Women in Tech Debate
The cluster centers on the underrepresentation of women in tech and other fields, debating causes like sexism, innate differences, or biases, and solutions such as quotas or affirmative action.
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People ARE treated differently based on race and gender. For example, women are severely underrepresented in the tech industry.You can either look into why that is and attempt to address underlying issues, or you can pretend people are sexist for doing something that doesn't directly benefit you.
so treating both genders equally doesn't always end in equality.
reality has a huge well-known gender bias. HN is a subset of reality.
The obvious reason is that we live in a sexist world. if women were treated the same way as men your comment would be true.See http://xkcd.com/385/
The core of the problem is that there are workplace gender imbalances. It's not clear what you meant by "stated as obvious"--it's stated as the result of a survey, like all the other results--but one reason it's not the focus of the article is that women were almost 200% more likely than men to be in that position in the first place."With genders reversed," the result is also reversed. Articles are being written about it (like the one you just read). Public
Quotas like this aren't sexist https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7660512
Your guessing sounds rather sexist. Why not stick to data instead of guessing? There is enough bias against men already.
I was assuming that the "fair" part was about the gender of people because that seems to be what most of the article is about. The rest of the reasons for doing this make sense so my question was mostly, what does this have to do with people's gender? It seems like they imply that this is a bigger problem because of the distribution of people's gender, than it would have been with another distribution.
The OP might mean it in a more general sense in that we all have our biases, men and women included. It's just that men's biases might be more problematic in this case, since they're the majority in this field so any common bias they may have gets compounded.
It's not mentioned in the article, but the unemployment rate among men is higher than among women. Even if it weren't, there is absolutely nothing sexist about an article which addresses unemployment for one sex to the exclusion of the other, just as there would be nothing racist about an article on unemployment among blacks, whites, et cetera.