Is RPS too white? I say no, let's talk about it though

[LexW]

Ok but that doesn’t usually result in a representative workforce. And how do we come up with what ‘representative’ is - is it matching the local area? The country? The world? The customer base, local or worldwide? Is it equal numbers of all races? How are we defining races? Black people are incredibly ethnically diverse, are we going for equal numbers from every African country, every Caribbean country, every other country black people originate from? You could go on forever…

What’s the actual argument here? I just see a lot of handwaving but no actual argument or point?

Local to the job, anyway, is the answer, and the rest is a bunch of obfuscatory nonsense. If the job is in the UK, but can be teleworked, then you have the UK as your base. It’s not discriminatory to pick within a country (it may become that way if we ever get teleporters or something but that’s a way out). If it’s based in London and needs physical presence, well London is your area.

As for “black people are diverse”, etc., uh-huh, but the problem is that black people as a group are discriminated against in a pretty flat way. Racism doesn’t care if you’re from London, Nigeria, Jamaica, or South Africa. So the main thing of importance is to give black candidates at least a solid chance.

Ironically the only issue I can see here is an inverse one. In the UK, Indian people actually on average, per working person, earn a bit more than white people. Whereas Pakistani people, on average, earn less than white people. So you have some complex discrimination issues there. But if slightly further advantage Indian people with your BAME process, as long you’re getting other BAME candidates, you’re probably doing good overall.

Thing is though, isn’t the only alternative to not hire based on merit?

You mean admitting what already happens? That’s how it works right now. Hiring is absolutely not based on merit. It’s based on a lot of factors, but generally speaking how “culturally appropriate” you are to a firm is a major one. I say this having clearly benefited from this.

I think it’s highly likely that companies like Google or Apple attempt to hire the best people for their positions, right?

They definitely do not. That you’re saying this is bizarre, given the scandals that emerged with Google’s hiring AI recently, where it was found to be hideously racist, to the point where they had to shut it down. Do you follow the news on this sort of subject at all?

And it obviously works because they are hyper successful.

No. They poach people who are already successful. This is very different to “hiring the best” in a more genuine way. If you only hire people who are already successful, you will strongly bias your pool towards people who will succeed at what you want them to. That does not mean that they were actually the best candidate, at all.

Further, both companies have had issues with their hiring practices of a fairly serious nature. Google has been particularly bad.

I’ve since looked up some studies on this - looks like it does happen unfortunately. That sucks, and taking steps to address that I’m for in principle. It would depend on what the specific steps are I guess but yeah we should be trying to stop this happening.

“I guess we should try”.

Yeah exactly. This sort of defeatist “Welllll l guess it happens nothing we can really do except “try” I guess…!” attitude leads to exactly nothing meaningful happening. Put some Yoda on that. There is no try, there is only do.

Actually do something.

Is it, definitely? I hope I’ve shown I’m willing to be wrong, it looks like there is strong evidence of bias happening at the hiring stage. Is there evidence that sexism is a big problem though? A majority male workforce doesn’t indicate that - more males tend to go for more tech type jobs whereas more females go for more people type roles, it’s a documented sex difference.

No, that’s bollocks, not a “documented sex difference”, that’s a cheap grade-school assumption based on “boys like trains, girls like dolls!” (which isn’t even really true - even to the degree it is, it’s like 60/40, not 90/10 like the games industry tends to be, or worse). If you look at the history of computer programming, rather than doing facile guesswork based on modern scenarios, you will see up until the late 1960s/1970s, it is quite sex-balanced, even perhaps female-biased. In the 1960s, there was huge push by the US government to re-educate male workers (specifically male workers - “breadwinners”) to do tech jobs which were to some extent perceived as “women’s work” or “unmanly”. Other countries had similar, if less aggressive efforts. And the effort was extremely successful - they got companies to actively put men into these positions, so that they could “support their families” and essentially kicked out women, because “men would support them”. This isn’t even that long ago. It still took a long, long time to get as gender-unbalanced as it did in the 1990s and 2000s. Even in the 1980s and earlier 1990s it was a lot better than it got to be later on.

