Can you even avoid affirmative action employers anymore? 79

[WARose]

I had a buddy talk me into applying to the same place he's working....and I take a look at the place later (nothing like looking after you leap)....and in a company that's 90% male....they've got women in just about ALL the lead positions. I know at least 2 of them.....and they are nowhere near as qualified as some of the other people there.

Is there even a way to avoid this now? (Except at the smaller companies.) I am not anti-female in any way....but this sort of thing has resulted in chaos everywhere I've been that had it.

 

[WARose]

You make an unwarranted presumption that all companies' owners will suicidally decide to intentionally hire incompetent management.

There is a future for you in hospice care because you are very good at putting things in people's mouths....especially words. That is not a assumption I am making at all.

 

[phamENG]

Yikes. I've been watching this one passively. Feels like the conversation, such as it was, has completely devolved. If I may offer a couple of thoughts:

As TheTick said early, AA is a bad solution to a worse problem. A look around the engineering community in the US and it's easy to see that it's dominated by white men, and in proportions that don't match the larger demographic of the country. To figure out if that's a problem, we have to try to figure out why it happened. Women and minorities are certainly no less competent generally than white men when afforded the same opportunities for education and training, so it's not that. That suggests there's some sort of discrimination in the system somewhere - whether it's early on in ways girls and minorities are taught and directed toward future career choices that discourage engineering, echoes of historic (and, in some cases, ongoing) racism and sexism that makes access to higher education more difficult, or discrimination in the hiring process and ongoing promotion ladder.

AA attempts to combat this at the end of the line. Admirable, but unfortunately it's too late at that point. Many of the potentially promising candidates who would otherwise have succeeded were told it's not for them, or that they should do something else instead, or were never told anything and left to figure it out on their own (and they didn't), or they couldn't afford it. So while many may be competent and capable, what's left isn't always the cream of the crop. But that's what's left to fill the quotas set out by AA. And as CWB1 points out, there are clear business advantages to following the quota system. I've heard of a few firms that restructured to ensure they were at least 51% woman owned...sometimes by putting the firm in the name of the engineers' wives...to get some big state contracts.

A lot of damage has been done in this country on account of race and gender, and while reaching a point where we're all colorblind and...gender blind?...is a great goal, we're not there and can't get there until much of the damage is repaired. I'm not sure exactly how we do it, but I do know that it can't be done unless we acknowledge that the damage is still affecting real people in a real way today and face it. The fix has to be from the ground up.

Quotas are not the answer, but until we come up with a better idea it's what we're stuck with.

 

[geotechguy1]

I don't really see that much room for incompetent people of any gender to survive in management positions in the modern consulting market. You might have the odd bad apple but as a systemic thing it would be impossible to sustain - there are always 20 other 'world leading consulting firms' who just cut their overhead 5% by moving their office out of the city who are ready to take your lunch and eat it, and an almost limitless number of small engineering shops setup by your former employees ready to vacuum away work and clients.

 

[271828]

You make an unwarranted presumption that all companies' owners will suicidally decide to intentionally hire incompetent management.

These situations aren't binary. More typical: There are several decent candidates and it's not obvious that an overrepresented group candidate is the best fit, so choose the candidate from the underrepresented group. Another example: Sort the pile of resumes so that any underrepresented group candidates are near the top.

Social scientists don't agree on why the disparities exist. Search the internet for "why are there more male chess grandmasters" and read the arguments on both sides. The subject at hand is similar. Nobody knows why the percentages are what they are. We all have our guesses and opinions.

Thus, during hiring or promotion decisions, an unfairness that might not exist is remedied by intentional unfair treatment of some candidates. If that's not a textbook example of a racist or sexist process, then I don't know what one would look like.

The only solution is to treat all individual people with respect and fairness and let the chips fall where they may.

 

[geotechguy1]

I think the answer to what 271828 is alluding to is actually pretty clear in the literature but it's not popular in certain circles. Essentially, the bell curve for women isn't as wide and in certain domains the average / median of the curve is shifted slightly to the right of the average / median for men at a population level. So, on average, women might be slightly better than men, at a population level, in a host of subjects and disciplines, but the outliers (the really really productive / smart people and the really really dumb unproductive people, essentially) are disproportionally male. The hyperproductivity of a small group of people who are primarily men at one end of the bell curve (and, by contrast, the hyper criminality or what have you of the primarily men at the other tail of the bell curve) is thus explained.

