> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte
I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.
I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.
The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.
I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
> The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.
Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms
Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.
I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;
I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.
Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".
> He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.
> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...
You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.
> This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.
“Memory hole” is a term that should be reserved for things everybody actually forgets. This is more of a thing lots of people probably remember, but they don’t bring it up all the time.
No, lots of people willingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the abuses that were happening. See Brigida v Buttigieg for a particularly egregious example around the hiring of ATC.
The FAA, on an official test that ATC candidates were required to take, would disqualify applicants if they didn't answer questions like "what was your worst subject in school" with answers like "math" or "science." This explicitly was to increase racial diversity, which is both patronizing in the extreme and really stupid.
When I bring this up in SF, people accuse me of making it up. It's not that people don't remember it, it's that political polarization has blinded us to our side doing batshit crazy things. Another similar example was "defund the police" which is a crazy slogan on its face, yet for a year Democrats felt compelled to sanewash it.
I am about as blue and pro-DEI as someone could reasonably be and I think that this stuff is small potatoes compared to a president who has been continuously trying to send the army in to crush Democratic-leaning cities. That being said, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are suspicious of DEI because we do not have a good track record of auditing these programs.
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
Why does an hard working non-legacy white boy deserve less of a shot than a non-legacy black one? Why should he be penalized because someone else’s father with a comparable skin tan was accepted 25 years ago?
43% of all white students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, directly related to faculty, or have family that donated to the university. That number falls to 16% or lower for black, latino, and asian students.
75% of that aforementioned group of white students would not have been admitted had it been based on merit. 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories.
Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
> Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter. Suggesting that preference for legacies be removed is a fine topic on its own, but it's orthogonal to explicitly discriminating against individual applicants based upon the color of their skin.
Since you clearly feel strongly about this topic, I'll ask again. Why should the poor white kid with no legacy relationship get cast aside for some other non-legacy kid with a tan?
> Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter.
Exactly. We shouldn’t treat similarly situated people differently because of group averages. That’s the definition of racism.
It’s also irrational in practice. If you want to compare whose grandparents had it harder, Indians and Chinese are clearly entitled to the most affirmative action.
>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.
So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.
A lot of the contemporary formal scientific process is done incredibly badly, for a variety of reasons including overt political bias on the part of individual scientists working in the academic system, pressure to publish any results including poor ones, and outright laziness and fraud. In general we shouldn't assume that if a bunch of public scientific studies purport to show that some phenomenon is happening, that that phenomenon is actually happening. It takes substantial time, effort, and experience to evaluate whether a claimed scientific result is valid; and all the moreso when that result has immediate political policy implications.
It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between.
If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.
There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?
What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?
The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.
I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.
Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”
As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.
The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.
> As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%.
The least single industry was 3%. And each single industry is a very noisy data point, based on a couple companies and needing more data points. By the time you aggregate into more solid data, like those bigger categories, it's more than 3%.
But the whole thing could use better methods and more data for sure.
> The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison
In comparison to this specific resume effect it's pretty big, but that was just a basic example, not an attempt to list the biggest issue.
In comparison to the fortune 500 CEOs the overall effect here is smaller (no I'm not going to look at 5th decile in isolation).
Also even after this bias was applied, they're admitting a below-population-average amount of black students and a far above-population-average amount of asian students. So there's a bunch of other data necessary to properly analyze what's going on and how bad it is. Should there be a super tight correlation to academic decile? There are huge differences in school quality that muddy the signals, and those differences often correlate with race.
I'm not saying they did nothing wrong, but I'm saying it's unclear what the numbers should have been.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".
That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.
That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.
I fail to see any difference between "congress passing a law that is in violation of another law" and "federal regulations mandating that laws be broken". Can you explain how these situations differ quitely, other than that "regulation" and "law" are different words?
The difference was an incentive grant program that was found to be discriminatory, versus regulations which dictate how private entities act. This a pretty big distinction.
It's an especially big distinction when the question was for sources of DEI advocates handing out instructions to corporate decision makers no how to break the law. It's not even remotely connected.
Actually it took me almost an hour to re-do a portion of the research and lay it out, which I did further down the thread, if you care to look.
Also you didn't ask me to link you to my sources, you asked me what my sources were. I answered your question directly in the best way I could at the time.
Expecting an internet stranger to spend an hour digging up sources for you, when you don't ask respectfully or with any inclination of curiosity comes off as combative - I am not here to debate, I am here to discuss. If you are genuinely curious, take 30 seconds to scroll down and find the other comment I made that took me an hour to put together.
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
That's fine, of course you don't work for anyone else! But you are also not going to convince anyone else by being vague and refusing to give any specifics.
Usually when somebody makes broad vague assertions of evidence but refuses to back it up, I find that they are either mistaken about their experiences and that their take aways do not really follow from their primary evidence. Though usually it's those on the more DEI side that say "I'm not responsible for educating you" that make these mistakes! In the past year I'm seeing it from people that think DEI is about discrimination, so it's an interesting evolution. The argument is still unconvincing, no matter who says it. And again, I'm not saying you must produce anything for anybody else, I'm just saying that you end up looking like you don't have anything to actually produce.
Actually, I work for many people: My customers, my colleagues, my family. I just don't work for strangers on HN.
My mistake was answering judahmeek's question directly. They asked "What are your sources?" and I answered with the truth, that my impressions came from reading the regulations myself. Instead I should have just not replied at all, because I didn't have the time then to go re-do the research and find all the links. It's not like I save every link I visit when exploring my own curiosity. I am not trying to get some paper published here, just trying to understand whats going on and occasionally share what things seem like to me on HN. Also if they had said something like "This is shocking to me, can you point me where to look into this for myself" I would have probably waited and made a more constructive response.
I hope you appreciate that I just took time out of my day to do this for you, primarily because I found your response (in contrast to judahmeek's) reasonably respectful.
What I noticed when I looked into this last year was that regulatory implementations of the affirmative action executive order 11246 continuously increased and seemed to hit a couple inflection points. I think one was in 2000 and one was in 2021, but there may have been more. I didn't save all the sources that I read to give me the impression I got last year, but after spending about 30 min trying to find at least some of them, it wasn't hard to start to see the picture again.
Note that there is a lot of disparate facts here that paint a picture, and they will paint different pictures depending on the stance the reader starts with before engaging. When I explored this last time, I came at it with curious skepticism. The picture they painted for me, was that something that was well intentioned (affirmative action) came with an assumption: if organizations hire blindly based on merit, over time the distributions of their workforce will match the distributions of the pool of applicants applying to work there. To implement affirmative action these organizations need to include everyone in the pools of applicants, which may require disproportional outreach to invite minorities. Based on this assumption, recommendations were made into outreach programs and requirements were set to measure outcomes. Over time the outcomes didn't match expectations, so regulatory pressure was increased. As the regulatory pressure increased, it put more pressure on all levels within these organizations to take action beyond just outreach programs. So what was federally mandated across many industries specifically was race, gender, sexuality reporting and making plans to reach distributions representative of the broader population. Given this accountability set by federal regulations, and decades of efforts to try to solve the problem with outreach and merit based hiring not leading to the expected outcomes, efforts naturally expanded beyond outreach into all relevant decisions (hiring, promoting). That is how you get people being hired and promoted based on race, gender, sexuality instead of merit. (The exact opposite of the original intention).
What I remember from last year as most shocking were Department of Education regulations and NSF incentives, but I can't find those primary sources now. The NSF website seems gutted. What I recall was that NSF set criteria in grant awards to incentivize institutions to have a diverse workforce. I can find evidence of this from secondary sources, but not the primary source I remember seeing last year. Similarly what I remember, is that the DOE mandated DEI reporting and planning and tied it to federal funding/support. The effect was that leaders would put pressure on the organization beyond just job placement recruitment/outreach. The reporting and accountability focused on diversity and representation throughout the entire organization, and so the "plans" and more importantly implications would extend beyond just outreach and impact placement decisions from hiring, to special training / career acceleration programs and promotions.
I think it crossed a line for some people in the years following 2021 (EO 13985) when these regulations were expanded to include factors related to peoples sexual orientation and preferences. Once some manager who was just trying to get through their quarter and hire the candidate that will the do best job has to forgo what seems like the best candidate in favor of some other candidate because of how they chose to identify or who they like to have sex with, well... yeah it was getting ridiculous.
Let me be extremely clear that I don't condone discrimination. I think we should do our best to support everyone to thrive. We just have to be careful about confusing responsibility with privilege, and respect how hard it is to design incentive systems that actually produce the desired outcomes.
You can look at the evidence that I am presenting here and call it weak and argue against it. Or you can consider that I dug this up in 30 min on my lunch break as a favor to you, as someone with no motive other than curiosity and concern.
See Brigida v Buttigieg, if you want a spectacularly dumb example of how bad a DEI program can get. These are not hard examples to find, although I will concede that the "post-truth" anecdotes from the anti-woke camp can lead to a lot of cruft to sift through.
> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.
Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.
(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.
I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).
My thought is, if this sort of problem was happening at a company as big and influential in the industry as Google, that's already pretty bad. The backlash may not be warranted either way but the other position (that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done) isn't necessarily correct either.
The solution to "DEI has run amok!" is not "Ban DEI!" but "better define what DEI means and what is within bounds/outside bounds". But, the latter doesn't fit on a campaign poster, so here we are...
> that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done
That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
> That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
> Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
> Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
My point is just that it seems to be a real problem worth discussion and consideration, not just something made up for concern trolling. Whenever you have potential incentives to violate the law, there is reason to be somewhat concerned. It doesn't always manifest, but sometimes it does.
(P.S.: It is true that nobody is advocating for illegal hiring practices, at least not in good faith. Still, disregarding the apparent connection between DEI initiatives and illegal hiring practices they can incentivize just terminates the discussion.)
I would estimate illegal DEI was happening at more than half of top 100 firms. I’m not as familiar with corporations, but I would be checked if it was less than 25% of Fortune 100s. The HR folks all attend the same conferences together. And the big corps set the permission structure for how everyone else acts.
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused. And yes, that would be quite odd.
The rationale for racial preferences in 2025 is not that they are a benefit to individuals who were personally harmed by racial discrimination. The institutions engaging in these practices insist that they are otherwise engaged in race blind practices. If such practices existed, DEI as we know it would be unnecessary. We could simply just enforce the existing laws in a race-blind way.
> To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused.
No, this is a consequence of your ideology, which assumes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act and etc. (Hence “we could simply just enforce. . .”) Mine does not.
Note that the metaphor as stated by 0xDEAFBEAD, which you already said was good, did not include this additional generational gap.
It’s not just “my ideology.” The universities and corporations that practice DEI do not believe they discriminate against people in the present. They see it as a remedy for historical discrimination.
It’s also not even an ideological matter. It’s a testable fact. There’s very little evidence that universities and corporations are discriminating against non-whites/asians.
So if admission rates are below population averages, is it your contention that:
1. Fewer minorities *want* to go to college -- what do you think causes that bias?
2. Minorities want to go to college, but due to factors of their environment are less able to make it to college -- what do you think leads to that inability?
3. Minorities want to go to college, and their environment is just as supportive of that goal as for white, but minorities are less capable (on average) of achieving that goal -- what are we to make of this?
4. Some other explanation I haven't thought of?
My contention is that the evidence of discrimination against (non-asian) minorities in universities is non-existent. I don’t have an opinion to what’s causing admissions rates to be different than population averages. If someone proves that it’s caused by discrimination against minorities, then we have laws to address that and I’d support enforcing those laws.
If we have the fact of lower admission rates, it is incumbent on us as a society that cares about all our members to figure out what's going on. You've refused to express an opinion. Of course, others have proposed rationales, and the solution proposed is unacceptable to you. So what are we to do with that?
By this logic we should stop giving college scholarships to women. They are over represented in enrollment compared to men, so that can only be sexism right?
Society faces many problems—individuals don’t need to have an opinion as to the causes of all of them. I’m not an education expert, so I can’t tell you what causes lower admissions rates. If you think the reason is universities are discriminating, then it’s incumbent on you to build a case for that. I’m sure I’d support enforcing the laws against discriminatory conduct that you can show is happening. But I’m not going to support indicting people without evidence of wrongdoing.
You're asking too much of society with such vague complaints. We should focus on getting basics right: prosperity, jobs, reduce crime, reduce road death, and so forth before navel-gazing about "abuse by society". In any case, even if society does somehow "address the abuse", it shouldn't come in the form of randomly abusing other people. But that's what you appear to be advocating for: Because some people were discriminated against, we should now randomly discriminate against some other people.
You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions. Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me: it's not a zero-sum game, and white people in general seem to have done fine over the past fifty years of "abuse".
>The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.
Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.
It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?
In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay.
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing?
Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have.
Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it.
Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class.
Better what makes better.
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
Because we must do better than our ancestors, we have no escuses, whereas e.g. 1880 gobal ileteracy rate > 80%.
More comfortable schools with less pupils per 1 teacher we need, fix the issue, not give painkillers.
We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.
Yep, you'r 100% right, it reminds me I once read that of all given jobs offers, 50% would be taken by someone who got introduced internally.
Out of personal exeperience as employer, that so was decided by me because it was filling the need instantly.
And out of those personal experiences, bad employees brought bad recruits, good employees brought good recruits.
Unknown recruits? half good, half bad.
Ironically chiraldic.
"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"
If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.
Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI. As an able-bodied individual, you may not feel you would benefit from those today; but if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another. When that day comes, you'll be asking for accommodations to get into public areas, and if those accommodations are not available to you, you will likely find how that limits your ability to participate in public life very unfair.
> if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another
Oh for sure, for sure. It's hard to predict exactly how the secondary effects play out. But I was referring to the primary intended effects, which I think is what the person I was replying to was talking about.
>Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI.
You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.
I am not saying disability law originated in the DEI movement of today, I'm pointing at the through line between the passage of the ADA and the modern DEI movement. From the civil rights era in the 60s, to women's rights in the 70s, to the ADA in the 90s, to gay rights in the 00s, to DEI today. The principles behind disability accommodations -- access, fairness, inclusion -- are foundational to DEI as a broader movement. The ADA was an early expression of those principles in law; DEI later extended them into other social and organizational contexts.
And yeah, the ADA has received broad bipartisan support in passage because it's well understood even by partisans that disabilities affect everyone, so it's important to have protections in place.
What's not so understood by partisans is how those disabilities manifest, so since the passage of the ADA there has also been widespread pushback on what qualifies as a disability, and what accommodations are reasonable. THAT is a whole different conversation which, as someone who is disabled and covered under the ADA, I will say can be like pulling teeth to get protections guaranteed under the law. For example, businesses are often loathe to make physical accommodations like ramps and elevators, and there is often resistance to providing accommodations for mental health conditions or neurodiversity.
But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone. This includes people who are disabled, and at no point in time has DEI not included disabled people. Maybe for the terminally online right, who only focus on gender and race, but that's not what it's all about in the real world. Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI). It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
It's not only not benefitting you but actively putting you at a disadvantage because of the way you where born.
Why do you think that? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
(Not gp but...) I believe it because diversity is not a zero sum game, where every gain for a demographic other than mine means a loss to my demographic which must be fought tooth and nail.
First, we are all enriched by having a variety of experiences and perspectives available to draw upon.
Second, I feel stronger bonds with historically marginalized humans than with humans who happen to belong to my own demographic.
> If you think "all white dudes are/think the same"
What makes you think I think "all white dudes are/think the same"? Did I say anything to suggest that?
The difference, I think, is that I'm not blind to the advantages I receive every day for being a white male. In the words of Louis CK, "If you're a white male and don't admit that it is thoroughly awesome, you're an asshole."
Reading your other comments, I was just thinking that you seemed to group everyone who look the same, together, and think about them as if they were 1 type of person you could generalize about. For example, white men, or black men, or women. - So, yes I suppose you did.
For example, if your country gets attacked, primarily the men go and defend their country and people. Is that "thoroughly awesome"? Anyway have a nice day
You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.
So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!
On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.
Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool. For example, page 64 shows that Google's APAC offices have 90.7% Asian workers, up from 90.4% a year earlier -- at the expense of all other ethnicities. Is Google doing a bad job there, or is this an accurate reflection of the available workforce?
>On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
>My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
I provided data. Not anecdotes. The data shows how the demographics of Google have shifted. The data shows how the professional prospects of minorities have shifted when it comes to Google jobs. The data does not show "no change at all".
A change from 90.4% to 90.7% percentage points I doubt is statistically significant. Phrasing it "at the expense" sounds like it's some terrible decline.
The conversation so far I believe has been about DEI in the US. Why focus on APAC, instead of the the US?
>Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool.
What does that mean? Are you saying that if the fraction of CS grads that are Black+ also increased from 2.2% to 10.0%, then Google's DEI efforts did nothing? That conclusion doesn't hold. Google has a lot of DEI efforts, including ones to increase the number of Black+ people who choose to major in CS.
> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.
Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.
(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)
Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.
All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.
The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".
Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires.
It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.
> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
The PSF grant one or a different one? In the PSF one, nobody is getting ostracized and fired for daring to suggest DEI, in fact, they are turning down a grant for a more pro-DEI stance.
You might be in trouble for actually implementing DEI programs, but it's not a taboo topic that can't even safely be talked about. Criticism of any DEI-related practice, whether it's illegal hiring discrimination or presubmits that yell at you for using an ever-expanding list of now-verboten words, was taboo in many places.
In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
I assume that many of those female speakers are transwomen, and transwomen are not underrepresented in the Python or similar programming communities (in some of them, they're conspicuously overrepresented).
Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.
Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.
The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Imo DEI should have always been based on socioeconomic status over anything else. It'd likely address the other forms of diversity, and would provide way less homogeneity in thought while at the same time providing a sense of inclusion/belonging.
No, it's not hard compared having a good combination of STEM and marketing skills. Many emigrants to the US had no or very few connections: Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, a long list of Indians, Chinese and other Asians.
There is a also merit at the individual level vs merit at the organizational level. e.g. most tech companies are male dominated, but many serve primarily women (Amazon retail, Pinterest, Etsy etc). So having more women in the companies, especially in positions to directly impact the customer experience is important even if we disregard individual merit. Ditto for products that serve primarily minority populations etc.
> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.
If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?
You can see this very visibly in things like the Marines combat fitness tests. [1] In any case where strength is directly involved the requirement for a minimum score for men tends to be near the standards for a max score for women. In that particular test the ammo can lift range is 62-106 for men versus 30-66 for women.
Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.
The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.
Every single time. You look into the source and realize that there's nothing behind the claims.
It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.
But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.
> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.
GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
> It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
It has two sides, one promoting, and one denying. Based on race. DEI activists are always talking about the first. How great it is. And never talks about second, to not to ruin the rosy picture. Just recently I visited a hospital in mostly white area. Inside it looked like african consulate. There are still DEI stickers on the wals. What they did they denied jobs to all white applicants.