Entrenched sexism is extremely well-documented and comes up all the time even now. Riot Games got into a lot of trouble for it and had to massively reform their workplace culture just recently.

It’s a lot less of an issue outside game dev now, but you still see companies keen to put women in certain positions but not others (leadership roles and management, sure - actual programming, regardless of how good they are? Less so).

I highly doubt there’s evidence of this either. Unless you can show some significant proportion of male game devs expressing views like this, then lets not cast aspersions on them like that.

So you missed the whole deal with Google having guy doing exactly this at some length for years, and finally, after it got particularly egregious, getting fired? And yet still getting a lot of support from colleagues, and bosses unwilling to outright condemn him. If you’ve ever worked in game dev, you know that there are people like this. If you haven’t, that kind of ignorant blind “let’s pretend everything is fine until someone loses an eye” knee-jerk defence is a huge part of perpetuating the problem. I’ve got firsthand experience of this stuff, too, note, so trying to tell me it doesn’t happen, when I’ve directly seen it happen, and heard countless similar accounts is pretty special

[MiniMatt]

I didn’t address your points because if your point is “is there any evidence of sexism in the games industry?” then you’re not just asking questions, you’re either trolling or you are extremely, unbelievably, naiive. If, unbelievably, it’s the latter then I will address that point by saying “google it”.

If your argument is “the womens like the fluffy roles & the men like the techy roles, it’s science” then again I’d say you’re dangerously close to trolling. Perhaps the womens just like cleaning more than men, and the men just like being CEO more than women.

[alms]

hiring say a black person into a company of white people doesn’t necessarily create real diversity - it just makes (more than before at least) racial diversity. Which is fine, but we don’t ascribe people characteristics based on their skin colour - which is what we’re doing if we say ‘your group is a certain way, so we need some of your group’. I think a better way is to try to hire an individual that is diverse from the existing staff - which might be someone from a minority group, and it might not.

In order to increase REAL diversity but not RACIAL diversity (which would have the unfortunate side effect of upsetting the Ancient Ones, and unleash the wrath of Azatoth on poor COVID-ridden Earth), RPS should do better to stick with white people, but different shades of white, whiteness diversity being the one that truly matters.

I’ll motion in support of suntanning as a legit way to increase diversity then – but shall we stick with natural suntanning, or is indoor suntanning acceptable too?

I’m in favor of tanning beds myself! This would have some wonderful synergistic effects, too:

• Somebody could shove John Walker inside the tanning bed, the suntan would make him less intense, commenter folks would be happy because he would no longer not like any of their favorite games.
• Suntanned white people are an ideal drop-in replacement for darker skinned article authoring units without all of the downsides, we have solid research on that from the same trusted white guys who proved Climate Change was a liberal conspiracy.
• There would be no need to go through a costly and fatiguing hiring process that could expose RPS to nig those lovely, funny-smelling, colored people. (I’m not racist, I swear! and surely I don’t only make fractious remarks either)
• RPS can write off the expense for the beds as an investment.
• Apocalypse would be staved off, for at least as long as it takes for Kotaku to stubbornly go on and do the wrong thing anyway (too bad that advice about the Carthage Treatment was not heeded)
• The End of the World Party at RPS would be Infinitely hip (and not as much bear), with all of its different shades of white.

In support of this much needed breath of fresh air, I’ll now shave my beard and apply black shoe polish to my white face.

Disclaimer: The views hereby expressed are not those of RPS or endorsed by RPS, nor are intended to be taken at face value.

[Aitrus]

Somebody could shove John Walker inside the tanning bed, the suntan would make him less intense, commenter folks would be happy because he would no longer not like any of their favorite games.

How will we know this doesn’t work until we try?

[crystal_gaiden]

You are very much misrepresenting what I said. However on what I actually did say - I absolutely could be wrong. Lex’s post above makes some very good points on it, I’m thinking through it all before I reply to him.

[crystal_gaiden]

Haha great post! I might not be getting the entire upshot of it though…

I’ll try to explain what I was getting at in the part you quoted - I was saying that most of the groups that we divide people into - the individuals in that group are in fact more different than they are similar. Let’s take black people for example - we can assume nothing about a black person just based on them being black, their skin colour doesn’t tell us anything about their personality, intelligence etc. Right? Surely the fundamental racism concept is that we know what someone is like based on how they look. So all I was getting at is, trying to get ‘diversity’ by hiring a person of specific race might not result in any more diversity at all - he might be just like all the people already there!