 

[271828]

I think the answer to what 271828 is alluding to is actually pretty clear in the literature but it's not popular in certain circles. Essentially, the bell curve for women isn't as wide and in certain domains the average / median of the curve is shifted slightly to the right of the average / median for men at a population level. So, on average, women might be slightly better than men, at a population level, in a host of subjects and disciplines, but the outliers (the really really productive / smart people and the really really dumb unproductive people, essentially) are disproportionally male. The hyperproductivity of a small group of people who are primarily men at one end of the bell curve (and, by contrast, the hyper criminality or what have you of the primarily men at the other tail of the bell curve) is thus explained.

To my knowledge, this is the most likely explanation, although others have different and opposing opinions.

Near the ends of the bell curve, there might be 5-10x as many of one group relative to another.

I think part of the story is that competition is different at elite levels, whether we're talking sports or the board room. Small differences in competitors result in big differences in outcomes.

 

[geotechguy1]

Another reason is simply that women don't want to be engineers at the population level - see how despite all the efforts in the nordic countries female participation in engineering is declining. We're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

 

[phamENG]

Does any of that control for childhood influence? I agree that if you somehow took a poll of all the men and women in developed nations and asked them if they wanted to be engineers, the answers women would give would likely be a disproportionate 'no.' But that doesn't mean that women aren't suited for the job. It likely means that, through a number of societal influences, they have a preconceived notion that engineering - or more likely the math and science that forms the basis of most engineering - is too hard or not something they would enjoy.

So we shouldn't be trying to fit any pegs into any holes. We should be sure that we're encouraging everyone to have the courage to try something new and different and enabling them to find success. Not succeeding for them, but ensuring they have the necessary guidance and that as many needless obstacles are removed as it's possible to do. This isn't a problem that gets solved today. It will take generations for the effects of past mistakes to wear off.

 

[geotechguy1]

The nordic countries have been trying to get women into engineering for long enough to rule out childhood influence. The countries with the highest female participation rates in engineering are middle eastern countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE I believe, - maybe we can take a lesson from them?

Even more curiously female participation in STEM is essentially inversely correlated with gender equality. The more gender equal a country is the lower the female STEM participation rate.

Unfortunately I think the lesson is that women only want to do STEM, especially engineering, when it's the only pathway to financial freedom and possibly a pathway to the west. The only field I see this changing in is medicine - I reckon Doctor's will end up being pretty strongly majority women over the next 30-40 years.

 

[GregLocock]

" in the nordic countries female participation in engineering is declining" and yet in pestilential third world hellholes female participation is rising.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amygut...gineering-students-are-women/?sh=4f74934444de

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[geotechguy1]

Here's an alternative to affirmative action: Accept the differences between men and women as they are. Hire the best person for the job. There actually very real reasons to want to hire female engineers to your team if you're a manager - if or when I am in a position to influence hiring I know full well I'll want to hire women as well as men and it has nothing to do with affirmative action policies.

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2013/december/brain-connectivity-study-revea

Who wouldn't want their engineering teams to have some engineers with higher social cognition and ability to create solutions that work for the group, along with people who are insanely skilled and specialized at certain tasks and functions?

I don't think bias from female k-12 teachers and moms during childrearing their daughters is the cause of women wanting to be nurses, doctors, teachers, and childcare workers instead of engineers, tradesmen and lawyers.

 

[JohnRBaker]

My alma mater, MTU (Michigan Technological University) as a summer youth program for high school students where they can experience college, in one-week segments, across a broad range of disciplines, including of course, engineering. Now none of our sons showed any interest (two are chefs and one is an IT geek), so we turned our focus to our granddaughters. The first three showed no real interest, but #4, Lynsey, (who's 16 and will be a junior next year) is all set to attend a week in July. We were all set to send her last year but the summer sessions were cancelled. But we're good to go this year.

