Or - none of the above? How do you choose which are important and which aren't? Or which come before the others? Do you dump a Catholic man to get another atheist who happens to be a woman? How do you choose between a Francophone young man, and an anglophone old man?
Or maybe it would be good to view individuals as individuals and not pre-judge people based on their DNA?
I work in conditions very similar to what he mentioned.
I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases).
Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh.
The Soviet pattern is reproduced today in places like Iran, where many more women study engineering.
Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, the traditionally-female professions like nursing are even more female-dominated than in the USA.
The trend seems to be: The freer the society, the less women are entering the tech workforce and the more they choose traditionally feminine work.
This even applies in the time-trend in America, where women in tech has reduced significantly since the 80's, while feminism has only become more dominant and wealth has increased.
There is no way to measure (or even define?) "benefiting the field".
For example, women leave the workforce earlier and more often. So we now get less work years per education year in these fields. Benefit? Not from the POV of the person paying for all this education and these services.
I think what you said about height might be a bit off since you're dismissing the possibility that tall people actually are better at their jobs.
E.g. looks and facial symmetry both correlate with fertility and IQ, probably through the mechanism of mutational load. So you could say, "good looking people make more money" as an example here, but the effect could be from IQ because they actually do go together.
The same could be happening for height. This may be the reason people instinctively are attracted to tall people.
I haven't looked at that literature myself, but I would be surprised if it completely disarms my point.
It's very believable that intelligence and height correlate, but the question then becomes "Do we overweight height in decision making, relative to its predictive power for success/intelligence?" If height very weakly predicts increased intelligence and we weight it strongly, that's still far from optimal decision making.
The correlation with intelligence isn't even necessary to ask that question. Hiring taller people also has upside in that other people (eg, your customers!) are biased toward them as well. However, and I admit this is conjecture, I still suspect allowing your own biases to influence decision making is a net negative.
Because of how gaussian distributions work, the differences at the outlying values are huge even for small differences in the average.
For example, men are taller than women in general, but of course some men are taller than some women.
But at the extreme heights, the ratio between men and women becomes stagger. At 6 feet tall, men outnumber women 30:1. At 6'3", 2000:1.
Now apply this to tech. If we imagine a relatively elite job, like being a professional programmer with significant responsibility, that is the kind of thing only someone at the extreme end of the bell curve of tech-proclivity is going to do. But because of the way gaussians work at extreme values, even if women on average have similar tech-proclivity to men, at that high level the ratio of men:women could be huge.
All this could just be due to a simple misunderstanding of the math of a bell curve distribution and how it works at the ends of the spectrum.
Sure. But the point of the height analogy was that, first, you don't need to be 6'3" to reach the top shelf of a kitchen, and second, there are so many skills required to cook, not just reaching the top shelf.
In the same way, even if we assume that women have a lower bell curve than men for, say, ability to focus on some algorithmic problem, first, you don't need to be the equivalent of 6'3" at algorithms to do a good job as a professional programmer, and two, algorithms is only a very small part of what you do.
For the bell-curve hypothesis to work for cooking, women would also have to be weaker at using knives, worse at visually comparing the volume of liquids, worse at keeping track of time, worse at tasting things for flavor balance, etc. etc. - every single one of these axes would need to have a bell curve lower for women than for men. That's just implausible. Same with programming.
Of course, if you set up your hiring / recognition processes to look for the 6'3" algorithmists and not for the 5'10" algorithmists or the people who do any of the other work than algorithms, you'll see a 2000:1 ratio. But I think that's a sign of the hiring and recognition process failing to find truly qualified candidates of any gender, and just using the easiest metrics instead of the best ones.
People don't give (or often even know) the real reasons they do things.
Steeped in a culture of sexism accusations, it's not surprising that you'd hear reports of sexism from women leaving the industry.
A man doing the exact same thing (and many men do leave tech) would say their boss was an asshole, or they hated the hours, or whatever. Women are prodded and trained to interpret exactly the same circumstances as sexism.
Of course this doesn't mean there isn't sexism. But it does mean that you can't just "figure out the reason that they left by asking them".
I've attended Women in STEM meetings at university as an undergrad and there was already weeding out. Posters for the Women in STEM meetings were always getting torn down. Asian Americans in STEM or Robotics Club posters were not removed as aggressively as the Women in STEM posters. Furthermore, pretty much every woman ther had an experience that I would find hard to say could ever happen to me as a male. One told me of a story where a TA called them "woman" instead of their real name several times. One told me they heard their boss saying "we should only hire the hot ones(referring only to hiring females if they're attractive to the boss)". I really can't imagine either of those things happening to a man in the workspace.
What are you on about? I'm intentionally laying out the worst extreme of "nationalism" as an example. Would you prefer that I responded to someone asking about what excessive nationalistic pride could do, with "well some people in the UK leer at the french a bit"?
Also, what do you mean by my "political mirrors"? I'm a libertarian, I don't particularly identify with the left or the right. I'm also a nationalist in the sense that I love my country and the values it supports. You're being hyperbolic.