This is another thing where I welcome feedback, am I wrong on this idea? It seems to make sense to me.

[Sarfrin]

I’m not involved in politics personally! When I say merit, I mean, y’know… merit.

Unless you live in a hut in the woods and never interact with other people, you’re involved in politics personally. Accepting the status quo is a political act.

[GGG]

In many ways, living in the woods and never interacting with people is a political act.

[GGG]

Let’s take black people for example - we can assume nothing about a black person just based on them being black, their skin colour doesn’t tell us anything about their personality, intelligence etc. Right? Surely the fundamental racism concept is that we know what someone is like based on how they look. So all I was getting at is, trying to get ‘diversity’ by hiring a person of specific race might not result in any more diversity at all - he might be just like all the people already there!

Being blind to difference doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There are many things that we can tell about someone who is black by looking at the colour of their skin, not because of any inherent differences between ‘races’ but because we live in a society that has racist foundations and has imposed differences. So, to use games journalism as an example, black people are underrepresented in the industry and so less likely to have social connections to help get them in. They are less likely to come from wealthy families, so low or unpaid internships are more difficult. And of course their are multiple studies that black people are less likely to be selected for jobs or university places, even when all other things are equal.

Saying that employing black people does not add diversity is being wilfully ignorant. Of course there are many forms of diversity, but you can’t use that to ignore a clear issue. Racial diversity is also likely to bring diversity of experience which you seem to be more interested in.

[LexW]

Let’s take black people for example - we can assume nothing about a black person just based on them being black, their skin colour doesn’t tell us anything about their personality, intelligence etc. Right? Surely the fundamental racism concept is that we know what someone is like based on how they look. So all I was getting at is, trying to get ‘diversity’ by hiring a person of specific race might not result in any more diversity at all - he might be just like all the people already there!

You seem to be looking for unusual scenarios in order to justify doing nothing. I’m not trying to be down on you because of this, but it’s really what it looks like. I get that you’re maybe kinda new to these ideas and mentally exploring them, so I don’t want to be too negative, but let’s be real, the scenario you propose is unlikely and still doesn’t suggest doing nothing.

Our society is really fundamentally racist. Boris Johnson, a massive racist who has literally been racist in public, on purpose, can claim otherwise, but it’s not exactly convincing. I’m a white guy from an upper-middle-class background who went to a posh school, and there were a few black kids there, mostly the children of diplomats. Did they face racism? Yes. Even them. With tons of advantages, people still managed to be racist against them. Black lawyers who work at my law firm still get pulled over in their nice cars by cops who are suspicious that a black man is driving a newer model of Mercedes or whatever. Luckily the UK police aren’t as armed or psychotic as the US police, but it’s still fucked-up.

And most black people in the US and UK come from a less-advantaged background because they’re descended from people who were taken and enslaved, and thus have had to try and work their way through a racist capitalist society, from absolutely nothing, which has been systematically attempting to deprive them of any advantage or chance to improve their lot, whilst denigrating them because they haven’t got enough money.

We can broadly assume that if you’re black, and in the UK or US, you will have faced greater challenges to get to the same place than a white person in that place. There will be exceptions. Some black people, especially Africans, may have faced fewer challenges, but even they are having to deal with racism as soon as they get to the UK, and from countries systematically deprived and taken advantage of by the West right up into the 1960s and 1970s, some even later. But black people will have experienced particular forms of adversity that white people will not have, because racism is so widespread and ingrained.

Also, you seem stuck on this word “diversity”. That’s not the only factor - fairness and fighting systemic societal racism matter too. Diverse voices or the like is about more than just “technically different” people, it’s about giving people from groups which society is oppressing more of a chance to speak. If they want to say similar things about games or whatever to other people, despite their different journey, I don’t think that’s a problem, because the point is that you’re bringing in people who had a different journey. But it’s unlikely that they will have exactly the same views and ideas, and even if they did, that’s not a reason to do nothing.