Anyway, I was hoping that she would be interested in engineering, but she always been interest in medicine. A few years ago, she had to have an operation on her foot and she spent the week leading up to the surgery researching on orthopedic procedures (she's a bit of brain). So for a couple of years she wanted to go into sports medicine, but since the pandemic and the air time that Dr Fauci has been getting, she's now thinking about going into research. For her week on campus, she's opted for a class in 'Human Physiology'. Now my old school, considering that it's primarily an engineering school, has been expanding it's biological curriculum, and part of that effort is encouraging more high school girls to participate in those summer youth programs.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
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[hokie66]

This is a major example of the implications of affirmative action:

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/02/politics/kamala-harris-office-dynamics/index.html

 

[271828]

Does any of that control for childhood influence? I agree that if you somehow took a poll of all the men and women in developed nations and asked them if they wanted to be engineers, the answers women would give would likely be a disproportionate 'no.' But that doesn't mean that women aren't suited for the job. It likely means that, through a number of societal influences, they have a preconceived notion that engineering - or more likely the math and science that forms the basis of most engineering - is too hard or not something they would enjoy.

Why dismiss innate differences between the groups?

If we expect the disparities to be due to societal influences and preconceived notions, then we should first expect the bell curve of every human characteristic to be identical for all groups. Has anybody produced a set of bell curves showing this?

The only comparisons of bell curves I've seen have been on IQ in the chess grandmaster question, and the male curves are flatter and wider, so there are a lot more males out near each edge of the curve. Engineering requires similar aptitudes in spatial visualization and logic, so I think there's a good chance that such differences are at least part of the explanation for the disparities.

So we shouldn't be trying to fit any pegs into any holes. We should be sure that we're encouraging everyone to have the courage to try something new and different and enabling them to find success. Not succeeding for them, but ensuring they have the necessary guidance and that as many needless obstacles are removed as it's possible to do. This isn't a problem that gets solved today. It will take generations for the effects of past mistakes to wear off.

If the last three or four decades haven't encouraged or enabled underrepresented groups enough, then I don't know what to say. Universities and many companies bend over backward to encourage and enable underrepresented groups.

 

[271828]

Obvious questions reveal the insanity of this entire subject.

Is the endgame of diversity to force there to be no underrepresented groups in any position?

Does the quest for diversity include careers that currently have a lot more females, such as nursing and child care?

Does it include all sports?

Does it include parameters other than sex and race? How about height in the NBA or size in the NFL?

Does it include making sure poor areas such as parts of the southeast and Appalachia equally represented in academia and in corporate board rooms?

I assume the answer to each of those is "no." In that case, are there valid criteria for selecting which fields get leveled?

 

[Enable]

Why dismiss innate differences between the groups?

It's never wise to attribute something so stupid to a man that smart. phamENG has not said or implied that innate differences do not exist rather he has stated that ones calculus should take characteristics of nurturing into account; and while its influence may be less than readily calculable, it is reasonably nontrivial and should not be ignored.

 

[271828]

Enable, I think he is capable of answering for himself.

 

[IRstuff]

Why dismiss innate differences between the groups?

The converse is the OP's implication that women in management is innately bad. Considering that it took over 100 years after women got the right to vote that we even have a woman vice president, we are easily a century away from being able to assert anything significant about true "innate differences." Toys for girls are still predominantly shaded in pink; that's not necessarily innate, that's some marketing person, likely male, making those decisions.

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[hokie66]

Performance counts. 100 years to get a woman vice president, and then we got the wrong one. See link above.

 

[geotechguy1]

Considering that it took over 100 years after women got the right to vote that we even have a woman vice president, we are easily a century away from being able to assert anything significant about true "innate differences." Toys for girls are still predominantly shaded in pink; that's not necessarily innate, that's some marketing person, likely male, making those decisions.

I can't find pre-1950 data but from 1950 onwards at least the United States population has been majority female:

https://knoema.com/atlas/United-Sta.../Demographics/Population/Male-to-female-ratio

. If women wanted female politicians they've had the majority for at least 70 years to get it done. In modern elections women also turn out at a higher rate than men, so, not only are there ~5% more women than men, something like 64% of women turnout to vote vs 59% of men. That ratio is enough for female voters to control the composition of the presidency, senate and house.

Re toys - women control the decision making for the overwhelming majority of consumer spending (

https://hbr.org/2009/09/the-female-economy).

It's not a male marketing person making decisions to make pink toys because he's a sexist, it's more likely a marketing person (isn't marking a female primary profession anyway?) deciding to sell and market pink toys because women control consumer spending and women want to buy pink toys for their daughters.