Looks like Python foundation decided to promote exactly this. Well, you will not get a penny from me till you change the course.
That stat is basically meaningless on its own. It could mean anything from they've done an amazing job on engaging women, to they've bodged the numbers by unfairly discriminating against men, or anything in between.
Annoyingly they actually do have the data to answer which it is, because Pycon's review process has a first stage which is blind, and a second stage which isn't. So if they published how many talks get rejected at each stage, by year and vendor, then we could draw actual conclusions.
I couldn't find where they have published those numbers though so we can't draw any conclusions here.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
You telling certain friends, but not others, based on characteristics named in the 1964 civil rights act, as part of your job requirements, would likely be illegal.
In your free time without occupational incentive? Sure.
Spamming the same bad-faith argument over and over in this thread on an account you clearly solely created for this purpose does not make it more true.
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
I opened the link and searched for "random" and id not find anything. I thought there was going to be something like a randomized controlled trial or similar from what you said but if random does not show up on the search I am not sure what to look for or what you are referring to when you say "Randomized studies". I skimmed the article and did not spot anything that matched, but I may be missing something.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
No because they obviously deserve it for there grand grand grand grand fathers sins and we still live in a patriarchy because 0.01% of men are part of the 1% richest so it's only right to punish the other 99.99%.
> We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
Funny, I've seen the exact opposite. Nice anecdotes we have here, maybe some real data would be more appropriate in arguments such as these.
And on the flip side, if I look at the state of my (US) government, seems like we've managed to fill it up with lowest-common-denominator stupidity, and most of it is white men (with a smattering of white women here and there). And it certainly seems we're dragging everyone else down with us...
At least in the US, it seems to be the lower-educated, rabidly anti-DEI faction that seems to be dragging everyone else down with them.
> DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
Very, very curious on what basis these claims are being made. Empirical studies would be ideal, but even some anecdotes would be illuminating at this point.
> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do
This is an odd phrasing. These are exclusive categories that cover the possibility space†; it makes sense to say that "women are favored over men", but it doesn't make sense to say "men face more discrimination than women". Any number you come up with for "discrimination against men" is necessarily defined relative to the outcomes for women; you can't assign cardinal numbers to both groups.
† Not quite. The possibility space also includes children. They face far, far more discrimination than either men or women do. For example, hiring them is a serious crime.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
This is a coherent claim, but it can't be summarized as "men face more discrimination than women do". Neither (1) nor (2) is an amount of discrimination.
It could be the case, for example, that there are twenty times as many jobs in male-dominated industries as in female-dominated industries, and that men and women apply to these in perfect proportion to their availability.
(Your more specific claim, women do not face any negative discrimination in male-dominated industries, will mean that the amount of negative discrimination faced by women is lower than that faced by men regardless, but this isn't a necessary part of the way you've constructed the question.)
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
This means more women working these roles with the same capability as men, it doesn't mean replacing men with women who are worse at the job, which ironically is an attitude making up part of the reason efforts like this have to be made.
> This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
Citation needed. Certainly neither of those is "clearly".
> If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
And if it's the opposite, as the best available evidence (not that there is any really solid evidence in this space) suggests?
I'm all for ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance that reflects their skills and experience, regardless of personal characteristics. As far as I can see DEI initiatives are working against that.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
Anonymizing names and such is fine/good but the whole push for equal net worth, etc is IMO bad. Granting assistance exclusively to people below the median is equal to punishing those above the median. And if you start adding race, gender, etc it gets even worse. And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
The status quo benefits me, but I also don't see why I owe X to Y. My parents worked hard to get me educated. Their parents worked hard to get them educated. Their parents worked hard to get them their own house. You can stretch it and say they were able to do that because Ys grand...parents got exploited but it's honestly not my problem at this point. We still exploit kids mining in bumfuck nowhere and making phones, everyone cares mostly when they can make an extra buck unless it's straight up death camps.
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant..
The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime? This is what the people looking for reparations are arguing, no wrongs were ever righted because the responsible at no point considered it their duty to do so.
This means they have been generationally disadvantaged compared to you. It means they have had worse social mobility. By the time Obama rolled around there had only been four black US senators in its history.
The US's historic (and ongoing!) poor treatment of its people based on skin colour is so obvious from the outside that I struggle to understand how you don't see it. The government can snap into action for Florida but cannot find its energy for New Orleans, and many other such interesting coincedences.
> done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
> Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime?
In a way, yes. Of course, it's different nowadays in that if I don't like how country X is treating me I just move to country Y so I won't touch that too much. If we make it equal to where I get sold (how did I become property? Debt? War? Kidnapping? The country just decided to cover some debts?) to go plow fields in bumfuck nowhere, I likely won't be happy, but that's so outside of modern life I have no idea how I'd feel since people are kinda weird under stress.
The thing is that it wasn't morally or legally wrong for a long time. So it's just holier than thou modern people judging people of the past and wanting retroactive punishments for legal actions to people who have nothing to do with said actions. Sure, it could have happened faster, it also could have not happened at all.
And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
> The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway.. This is covered clearly as of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So anyone who had an issue with it could sue based on it. It's how the system is supposed to work. Not via redistribution systems based on "reverse" racism/sexism/etc.
> And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
It's better to feel punished now when your illfound gains are equalised to the people who lost out for you to have them, than to continue punishing the people who lost out forever because you don't have the humility to say "yeah my ancesters were probably wrong about this"
> No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway..
"No clue" might be the best I'll get, if you want to look it up and learn it's Duval County, Florida which integrated in 1999.
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
Yeah you know all those "women" and their "liberal views". I'm a strong republican, that's why I only want to be around men. And touch them and smell them.
DEI in practice works like this: You have a ruling class of affluent white males and a Harvard educated Executive Director. None of these have ever been suppressed in their lives.
If anyone points out that fact on PSF infrastructure, you ban them (yes, this has happened).
You create a couple of programs that are mostly ineffective but good for PR.
You never mention any economic or other injustices that could upset the corporate sponsors.
You support and promote job replacement by AI while blogging about redistributing jobs via DEI.
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.
If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit.
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
From my side of the coin, I've always thought that the best solution is ground level support.
Ensure that students of any type have excellent public schools. Ensure that people without resources, of any background, have access to higher education. This can be by grants for the very poor, just as it can be by government backed, guaranteed approved student loans.
Healthy, stable food in schools is an excellent way to keep a child's mind on education.
These things level the playing field. There are plenty of white males who need such help to be on a level playing field with wealthier families too. I grew up in a rural community in Canada, and saw many smart but underprivileged(including trouble with keeping food on the table) families end up with grants to go to university.
If you do this, if you provide the capability for merit to shine, and ensure that merit can be fed intellectually, you're doing much of the work required for true equality.
I frankly don't give a rat's ass about women being in any specific field, or someone of whatever skin tone. I do 100% care if people want to, but cannot!! I want all who are capable, to be able to express that capability.
If this is done, and done correctly, then the numbers of candidates applying for jobs will result in numbers indicative of candidates in the field. And more importantly, of people wanting to be in those fields. If you get 11% women in the field, and 11% women applicants, and nothing prevented women from entering that field, you're where you want to be.
We don't need to encourage people to enter a field. We need to only ensure they can if they want to.
This sort of "women are weak and are scared of entering fields" is bizarre, from an equality standpoint. The same for people with different skin tones. Why do people seem to think women, for example, are weak and incapable of pursing their dreams? They are not!
The women I've known in my life have been strong in opinion and in drive, the same goes for people of any racial background. There are of course those that are not, but I've seen lazy, undriven white males too.
People don't need to be prodded, dragged, pulled into a field.
They just need to have no way that they are hindered. They just need the freedom to choose. To know that they can pursue that which they desire.
It's not like a white male cannot get mentored in Python by anybody. By 2019 Python was already one of the most popular languages in the world. Surely any dev on Earth who wants to learn Python has plenty of people and resources at their disposal, and it would take a very good set of reason to turn to the language inventor himself.
I agree that DEI often acts as a fig leave over a whole bunch of other systemic issues, and the European vs American cultural and historical landscapes are already so different as to make any cross-the-pound discussion on DEI extremely hard to navigate, but I still commend the PSF for not taking clearly ideological orders from a funding body. That road would have lead to nothing but trouble.
> The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
I feel like you're glossing over my main point, which is that this stuff 100% does breed resentment for the average person, which is how we end up with people like Trump (obviously there are many more factors to consider but this is definitely one of them).
The difference between your scenario is just how visible it is; I have never ever had somebody go up to me and say 'This opportunity is being given to you because you're a white male'! If anything, it's the opposite! Did you know I was not eligible _to apply_ for a single scholarship for college a few years back, solely based on my race and gender? It was pretty demoralizing!
Again, I'm not saying that I _haven't_ benefitted from being a white male in some indescribable unknown way; but unlike in your scenario, I cannot _see_ this. Think about the average person, who goes their whole life seeing others being handed stuff specifically because of their race and gender and when they complain about it they simply get told 'Do you have no empathy? Your life is much better off than theirs!'
Again, who knows what the right solution is. But I don't think that it's the status quo.
> I feel like you're glossing over my main point, which is that this stuff 100% does breed resentment for the average person, which is how we end up with people like Trump (obviously there are many more factors to consider but this is definitely one of them).
I mean, having to cater to the feelings of overly sensitive men is how most of these problems started in the first place.
Ack! There is nothing 'overly sensitive' about being annoyed when you see somebody else get an opportunity because of the color of their skin or gender. It's human nature! In fact I suspect the average person in favor of DEI and / or identity politics would still suffer a decent amount of cognitive dissonance if they were passed up because of something like this. Again, it's just human nature!
Please try to imagine advocating for women's rights 100 years ago and hearing somebody say something like 'overly sensitive women want to vote! Psh!' If you want to argue for DEI please try to present good faith arguments.
Personally, I don't really get butthurt about things, so this isn't a problem for me (although I do think it's a problem in general as it is obviously going to anger people). I do think one of the main problems with DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
You just wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about how appearances made you feel things without ever addressing the actual facts.
>DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
> You just wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about how appearances made you feel things without ever addressing the actual facts.
Yes, appearances matter! That's why Trump is president right now (a fact, in case it isn't clear, I'm not happy about)! Because the American people were unhappy with the status quo. Whether or not you think DEI is "fair". And when people like you ignore this, you alienate the voting class, which you need on your side!
> Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
No, there are not DEI initiatives for pre kindergarten / very early school. Not that I've heard of at least, and definitely not on a large scale. And I'm not even talking about adding DEI there; I'm simply saying that we should really be asking why the gap between men and women in STEM seems to start so young (and if it really is because of something that hurts girls, remove that. Which would still not be DEI!)
> Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
...what? I am arguing against the current status quo. And it's true, it would be beneficial to me for DEI to be removed / identity politics abolished. I also believe it would be beneficial to everyone (albeit to a lesser extent), but that's beyond the scope of this argument.
Imagine the teacher lines up all the kids, gives them cookies, notices all the kids are boys, so the teacher puts up a sign outside the girls restroom advertising free cookies for anyone who attends math class.
Now the boys have cookies and the girls have cookies.
Except the cookies are not actually cookies, they just represent what you'll learn by attending the class.
That is out reach.
I don't see jocks complaining about fitness outreach programs to geeks. That'd be absurd.
But guys famously will complain about:
1. Women reading science fiction
2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
3. Women playing d&d
4. Women playing online games
5. Women writing code.
To be fair, many women are judgemental about male nurses or even male teachers.
That type of idiocy has to stop both ways. Let people do what they want to do.
> But guys famously will complain about:
> 1. Women reading science fiction
> 2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
> 3. Women playing d&d
> 4. Women playing online games
> 5. Women writing code.
In your head? The first two are specially absurd. How would anyone know what women watch or read in their houses?
As soon as women try to participate in fandom or attend conventions, they are derided as not being "real fans". This has been documented as a problem with geek culture for well over 50+ years.
If boys always get 4 cookies at home, and girls get none, and then we go to school and boys get 1 more cookie, and girls get 3 cookies, I'd think it was pretty weird that boys get 5 cookies and girls only get 3.
> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).
In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
It was legal and common to discriminate on the basis of sex in banking services until 1974. I actually don't see anything in your link that disputes that. It discusses some earlier milestones about women being able to own certain types of property.
Even if we quibble about the dates involved, we all understand that historically women have been marginalized, denied property, voting, and other rights, and that this was the status quo for millenia, right? And that that has lasting effects that continue in our society?
> Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974.
And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.
> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.
You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.
I actually don't care what the makeup of college students is. It's useful to encourage women to pursue education in order to promote equity. But there isn't some magic proportion of men to women graduates that I think we should be pursuing.
I don't want everything dominated by women, I just recognize that the work of undoing their marginalization is not complete.
If that's not your position, clarify what it is. You're complaining about efforts to encourage women to seek an education. What is the theory of harm, if not that women shouldn't be educated? Perhaps what I said was too snarky of inflammatory, but I genuinely don't understand what else it would be.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
There’s actually quite a bit of outreach-type programs aimed at getting them in the door, and a lot less after that because despite women dominating degrees and entry-level hires, men still disproportionately dominate management and leadership roles.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
These people are very disconnected from reality. They make wild claims like groups for men are illegal and you’d never see a group dedicated to helping men in the nursing field. The feminists would destroy it! And yet…
It’s really telling how they’re just so confident about easily debunked claims.
I’m reminded of a retired college admissions administrator whose theory was that some of the men in college gap was over-confidence: statistically the women who applied overall were far closer to the women who were accepted, whereas like a third of their male applicants had no chance so a roughly even balance of applicants turned 2:1 in favor of women being accepted. I’m sure that many of them grumble about DEI, unaware that merit is _why_ they weren’t accepted whereas their fathers’ generation would’ve found room for many of them via legacy or sports spots.
> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly
That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
Your argument is based on the fact that more men naturally gravitate towards STEM than women do. This doesn't mean there aren't still men who could go into STEM but lack motivation/opportunity/some other push. Maybe there are more of them than there is women like that, maybe not.
You are saying it's ok to ignore all those men just because already bigger % of men naturally go into STEM. This is just discriminatory. Just because some people sharing some characteristic with me do better (in this context) doesn't mean I am in position to do better.
This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.
> We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
I don't believe this is true. I think the gendered difference in interest in the cluster of topics we label "STEM" is mostly biological and deeply-seated - one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
I also don't think that boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls. I think that girls are explicitly encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in much greater numbers than boys - this is exactly a consequence of the above-noted social fact that "Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly". And as you say, this is because males are much more likely to be intrinsically interested in pursuing STEM education and careers, whereas females are more likely to require explicit societal encouragement to do so. I've read more than one account of a woman who had worked in some kind of software-related field admitting that she wasn't intrinsically excited about the work, but felt like she would be a bad feminist if she left a STEM track to do something more traditionally female-coded instead.
> one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
> This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
It's certainly possible that particular study had limitations or was otherwise bad. This is a hard thing to study rigorously. My understanding wasn't that the primates were choosing toys based on gender association in (some) human societies, it's that they were playing with the same physical objects in gendered ways. And this is consistent with the anecdotal observation about human children I've heard from many parents that girls like to play with any toy as if it is a doll whereas boys like to play with any toy as if it is a tool or a gun; girls being given toy cars and then tucking them into a toy bed as if they were a doll, etc.
> What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
I don't think I would claim that women are innately worse at engineering (and I think that "engineering" is a broad enough field with enough subspecializations that it's difficult to judge engineering skill in a way that is both objective and useful). I'd claim that women are systematically less interested in the kinds of highly technical systems-focused work we associate with fields like software engineering. In other words, I think that both men and women can be taught to program a computer and do software engineering, but that men (really AMAB people, I think transwomen pattern like cis men in this respect) are much more likely to be deeply interested in programming computers and voluntarily spend a lot of time doing it to the exclusion of other things, which eventually caches out in programming as a whole being a very male-skewed field.
I think the lower gender gap in the Soviet Union and other mid-20th-century Communist states is explained by exactly what you said, explicit social and political pressure for gender equality. I also suspect that even in the Soviet system, there might have been more equal numbers of men and women doing STEM work or programming work specifically, but (at least as far as computer programming goes), males were systematically more intrinsically interested in and energized by the actual programming, whereas the women were more likely to just be doing their jobs and feeling like they would rather be spending their time doing something else. The Soviet system was in any case characterized by a large amount of state control over how people worked, in ways we generally find authoritarian today, and it's not a model I would like to see modern US employment policy follow.
> When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
I agree that these are interesting and complex questions that cognitive scientists should attempt to study to the best of their ability. I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
> I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
Interesting take. I faced abusive repercussion in daycare for playing with the cooking set and dolls because “those aren’t my toys and it’s wrong”, so while I was inclined to think this was very much socially enforced dimorphism, your comment seems to suggest that I am in some way more “biologically feminine” than most skeptics would like to suggest. curious !
As for us being overrepresented in tech, for a lot of gals I know it’s a way for our merit to be judged over our appearance, similar to socially awkward guys preferring work that doesn’t take constant face-to-face.
Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
There's no St. Jude's Non-Cancer Cancer Research because that would be fucking stupid. Similarly, there is no "coding for white guys". Well, there is, we just call that the entire industry.
I don't want "coding for white guys", if I could decide, I'd want for example "coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America" (I live in Poland so it's not directly about me).
It seems you're also making a false assumption that since "white guys" make the majority of the industry that means all kinds of "white guys" are properly represented there.
But I don't see colors or genders like that.
Is this one of those “what about white guys?” complaints, or am I misreading? Because the implied qualification for “subset of people” is “underrepresented”. Any political/cultural undertones are on you.
> In the US, this also applies to Republican voters. What about them?
Nobody cares about them. If you want to make a "coding for republicans", then go for it. Nobody is stopping you. You can't pretend people are stopping you so then you can turn around and act like a victim. That's not normal person behavior.
> conservative views? They're also pretty underrepresented in the tech industry
First off, not they're not. Second off - nobody is censoring conservative views.
They ARE censoring obvious racism, sometimes pedophilia, sometimes misogyny. Because those all suck. And when that happens, some conservatives cry. Which doesn't say what you think it says. That does not reflect well on you or the broader ideology.
At the end of the day, if I speak like Hilary Clinton at work, it's perfectly normal. If I speak like Trump and talk about "human garbage" and various brown people eating cats and dogs, I'm probably getting fired and potentially a referral to a psychiatrist.
That's the difference. Not the ideology, the words.
What is your evidence for this: "... because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems ..." , "the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out ... "?