Also, let’s be clear - it’s not just about “how people look”. Racism is about so much more than that. It’s not like everyone is on an equal footing and people just decided that people with darker skin suck. Centuries ago, to excuse inexcusable and outrageously immoral actions, people decided that darker-skinned people were “inferior”, first from dubious readings of the Bible that even the Pope didn’t agree with, and when that failed them, with pseudo-science. White people systematically raided and essentially raped and pillaged their way through the countries of darker-skinned peoples, leave a massive world order which disadvantaged those countries, and particularly cruelly disadvantaged the descendents of the slaves those scoundrels had stolen from those countries. Black people got the shittiest part of this because of slavery, which meant that not only were their countries ruined, but those people taken out of the country were placed in the deepest possible poverty-hole, even when slavery ended, and then had to fight a racist society and a racist world-order to try and get out of it.

So it’s really facile to focus on appearance. Anti-black racism by the police in the US (for example) is about a lot more than that - appearance is how they identify people as “black”, but the actions they take aren’t “lol a dark-skinned person, they suck, I’ll give them a hard time”, they’re coloured by so much more - specifically centuries of pseudo-science and hate, which portrays black people as animalistic, possibly unstoppable by anything but extreme violence, and generally less than human. And this permeates the police in the US, and not just the police, but a lot of white people have these beliefs too on some level, because centuries of racist indoctrination isn’t easy to deal with.

In the UK it’s less extreme, and more about the poverty of ex-slavery and coming from colonial nations which were exploited by Britain, but that poverty is bad enough. And there’s some US-style racism on top of that, because right up into the 20th century, major British figures like Churchill were just casually implying black people are “inferior”, and there are still loads of people around, especially older white people outside London and the big cities, who believe that, even if they won’t admit it.

And there’s then there’s denialists, self-deluded people who just don’t want to believe racism exists, which is itself part of racism. They constantly point to lucky exceptions, and say that there is no racism. These are the sort of people who think it’s fine for the statues of sick fucks like Colston to remain standing because they want to pretend there’s no racism, and thus it’s “just history” like the Druids being massacred by the Romans in 50AD or something, which is obviously horseshit.

[crystal_gaiden]

Hey - I still need to reply to your (LexW that is, not sure if I hit the correct ‘reply’ button) other post above, and I will do - I’m still pondering through it all to be honest. The stuff about sex differences, I think I’m right about that (about exactly, precisely what I said mind, and only that - people are extrapolating from what I said) but I’ll have to look up some sources. Maybe I am wrong, if I am I will admit it. My goal here is not to ‘win’ the discussion, but to advance my thinking. To respond to this post though:

I want to take a second to just restate my position. We’ve gotten into a more general discussion on racism, and the thing is, I agree with you on it. Racism is absolutely real, I’d never say it isn’t. Boris is a disgrace, it’s insane to me he still has a career. Pulling down statues is fine as far as I’m concerned if the people depicted were literally slave traders and racists, it’s weird af that we would even have statues of those people up. I don’t want to respond to every single line but the gist of what I’m getting at is - you don’t need to argue with me that racism is real and is a big problem. No decent person would ever argue against that, I’m certainly not.

Anyway restating my position: There was only two points that I was making when I made this thread -

1. RPS being all while does not demonstrate a problem with hiring at RPS. Is it possible there is a problem? Yes, absolutely. Look into it by all means. But being all while is not evidence of that.

2. That the race of an applicant should be very, very far down the list of attributes that should be considered when hiring for this role. For the simple reason that the race of a person does not have any bearing on how good a writer they are. We don’t ascribe attributes to race because we aren’t racists! Is it OK to hire a black person/some other ethnic minority person for this? Of course it is! I’m not mental. All I am saying is that if we say ‘well, we’re too white, we need someone from group x’ we are falsely attributing characteristics to race.

It’s very possible - maybe even likely - that when hiring the next person, diversity of opinion/outlook/life experience/whatever might best be served by hiring someone who is, for example, black. BUT, and this is a very important but, we pick the person based on that INDIVIDUAL, the individual characteristics of that one specific person, not because of what group they are in. That is not hiring based on race, it’s hiring based on an individual. Is there overlap between certain groups and certain life experiences? Of course there is. But what I’m saying is that we can’t know it, or even assume it based on the group. So we hire an individual instead of a person who rounds out your numbers. In this scenario, I think it’s fairly likely that the person actually does round out your numbers, which is fine. But it’s not the reason for hiring.

