right now, I find the argument 'gender has no effect on performance, therefore we need to discriminate based on gender' unconvincing.
If the argument is: a man and a woman has achieved the same level of achievement. we should favour women because she is more likely to have faced greater difficulties due to societal reasons and therefore indicates greater potential. I have several problems with this line of argument:
1). how often are two candidates truly indistinguishable in terms of performance? in this case, wouldn't it be better to give these two additional interviews in order to distinguish ability? as opposed to making a decision based on gender.
2). Do we have evidence that women face greater difficulties in tech today? (I don't think citing a figure such as the current representation is evidence, since we don't know what the percentage will come out to be in a hypothetical truly free society.) If anything I think women are offered more opportunities such as female only events, scholarships or even internships.
3). Even if this is the case. should companies hire based on current ability or potential? I think this decision should be left to individual companies. Since its reasonable to assume some companies will favour current ability a lot more than potential(e.g. if you are a small company, you don't want to invest a lot of time and resources on training an employee to achieve his/her potential only to have him leave to a more prestigious company). I don't think there is a problem with hiring a male who has better current ability(due to possibly societal advantages) over a female who may have more potential.
4). how do we know when society is fair/unfair? If you can provide evidence that an institution(government or a specific firm) is being unfair to a specific group(in the form of law or discriminatory policies etc) then sure, I'm happy to condemn such an institution. but I don't take claims such as there is systematic discrimination against women in tech seriously.