They presumably didn’t write an entire literature survey in an HN comment because the CS pipeline problem has been written about so much in the past that it’s reasonable to assume basic familiarity:
I mean there's reams of women in tech or academia who talk about this shit. "I left my PhD program because I was constantly belittled and harassed by my advisor and labmates" "I left my position for a different company because I kept getting passed over for promotion after I had kids" "I switched majors from CS in college because most of my classmates were men who made me uncomfortable" "I was bullied in high school by boys because they thought I didn't get accepted into school based on merit". These are all stories I've heard and there are many of them. Go ask some women in your workplace and I'd bet money they've heard stories like this from other women they know or have experienced it themselves. I'm a man and I'm tired of hearing the contrarian denials regarding these problems from my peers in the industry. Maybe every woman I know in the industry experiencing sexism at some point in their education or career is too anecdotal for you I guess.
I'm sure there's studies in labor and education stats to show some quantitative evidence of this stuff but I'm not going to waste my time proving the obvious to you.
I don't think it's our responsibility to educate you about a phenomenon that has been discussed, analyzed, and written about extensively over the past couple decades. If you haven't seen evidence of this, then you've been living under a rock.
Outreach programs like “girls who code” and encouraging underrepresented groups to get involved are absolutely not against the law. Explicit discriminatory practices in hiring practices would be.
Yes, they are literally against the law, your knowledge of the law is probably a few years out of date, and I think you should spend more time reading the statutes themselves, this has already been litigated up to the supreme court.
> Nothing contained in this subchapter shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee subject to this subchapter to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any labor organization, or admitted to, or employed in, any apprenticeship or other training program, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.
Which is to say, affirmative action or diversity programs.
29 C.F.R. § 1608.1–1608.1(c) says:
> Voluntary affirmative action to improve opportunities for minorities and women must be encouraged and protected in order to carry out the Congressional intent embodied in title VII.[4] Affirmative action under these principles means those actions appropriate to overcome the effects of past or present practices, policies, or other barriers to equal employment opportunity. Such voluntary affirmative action cannot be measured by the standard of whether it would have been required had there been litigation, for this standard would undermine the legislative purpose of first encouraging voluntary action without litigation.
34 C.F.R. § 106.3(b) says:
> a recipient may take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limited participation therein by persons of a particular sex.
The decision in United Steelworkers v. Weber states:
> Title VII's prohibition in §§ 703(a) and (d) against racial discrimination does not condemn all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action plans. ... Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U. S. 405, 422 U. S. 418, cannot be interpreted as an absolute prohibition against all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action efforts to hasten the elimination of such vestiges.
The decision in Johnson v. Transportation Agency similarly states that Santa Clara County Transportation Agency did not violate Title VII by promoting a less-qualified woman.
The decision in Cohen v. Brown University upheld the use of affirmative action to equalize opportunity.
The law _literally_ contemplates this. As you said, "you need to literally look it up sometime."
STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 2023
Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 6–40.
"(b) Proposed by Congress and ratified by the States in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” Proponents of the Equal Protection Clause described its “foundation[al] principle” as “not permit[ing] any distinctions of law based on race or color.” Any “law which operates upon one man,” they maintained, should “operate equally upon all.” Accordingly, as this Court’s early decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause explained, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed “that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.”
...
"Respondents suggest that the end of race-based admissions programs will occur once meaningful representation and diversity are achieved on college campuses. Such measures of success amount to little more than comparing the racial breakdown of the incoming class and comparing it to some other metric, such as the racial makeup of the previous incoming class or the population in general, to see whether some proportional goal has been reached. The problem with this approach is well established: “[O]utright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
AMERICAN ALLIANCE FOR EQUAL RIGHTS, versus FEARLESS FUND MANAGEMENT, LLC, 2023
To be sure, the line between “pure speech” that arguably entails discriminatory sentiments, see 303 Creative, 600 U.S. at 587, and the very act of discrimination itself may at times be hard to draw. And to be sure, Fearless characterizes its contest as reflecting its “commitment” to the “[b]lack women-owned” business community. The fact remains, though, that Fearless simply—and flatly— refuses to entertain applications from business owners who aren’t “black females.” Official Rules at 3. If that refusal were deemed sufficiently “expressive” to warrant protection under the Free Speech Clause, then so would be every act of race discrimination,
...
"Moreover, and more specifically, each lost opportunity to enter Fearless’s contest works an irreparable injury because it prevents the Alliance’s members from competing at all—not just for the $20,000 cash prize but also for Fearless’s ongoing mentorship and the ensuing business opportunities that a contest victory might provide. "
The organization refused applications from anyone who wasn’t a black female, again different then an outreach group. I am sure if a male applied to “Girls who code” was denied and was able to establish this did harm to him he could have a case. As far as I know that has not happened so the group and others like it are perfectly legal.
Which law are you referring to? If you are referring to Presidential statements, they have to be followed by an actual regulation or else they are just a press release.
The ask for the former is to have competitive spaces that are designated specifically for female athletes. This of course implies that all male athletes must be excluded, regardless of their identity claims.
The rationale is the same for both: to provide opportunities for women and girls in an otherwise male-dominated space. Neither should be controversial.
You slipped in "based on sex" for an intentional reason that I'd like you to share with the class. Say, is your opinion of the "sex is an immutable characteristic and fixed at birth and therefore trans people are invalid and should..."? Or maybe I'm just reading into your wording a little too much.
You're talking to a trans woman by the way. Just thought I should throw that out there just in case you want to hurl some insults at me while you're at it too :)
In humans and other mammals the immutability of sex is a fact, not an opinion. We are not a species of sequential hermaphrodites.
The cultural artefact of people identifying themselvee as the opposite gender is a different type of concept to this. It's more of a sociological or psychological phenomenon.
If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
> Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
This ties into a very specific confusion about affinity groups. Specifically, they generally are not exclusionary (in part because it's largely illegal). The only thing preventing boys from participating in a "girls who code" type of event is the boys don't want to go to something with "girls" in the name.
I blearily put this reply to the wrong top-level comment earlier, but ...
That very much depends on the group.
Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.
Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
If you were to create a "boys who code" organization and get denied for use of a public space that a "girls who code" org has used, then a) you could sue for use of the space, citing the girls groups' use, and win, or b) you could sue saying that the girls group shouldn't be allowed to use it, and win.
Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.
Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
its just that human beings aren't writing things using type safe memory checked languages, but i'll just say that they're trying to concatenate and distill a series of supreme court decisions into public policy.
It basically boils down to:
A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need"
B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine.
C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
> We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional.
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
Does it define what DEI is? It seems very loosely defined to me so it seems a bit crazy to talk about it in contact terms without defining it more precisely.
The point is to muddy the waters, to sow uncertainty. To have the ability to apply the law arbitrarily, as opposed to uniformly. The absence of a specific definition very much aids that use case.
The opinion of the current administration is that DEI is illegal, the language is intentionally implying that DEI is illegal discrimination, because that is the view they are trying to advance. Grants are even being terminated for being related to any sort of diversity topic.
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
From Democratic analyst David Shor back in March ( https://archive.is/kbwom ) : "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]." So, not that it brings me any joy to say it but it would seem more like 55%?
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
“Registered voters” is not the same group as “people”.
Winning by 5% (even assuming no third party votes) is 52.5% (with 47.5% for the opponent) not 55%, if there are any third-party votes, that gets even lower.
A piece written in March 2025 discussing a hypothetical for the November 2024 election is not describing the state of the world in October 2025.
Unless the 40% number in your previous post was from October 2025, that's plainly moving the goalposts. And registered voters are the only people who matter since anyone else can't cast a ballot.
Beyond that, the August 2025 (since October's aren't available yet) poll numbers don't seem that much better. That the Democratic Party approval is neck and neck with the Republicans despite the Republicans' blatant corruption and incompetence speaks volumes about how unpopular the Democratic Party is. They need to reform drastically before the midterms next year.
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened.
From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
Even the people buried deep in the most podunk regulatory department you've never even heard of are smart enough to re-order the priority list on a change of administration. They don't need to be told and there is no paper trail. They just know what's good for their boss's boss's boss's boss^n is good for them and that kicking a potential hornet's nest is bad for them.
And even if you personally want to hassle someone with friends in the right places, what are the odds every other leaf of every other part of the organization(s) does? There will always be someone who has no morals and wants to climb the ladder who's happy to read between the lines and drop the ball.
It's just how it is. On some level, I'm not even sure this is a bad thing. If the executive can't change prioritization implicitly then the organization is either stupid or unaccountable.
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
Did it have a claw back clause? If not, then it's quite different than the current situation?
Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
It doesn't matter if you have used them in this thread or not. An account of your age and your disposition should not have access to automated moderation tools, period.
Moderation via easily gamified populism is the worst kind of moderation.
Because the leftists flagging and downvoting everything they disagree with in this thread are clearly exemplars of excellent user moderation? Knock it off.
This is a contradiction. There's no such thing, only shades of bad, and HN has about the worst possible implementation.
For what it's worth, I didn't flag or downvote you. YC is seemingly fine with your behavior, and I've seen much worse out of people who have been here longer. I'd rather your mask-off rants be out in the open than swept under the rug.
> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
I don't recall the government making hugely significant financial decisions about science funding on those grounds, any more than people "falling over themselves" to shave two characters off the default branch name. Nor do I remember DEI being quite as harmful to the humans as master/slave relations in the US. But, it is completely in line with these sorts of politicians and their supporters to criticize people for something, and then act 10x as bad.
I didn't engage with the explanation because nobody has provided one. This whole thread is just people asserting that it's OK to change a few words and continue doing what they were previously doing, because Trump. There's no deeper logic and that's not an intricate explanation. It is, in fact, fraud.
Nobody here is actually confused about any of this. You're all defending fraud because you hate the victims of it, not out of any intellectual principle. The government doesn't want to fund certain kinds of work. People who want to grab money for that work anyway are manipulating the language they use whilst refusing to change what they're really doing. That is grant fraud. Merely asserting it's not over and over will not help you when lawsuits start flying.
That's academics. The PSF, despite how awful this blog post makes it look, is at least doing what it's supposed to be doing: taking the requirements seriously and refusing the money.
> First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions
Python hacking isn't science! But if you want to talk about academic research instead, the time for academics to make this argument was 50 years ago. Nobody is going to buy the idea it's unacceptable to be political from academics of all people. There is no group more blatantly political: if it's unethical to impose "political filters" on "scientific positions" then academia needs to engage in massive purges of itself because it's overrun with unethical behavior.
> The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
It and its congressional allies literally makes the law, there is nothing in the constitution requiring the government to fund DEI and it is doing so because it won an election in which it said it'd do all these things. It's academia that's acting lawlessly, ignoring direct orders from its funding sources and has zero regard for the constitution - which puts the executive and Congress in charge of grant funding, not grantees or the PSF.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.
Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.
this and many other grants were singled out because of words used in their description. you seem quite certain that 'diversity' here isn't referring to the degree to which the genome of these animals is similar to different to other of their species, but instead a leftist dogwhistle hiding racist intent, and this researcher lost their position because they are really a secret racist and deserves to be 'blowtorched'.
you celebrate the ruin of the career of a highly trained person, frankly a national resource, because they used a word to describe their work that you think has evil connotations.
I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.
For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.
Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.
The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.
> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
We can?
I'm pretty sure companies have spent billions trying to achieve this and failed. The best they can do is maybe sort of sometime hire people that are good enough
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?
A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't.
The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather than applied for any new minority. The programs always get designed with a specific target in mind.
Similar for the second, if a group get popular support, diversity programs will help those while ignore any similar but disliked group. The program is not there to fix diversity, it is to help the intended group. When the political environment becomes polarized, it becomes very clear which groups get support from which side.
It has been very clear by diversity programs, and those who oppose diversity programs, that no one want a difference in perspectives, or for that matter catching their own blind spots.
Any system that tries to not hire for competence has a known, conscious blind spot. That's much worse than a system that arrives for the best but has accidental blind spots.
It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.
The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.
And before you call me a bigot:
My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
I agree with you, and I am a minority, but as someone from the midwest, sometimes people here fail to succeed because they are lazy, like any other person. Midwesterners are modest, and this is great, but the stereotype that we are somehow more hardworking is lost on me.
Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.
i'm one of those poor whites you're talking about (from another region; ethnic and economic bases covered though). you believe falsehoods.
> And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
i would never ask you that. but i wonder if you should ask yourself how your views could potentially negatively impact your relationships with your family.
And thank you for the condescending, pious, moral superiority in the "your views" comment. It perfectly encapsulates the quasi-religious nature of the DEI adherents.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.
That's not how the human brain can work.
That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.
If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.
Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.
We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.
And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.
Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time.
Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me".
> virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights
So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair?
This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one.
> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to
> max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.
Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.
If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
"Give everyone what they need to max out their potential" is not "give everyone every opportunity". That’s a strawman.
Floor, not ceiling. We set a floor of real opportunity (nutrition, basic health, safety, functional education, accessible selection processes). It doesn’t promise bespoke elite tracks for all. Removing constraints is different from subsidizing every aspiration. By doing so, you lift the average, and allow the best to develop to their fullest, growing society's total output.
If the signal of ability is suppressed by early disadvantage, you’ll misallocate talent. Low cost, well aimed supports (early literacy, assistive tech, unbiased hiring screens) improve matching, which is exactly what meritocracy needs to place the brilliant mathematician in math and the gifted teacher in the classroom.
We have noisy priors shaped by wealth, networks, and bias. They need removed so that comparative advantage can actually surface. That raises both the mean and the max.
We're talking about true meritocracy: merit, not circumstances.
Funnily enough, we agree:
> giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human)
That's exactly my point, currently we spend resources on a bunch of people that are only circumstantially better, remember pro-sports before black people were allowed?
Spend your resources to realize the best to be the best, and to make even the worse better. That gives you full global maximum.
It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument.
The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person.
Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people.
This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry.
You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad
And that's exactly the point. DEI and other "positive" discriminatory practices are making the field uneven for people. People should be treated as individuals, representing themselves and standing for their own abilities, instead of being treated as members of whatever group. Those type of racists, sexists and DEI activists are objectively bad people.
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.
The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.
This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition.
This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it.
No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it.
How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
How many conservatives celebrated Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting beaten? I remember Donald Trump Jr. said that a Halloween costume would be funny.
Yes, that’s basically the one notable example. Now the challenge becomes whether you can name two more without looking anything up.
Because I can name January 6 (capitol police officers lost their lives, Trump rioters intended to harm Nancy Pelosi specifically), Nancy Pelosi’s
Husband as mentioned above, Charlottesville (counter-protestor run over by a car intentionally), the two
Democratic Minnesota lawmakers who were injured recently, the pizzagate shooter, pulse nightclub (bonus: perpetrated by an ISIS sympathizer, a right-wing extremist terrorist group)
People don’t wonder why you shy away from the trans movement, we know it’s got nothing to do with left wing violence and more to do with creating a scapegoat class that is rare enough (<1% of the population) so that most people don’t know any of them. Gay men didn’t work as a scapegoat class because just about everyone eventually knew a gay man and figured out that they are normal, nice people.
Agreed it's not really to do with violence per se, even though that is a concerning behavior amongst a small number of activists.
People on both the right and the left, and in-between, are shying away from that movement more because of the demonstrably negative impact on women's rights.
"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US"
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of left-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the right commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the left together, then you can't complain when the right gets lumped together).
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Islamic radicals aren’t that different in belief system from a lot of Christian nationalists.
We have all seen family portraits where people pose with American flags, bibles, and guns.
American Christians talk about how the woman/wife is subservient to the husband, how women should stay at home and forego a career and perform traditional roles at home. Many denounce and try to restrict contraceptive access. Many insist that women should/should not dress a certain way.
American Christian talk about how being gay is a sin and how America is a Christian country, not a secular democracy, how we need to have the Ten Commandments in school and in government buildings.
American Christians even grow beards, wear tactical/military-style gear, and drive pickup trucks just like Islamic radicals! (Okay that last one is a a half-joke but it’s kind of funny how the similarities bleed into the aesthetic).
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
To paraphrase:
```
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together).
```
Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
> if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion
No, because we are not talking about Boolean variables where you can discover the logical opposite by negation. These are words with deeply fuzzy meanings. Supporters can support the best possible meanings, and opposers can oppose the worst possible meanings, and be closer to consensus than this binary, polarized, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric might imply.
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.
If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.
No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.
Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men.
There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews.
That one change helped shift the dial from almost entirely male speaker lineups to a much more balanced speaker lineup. As a result, we get a much broader range of talks.
There is nothing "immoral, hate based, and anti-truth" about efforts like this.
>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews
Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
Making a process blind to the person applying is a common DEI tool. Orchestra auditions are the famous one that I know about off the top of my head. Some links I googled and skimmed for rough quality, not vetted for serious study and may only be a starting point:
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI
... I mean, that's because they're the same thing, presuming that you use the literal definition of 'meritocracy'. Now, 'meritocracy' is sometimes used to mean "only hire straight white guys who went to one of about four universities", but that it is being used as a euphemism, not in its literal meaning (however, these days it is so often used in that euphemistic sense that it has become honestly pretty pointless as a term.)
Sure. Is it doing anything to push people away? Yes, it pushes away people who disagree with far left ideological ideas, like when it purged Tim Peters who worked on Python for 20 years.
Stop leftists waging ideological war against long term Python contributors and it will be a more inclusive place, whilst acting in a moral way.
if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?
Wrong fallacy. A strawman argument is where you claim someone else said something that they didn't, you put words in their mouth. hn_shill didn't do that.
machomaster says it's reducto ad absurdum. It's not that either. There's nothing absurd about the proposal, it's exactly the same idea as many other DEI policies like female-only shortlists, which are found in politics or female only bonus/prize pools found everywhere.
It's no fallacy! What they did was pose a hypothetical designed to test people's commitment to their stated principles. Does a minor change in context cause someone to recoil from their own ideas? If yes, the ideas are bad and they haven't thought it through.
PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential treatment, where you would get hired because of your race, and not merit.
I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness, and I don't think we should exclude people based on the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status.
Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
> Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Are we reading the same thing? You are quoting something that says that the PSF's standard DEI policies are a violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the PSF does not agree with, and likely no court would ever agree with.
Compliance with law is always mandatory, but by signing a contract that misstates the law and in fact endorses a particular and incorrect interperation of the law, means that actually litigating the law correctly lately in the courts is harder.
Further, by carrying out the PSF's existing policies, the PSF is carrying ou their principles, rather than your derisive and inaccurate characterization of that as mere "optics."
> I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness,
If you were actually for those things, you'd be for what the PSF does! That's what they do! Instead you are supporting the oppression of those things with your comment.
On the ending of “DEI” (itself an eviscerated approach to addressing the minimal demands to address over two centuries of american slavery, indigenous genocide, patriarchal violence, anti-trans, anti-queer violence) as targeted death making. The list of the scientific establishment’s participation, complicity, neglect is long. Some programs called immediately to mind include:
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
This is called getting high on your own supply. It was never any of those things, but lies like the ones you are spreading were perpetuated to push back against the idea of equal fairness for all.