[GGG]

Of course when hiring you’re going to look at the individual and what they bring to the role. Affirmative action (which I guess is what you’re worried about) doesn’t mean that just because someone from an under represented group is hired it means that their only qualification is their ethnicity/gender/whatever.

Have you ever been involved in a hiring process? Often there are a number of candidates who are at a pretty similar level and in some cases distinguishing between them is very difficult. Ultimately we’re not talking about some obscure and incredibly complex branch of theoretical physics which only a handful of people on the planet can understand. It’s writing about video games, the number of people who could do the job vastly outweighs the number of jobs available. If over a period of time the normal hiring process has led to some groups being under represented then the hiring practices should be reviewed (such as are you looking for qualification or experience that aren’t necessary?) but the best way that things can change in the long term is to have a more diverse team making decisions. This could mean choosing a minority candidate over a white one in some instances but this should be viewed as a correction for the previous bias in the system and (most importantly) it does not mean that the person who got the job is under qualified.

[Vheissu]

You did lead with those two statements, but quickly segued into debating as to whether discriminatory hiring practices actually exist, if it is possible to have equal representation in the workforce without forcible conscription and whether the games industry is sexist or not. Among other things.

So no, this thread is no longer about representation at RPS. There’s no getting this train back on the rails.

[LexW]

The stuff about sex differences, I think I’m right about that (about exactly, precisely what I said mind, and only that - people are extrapolating from what I said) but I’ll have to look up some sources.

You are absolutely not correct, and you’re totally unaware of the history of the software industry.

RPS being all while does not demonstrate a problem with hiring at RPS. Is it possible there is a problem? Yes, absolutely. Look into it by all means. But being all while is not evidence of that.

I mean, you were the one to suggest it might be. I’m not saying it is, but maybe they could do better?

That the race of an applicant should be very, very far down the list of attributes that should be considered when hiring for this role.

What are you even talking about here? The issue you have failed to engage with entirely and completely is structural racism. You have consistently failed to acknowledge that they system itself is racist, and until efforts are made to break the wheel, the wheel will keep turning in the same rut. White people who went to “the best schools” and so on will continue to have opportunities (as will select ethnic minorities who come from enough money to do the same), but black people (particularly) will continue to be excluded, because they’re from people who had everything taken from them, and have endured literally centuries of people trying, very hard, to stop them getting ahead.

In hiring, if you want to be fair, you have to eliminate a whole bunch of stuff you likely don’t want to eliminate, like you need to eliminate “went to Oxford”. Indeed, if the role does not genuinely require a degree, I mean actually hard-require, you need to eliminate “requires a degree” at all. You have to cut every false “requirement”, cut to the bone, and keep only what is genuinely needed to do the job. Then you have to go blind - get the rid of the name, the dates/age, and so on of the applicant, at least until you select the final pool of candidates for interview.

This is the only way to reduce structural racism. And it only reduces it. It doesn’t fix it.

Keep it going long enough, and do a lot of other stuff in society, and maybe, in a century or so, you might fix it, but it’ll be a long road, because the oppression goes back centuries, and no-one has done much to fix it, indeed, until like, 20-30 years ago, almost nothing has been done. And even then very little has been done.

If you really want to help, you can ask, legally, to have BAME candidates included in your pool, and not accept a pool of candidates from recruiters that doesn’t include them. You can’t hire on the basis of race in the UK (generally speaking), but you can ask that you at least get to see them in the pool. You do this because of structural racism more than anything else.

