The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs.
People in the comments: Discrimination is bad! (Except when it’s against a group of people I don’t like)
It’s a shame these people can’t understand the flaw in their logic. More discrimination is not the answer.
Discrimination, without context, is necessary in nearly every situation. I must discriminate between bleach and water if I am to live, I must discriminate between walking into fast traffic and when it is safe to cross the road etc…
On a softer level, I discriminate between who I call my wife, and who I don’t, which of my friends is named David and which is named Alex…
And then if I’m employing people I can’t give everyone a job, I have to discriminate to a single person per job.
So, with the taken that to do anything some level of common sense discrimination is needed. However, humans cannot be relied upon to not take discrimination to an unfair place, and people must be forced to discriminate fairly.
People also lie, and will straight up tell you to your face they do not discriminate against women from the moment they enter the workforce to their dying day, and yet will, in private, discriminate against women so hard even if it were to destroy everything they hold dear. The only way to prevent that is to force people to discriminate.
People can’t be trusted to hire correctly but they can be trusted to do a their job correctly? Say I was interviewing another engineer, you would argue that I can’t be trusted to do this task, but you presumably accept I can be trusted to do all other tasks associated with my job. Strange how I lose all ability to reason correctly the moment I walk into the conference room and regain it the moment I leave.
Hey if I stand in the door way will I be in a superposition state between bigoted and rational or will I be half of both at once or is it more like the Trinity? You know a mystery of the church…watch as the engineer is fully rational and fully irrational the two are separate but of same substrate.
Discrimination != Choice
There are moments in life where you gotta choose something. There is no discrimination if you choose objectively. You choose water over bleach because there are objective reasons why one over the other will be better for you. You choose waiting for a green light over running onto a driving car because that is less likely to get you killed. If you cant give everyone a job you have to choose someone. If you choose purely based on qualities describing who will fit the position best like experience and knowledge that wont be a discrimination. There is no such thing as a fair discrimination
I know that, of course, I was using my initial points to set a frame of reference that the word “discrimination!” is a thought-terminating cliche.
Imagine if this was a whites only or over 6ft tall job fair, this stuff just fails to make sense when you divide groups based on criteria you can’t control.