As proof that you are spreading further lies, one only has to look at the long string of court filings that shows that the administrations' policies fighting DEI are outright racism, words that are coming from conservative judges appointed long ago that operate based on truth rather than whatever misinformation cult has taken over so much of politics these days. Here's just one of many many many instances of blatant racism being perpetrated through Trump's politicization of science funding.
> ‘My duty is to call it out’: Judge accuses Trump administration of discrimination against minorities—The Reagan-appointed judge ordered the NIH to restore funds for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
Good for them for putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
I’m not American, nor I’ve ever lived there. But I’m not sure what an average Google/Meta employee is supposed to do? Reality is, this is what an average US citizen wants. It’s not like the government was chosen without the support of majority or something.
The government was chosen with the majority, yes. That does not mean that the majority should have its way with everything, nor does it mean that everyone, even those who voted in favor at that time agree and approve of current behavior. I mean, why even hold another election if the majority voted for the current administration? Oh wait...
He got 47%, which is not a majority of the vote. Also, many people decided to just abstain. He got something like 30% of eligible voters to vote for him.
If those tech companies make a habit of funding "pro-DEI" organizations, their contracts with the US government could be jeoparized.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
It is literally quid pro quo right now. you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
"Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." -- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?
Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
I'm watching videos of ICE kidnapping a woman and her kids while shes in their school, to be brought to god knows where, that would not look out of place in the 1930s.
When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.
And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.
I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.
They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.
> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.
Good points. And I'd say that also falls into the "put the money where the mouth is" category. We know where both of those things are for them, so we don't have to have any illusions or fantasies.
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
> putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
I have—fortunately—very little personal experience with being extorted by corrupt officials, but I'd wager another facet is to try to ensure all communication is public and recorded.
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
> > The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
> The mission explicitly calls for engineering a racial and ethinic composoition to the user base.
If you're going to lie, don't refute yourself right before the lie.
What does 'facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers' mean?
Here 'diversity' refers to race/ethnicity.
If you don't think so, the PSF do, because its their explicit reason for their lawyers declining the grant. It's also the plain meaning of the term in this context.
Yes, the foundation for a programming language has a mission which involves the racial composition of its user base. Yes, this is entirely in-keeping with their comms and practices over the last few years, if you are at all aware of how they've acted.
No one in this partisan political thread has explained why the foundation for a programming language has a mission involving 'diversity' of people in any sense.
The laywers for the PSF decided that this mission is inconsistent with the government mandate. The PSF did NOT just decline the money.
This entire thread is one big group-think hate dump and has nothing to do with the PSF or why they were legally unable to accept goverment funding conditioned on non-discriminatory practices.
1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?
The PSF and several other organizations that provide public package registries wrote an open letter [1] announcing a joint effort to make this situation more sustainable. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
A business will always tend towards taking the maximum and giving the minimum. Believing anything else is wishful thinking at best and naive at worst.
So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.
From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.
I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Yes, that’s what I meant, stated more clearly. The contract is spelling out behavior that both sides agree up front that they consider a violation of the law, so you can’t claim that you didn’t think you were breaching the contract because you didn’t think you were violating the law.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
If your point is that corporate lawyers tend to see monsters behind every blade of grass, I agree. This is what they are paid to do. If I am a cavalier, it is to calm this community, to point out that they are over-indexed on this language and that it is the courts jurisdiction to decide what is meant.
There is no language that will magically prevent a government from canceling a grant and requiring a grantee to pursue relief from the court. This type of guarantee does not exist.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
This administration is working very hard to make all lawyers redundant. The law doesn't really matter if the court is at the beck and call of the President.
Honestly who knows, i wouldn't even trust a lawyer's advice, this administration has shown itself to not be a plain dealer or trustworthy, and willing to weaponize whatever they want to punish whoever they think needs punishing. Past experience of what should be legally enforceable or not does not seem very reliable at present.
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF might be just fine taking the grant and giving half to Trump personally, but who knows?
Yeah, HN tends toward treating law as less dependent on human application than it is under normal circumstances; with the current practice drifting away from normal circumstances towards “Quod rex vult, lex fit”, that mode of analysis becomes far more dangerously misleading.
At the end of the day it’s about making sure any attempt to help, acknowledge, or in any way highlight marginalized groups is branded as discriminating against the administration’s preferred (usually but not always their own) demographic. The nuances don’t really matter to them, the goal is to make sure that happens every time. If you’re talking about the wrong group in a way they deem “bad,” they will ruin your life.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
It parses however the Trump administration wants it to parse in any particular context on any particular day. Their legal moves have been a shit-show of incompetence and callous disregard for the law.
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options.
It's a good point that this is a US-based organization, but I don't think the parent is looking for a different focus from this post. Rather, they're asking that given Python's international influence why aren't organizations from more countries (or the countries themselves) contributing? My gut feeling is that it's because the PSF isn't looking outside the US for those sponsors. Here's their sponsor list btw:
> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14.
This might be the bigger story.
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
Yes, it's crazy. I think a lot of people see it as a question of "how can we give the PSF (or orgs like it) more money" but I see it a bit differently. Basically if something like Python can arise and become so effective and useful in so many ways with so little funding (and even less in earlier stages), it suggests that money isn't really the bottleneck here. What we need are people doing good work with good motives and not chasing dollars.
That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.
The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.
I do see a lot of companies trying to cut corners and make things as cheap as possible but I fundamentally believe that this ends up increasing costs in the long run. Which is a bit weird since I know a lot of business people and most seem to be familiar with Boot Theory[0] and even agree with it. But maybe it is one of those things that is just not realized in practice. Yet I constantly see these sacrifices being made. Profits over product. I don't think that actually leads to more profits. Maybe in the quarter, but not long term. It's a sustainable strategy if you've monopolized the market though...
I also notice that when layoffs come around that the people who decide who to lay off tend to not lay off themselves. Great way to become management heavy... When in reality, if you have a lot of "rockstar programmers" they should be able to mostly manage themselves. You want to keep them from going down too many rabbit holes and help them prioritize, but for the most part experts know what is most important in the system they're working in.
> Maybe in the quarter, but not long term. It's a sustainable strategy if you've monopolized the market though...
It's also a sustainable strategy if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad. This is a pervasive problem these days. It may still be the case that a good pair of boots will last you 10 years, but how can you tell which pair is the good one? There are 10,000 brands, all of them have 4.7 star ratings because of bots, most of them have a picture that looks nothing like what you'll receive, and if they wear out in two years you'll have no recourse because the brand was just a facade over a "ghost workshop" that's now producing the same crap under another name. Trying to vote with your dollars is like pushing on a rope.
> When in reality, if you have a lot of "rockstar programmers" they should be able to mostly manage themselves.
I'm not so sure about this. There are many people who are good at doing things but not at organizing that activity in a coherent way (especially across a team). Also when the people doing the "real work" are also managing, they often have a tendency to give the managing short shrift because they'd rather do the "real work".
I agree we could do with a lot fewer managers than we currently have, but I think we do need some. (And this isn't just about software, it's about companies and organizations in general.) But I think we would be better off with more democratized company structures where the managers' power ultimately rests on the consent of the workers, so that when you have these clashes that currently result in "half the staff resigned in protest" they would instead result in "the CEO was fired due to lack of support from the staff".
> if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad
If you didn't know, there's a formal name for this: Lemon Markets[0]. Which yes, I agree. I think it is an accurate description of tech. Even among techies now. Hell, in that other thread[1] we seem to be talking to programmers who think we're omniscient and can generate bug free code (I'm still absolutely baffled by this). So tech literacy seems to be low even among the "techies".
> I'm not so sure about this.
I actually agree with you. I probably didn't phrase it well enough. That's a bit what I was trying to say when saying you want to prevent them from going down too may rabbit holes. But I did also want to subtly reference to Mervin Kelly, former director of Bell Labs. When asked "how do you manage genius?" his answer was "you don't"[2].
So I do agree that we need managers. Their job is to validate direction, ensure people are able to do their specialized job with minimal interruptions, and all that jazz. I think we often confuse "speed" with "velocity." The experts know the direction things need to go, but a manager's job is to ensure that those vectors are aligned across teams and aligned with the company goal. But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.". It's easy to drop that part off, but doing so shifts your customers from those that purchase your product to "shareholders". Even if shareholder price is based on people buying your product...
> If you didn't know, there's a formal name for this: Lemon Markets[0]. Which yes, I agree. I think it is an accurate description of tech.
Well, but I'm saying it's not just tech, it's becoming everything. (Unless by "tech" you mean "tech has made all markets act this way".) I guess one way to look at what I'm saying is that online marketplaces are inherently more "lemon-leaning" because the buyer's ability to assess the quality of the good is inherently limited (since they can't actually see, touch, or use it).
Interestingly the "solution" that e-commerce seems to have settled on is "free shipping with free returns". This limits the damage of buying a lemon, since the customer can just send it back. But it creates a sort of moral hazard for both buyers and sellers: the buyer has an incentive to essentially operate like a spammer, selling crappy goods just on the off chance that a few won't get returned; and the seller is encouraged to just buy willy-nilly since they can just return anything that turns out to be crap. This generates an enormous amount of waste and churn and exacerbates the downward spiral of the lemon market.
> But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.".
This is the crux of the issue. I don't see that as an issue of "management" really though. I mean it is an issue of management but at a higher level, in the way the executives manage the whole company, or the way the board manages the executives, rather than the way mid-level managers manage actual workers.
But ultimately it's an issue of values. As you say, too many people have drifted away from any value system that would place any kind of constraints on "the goal is to make money".
> I'm saying it's not just tech, it's becoming everything.
I'm in agreement with you. I've said in the past on HN that I think we've created an economy of lemons. So you're not alone. I think tech has definitely facilitated this[0,1]
> Interestingly the "solution" that e-commerce seems to have settled on is "free shipping with free returns". This limits the damage of buying a lemon, since the customer can just send it back
As far as I'm aware, Amazon doesn't really practice this anymore. I wouldn't call it "free" as the shipping is amortized into the price now (a lot like credit card fees). But also my understanding is that if you send stuff back enough that they'll ban you from doing this.
Not to mention that the inconvenience itself creates enough friction that people are just more likely to keep garbage. Especially if it is very cheap. I think this was also true with physically purchased items but just that the rate of "false positives" was lower since you could physically inspect them.
> This is the crux of the issue. I don't see that as an issue of "management" really though.
It is definitely a complex issue and I don't want to create too much simplification. I agree that it goes all the way up the chain, each step having more and more slip.
But I think something that is more actionable and that we as the developers and engineers can address is recognizing that we had a shift in culture. There used to be some contention between the managers and engineers. It was adversarial by nature. While I think that creates friction, that this was a beneficial feature, not a flaw[2]. To be a tad over simplified, the engineer's focus is on the product. When push comes to shove, profits get sacrificed in order to ensure the quality of the product. On the other side the business people take the opposite role. This contention helps navigate the complex setting where we need to create good products but also stay in business. If the engineer gets to much weight then the business goes under while trying to fix all the problems. Perfection cannot exist, so the endeavor can be endless[3], and the business fails. On the other hand, if the business people have too much weight then they'll ship the lowest quality product that customers will still buy. The contention often resolved around what "minimum viable product" actually meant. To the engineer, it is a product that generally works in the sense of the intended design. To the business person, it is what the customer will buy.
The shift I've seen is that I see fewer and fewer engineers care deeply about the product. They aren't personally vested in it, beyond a monetary sense. When I've talked to others about bugs which should be reasonably quick to resolve I find more often the response is "but what's the (monetary) value in that?" This is not our job as an engineer! Our focus is on the product. It may be the job of the engineering manager to make that argument to the business side if the solution is going to take long enough, but I've seen this response given to bugs that may take only a few hours to fix or even have a PR already set up! To me, this is insane.
Don't get me wrong, I love that coding pays very well, but that's not why I do it. There's plenty of other ways to make money, and make even more. My cousin sells insurance and spends all his days golfing, eating at country clubs, and makes over $300k/yr[4]. My neighbor is a plumber who started his own business and hires guys starting at $100k/yr and they provide on the job training. There's a lot of ways to make good money. The reason I do this work is because I enjoy the work. Because I can take pride in this type of work. Because I'm good at it. Because I can finish my day or a project and take pride in my accomplishments. But I feel that this is the shift. Coding is not just for nerds anymore. Many coders now care about money first and product second (if at all). The "tech bros". I wouldn't mind them so much if they just didn't need to justify their mindset and interfere with mine. I feel that's part of the problem. They've become the dominant force in the coding world and normalized the exaggeration of their abilities that they believe they are the best. Like what, we send people through months of interviews, to do tons of leetcode and standardized tests to what... end up with shit work? I don't think we're hiring "the best". I think we're wasting money.
I think we fix these issues by pushing back a bit more. Explain why the manager's idea of a MVP is not a real MVP. Support our coworkers who raise these concerns in a meeting. Just a small comment will do. Push back against the engineers who offer overly simplified solutions and promises that lead to tech debt. To remember that we can both make good money and good products at the same time. To remember that pushing back is not disloyalty to the company. That pushing back is in fact loyalty to the company, because we do it because we care about what is being made.
There's no easy fix here, but I think there are things we can do and we should be more open about this culture shift. I grew up dreaming of the Sci-Fi utopia of Star Trek and of Asimov. I got into STEM because I wanted to help create that world. Is that no longer our goal? Do we really believe this goal is at odds with making a good living?
[2] I think we believed it to be a flaw. Certainly management did as it is employees undermining them. Engineers see it as a flaw too because they have to spend time arguing and it is frustrating. Easier to just shut up and get paid, right?
[3] I think all but junior engineers understand this. I hate the phrase "don't let perfection be the enemy of 'good enough'" because the contention was never about perfection. The contention was about what is 'good enough'. The phrase shuts down that conversation, which is an important one.
[4] I don't intend to say his work is easy. It is easy to look at what he does and think he doesn't work hard. But I've seen him in action and it is clear he has honed his skills.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python.
> That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
> I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it
It is definitely a complicated problem but governments tend to but good funding agencies for work that uplifts the broader society and creates the foundation for new markets. That's the idea behind science funding anyways. New science might not create a trillion dollar business directly but it sure lays the funding for new multi billion dollar companies and companies to skyrocket from 500bn to 5T market caps...
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
> I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs
Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.
It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
The PYthon Software Foundation does not develop Python. They manage the package repository, do marketing pro-Python, and distribute money among people they like (in theory to promote the language).
I think people are overlooking the most important part:
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
I would hope another funding source with no interest in this kind of legalistic politics emerges. Conditionality like this is going to be much more common for another 3 years at least.
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
It truly is not easy IMO. I am just picking a nit here but "if you have the fortitude" is doing a lot of work. I ran a company for a while and you not only have to have the fortitude, but principles and an ability to weather the consequences of a choice like that. If you are in a tough position and you have employees who are counting on you and the business it is anything but easy. Even if you have fortitude. These decisions can be existential. Of course there are and should be red lines based on your ethics and morals, but none of that is easy. To me it is very hard.
What about DEI makes it an “ideological” movement as opposed to other movements who are presumably not ideological?
And I’m not sure what “most people”, is supposed to mean; you do realize you’re talking about 49% – that is, under half, so definitively not “most” – of the US of A’s population?[0]
Maybe the demonizing everybody who does not agree with it or the agenda driven financial investment by mega corporations with ESG scores invented by the WEF folks
Most Americans are growing skeptical of DEI as an ideological framework and that helped Trump.
This suggests two possible paths forward: either we move beyond the theoretical underpinnings and focus on practical inclusion — supporting people from diverse backgrounds through approaches with broad consensus.
Or DEI becomes increasingly marginalized, championed primarily by masked activists who struggle to maintain relevance.
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
Under discussed is that it should not takes months of work to apply for scientific funding.
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
DEI is actually a bit of red herring here. It's worth reading again the commentary from simonw's blog:
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
This is the real problem. It's not about DEI really. It's the same problem as so much else this year: the US government is currently wildly unpredictable and doing business with such an entity is a liability.
DEI has always been a weird thing because half the people supposedly doing it were always just trying to curry favor with people in positions of power who supported it, and now that the winds have shifted they're equally happy to curry favor by getting rid of it. They signal virtue or vice depending on how virtuous or vicious the leader.
I think the PSF actually wants to do the right thing, which in the current perverse environment makes them more likely to be targeted. The wisest move is not to play.
I'm strongly in favor of the US federal government requiring that recipients of federal grant money affirm the statement that they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.". I'm a US citizen and taxpayer, and I don't want my tax dollars going towards organizations that are unwilling to affirm this.
As a Python user, I do wish that the PSF wouldn't institute DEI policies on their own volition; but ultimately they're a private organization that I have no relationship with, and they're entitled to make political decisions differently than I would. But in terms of receiving taxpayer money, I'm glad that these US federal government grant rules are putting real financial pressure on them.
Bummer about the funding (and for a small org, almost more importantly the wasted application work), but all around an excellent decision. And a good reference for non-profit backbone.
do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
The government can certainly add restrictions to the use of the grant money, but applying that broadly over any actions the grantee performs during that time is overreach. I wonder about the legality of that condition.
>> "Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities."
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed).
Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.
I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.
In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.
The PSF itself is an activist pro-DEI/partisan organization. If US federal money is going to go to an activist organization no matter what, I would prefer that it does to one that denounces DEI rather than supports it.
It's a general issue with budgeting grants but at the same time companies need to be talked to in numbers. If there's no known money jar, I don't believe anyone will partake and it'll all get more sketchy. 'Why did money appear for them but not for us?' type of thing
I realize this is a joke, but honestly, I wouldn't mind if US federal government grant funding policy was targeted towards promoting strongly typed programming languages. It's actually bad if your programming language allows a string to identify as an int!
Python doesn't use the GPL, and such a license wouldn't meet the FSF Four Freedoms, nor the OSI Open Source Definition, so it would likely lead to a fork, less usage and less redistribution.
pypi put out a survey a while back that was full of bs questions about dei fluff. the lack of subject matter made me really question the competence of the project staff.
Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.
Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.
Their position is logically inconsistent. If they are worried about being eventually targeted by the Trump administration, they have done more to paint a target on their back now then they ever could've done by quietly accepting the money.
I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.
> If they are worried about being eventually targeted by the Trump administration, they have done more to paint a target on their back now then they ever could've done by quietly accepting the money.
That's probably not true given their prominence and the conservative people who've grumbled about them for years, but let's assume that it is the case. Think about what happens next:
If they took the money, they have a substantially non-zero risk that they would be asked to return _all_ of it based on politically-motivated enforcement triggered by anything the PSF does and would face the prospect of spending at least that much money defending themselves in court if they disagreed. You can't rule out that being as simple as someone at PyCon does something which a conservative influencer dislikes.
If they don't take the money, they don't have to estimate the likelihood of the clawback provision being exercised or spend any time trying to protect themselves in that event.