[crystal_gaiden]

Hmm, yeah I guess you’re right. Well can we at least try and get it back on the rails? I still have to go back in time and respond to the other big post above, I’ll do that now hopefully. But maybe back on the rails after this.

whether discriminatory hiring practices actually exist

They do - yes I did question it, and I learned from people’s responses. That’s the point, that’s why we talk about it.

if it is possible to have equal representation in the workforce without forcible conscription

It’s not possible. Just because we can’t make it equal doesn’t mean we can’t strive to make it more equal than it is though, which I’m not arguing against. Just so we don’t get derailed again - it’s impossible because we can divide the people we’re trying to represent up in a million different ways. We would have to conscript based on sex and gender and age and hundreds (literally) of different racial backgrounds and intelligence and economic status and and and, it goes on forever. We might be able to achieve it based on only sex and extremely broad racial categories perhaps.

whether the games industry is sexist or not

I’m reading about it right now.

[crystal_gaiden]

You are absolutely not correct, and you’re totally unaware of the history of the software industry.

Come on man, I think you could have quoted the part where I said I could be wrong and that I’d admit it if I am. Let’s play nice. I still haven’t responded to your other post, I’ll try to do that tonight. I certainly was unaware of the history of the software industry!

I mean, you were the one to suggest it might be. I’m not saying it is, but maybe they could do better

I was a bit confused for a second here - it sort of feels like we’re arguing on this but yeah I agree with that. I think what I was getting at with the original point was that it’s not necessarily a problem to fix - but maybe no one was saying that in the first place? I’m not sure.

The rest of it: I’ve not argued against any of this stuff. I don’t do a job where I’m involved in hiring anymore, but when I did, I didn’t do any of these things. I can see the value in them now though, and if I were to do the job again I would implement as much of this kind of thing as I could.

[crystal_gaiden]

You’re right - I was wrong to say that

[crystal_gaiden]

doesn’t mean that just because someone from an under represented group is hired it means that their only qualification is their ethnicity/gender/whatever.

Absolutely, agree 100%. It’s completely fine to hire from an under represented group, I’ve not said otherwise. What I’m talking about is hiring based on a perceived gap in races.

If over a period of time the normal hiring process has led to some groups being under represented then the hiring practices should be reviewed (such as are you looking for qualification or experience that aren’t necessary?) but the best way that things can change in the long term is to have a more diverse team making decisions. This could mean choosing a minority candidate over a white one in some instances but this should be viewed as a correction for the previous bias in the system and (most importantly) it does not mean that the person who got the job is under qualified.

Hmm, yeah I guess that makes sense - when you put it like that I can see a scenario where it might be better to pick the slightly less qualified minority group person. It still feels deeply weird to give more value to a skin colour than some other trait, and a group being underrepresented is still not evidence of bias (unless we know the exact demographics of applicants perhaps?) But yeah in essence I think you’re right.

[crystal_gaiden]

OK I’ve got a lot to get through here -

What’s the actual argument here? I just see a lot of handwaving but no actual argument or point?

Hmm. Maybe it was pointless to say what I did there. What I said there is correct but just because we can’t achieve it perfectly doesn’t mean we can’t make it more diverse to certain groups.

Local to the job, anyway, is the answer, and the rest is a bunch of obfuscatory nonsense

Fair enough. I think there maybe might be an argument there for it being based on customer base, but maybe I’m just being argumentative. So yeah that’s fair enough

Ironically the only issue I can see here is an inverse one. In the UK, Indian people actually on average, per working person, earn a bit more than white people. Whereas Pakistani people, on average, earn less than white people. So you have some complex discrimination issues there.

Interesting, didn’t know that

You mean admitting what already happens? That’s how it works right now. Hiring is absolutely not based on merit. It’s based on a lot of factors, but generally speaking how “culturally appropriate” you are to a firm is a major one. I say this having clearly benefited from this.

Hmm, this is a tricky one. I had to puzzle this out for a while and I’m still not completely sure on it. I’ll go as far as hiring is absolutely not based entirely on merit, which is a different thing. It’s merit with mistakes, with bias, with human fallibility. But it’s still people attempting to hire the best person. As for how “culturally appropriate” you are being a major factor - man, that part is really difficult. On the face of it, I would say this is in fact just a sub component of attempting to hire the best person - surely culturally appropriate is a relevant factor for how effective they will be, it’s almost like another way of framing ‘how well will they fit in’. But but but I can absolutely see how that could lead to bias - culture is not that far from race, and if the company is already snow white…

They definitely do not. That you’re saying this is bizarre, given the scandals that emerged with Google’s hiring AI recently, where it was found to be hideously racist, to the point where they had to shut it down. Do you follow the news on this sort of subject at all?