If you're a small non-profit, recognizing when you don't have the resources to fight a particular battle is a very useful skill. It seems very consistent to say that in the choice between a potential trap and no trap they had to avoid a small but non-zero risk of something which could bankrupt the organization.
> I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.
Their motives were never secret – it's literally in the mission statement on their website! – so it's a bit unclear what the point of this paragraph was. Reporting political interference in technical organizations seems like something which is pretty broadly of interest to the community and the amount of positive attention it's getting seems to support that.
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
> Playing nice seemed to not work for White people because they are systemically discriminated against in almost every Western and non-Western country.
I'm white and not discriminated against in my Western-adjacent country (Czech Republic) and think most of Europe is the same.
I see race-based politics as primarily a US thing: both the militant "diversity advocates" and the white supremacists. From my point of view over the ocean they are quite similar: putting importance of skin colour over other things.
As a white American, this feels insulting to all those around me. Diversity is what made the US so great. White people are just one tone of the human palette.
They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
We can debate whether doing this rights historical wrongs but we can't pretend it is not racist to treat different people of different skin colors differently.
> They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
"Racism" means the oppression of one group because of race.
In an historically racist society (writing this in New Zealand) righting those historical wrongs involves some treating "...one group different from others based on race."
It is bad enough here, and it continues here explicitly by the current government (indigenous people just lost a bunch of property rights because they were indigenous, blatant, official, statutory racism), but according to people I respect in the USA it is considerably worse there.
"ACT New Zealand party, a junior partner in the governing centre-right coalition government, last week unveiled the bill, which it had promised during last year’s election, arguing that those rights should also apply to non-Indigenous citizens."
How does grant others the same rights turn into racism. Shouldn't everyone have those rights including groups that are bigger minorites in New Zealand like blacks of Indians from India?
When we single out groups for special treatment we exclude others who might need it more but who's voices are softer.
It might be worse in the US compared to New Zealand but compared to most of the rest of the world: Middle East, India, Africa, Europe, Russia, China, Korea the US is the least racist place but also has the biggest anti-racism industry which makes their voiced louder.
I am talking of the Foreshore and Seabed Act (under a different name) that overturned settled case law and disapropriated IWI claims for property rights.
Māori have their property rights confiscated regularly. About every twenty or thirty years there is another round
That said the racism here is mild compared to reports from the USA
When you become what you are fighting against you become the problem.
If the issue is not using a person's race to make blanket judgements against them then using someone's race to to counterbalance historical is equally as wrong.
The message you are telling everyone is you should use someone's race to judge them. The people in power changes but the racism never goes away.
You end up with foolish ideas like reparations where the people demanding money are a product of a union between a slave and slave owner where half of you should pay the other half.
Or quota systems that exclude minorities because they aren't the right race.
The racism you want to keep needs to be let go. You can't say racism is bad but then use it to enrich yourself.
People have been getting the message "you should use someone's race to judge them" in my country for over a hundred years
In the USA since the seventeenth century
Here Māori property is confiscated with gay abandon, laws written specifically for that purpose
In the USA there was slavery. It has cast a long shadow, and still politicians are moving mountains to corral the black vote so it does not threaten entrenched privileges
"A significant portions of Māori land were confiscated by the New Zealand government, primarily after the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s through legislation like the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863. This process, known as raupatu, resulted in the seizure of over a million hectares of land from various iwi"
Wasn't there a Waitangi Tribunal investing breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi? Isn't there a Māori land court setup to deal with those issues?
Are there specific instances you want to refer to? We would like to understand a little more.
No one is trying to corral the black vote in the US. It generally goes to one party. It does not threaten the powerful. Black vs rich powerful isn't really an issue as many powerful people are black. Working class vs rich powerful is more of the classic stereotype.
You can do a lot about racism from education to fairness laws but the one thing you can't do is use racism to stop racism. That's my core message.
That's my point. Why not give food to all? You just want to give food to who you think is hungry based on great grandparents being hungry. Everyone should eat even the obese.
The entire issue is that, despite the law, some people refuse to feed everyone. And not a small handful of people, but a sizable enough population that their actions mean millions aren't fed.
That's my point.
Your "solution" only works if racism is eliminated. It is not eliminated, despite eduction and fairness laws.
So we can either chose to feed the hungry or let them starve in the name of a false, ignorant, and naive position of neutrality.
No one takes them to jail; companies and organizations can run however they want, unless they break laws.
It doesn't mean that the government that runs and wins on an anti-DEI agenda should give them money.
> Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
I have no idea what point you think you're making, but this happens all the time. Do you really think you should be obligated to let strangers buy into your private business?
Ah yeah you're right. What they actually mean is that DEI is when you build so many equity preference multiples into your term sheets the employee option pool becomes entirely worthless.
Could you clarify that you're suggesting that "it's un-American" for the government to require that the grantee not violate any of its anti-discrimination laws?
Federal money always has lots of strings attached. The specific rules differ by the specific funding vehicle. The main vehicle is the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR); you can review their rule here:
I think people defend anti discrimination or are against it depending on how the anti discrimination policy discriminates discrimination.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
I agree that humans discriminate inherently, although I would argue that what differentiates us is whether we struggle against that impulse.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's probably a reason someone wrote it into the grant agreement, and that they're declaring DEI stands for something other than the familiar Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that funding for research that lead to the various tech powering the modern internet was done only by organizations that never before or since considered trying to source candidates from a variety of places because they believe different viewpoints have value?
Or are you trying to hang this entire thing on a definition of DEI that somehow always and exclusively means illegal race or gender based discrimination (I assume against white men)?
These conversations are so absurd sometimes. I'm baffled by how spitting mad people can decide they are to fight these straw men. Then I'm annoyed by (and suspicious of) the overwhelming silence from most of these sources when it comes to other obvious examples of racial discrimination or things like the government trying to remove history books that mention slavery.
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.
The people who benefited from those who sacrificed for rights and equality over the past century got complacent and lazy.
The current rhetoric is exactly the same as was used to discriminate against my ancestors 100 years ago. The only substitutions are the different slurs. Everyone who wants to talks about race and immigrants should be required to listen to 8 hours of radio programs from the early 1900s saying the exact same thing about them and their ancestors.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
You fight or you lose. Every time; all the time. Politics is a contact sport and you don't get to opt out.
The following antidiscrimination laws part was the part quoted in the article linked here. The part they said was recently added. What part are you referring to?
It includes "DEI, that violates nondiscrimination laws" presented as an accepted fact.
So that includes a statement that is opinionated and political, not based on facts or rationality, and roughly half the US population at least does not agree with it.
So, besides how dishonest your comment may be, at least all the readers (who somehow missed that unmissable point, but I digress) get the idea.
Edit: the presence of the comma forbids any interpretation as "{follows DEI} AND {violates nondiscrimination laws}", and instead it reads as "{follows DEI} AND {by the way you already know/agree that DEI violates nondiscrimination laws}". Which any project leader that doesn't believe that DEI violates nondiscrimination laws will reject instantaneously.
But I have the sense that you are not discussing in good faith anyway, so...
That would be true if the society was already perfectly fair and neutral (which some people believe).
However, there is racism and sexism in the world (it's systemic, in a sense it's not about one person not liking another personally, but biases propagated throughout the society). To counter that, you need to recognize it, and it will be necessary to treat some people differently.
For example, women may not feel safe being a small minority at a gathering full of men. If you do nothing, many potentially interested women will not show up. You could conclude that it's just the way things are and women are simply not interested enough in the topic, or you could acknowledge the gender-specific issue and do something about it. But this isn't a problem affecting everyone equally, so it would require treating women specially.
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.
The way how you respond and means of addressing the issue very much matters. It's possible to have equitable objectives, but using discriminatory means. For example, just declaring quota and filling to order will fulfill the objective, but will be very discriminatory in practice.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio of 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
If they picked any of the conferences based on the gender of the attendees, then they were pretty obviously discriminating based on a protected characteristic and should face legal ramifications for it.
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Kevin McCarthy, former GOP House leader and Speak of the House.
Wow. What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For that kind of money, I would put a large national flag in the banner of the socketcluster.io website, I would relocate HQ to whatever country and state they want. I would never utter the word 'diversity' for the rest of my life and upon receiving the money, I would take a screenshot, frame it, put it up on the back wall of my new office and I would pray to it every morning to give thanks.
> What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For a non-profit backing a community, an important goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability and viability of the org, because the community relies on it to keep infra working, legal representation in place, and other vital needs.
Accepting those $1.5mio would have come with significant "we want that money back" risk, as the post explains. At a $5mio annual budget that could seriously destabilize a small org like this, from the money shortfall to community unrest. Taking this money would be irresponsible.
My two cents, as treasurer of another large FOSS non-profit.
You either think DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others, or that the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
> do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
"Or" means at least one of multiple alternatives. Alteratives contrast with each other, they differ. Of course, the original author could be repeating the same thing for emphasis, but more likely they are saying two different things. Since the second thing is discrimination, the first thing, "DEI", must necessarily not be discrimination. If they merely wanted you to not discriminate, they could have just said "follows federal anti discrimination laws" which are quite stringent.
They are saying the same thing twice. They repeat themselves specifically because certain groups hold a strong belief that "discrimination" only goes one-way, and have effectively twisted the meaning of the word in their minds.
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
That may be what they mean, but it is a sufficiently dubious interpretation that one can't reasonably use it to obtain the funding unless clarification is provided by the administration.
You're free to disagree with anyone here, but playing stupid is only a waste of time. It's not a difficult topic to understand both sides of, regardless of where you come down.
No, the PSF doesn't want to expose its finances to special risk from the Trump Administration’s attempts to paint inclusion as discrimination as a pretext for exerting control that the law itself does not justify over institutions receiving federal funding, finding the risk:reward ratio unjustified for a $1.5M grant. (Note that the actual term purports to prohibit only what the law already prohibits, which is a clue that a naive reading cannot reveal their motive, since under a naive reading they would be equally risk for the behavior that would violate the terms whether or not ot agrees to them or received the grant. So you have to look beyond the agreement to the context of the behavior of the Trump Administration in regards to the issue addressed in the terms and federal funding.)
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, but in principle it can't be applied 'at any point'.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio is 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
I'd be 100% okay with the government stating no grant money can be used for funding DEI, but the actual wording in the grant prevents organizations like the PSF from any DEI, whether or not it is funded by the government grant. That's overly broad and seems likely to be an infringement of the first amendment (though I'm not a lawyer, so this is my lay interpretation).
But hey, some of the same people that celebrated the cancellation of Tim Peters are celebrating the "bold" and "audacious" step of the PSF now (I don't mean you, I mean others).
EDIT: The Python fascists can get this one down to -4 as well to distract from their incompetence.
I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
> the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
It has high overlap with the rad trad Catholic wing, believe me. I am a fairly traditional Catholic. I had heard of Yarvin via the Haskell world, and was floored when a parishioner at my parish brought him up. Such a strange crossing of worlds.
I imagine by LGBTQ colleagues must have the same feelings at whatever it is they do on Sundays
Honestly I sometimes think I'm the most normal person in the field, but we all probably think that. I think if my colleagues found out that I only go to a traditional Novus Ordo on Sundays where we use a lot of Latin and not a full-fledged Tridentine Mass, all of them would be angry at me. The LGBTQ crowd for being Catholic and the rad-trad crowd fro not being the right kind lol.
But anyway, I guess what I meant with my last point is: where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field? Everyone agrees it attracts the neuro-diverse? Then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to encourage the neuro typical? Imagine how great PLs would be if they were actually eloquent haha.
> where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field?
I won't say they are particularly effective, but the group behind the LIVE workshop is at least self-aware enough to try and build things that neurotypical people might use. There binding force in that group is best expressed by Jonathan Edwards (author of subtext) when he said something along the lines of "most programming languages are built by high functioning autists for high functioning autists", the upshot being if we want more people to be able to use programming languages they will probably have to pay more attention to usability and alternative representations.
I think Bret Victor does a good job with this "seeing spaces" in the form of Dynamics Land: https://dynamicland.org
Also the Logo programming language was a good example of designing a language for where the users are, where in that case the users were gradeschool children. Obviously children can't build programming languages for themselves, so they used cognitive development principles to design a language which was approachable given their cognitive abilities as 7 year olds.
All you have to do to encourage nuerotypical white males from elite schools is to have high remuneration. They see highly paid jobs as the best jobs. This is not discrimination. If a job is too hard for the pay offered then this class will choose something else.
They are also not excluded from working in sewers, even though they are underrepresented!
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
> We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces.
The flag simply acknowledges that certain people have the right to exist. Extrapolating anything else out of that is you being weird.
> I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade.
It seems to be necessary because you want to "turn the power of the state against you". All because of a rainbow?
> We won the last election.
Did the whole of humanity have an election that I missed? Just because an election at one time and in one place went one way or the other doesn't mean much to something that is global. If you're speaking of the US Election, a certain person didn't even get 50% of the vote. So, I don't see how you act like this is some mandate that means you get to silence other people.
> We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
You don't seem sad about this at all.
My small site now sports a flag because it is clear it is needed. Are you going to come after me too?
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
Non sequitur and false. The US constitution only guarantees that the government won't ban your speech. Non-government entities are allowed to ban speech.
Of course. DEI is for "community" members from the right families to get jobs through PyCon networks regardless of qualifications.
The leadership is generally white affluent virtue signaling male. A PSF fellow was canceled for pointing exactly that out (at the same time as Tim Peters was canceled).
So it is understandable why they want to preserve DEI but do not go after other economic or corruption or foreign policy failures of this administration --- after all, they have to preserve the same corporate sponsors who also sponsor Trump.
I’m not sure why you would think the “top N” of any given field would be men. There aren’t more men than women overall, and men aren’t inherently any smarter or more talented. If you’ve only ever worked in tech, though, maybe you have a skewed perspective.
Some traits are more variable in men. So there are more men at the top and bottom of the distribution. But not enough to explain 80% men in a field as large as computer science.[1]
This is about the purest form of flamebait there is, and thus is not welcome on HN. There are several guidelines that ask us to avoid this style of commenting, notably:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously...
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I wish you recognized the confirmation bias in your logic.
Men & women are socialized to compete in very different arenas & women are generally socialized not to compete with men.
None of that is proof that men are smarter or more talented. Men's intelligence may be more jagged than women's, but even if so, that doesn't mean 'better'.
It would mean that men & women's intelligence complements each other.
> Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants.
Try to support this with data and you run into some real messy analysis: in a few cases where testosterone matters such as sports or hand grip strength, this is true and there’s a well-understood biological explanation for it. In most other cases, however, there isn’t a known mechanism and the data usually has shifts over time which strongly suggest that it’s either an issue with data collection or learned behavior (e.g. the famed engineer gender gap showing very different results in former communist countries where girls were socially encouraged to strive for those jobs).
Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board.
Lastly, even if there was a proven biological link between gender and peak performance, we haven’t established that Pycon talk slots only go to the top 1% performers on such a narrow metric. I don’t think even the angriest internet dudes try to make that claim, and once you’re saying something isn’t Olympic Games-level elite you’re saying there are a ton of women who perform just as well as the median man giving a conference talk.
> Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board
CS/EE as a field is about 80% male, depending on the year
When the pipeline is that thin, it’s hard to get an equal outcome at the professional level
I definitely agree it’s a problem. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that it’s innate rather than social in origin. Human neuroplasticity is our species’ big defining trait so it seems far more likely that we have a complex mix of feedback loops based on socialization.
Exactly 50:50 doesn’t need to be the target but when you’re talking 80:20 on a large, lucrative field it’s more likely that there are interested people being deterred rather than just lack of interest. There certainly are many reports of social pressure supporting that conclusion as well, which is why many people want to make it more welcoming.
i have no take on this comment, but i like the model in this paper for considering whether it could be possible or appropriate wrt different levels of vetting:
In the GP’s view, it’s the top N% of the applicant pool, so a more diverse applicant pool leads to more diverse talks.
Talk selection is blind (per GP), so the increasing % of female-led talks is evidence for the GP viewpoint. If the Parent view were correct, the same 98% male talks would be selected because they are “objectively better” than the lower-quality female-led talks that are bulking up the applicant pool.
I have not verified the claim about talk selection being blinded. A source (or contradicting source) would be welcome.
This whole manufacturing of a fear culture, the emphasis on us-vs-them (ICE), loyalty oaths (MIT, pledges of CEOs), purging of institutions (doge), attempts to reorganize higher education (Harvard), control of media (Kimmel), the symbolism (maga), it’s all Trump 2.0 boring attempt at a ‘Cultural Revolution’ a la Mao.
It’s just a bit messier because Trump never commits to much and blatantly chases much of his own selfish interests (crypto schemes and market manipulation).
I believe that the parallels that someone may draw between Biden and Mao are much much weaker.
Welcome to government funding. This is par for course. It's not just dei or anti dei. If you want to take government funding, you have to not read the fine print and swallow hard.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
Note that many universities still have DEI offices. I believe that they are interpreting as described here: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08.... So as long as they can show that they are not doing any of those, they seem to believe that they will be okay.
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.
It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):
> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote shown on page 28 in this court case: https://www.scribd.com/document/372802863/18-CIV-00442-ARNE-...
YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte observed the similar racial and sex quotas from the inside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
IBM's CEO infamously championed DEI-as-quota which led to wave of lawsuits that IBM was forced to settle.
The memory holing on this topic is concerning.
> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte
I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.
I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.
The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.
I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
> The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.
Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms
Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.
I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;
I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.
Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".
> He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.
> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...
You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.
> This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.
“Memory hole” is a term that should be reserved for things everybody actually forgets. This is more of a thing lots of people probably remember, but they don’t bring it up all the time.
No, lots of people willingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the abuses that were happening. See Brigida v Buttigieg for a particularly egregious example around the hiring of ATC.
The FAA, on an official test that ATC candidates were required to take, would disqualify applicants if they didn't answer questions like "what was your worst subject in school" with answers like "math" or "science." This explicitly was to increase racial diversity, which is both patronizing in the extreme and really stupid.
When I bring this up in SF, people accuse me of making it up. It's not that people don't remember it, it's that political polarization has blinded us to our side doing batshit crazy things. Another similar example was "defund the police" which is a crazy slogan on its face, yet for a year Democrats felt compelled to sanewash it.
I am about as blue and pro-DEI as someone could reasonably be and I think that this stuff is small potatoes compared to a president who has been continuously trying to send the army in to crush Democratic-leaning cities. That being said, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are suspicious of DEI because we do not have a good track record of auditing these programs.
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.
> The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.
Wow, I am extremely happy to know that all racism ended in 1964!
Marijuana was made illegal in 1937 and it stopped being used completely for the next 70 years.
So in other words, it went on for a few centuries like I said.
Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.
[dead]
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
How else are they going to balance out all the legacy admissions?
Why does an hard working non-legacy white boy deserve less of a shot than a non-legacy black one? Why should he be penalized because someone else’s father with a comparable skin tan was accepted 25 years ago?