The key word in what I said was ‘attempt’, I said they attempt to hire the best people for the positions. I can’t find anything about that AI, there’s a sort of similar story about Amazon though, is that the one?

No. They poach people who are already successful. This is very different to “hiring the best” in a more genuine way. If you only hire people who are already successful, you will strongly bias your pool towards people who will succeed at what you want them to. That does not mean that they were actually the best candidate, at all.

Further, both companies have had issues with their hiring practices of a fairly serious nature. Google has been particularly bad.

Is it different? If I was Google, of course I would poach people if I could, they’ve actually literally demonstrated that they are good at the job, by doing it - that’s about the best possible hiring metric I could think of. It’s the difference between someone who is potentially very good and someone who actually is. The issues with their hiring practices, I’ve not heard anything about that (not saying you’re wrong, but I’ve not seen any stores on that). The only one I did hear was a guy at google getting fired for something he wrote in a memo, where (I think this is correct) he posed the question of whether the lack of women in tech could be related to gender differences. If that’s what he did say, pretty stupid thing to fire him over - there are relevant gender differences. Seems perfectly reasonable to at least ask the question, even if the answer turns out to be no.

“I guess we should try”.

Yeah exactly. This sort of defeatist “Welllll l guess it happens nothing we can really do except “try” I guess…!” attitude leads to exactly nothing meaningful happening. Put some Yoda on that. There is no try, there is only do.

Actually do something.

You could have literally quoted me there. Instead you didn’t, you subtly changed what I said. Maybe it was accidental. I did use the word ‘try’ though, which was the right word because it’s an extremely complicated and difficult problem to solve. By using the word ‘try’ I was expressing that I’m not arrogant enough to think I can fix something that even an entire society has not been able to fix.

No, that’s bollocks, not a “documented sex difference”, that’s a cheap grade-school assumption based on “boys like trains, girls like dolls!” (which isn’t even really true - even to the degree it is, it’s like 60/40, not 90/10 like the games industry tends to be, or worse).

OK well in the example you’ve given there, that literally is a documented sex difference. It’s not saying that you know a girl likes dolls because she’s a girl - but it is saying that across a large group there is a pattern. It’s absolutely true that there is a similar pattern among men and women, they way I’ve heard it expressed is women are more interested in people, men are more interested in things. I am absolutely not saying that I know what a person is interested in based on gender, it’s just a pattern - a random man is more likely to be more interested in things than a random woman.

If you look at the history of computer programming

Now we’re getting into where I was, well, ignorant. I suspected sexism might be less of a big deal than it actually is because there are genuine, significant differences between men and woman as a group obviously please don’t anyone wilfully misunderstand this and I thought that this would be the reason why there was such a disparity in genders. It seems like this is not the case however, so I was wrong.

So you missed the whole deal with Google having guy doing exactly this at some length for years, and finally, after it got particularly egregious, getting fired? And yet still getting a lot of support from colleagues, and bosses unwilling to outright condemn him. If you’ve ever worked in game dev, you know that there are people like this. If you haven’t, that kind of ignorant blind “let’s pretend everything is fine until someone loses an eye” knee-jerk defence is a huge part of perpetuating the problem. I’ve got firsthand experience of this stuff, too, note, so trying to tell me it doesn’t happen, when I’ve directly seen it happen, and heard countless similar accounts is pretty special

Ooh, ‘special’ sounds a bit non-PC for this thread! Anyway… I did miss that, yes. And I didn’t say it doesn’t happen. I’ve since been reading about the history of programming and it really does seem like sexism was a big part of it, you’re right. All I was getting at is that seeing one instance or even several doesn’t necessarily indicate a systemic problem - but I still shouldn’t have alluded to that, because any sexism is too much. It doesn’t help for me to say ‘well maybe it’s not so bad overall,’ so I shouldn’t have.

[Sarfrin]

he posed the question of whether the lack of women in tech could be related to gender differences. If that’s what he did say, pretty stupid thing to fire him over - there are relevant gender differences

What are they? /20char