43% of all white students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, directly related to faculty, or have family that donated to the university. That number falls to 16% or lower for black, latino, and asian students.
75% of that aforementioned group of white students would not have been admitted had it been based on merit. 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories.
Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361
> Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter. Suggesting that preference for legacies be removed is a fine topic on its own, but it's orthogonal to explicitly discriminating against individual applicants based upon the color of their skin.
Since you clearly feel strongly about this topic, I'll ask again. Why should the poor white kid with no legacy relationship get cast aside for some other non-legacy kid with a tan?
> Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter.
Exactly. We shouldn’t treat similarly situated people differently because of group averages. That’s the definition of racism.
It’s also irrational in practice. If you want to compare whose grandparents had it harder, Indians and Chinese are clearly entitled to the most affirmative action.
Should we be giving Swedish people special treatment and privileges in 2025, or how long until bygones are bygones?
>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.
So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.
A lot of the contemporary formal scientific process is done incredibly badly, for a variety of reasons including overt political bias on the part of individual scientists working in the academic system, pressure to publish any results including poor ones, and outright laziness and fraud. In general we shouldn't assume that if a bunch of public scientific studies purport to show that some phenomenon is happening, that that phenomenon is actually happening. It takes substantial time, effort, and experience to evaluate whether a claimed scientific result is valid; and all the moreso when that result has immediate political policy implications.
Hint: if everyone has such anecdotes, they are no longer anecdotes.
It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between.
If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.
There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?
What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?
The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.
As mentioned a couple comments up, something like this: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A-Discri... is way more impactful then some CEO choices.
I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.
Why is that a low number? What is the correct percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs to be black, or any other specific ethnic background.
These studies are misleading, because they try to create race signals by using names that are also class signals: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-study-suggests-resea....
Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”
Do you have any numbers for trying to correct for that factor?
And the bulk are not at 3%, the bulk are between 5 and 10. 3 was the absolute lowest.
Also you didn't mention the CEO thing, does that mean my numbers were sufficient to address that worry?
As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.
The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.
> As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%.
The least single industry was 3%. And each single industry is a very noisy data point, based on a couple companies and needing more data points. By the time you aggregate into more solid data, like those bigger categories, it's more than 3%.
But the whole thing could use better methods and more data for sure.
> The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison
In comparison to this specific resume effect it's pretty big, but that was just a basic example, not an attempt to list the biggest issue.
In comparison to the fortune 500 CEOs the overall effect here is smaller (no I'm not going to look at 5th decile in isolation).
Also even after this bias was applied, they're admitting a below-population-average amount of black students and a far above-population-average amount of asian students. So there's a bunch of other data necessary to properly analyze what's going on and how bad it is. Should there be a super tight correlation to academic decile? There are huge differences in school quality that muddy the signals, and those differences often correlate with race.
I'm not saying they did nothing wrong, but I'm saying it's unclear what the numbers should have been.
No, they're still anecdotes.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
That's like saying "the Crusaders weren't real Christians because real Christianity is peaceful"
See also: No True Scotsman Fallacy
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
Your point is well taken. Not everyone was violating the law. But meanwhile Microsoft was setting explicit numeric targets on hiring employees from particular racial groups: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-microsoft-diversity....
Companies were also demanding race-conscious staffing practices at the law firms they used: https://www.wsj.com/business/law-firm-clients-demand-more-bl.... Microsoft offered financial bonuses to law firms for promoting lawyers from specific racial groups: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/If3eb4570033e11eb8e48d387....
> it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law
I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.
What are your sources?
Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".
There was a trial. The government lost. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/21...
That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.
That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.
I fail to see any difference between "congress passing a law that is in violation of another law" and "federal regulations mandating that laws be broken". Can you explain how these situations differ quitely, other than that "regulation" and "law" are different words?
The difference was an incentive grant program that was found to be discriminatory, versus regulations which dictate how private entities act. This a pretty big distinction.
It's an especially big distinction when the question was for sources of DEI advocates handing out instructions to corporate decision makers no how to break the law. It's not even remotely connected.
Regulations are made by federal agencies.
Laws are made by Congress.
The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...
Then it shouldn't be hard for you to say something other than 'do your own research'
Actually it took me almost an hour to re-do a portion of the research and lay it out, which I did further down the thread, if you care to look.
Also you didn't ask me to link you to my sources, you asked me what my sources were. I answered your question directly in the best way I could at the time.
Expecting an internet stranger to spend an hour digging up sources for you, when you don't ask respectfully or with any inclination of curiosity comes off as combative - I am not here to debate, I am here to discuss. If you are genuinely curious, take 30 seconds to scroll down and find the other comment I made that took me an hour to put together.
I appreciate that you took the time to follow through with sources to support your claim.
You & I definitely have different definitions of "not hard to find", however.
I guess so, but it's relative. An hour isn't hard if you're driven by curiosity, but it is if it's a chore you're doing for someone else.
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
That's fine, of course you don't work for anyone else! But you are also not going to convince anyone else by being vague and refusing to give any specifics.
Usually when somebody makes broad vague assertions of evidence but refuses to back it up, I find that they are either mistaken about their experiences and that their take aways do not really follow from their primary evidence. Though usually it's those on the more DEI side that say "I'm not responsible for educating you" that make these mistakes! In the past year I'm seeing it from people that think DEI is about discrimination, so it's an interesting evolution. The argument is still unconvincing, no matter who says it. And again, I'm not saying you must produce anything for anybody else, I'm just saying that you end up looking like you don't have anything to actually produce.
Actually, I work for many people: My customers, my colleagues, my family. I just don't work for strangers on HN.
My mistake was answering judahmeek's question directly. They asked "What are your sources?" and I answered with the truth, that my impressions came from reading the regulations myself. Instead I should have just not replied at all, because I didn't have the time then to go re-do the research and find all the links. It's not like I save every link I visit when exploring my own curiosity. I am not trying to get some paper published here, just trying to understand whats going on and occasionally share what things seem like to me on HN. Also if they had said something like "This is shocking to me, can you point me where to look into this for myself" I would have probably waited and made a more constructive response.
I hope you appreciate that I just took time out of my day to do this for you, primarily because I found your response (in contrast to judahmeek's) reasonably respectful.
What I noticed when I looked into this last year was that regulatory implementations of the affirmative action executive order 11246 continuously increased and seemed to hit a couple inflection points. I think one was in 2000 and one was in 2021, but there may have been more. I didn't save all the sources that I read to give me the impression I got last year, but after spending about 30 min trying to find at least some of them, it wasn't hard to start to see the picture again.
Note that there is a lot of disparate facts here that paint a picture, and they will paint different pictures depending on the stance the reader starts with before engaging. When I explored this last time, I came at it with curious skepticism. The picture they painted for me, was that something that was well intentioned (affirmative action) came with an assumption: if organizations hire blindly based on merit, over time the distributions of their workforce will match the distributions of the pool of applicants applying to work there. To implement affirmative action these organizations need to include everyone in the pools of applicants, which may require disproportional outreach to invite minorities. Based on this assumption, recommendations were made into outreach programs and requirements were set to measure outcomes. Over time the outcomes didn't match expectations, so regulatory pressure was increased. As the regulatory pressure increased, it put more pressure on all levels within these organizations to take action beyond just outreach programs. So what was federally mandated across many industries specifically was race, gender, sexuality reporting and making plans to reach distributions representative of the broader population. Given this accountability set by federal regulations, and decades of efforts to try to solve the problem with outreach and merit based hiring not leading to the expected outcomes, efforts naturally expanded beyond outreach into all relevant decisions (hiring, promoting). That is how you get people being hired and promoted based on race, gender, sexuality instead of merit. (The exact opposite of the original intention).
For example in Title 41: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/subtitle-B/chapter-60/... See 60-2.16 placement goals
Federal contract compliance programs https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/12/09/2014-28...
FAR 52.222-23 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.222-23 Construction firms must set goals for gender participation in workforce
SEC Release no 34-92590 https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/sro/nasdaq/2021/34-92590.pdf Publicly traded companies that don't have at least two minorities on their board risk being delisted from exchanges
What I remember from last year as most shocking were Department of Education regulations and NSF incentives, but I can't find those primary sources now. The NSF website seems gutted. What I recall was that NSF set criteria in grant awards to incentivize institutions to have a diverse workforce. I can find evidence of this from secondary sources, but not the primary source I remember seeing last year. Similarly what I remember, is that the DOE mandated DEI reporting and planning and tied it to federal funding/support. The effect was that leaders would put pressure on the organization beyond just job placement recruitment/outreach. The reporting and accountability focused on diversity and representation throughout the entire organization, and so the "plans" and more importantly implications would extend beyond just outreach and impact placement decisions from hiring, to special training / career acceleration programs and promotions.
I think it crossed a line for some people in the years following 2021 (EO 13985) when these regulations were expanded to include factors related to peoples sexual orientation and preferences. Once some manager who was just trying to get through their quarter and hire the candidate that will the do best job has to forgo what seems like the best candidate in favor of some other candidate because of how they chose to identify or who they like to have sex with, well... yeah it was getting ridiculous.
Let me be extremely clear that I don't condone discrimination. I think we should do our best to support everyone to thrive. We just have to be careful about confusing responsibility with privilege, and respect how hard it is to design incentive systems that actually produce the desired outcomes.
You can look at the evidence that I am presenting here and call it weak and argue against it. Or you can consider that I dug this up in 30 min on my lunch break as a favor to you, as someone with no motive other than curiosity and concern.
See Brigida v Buttigieg, if you want a spectacularly dumb example of how bad a DEI program can get. These are not hard examples to find, although I will concede that the "post-truth" anecdotes from the anti-woke camp can lead to a lot of cruft to sift through.
Sure, but you’re god deciding who goes to hell.
Illegal stuff happens all the time in the workplace and very frequently goes unreported, underreported, or otherwise results in nothing.
Using claims that something is illegal to discredit an argument is extremely dubious.
Whether something is illegal is only loosely correlated with whether it is common. Eg the war on drugs.
> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.
Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.
(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.
I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).
My thought is, if this sort of problem was happening at a company as big and influential in the industry as Google, that's already pretty bad. The backlash may not be warranted either way but the other position (that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done) isn't necessarily correct either.
Agreed, I think.
The solution to "DEI has run amok!" is not "Ban DEI!" but "better define what DEI means and what is within bounds/outside bounds". But, the latter doesn't fit on a campaign poster, so here we are...
> that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done
That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
> That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
> Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
> Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
My point is just that it seems to be a real problem worth discussion and consideration, not just something made up for concern trolling. Whenever you have potential incentives to violate the law, there is reason to be somewhat concerned. It doesn't always manifest, but sometimes it does.
(P.S.: It is true that nobody is advocating for illegal hiring practices, at least not in good faith. Still, disregarding the apparent connection between DEI initiatives and illegal hiring practices they can incentivize just terminates the discussion.)
I would estimate illegal DEI was happening at more than half of top 100 firms. I’m not as familiar with corporations, but I would be checked if it was less than 25% of Fortune 100s. The HR folks all attend the same conferences together. And the big corps set the permission structure for how everyone else acts.
>I and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
Gee, it's almost like we're re-learning what the origin of the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety" is.
Unfortunately, it’s trivial these days to gin up the appearance of impropriety even where there is none.
I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
Who's going to start a lawsuit and get blacklisted? HR is normally pushing for this.
No one is brave enough to start such lawsuits. Likelihood of winning too low, first mover disadvantage at play.
That's a lot of whites for a roofing company.
In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
Suppose you were abused by your parent. How much would it be reasonable for you to abuse your child, in order to balance the scales?
That's a bad metaphor.
It’s a good metaphor. You can’t undo racial discrimination against someone who is now dead by discriminating against someone else who is now alive.
No, it’s a bad metaphor.
The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused. And yes, that would be quite odd.
The rationale for racial preferences in 2025 is not that they are a benefit to individuals who were personally harmed by racial discrimination. The institutions engaging in these practices insist that they are otherwise engaged in race blind practices. If such practices existed, DEI as we know it would be unnecessary. We could simply just enforce the existing laws in a race-blind way.
> To make your analogy work, the benefit would be for people who weren’t personally abused, but whose parents or grandparents were abused.
No, this is a consequence of your ideology, which assumes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act and etc. (Hence “we could simply just enforce. . .”) Mine does not.
Note that the metaphor as stated by 0xDEAFBEAD, which you already said was good, did not include this additional generational gap.
It’s not just “my ideology.” The universities and corporations that practice DEI do not believe they discriminate against people in the present. They see it as a remedy for historical discrimination.
It’s also not even an ideological matter. It’s a testable fact. There’s very little evidence that universities and corporations are discriminating against non-whites/asians.
So if admission rates are below population averages, is it your contention that:
My contention is that the evidence of discrimination against (non-asian) minorities in universities is non-existent. I don’t have an opinion to what’s causing admissions rates to be different than population averages. If someone proves that it’s caused by discrimination against minorities, then we have laws to address that and I’d support enforcing those laws.
If we have the fact of lower admission rates, it is incumbent on us as a society that cares about all our members to figure out what's going on. You've refused to express an opinion. Of course, others have proposed rationales, and the solution proposed is unacceptable to you. So what are we to do with that?
By this logic we should stop giving college scholarships to women. They are over represented in enrollment compared to men, so that can only be sexism right?
Society faces many problems—individuals don’t need to have an opinion as to the causes of all of them. I’m not an education expert, so I can’t tell you what causes lower admissions rates. If you think the reason is universities are discriminating, then it’s incumbent on you to build a case for that. I’m sure I’d support enforcing the laws against discriminatory conduct that you can show is happening. But I’m not going to support indicting people without evidence of wrongdoing.
I'm not an education expert either, and I'm happy to let universities decide. It's your lot who won't let them.
I'd argue the correct analogy is "Suppose you were abused by society; should society be forced to address that abuse." But that's just me.
You're asking too much of society with such vague complaints. We should focus on getting basics right: prosperity, jobs, reduce crime, reduce road death, and so forth before navel-gazing about "abuse by society". In any case, even if society does somehow "address the abuse", it shouldn't come in the form of randomly abusing other people. But that's what you appear to be advocating for: Because some people were discriminated against, we should now randomly discriminate against some other people.
You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions. Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me: it's not a zero-sum game, and white people in general seem to have done fine over the past fifty years of "abuse".
>You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions.
???
>Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me
It was an analogy.
>white people in general seem to have done fine
Black people in the US are also doing far better than Black people in Africa or frankly pretty much any other country with a large Black population.
>The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.
Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.
It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?
In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
You cannot make a fair system by introducing subjective ideas like historical balance.
A set of rules for fairness require that current decisions only account for individual merit; not special status.
I didn't propose subjective harm in the past, why would you suggest that I did?
But in any case, it seems like your answer is zero, right?
Inverting the privilege pyramid does not make for a balanced and healthy system.
If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay.
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
Companies know their own historical data and practices best.
I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing? Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have. Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it. Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class. Better what makes better.
> We need the best for the job
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
Because we must do better than our ancestors, we have no escuses, whereas e.g. 1880 gobal ileteracy rate > 80%. More comfortable schools with less pupils per 1 teacher we need, fix the issue, not give painkillers.
We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.
Yep, you'r 100% right, it reminds me I once read that of all given jobs offers, 50% would be taken by someone who got introduced internally. Out of personal exeperience as employer, that so was decided by me because it was filling the need instantly. And out of those personal experiences, bad employees brought bad recruits, good employees brought good recruits. Unknown recruits? half good, half bad. Ironically chiraldic.
This isn't a thread about what's reasonable, it's a thread about what's legal.
That means a "what's reasonable" question is disallowed?
"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"
Okay, so we've established that your upper bound is "less than thousands of years" but what's your lower limit? Or were you just strawmanning?
If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.
Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI. As an able-bodied individual, you may not feel you would benefit from those today; but if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another. When that day comes, you'll be asking for accommodations to get into public areas, and if those accommodations are not available to you, you will likely find how that limits your ability to participate in public life very unfair.
> if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another
Oh for sure, for sure. It's hard to predict exactly how the secondary effects play out. But I was referring to the primary intended effects, which I think is what the person I was replying to was talking about.
>Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI.
You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.
I am not saying disability law originated in the DEI movement of today, I'm pointing at the through line between the passage of the ADA and the modern DEI movement. From the civil rights era in the 60s, to women's rights in the 70s, to the ADA in the 90s, to gay rights in the 00s, to DEI today. The principles behind disability accommodations -- access, fairness, inclusion -- are foundational to DEI as a broader movement. The ADA was an early expression of those principles in law; DEI later extended them into other social and organizational contexts.
And yeah, the ADA has received broad bipartisan support in passage because it's well understood even by partisans that disabilities affect everyone, so it's important to have protections in place.
What's not so understood by partisans is how those disabilities manifest, so since the passage of the ADA there has also been widespread pushback on what qualifies as a disability, and what accommodations are reasonable. THAT is a whole different conversation which, as someone who is disabled and covered under the ADA, I will say can be like pulling teeth to get protections guaranteed under the law. For example, businesses are often loathe to make physical accommodations like ramps and elevators, and there is often resistance to providing accommodations for mental health conditions or neurodiversity.
But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone. This includes people who are disabled, and at no point in time has DEI not included disabled people. Maybe for the terminally online right, who only focus on gender and race, but that's not what it's all about in the real world. Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI). It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
It's not only not benefitting you but actively putting you at a disadvantage because of the way you where born.
Why do you think that? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
(Not gp but...) I believe it because diversity is not a zero sum game, where every gain for a demographic other than mine means a loss to my demographic which must be fought tooth and nail.
First, we are all enriched by having a variety of experiences and perspectives available to draw upon.
Second, I feel stronger bonds with historically marginalized humans than with humans who happen to belong to my own demographic.
> If you think "all white dudes are/think the same"
Ha, we definitely do not all think alike.
What makes you think I think "all white dudes are/think the same"? Did I say anything to suggest that?
The difference, I think, is that I'm not blind to the advantages I receive every day for being a white male. In the words of Louis CK, "If you're a white male and don't admit that it is thoroughly awesome, you're an asshole."
Reading your other comments, I was just thinking that you seemed to group everyone who look the same, together, and think about them as if they were 1 type of person you could generalize about. For example, white men, or black men, or women. - So, yes I suppose you did.
For example, if your country gets attacked, primarily the men go and defend their country and people. Is that "thoroughly awesome"? Anyway have a nice day
>advantages I receive every day for being a white male
Really like what? There are many concrete examples of how "white dudes" are statistically are disadvantaged.
Higher rate to being victim of a violent crime, suicide, homelessness, harsher sentences, dying at work, dying younger, dying in a war, white guilt
You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-settles-28...
So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!
On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...
Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool. For example, page 64 shows that Google's APAC offices have 90.7% Asian workers, up from 90.4% a year earlier -- at the expense of all other ethnicities. Is Google doing a bad job there, or is this an accurate reflection of the available workforce?
throwawaykf10 said:
>On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
>My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
I provided data. Not anecdotes. The data shows how the demographics of Google have shifted. The data shows how the professional prospects of minorities have shifted when it comes to Google jobs. The data does not show "no change at all".
A change from 90.4% to 90.7% percentage points I doubt is statistically significant. Phrasing it "at the expense" sounds like it's some terrible decline.
The conversation so far I believe has been about DEI in the US. Why focus on APAC, instead of the the US?
>Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool.
What does that mean? Are you saying that if the fraction of CS grads that are Black+ also increased from 2.2% to 10.0%, then Google's DEI efforts did nothing? That conclusion doesn't hold. Google has a lot of DEI efforts, including ones to increase the number of Black+ people who choose to major in CS.
> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.
Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.
(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)
Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.
All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.
The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".
Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires.
It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.
> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
Have you read the actual article?
>If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly.
Because the race based pity hiring programs didn't actually address the pipeline problems.
> Have you read the actual article?
The PSF grant one or a different one? In the PSF one, nobody is getting ostracized and fired for daring to suggest DEI, in fact, they are turning down a grant for a more pro-DEI stance.
You might be in trouble for actually implementing DEI programs, but it's not a taboo topic that can't even safely be talked about. Criticism of any DEI-related practice, whether it's illegal hiring discrimination or presubmits that yell at you for using an ever-expanding list of now-verboten words, was taboo in many places.
Did that case ever resolve?
In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
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I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
I assume that many of those female speakers are transwomen, and transwomen are not underrepresented in the Python or similar programming communities (in some of them, they're conspicuously overrepresented).
Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.
Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.
The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
> unusually homogenous communities
Which can be socioeconomic rather than racial..
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Imo DEI should have always been based on socioeconomic status over anything else. It'd likely address the other forms of diversity, and would provide way less homogeneity in thought while at the same time providing a sense of inclusion/belonging.
No, it's not hard compared having a good combination of STEM and marketing skills. Many emigrants to the US had no or very few connections: Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, a long list of Indians, Chinese and other Asians.
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There is a also merit at the individual level vs merit at the organizational level. e.g. most tech companies are male dominated, but many serve primarily women (Amazon retail, Pinterest, Etsy etc). So having more women in the companies, especially in positions to directly impact the customer experience is important even if we disregard individual merit. Ditto for products that serve primarily minority populations etc.
>> (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.
If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
You know what encourages women to be programmers? Seeing women be programmers.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?
You can see this very visibly in things like the Marines combat fitness tests. [1] In any case where strength is directly involved the requirement for a minimum score for men tends to be near the standards for a max score for women. In that particular test the ammo can lift range is 62-106 for men versus 30-66 for women.
Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.
The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.
[1] - https://www.military.com/military-fitness/marine-corps-fitne...
I'm pretty sure that the effectiveness of a soldier in combat depends on a lot more than just a strength score.
Look at the FAA ATC hiring controversy.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
If you want to make an argument, make it here and cite some primary sources.
Everything I've read (that isn't from a blubbering MAGA source) suggests that the "controversy" is entirely manufactured.
A fascinating claim.
You do know there were exams leaked to a group right?
Every single time. You look into the source and realize that there's nothing behind the claims.
It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.
But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.
> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.
GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
> It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
It has two sides, one promoting, and one denying. Based on race. DEI activists are always talking about the first. How great it is. And never talks about second, to not to ruin the rosy picture. Just recently I visited a hospital in mostly white area. Inside it looked like african consulate. There are still DEI stickers on the wals. What they did they denied jobs to all white applicants.
Looks like Python foundation decided to promote exactly this. Well, you will not get a penny from me till you change the course.
That stat is basically meaningless on its own. It could mean anything from they've done an amazing job on engaging women, to they've bodged the numbers by unfairly discriminating against men, or anything in between.
Annoyingly they actually do have the data to answer which it is, because Pycon's review process has a first stage which is blind, and a second stage which isn't. So if they published how many talks get rejected at each stage, by year and vendor, then we could draw actual conclusions.
I couldn't find where they have published those numbers though so we can't draw any conclusions here.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
Encouraging specific people to submit applications is not illegal. Even based on those characteristics.
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It's literally not illegal. Me telling my friends they should apply to some job is not illegal.
You telling certain friends, but not others, based on characteristics named in the 1964 civil rights act, as part of your job requirements, would likely be illegal.
In your free time without occupational incentive? Sure.
No it would not be illegal.
What happens if all my friends happen to be black? I can never tell anyone about a job opportunity ever again?
Have we taken a step back and actually thought about the things we're saying?
When is it ever a job responsibility to tell your friends about job opportunities & no one else?
Spamming the same bad-faith argument over and over in this thread on an account you clearly solely created for this purpose does not make it more true.
I’m sorry do you operate a legal business and go to weekly meetings at Stanford law schook
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
You're asserting that the Fair Housing Act applies to tech recruiting?
Securement of a settlement proves literally nothing.
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> Randomized studies show
I opened the link and searched for "random" and id not find anything. I thought there was going to be something like a randomized controlled trial or similar from what you said but if random does not show up on the search I am not sure what to look for or what you are referring to when you say "Randomized studies". I skimmed the article and did not spot anything that matched, but I may be missing something.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
None of the bits you copy-pasted include the word "random" either.
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
There's a whole lot of self-referencing going on in that article (author published in "Queer Majority" and "The Quilette" and not much else...)
No because they obviously deserve it for there grand grand grand grand fathers sins and we still live in a patriarchy because 0.01% of men are part of the 1% richest so it's only right to punish the other 99.99%.
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> We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
Funny, I've seen the exact opposite. Nice anecdotes we have here, maybe some real data would be more appropriate in arguments such as these.
And on the flip side, if I look at the state of my (US) government, seems like we've managed to fill it up with lowest-common-denominator stupidity, and most of it is white men (with a smattering of white women here and there). And it certainly seems we're dragging everyone else down with us...
At least in the US, it seems to be the lower-educated, rabidly anti-DEI faction that seems to be dragging everyone else down with them.
> DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
Very, very curious on what basis these claims are being made. Empirical studies would be ideal, but even some anecdotes would be illuminating at this point.
Look at what happened to software in the early 2010s.
There are already plenty of anecdotes by others here where sub-par work was given a blind eye because of its creator's identity.
And surely you are on the intelligent side?
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> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375863746_Men_Now_F...
So shouldn't there be more DEI rectifying anti-male discrimination now?
The article you linked is not the "randomized study" you mentioned. Your argument would be more solid if you linked to a source that backs it up.
> Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do
This is an odd phrasing. These are exclusive categories that cover the possibility space†; it makes sense to say that "women are favored over men", but it doesn't make sense to say "men face more discrimination than women". Any number you come up with for "discrimination against men" is necessarily defined relative to the outcomes for women; you can't assign cardinal numbers to both groups.
† Not quite. The possibility space also includes children. They face far, far more discrimination than either men or women do. For example, hiring them is a serious crime.
You might expect both
1. discrimination against women in male dominated industries and
2. discrimination against men in female dominated industries.
Studies show that now 2. is worse than 1:
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
> Studies show that now 2. is worse than 1
This is a coherent claim, but it can't be summarized as "men face more discrimination than women do". Neither (1) nor (2) is an amount of discrimination.
It could be the case, for example, that there are twenty times as many jobs in male-dominated industries as in female-dominated industries, and that men and women apply to these in perfect proportion to their availability.
(Your more specific claim, women do not face any negative discrimination in male-dominated industries, will mean that the amount of negative discrimination faced by women is lower than that faced by men regardless, but this isn't a necessary part of the way you've constructed the question.)
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
This means more women working these roles with the same capability as men, it doesn't mean replacing men with women who are worse at the job, which ironically is an attitude making up part of the reason efforts like this have to be made.
> This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
Citation needed. Certainly neither of those is "clearly".
> If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
And if it's the opposite, as the best available evidence (not that there is any really solid evidence in this space) suggests?
I'm all for ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance that reflects their skills and experience, regardless of personal characteristics. As far as I can see DEI initiatives are working against that.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-ra...
2: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
Anonymizing names and such is fine/good but the whole push for equal net worth, etc is IMO bad. Granting assistance exclusively to people below the median is equal to punishing those above the median. And if you start adding race, gender, etc it gets even worse. And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
The status quo benefits me, but I also don't see why I owe X to Y. My parents worked hard to get me educated. Their parents worked hard to get them educated. Their parents worked hard to get them their own house. You can stretch it and say they were able to do that because Ys grand...parents got exploited but it's honestly not my problem at this point. We still exploit kids mining in bumfuck nowhere and making phones, everyone cares mostly when they can make an extra buck unless it's straight up death camps.
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant..
The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime? This is what the people looking for reparations are arguing, no wrongs were ever righted because the responsible at no point considered it their duty to do so.
This means they have been generationally disadvantaged compared to you. It means they have had worse social mobility. By the time Obama rolled around there had only been four black US senators in its history.
The US's historic (and ongoing!) poor treatment of its people based on skin colour is so obvious from the outside that I struggle to understand how you don't see it. The government can snap into action for Florida but cannot find its energy for New Orleans, and many other such interesting coincedences.
> done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
> Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime?
In a way, yes. Of course, it's different nowadays in that if I don't like how country X is treating me I just move to country Y so I won't touch that too much. If we make it equal to where I get sold (how did I become property? Debt? War? Kidnapping? The country just decided to cover some debts?) to go plow fields in bumfuck nowhere, I likely won't be happy, but that's so outside of modern life I have no idea how I'd feel since people are kinda weird under stress.
The thing is that it wasn't morally or legally wrong for a long time. So it's just holier than thou modern people judging people of the past and wanting retroactive punishments for legal actions to people who have nothing to do with said actions. Sure, it could have happened faster, it also could have not happened at all.
And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
> The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway.. This is covered clearly as of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So anyone who had an issue with it could sue based on it. It's how the system is supposed to work. Not via redistribution systems based on "reverse" racism/sexism/etc.
> And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
It's better to feel punished now when your illfound gains are equalised to the people who lost out for you to have them, than to continue punishing the people who lost out forever because you don't have the humility to say "yeah my ancesters were probably wrong about this"
> No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway..
"No clue" might be the best I'll get, if you want to look it up and learn it's Duval County, Florida which integrated in 1999.
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> This is easy to explain on the grounds of ability.
What exactly are you suggesting here? If it's easy to explain, can you try to help me understand?
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“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
"Maybe you should [get some education], because [my anecdotes]" is rude and not particularly convincing.
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If the status quo is discrimination, at some point the argument is "I deserve to continue to benefit from generations of discrimination."
We're talking about generations of people who faced this same treatment you have that "wasn't ok". They, as you, experienced what we call injustice.
The question is, does their injustice deserve justice? Or only yours?
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
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Yeah you know all those "women" and their "liberal views". I'm a strong republican, that's why I only want to be around men. And touch them and smell them.
Nothing wrong with touching and smelling men if they consent.
DEI in practice works like this: You have a ruling class of affluent white males and a Harvard educated Executive Director. None of these have ever been suppressed in their lives.
If anyone points out that fact on PSF infrastructure, you ban them (yes, this has happened).
You create a couple of programs that are mostly ineffective but good for PR.
You never mention any economic or other injustices that could upset the corporate sponsors.
You support and promote job replacement by AI while blogging about redistributing jobs via DEI.
"The world doesn't run on merit. " Critical systems do.
And we are seeing a slow collapse as a result of the past decade of identity politics.
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.
If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit.
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
>>> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity.
It's a remarkably stable system for inequity.
>Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male
Honestly such statements weird me out. How did we come to saying such things being considered normal??
From my side of the coin, I've always thought that the best solution is ground level support.
Ensure that students of any type have excellent public schools. Ensure that people without resources, of any background, have access to higher education. This can be by grants for the very poor, just as it can be by government backed, guaranteed approved student loans.
Healthy, stable food in schools is an excellent way to keep a child's mind on education.
These things level the playing field. There are plenty of white males who need such help to be on a level playing field with wealthier families too. I grew up in a rural community in Canada, and saw many smart but underprivileged(including trouble with keeping food on the table) families end up with grants to go to university.
If you do this, if you provide the capability for merit to shine, and ensure that merit can be fed intellectually, you're doing much of the work required for true equality.
I frankly don't give a rat's ass about women being in any specific field, or someone of whatever skin tone. I do 100% care if people want to, but cannot!! I want all who are capable, to be able to express that capability.
If this is done, and done correctly, then the numbers of candidates applying for jobs will result in numbers indicative of candidates in the field. And more importantly, of people wanting to be in those fields. If you get 11% women in the field, and 11% women applicants, and nothing prevented women from entering that field, you're where you want to be.
We don't need to encourage people to enter a field. We need to only ensure they can if they want to.
This sort of "women are weak and are scared of entering fields" is bizarre, from an equality standpoint. The same for people with different skin tones. Why do people seem to think women, for example, are weak and incapable of pursing their dreams? They are not!
The women I've known in my life have been strong in opinion and in drive, the same goes for people of any racial background. There are of course those that are not, but I've seen lazy, undriven white males too.
People don't need to be prodded, dragged, pulled into a field.
They just need to have no way that they are hindered. They just need the freedom to choose. To know that they can pursue that which they desire.
Support at the ground level does this.
It's not like a white male cannot get mentored in Python by anybody. By 2019 Python was already one of the most popular languages in the world. Surely any dev on Earth who wants to learn Python has plenty of people and resources at their disposal, and it would take a very good set of reason to turn to the language inventor himself.
I agree that DEI often acts as a fig leave over a whole bunch of other systemic issues, and the European vs American cultural and historical landscapes are already so different as to make any cross-the-pound discussion on DEI extremely hard to navigate, but I still commend the PSF for not taking clearly ideological orders from a funding body. That road would have lead to nothing but trouble.
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> The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
I appreciate your efforts to support community and people
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They don't like being found out.
Sorry. Given the context of the thread
Who is "they" exactly?
Presumably, somebody downvoting that comment. Of course, it doesn't have to be that reason, but if the shoe fits
Cronyism is back on the menu.
You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?
Note that they said:
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
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Why are you so threatened by "girls who code?"
Why are you so threatened by girls who don’t code
I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
> but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly?
I can see how it might seem weird to an alien who knew what men and women were, but had no context for the existing state and history of society.
I can't see how it would seem weird to anyone else, however.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
I feel like you're glossing over my main point, which is that this stuff 100% does breed resentment for the average person, which is how we end up with people like Trump (obviously there are many more factors to consider but this is definitely one of them).
The difference between your scenario is just how visible it is; I have never ever had somebody go up to me and say 'This opportunity is being given to you because you're a white male'! If anything, it's the opposite! Did you know I was not eligible _to apply_ for a single scholarship for college a few years back, solely based on my race and gender? It was pretty demoralizing!
Again, I'm not saying that I _haven't_ benefitted from being a white male in some indescribable unknown way; but unlike in your scenario, I cannot _see_ this. Think about the average person, who goes their whole life seeing others being handed stuff specifically because of their race and gender and when they complain about it they simply get told 'Do you have no empathy? Your life is much better off than theirs!'
Again, who knows what the right solution is. But I don't think that it's the status quo.
> I feel like you're glossing over my main point, which is that this stuff 100% does breed resentment for the average person, which is how we end up with people like Trump (obviously there are many more factors to consider but this is definitely one of them).
I mean, having to cater to the feelings of overly sensitive men is how most of these problems started in the first place.
Ack! There is nothing 'overly sensitive' about being annoyed when you see somebody else get an opportunity because of the color of their skin or gender. It's human nature! In fact I suspect the average person in favor of DEI and / or identity politics would still suffer a decent amount of cognitive dissonance if they were passed up because of something like this. Again, it's just human nature!
Please try to imagine advocating for women's rights 100 years ago and hearing somebody say something like 'overly sensitive women want to vote! Psh!' If you want to argue for DEI please try to present good faith arguments.
Personally, I don't really get butthurt about things, so this isn't a problem for me (although I do think it's a problem in general as it is obviously going to anger people). I do think one of the main problems with DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
You just wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about how appearances made you feel things without ever addressing the actual facts.
>DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
> You just wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about how appearances made you feel things without ever addressing the actual facts.
Yes, appearances matter! That's why Trump is president right now (a fact, in case it isn't clear, I'm not happy about)! Because the American people were unhappy with the status quo. Whether or not you think DEI is "fair". And when people like you ignore this, you alienate the voting class, which you need on your side!
> Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
No, there are not DEI initiatives for pre kindergarten / very early school. Not that I've heard of at least, and definitely not on a large scale. And I'm not even talking about adding DEI there; I'm simply saying that we should really be asking why the gap between men and women in STEM seems to start so young (and if it really is because of something that hurts girls, remove that. Which would still not be DEI!)
> Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
...what? I am arguing against the current status quo. And it's true, it would be beneficial to me for DEI to be removed / identity politics abolished. I also believe it would be beneficial to everyone (albeit to a lesser extent), but that's beyond the scope of this argument.
Imagine the teacher lines up all the kids, gives them cookies, notices all the kids are boys, so the teacher puts up a sign outside the girls restroom advertising free cookies for anyone who attends math class.
Now the boys have cookies and the girls have cookies.
Except the cookies are not actually cookies, they just represent what you'll learn by attending the class.
That is out reach.
I don't see jocks complaining about fitness outreach programs to geeks. That'd be absurd.
But guys famously will complain about:
1. Women reading science fiction
2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
3. Women playing d&d
4. Women playing online games
5. Women writing code.
To be fair, many women are judgemental about male nurses or even male teachers.
That type of idiocy has to stop both ways. Let people do what they want to do.
> But guys famously will complain about: > 1. Women reading science fiction > 2. Women watching science fiction on TV. > 3. Women playing d&d > 4. Women playing online games > 5. Women writing code.
In your head? The first two are specially absurd. How would anyone know what women watch or read in their houses?
As soon as women try to participate in fandom or attend conventions, they are derided as not being "real fans". This has been documented as a problem with geek culture for well over 50+ years.
I noticed that you have worked very hard in your strained analogy to setup conditions which validate my original statement:
“I can see how it might seem weird to an alien who knew what men and women were, but had no context for the existing state and history of society.”
If boys always get 4 cookies at home, and girls get none, and then we go to school and boys get 1 more cookie, and girls get 3 cookies, I'd think it was pretty weird that boys get 5 cookies and girls only get 3.
> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).
In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.
What a bizarre analogy...
If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM, STEM graduates have been majority female for decades.
Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
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It was legal and common to discriminate on the basis of sex in banking services until 1974. I actually don't see anything in your link that disputes that. It discusses some earlier milestones about women being able to own certain types of property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act
Even if we quibble about the dates involved, we all understand that historically women have been marginalized, denied property, voting, and other rights, and that this was the status quo for millenia, right? And that that has lasting effects that continue in our society?
> Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974.
And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.
> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.
You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.
I actually don't care what the makeup of college students is. It's useful to encourage women to pursue education in order to promote equity. But there isn't some magic proportion of men to women graduates that I think we should be pursuing.
I don't want everything dominated by women, I just recognize that the work of undoing their marginalization is not complete.
Wow, way to make up words that the person you're replying to never said, and then arguing with them.
Bad-faith arguments seem to be your shtick, given your comment history on this post.
This is a bad faith argument: "What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?"
If that's not your position, clarify what it is. You're complaining about efforts to encourage women to seek an education. What is the theory of harm, if not that women shouldn't be educated? Perhaps what I said was too snarky of inflammatory, but I genuinely don't understand what else it would be.
> DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!"
No, “DEI” doesn’t keep saying that. Why are you making up a strawman to fight?
Erm…accounting is STEM via the M by many modern definitions.
Accounting is not a branch of mathematics.
Accounting is applied mathematics.
If that would make it count as STEM, you could just rename STEM to M because STE is arguably all just applied mathematics.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
There’s actually quite a bit of outreach-type programs aimed at getting them in the door, and a lot less after that because despite women dominating degrees and entry-level hires, men still disproportionately dominate management and leadership roles.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
You've never heard of programs to encourage men to be nurses or teachers? I certainly have.
Here's what I found after a quick search. If you're interested I'm sure you could research and find more information.
https://www.arizonacollege.edu/blog/men-wanted-new-efforts-t...
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
https://www.belmont.edu/stories/articles/2025/men-in-educati...
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
These people are very disconnected from reality. They make wild claims like groups for men are illegal and you’d never see a group dedicated to helping men in the nursing field. The feminists would destroy it! And yet…
https://www.aamn.org/
It’s really telling how they’re just so confident about easily debunked claims.
I’m reminded of a retired college admissions administrator whose theory was that some of the men in college gap was over-confidence: statistically the women who applied overall were far closer to the women who were accepted, whereas like a third of their male applicants had no chance so a roughly even balance of applicants turned 2:1 in favor of women being accepted. I’m sure that many of them grumble about DEI, unaware that merit is _why_ they weren’t accepted whereas their fathers’ generation would’ve found room for many of them via legacy or sports spots.
> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly
That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
Your argument is based on the fact that more men naturally gravitate towards STEM than women do. This doesn't mean there aren't still men who could go into STEM but lack motivation/opportunity/some other push. Maybe there are more of them than there is women like that, maybe not. You are saying it's ok to ignore all those men just because already bigger % of men naturally go into STEM. This is just discriminatory. Just because some people sharing some characteristic with me do better (in this context) doesn't mean I am in position to do better.
This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.
It's fun that you say 'naturally' when there have been centuries of oppression and conditioning against women in STEM.
> We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
I don't believe this is true. I think the gendered difference in interest in the cluster of topics we label "STEM" is mostly biological and deeply-seated - one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
I also don't think that boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls. I think that girls are explicitly encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in much greater numbers than boys - this is exactly a consequence of the above-noted social fact that "Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly". And as you say, this is because males are much more likely to be intrinsically interested in pursuing STEM education and careers, whereas females are more likely to require explicit societal encouragement to do so. I've read more than one account of a woman who had worked in some kind of software-related field admitting that she wasn't intrinsically excited about the work, but felt like she would be a bad feminist if she left a STEM track to do something more traditionally female-coded instead.
> one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
> This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
It's certainly possible that particular study had limitations or was otherwise bad. This is a hard thing to study rigorously. My understanding wasn't that the primates were choosing toys based on gender association in (some) human societies, it's that they were playing with the same physical objects in gendered ways. And this is consistent with the anecdotal observation about human children I've heard from many parents that girls like to play with any toy as if it is a doll whereas boys like to play with any toy as if it is a tool or a gun; girls being given toy cars and then tucking them into a toy bed as if they were a doll, etc.
> What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
I don't think I would claim that women are innately worse at engineering (and I think that "engineering" is a broad enough field with enough subspecializations that it's difficult to judge engineering skill in a way that is both objective and useful). I'd claim that women are systematically less interested in the kinds of highly technical systems-focused work we associate with fields like software engineering. In other words, I think that both men and women can be taught to program a computer and do software engineering, but that men (really AMAB people, I think transwomen pattern like cis men in this respect) are much more likely to be deeply interested in programming computers and voluntarily spend a lot of time doing it to the exclusion of other things, which eventually caches out in programming as a whole being a very male-skewed field.
I think the lower gender gap in the Soviet Union and other mid-20th-century Communist states is explained by exactly what you said, explicit social and political pressure for gender equality. I also suspect that even in the Soviet system, there might have been more equal numbers of men and women doing STEM work or programming work specifically, but (at least as far as computer programming goes), males were systematically more intrinsically interested in and energized by the actual programming, whereas the women were more likely to just be doing their jobs and feeling like they would rather be spending their time doing something else. The Soviet system was in any case characterized by a large amount of state control over how people worked, in ways we generally find authoritarian today, and it's not a model I would like to see modern US employment policy follow.
> When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
I agree that these are interesting and complex questions that cognitive scientists should attempt to study to the best of their ability. I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
Not that you asked for a trans opinion here but
> I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
Interesting take. I faced abusive repercussion in daycare for playing with the cooking set and dolls because “those aren’t my toys and it’s wrong”, so while I was inclined to think this was very much socially enforced dimorphism, your comment seems to suggest that I am in some way more “biologically feminine” than most skeptics would like to suggest. curious !
As for us being overrepresented in tech, for a lot of gals I know it’s a way for our merit to be judged over our appearance, similar to socially awkward guys preferring work that doesn’t take constant face-to-face.
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So we shouldn’t focus on helping a subset of people because doing so is discriminatory to everyone else?
Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
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Some people are disadvantaged and some are not.
There's no St. Jude's Non-Cancer Cancer Research because that would be fucking stupid. Similarly, there is no "coding for white guys". Well, there is, we just call that the entire industry.
Source: I am a white man living in America.
I don't want "coding for white guys", if I could decide, I'd want for example "coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America" (I live in Poland so it's not directly about me).
It seems you're also making a false assumption that since "white guys" make the majority of the industry that means all kinds of "white guys" are properly represented there. But I don't see colors or genders like that.
It’s very frustrating when non-residents or citizens have such strong opinions on US policy like this.
We do have those programs ("coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America") already and we have for quite a long time.
The only people who have the privilege to not see color or gender are those in the majority.
You bet your ass black Americans see color, because they're reminded of it every day. In our policies, communities, and workplaces.
Also: I agree such a program would be great, but it's not an either or type thing. We can, and do, do both.
This crab bucket sort of whiney baby mentality of "daaaad why do THEY get stuff?" is destructive. It's literally anti-solutions.
Making everything worse across the board for everyone might be fair, but it's also shitty and intellectually lazy.
Is this one of those “what about white guys?” complaints, or am I misreading? Because the implied qualification for “subset of people” is “underrepresented”. Any political/cultural undertones are on you.
Yes. They've got several other comments in this same thread honestly curious why there aren't outreach programs for "conservatives."
As if any of the tech companies would have had even a fraction of their success if they were ran like a Truth Social forum...
You're calling an entire gender "compatible" with what, exactly?
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> we want the people building our technology to have more diverse views than just well off men from the suburbs
is this actually true? i think we tend to move people into the suburbs and demand they act like a well off man from the suburbs.
Touché lmao
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> > Women are half the population
> In the US, this also applies to Republican voters.
No, in fact, in the US, it is closer to true of voters without any partisan qualification than it is to being true of Republican voters.
Are Republican voters/conservatives underrepresented in tech? There seem to be plenty of safe spaces for them.
> In the US, this also applies to Republican voters. What about them?
Nobody cares about them. If you want to make a "coding for republicans", then go for it. Nobody is stopping you. You can't pretend people are stopping you so then you can turn around and act like a victim. That's not normal person behavior.
> conservative views? They're also pretty underrepresented in the tech industry
First off, not they're not. Second off - nobody is censoring conservative views.
They ARE censoring obvious racism, sometimes pedophilia, sometimes misogyny. Because those all suck. And when that happens, some conservatives cry. Which doesn't say what you think it says. That does not reflect well on you or the broader ideology.
At the end of the day, if I speak like Hilary Clinton at work, it's perfectly normal. If I speak like Trump and talk about "human garbage" and various brown people eating cats and dogs, I'm probably getting fired and potentially a referral to a psychiatrist.
That's the difference. Not the ideology, the words.
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What is your evidence for this: "... because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems ..." , "the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out ... "?
What alternative reasons have you explored?
They presumably didn’t write an entire literature survey in an HN comment because the CS pipeline problem has been written about so much in the past that it’s reasonable to assume basic familiarity:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/punch-cards-pipel...
I mean there's reams of women in tech or academia who talk about this shit. "I left my PhD program because I was constantly belittled and harassed by my advisor and labmates" "I left my position for a different company because I kept getting passed over for promotion after I had kids" "I switched majors from CS in college because most of my classmates were men who made me uncomfortable" "I was bullied in high school by boys because they thought I didn't get accepted into school based on merit". These are all stories I've heard and there are many of them. Go ask some women in your workplace and I'd bet money they've heard stories like this from other women they know or have experienced it themselves. I'm a man and I'm tired of hearing the contrarian denials regarding these problems from my peers in the industry. Maybe every woman I know in the industry experiencing sexism at some point in their education or career is too anecdotal for you I guess.
I'm sure there's studies in labor and education stats to show some quantitative evidence of this stuff but I'm not going to waste my time proving the obvious to you.
I don't think it's our responsibility to educate you about a phenomenon that has been discussed, analyzed, and written about extensively over the past couple decades. If you haven't seen evidence of this, then you've been living under a rock.
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Outreach programs like “girls who code” and encouraging underrepresented groups to get involved are absolutely not against the law. Explicit discriminatory practices in hiring practices would be.
Yes, they are literally against the law, your knowledge of the law is probably a few years out of date, and I think you should spend more time reading the statutes themselves, this has already been litigated up to the supreme court.
Can you point to the ruling that bans the organization of Girls Who Code?
It's literally not the law.
42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(j) says:
> Nothing contained in this subchapter shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee subject to this subchapter to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any labor organization, or admitted to, or employed in, any apprenticeship or other training program, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.
Which is to say, affirmative action or diversity programs.
29 C.F.R. § 1608.1–1608.1(c) says:
> Voluntary affirmative action to improve opportunities for minorities and women must be encouraged and protected in order to carry out the Congressional intent embodied in title VII.[4] Affirmative action under these principles means those actions appropriate to overcome the effects of past or present practices, policies, or other barriers to equal employment opportunity. Such voluntary affirmative action cannot be measured by the standard of whether it would have been required had there been litigation, for this standard would undermine the legislative purpose of first encouraging voluntary action without litigation.
34 C.F.R. § 106.3(b) says:
> a recipient may take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limited participation therein by persons of a particular sex.
The decision in United Steelworkers v. Weber states:
> Title VII's prohibition in §§ 703(a) and (d) against racial discrimination does not condemn all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action plans. ... Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U. S. 405, 422 U. S. 418, cannot be interpreted as an absolute prohibition against all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action efforts to hasten the elimination of such vestiges.
The decision in Johnson v. Transportation Agency similarly states that Santa Clara County Transportation Agency did not violate Title VII by promoting a less-qualified woman.
The decision in Cohen v. Brown University upheld the use of affirmative action to equalize opportunity.
The law _literally_ contemplates this. As you said, "you need to literally look it up sometime."
STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 2023
Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 6–40.
"(b) Proposed by Congress and ratified by the States in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” Proponents of the Equal Protection Clause described its “foundation[al] principle” as “not permit[ing] any distinctions of law based on race or color.” Any “law which operates upon one man,” they maintained, should “operate equally upon all.” Accordingly, as this Court’s early decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause explained, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed “that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.” ...
"Respondents suggest that the end of race-based admissions programs will occur once meaningful representation and diversity are achieved on college campuses. Such measures of success amount to little more than comparing the racial breakdown of the incoming class and comparing it to some other metric, such as the racial makeup of the previous incoming class or the population in general, to see whether some proportional goal has been reached. The problem with this approach is well established: “[O]utright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
In regards to race conscious bias in the admissions process this is very different then an outreach program
AMERICAN ALLIANCE FOR EQUAL RIGHTS, versus FEARLESS FUND MANAGEMENT, LLC, 2023
To be sure, the line between “pure speech” that arguably entails discriminatory sentiments, see 303 Creative, 600 U.S. at 587, and the very act of discrimination itself may at times be hard to draw. And to be sure, Fearless characterizes its contest as reflecting its “commitment” to the “[b]lack women-owned” business community. The fact remains, though, that Fearless simply—and flatly— refuses to entertain applications from business owners who aren’t “black females.” Official Rules at 3. If that refusal were deemed sufficiently “expressive” to warrant protection under the Free Speech Clause, then so would be every act of race discrimination, ... "Moreover, and more specifically, each lost opportunity to enter Fearless’s contest works an irreparable injury because it prevents the Alliance’s members from competing at all—not just for the $20,000 cash prize but also for Fearless’s ongoing mentorship and the ensuing business opportunities that a contest victory might provide. "
The organization refused applications from anyone who wasn’t a black female, again different then an outreach group. I am sure if a male applied to “Girls who code” was denied and was able to establish this did harm to him he could have a case. As far as I know that has not happened so the group and others like it are perfectly legal.
Which law are you referring to? If you are referring to Presidential statements, they have to be followed by an actual regulation or else they are just a press release.
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The ask for the former is to have competitive spaces that are designated specifically for female athletes. This of course implies that all male athletes must be excluded, regardless of their identity claims.
The rationale is the same for both: to provide opportunities for women and girls in an otherwise male-dominated space. Neither should be controversial.
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You slipped in "based on sex" for an intentional reason that I'd like you to share with the class. Say, is your opinion of the "sex is an immutable characteristic and fixed at birth and therefore trans people are invalid and should..."? Or maybe I'm just reading into your wording a little too much.
You're talking to a trans woman by the way. Just thought I should throw that out there just in case you want to hurl some insults at me while you're at it too :)
Congratulations on immediately being vindicated :/
In humans and other mammals the immutability of sex is a fact, not an opinion. We are not a species of sequential hermaphrodites.
The cultural artefact of people identifying themselvee as the opposite gender is a different type of concept to this. It's more of a sociological or psychological phenomenon.
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You seem to care a lot about it actually.
I believe you are always allowed to create a club "boys who code" if that's something you are interested in.
If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
> Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
This ties into a very specific confusion about affinity groups. Specifically, they generally are not exclusionary (in part because it's largely illegal). The only thing preventing boys from participating in a "girls who code" type of event is the boys don't want to go to something with "girls" in the name.
I blearily put this reply to the wrong top-level comment earlier, but ...
That very much depends on the group. Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.
Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
If you were to create a "boys who code" organization and get denied for use of a public space that a "girls who code" org has used, then a) you could sue for use of the space, citing the girls groups' use, and win, or b) you could sue saying that the girls group shouldn't be allowed to use it, and win.
That very much depends on the group.
Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.
Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
So what about the girl scouts, is that also discriminatory?
Yes, there was an entire supreme court case about that 30 years ago, a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts I might add.
That was against the boy scouts but the reverse lawsuit hasn't been filed against the girl scouts to my knowledge.
That said, law in the US and one’s opinions on what constitutes discrimination are different things.
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
Could the foundation take the money and sit on it in bonds or some other safe instrument? Call it an "endowment"?
$1.5M at 4% is nice.
But I suppose the "proposal" means these funds come with a distribution plan attached?
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
The text is:
> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
its just that human beings aren't writing things using type safe memory checked languages, but i'll just say that they're trying to concatenate and distill a series of supreme court decisions into public policy.
It basically boils down to: A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need" B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine. C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
> We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional.
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
Sure, but the executive order is not a law.
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
You say that confidently like that's an obstacle to executive power in 2025.
Does it define what DEI is? It seems very loosely defined to me so it seems a bit crazy to talk about it in contact terms without defining it more precisely.
The point is to muddy the waters, to sow uncertainty. To have the ability to apply the law arbitrarily, as opposed to uniformly. The absence of a specific definition very much aids that use case.
The opinion of the current administration is that DEI is illegal, the language is intentionally implying that DEI is illegal discrimination, because that is the view they are trying to advance. Grants are even being terminated for being related to any sort of diversity topic.
Grants are terminated based on keyword matches.
they'd have to be extra careful with cpython, it's got a lot of include
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
If it’s not “DEI” then it’s “waste fraud and abuse”. And if it’s not that then it’s “terrorism” or “treason”.
“Anti-semitism” if it involves colleges in any way, don’t forget that!
The conjunction used is "or". It could mean either.
My reading in context is different: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08...
That's a different, non-governmental website?
That was labor lawyers interpreting a governmental memorandum about the same issue substantially or precisely.
Who, in 2025, is still giving the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the rule of law?
As I’ve said in the past: they need the benefit of the doubt on everything; they deserve the benefit of the doubt on nothing.
A non-trivial amount of people in this thread, sadly. Many of which are leaving comments like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727967
Roughly half of the country, give or take.
Roughly 40% supports Trump, but they are often quite loud about putting other things above the rule of law.
Not sure why you think roughly 50% give him the benefit of the doubt on dedication to the rule of law.
From Democratic analyst David Shor back in March ( https://archive.is/kbwom ) : "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]." So, not that it brings me any joy to say it but it would seem more like 55%?
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
“Registered voters” is not the same group as “people”.
Winning by 5% (even assuming no third party votes) is 52.5% (with 47.5% for the opponent) not 55%, if there are any third-party votes, that gets even lower.
A piece written in March 2025 discussing a hypothetical for the November 2024 election is not describing the state of the world in October 2025.
Unless the 40% number in your previous post was from October 2025, that's plainly moving the goalposts. And registered voters are the only people who matter since anyone else can't cast a ballot.
Beyond that, the August 2025 (since October's aren't available yet) poll numbers don't seem that much better. That the Democratic Party approval is neck and neck with the Republicans despite the Republicans' blatant corruption and incompetence speaks volumes about how unpopular the Democratic Party is. They need to reform drastically before the midterms next year.
> registered voters are the only people who matter
This right here is moving the goalposts.
*Roughly 40% of the country, give or take. Don't be complacent.
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
I wonder, how likely do you think there would be a retaliatory threat of revoking PSF’s nonprofit status for a perceived snub in rejecting the offer?
The IRS has withheld 501(c) status from the president’s perceived adversaries before[0]. But I haven’t heard of 501(c) status being revoked.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened. From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-comi...
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/154584-ig-audit-of-irs-ac...
Even the people buried deep in the most podunk regulatory department you've never even heard of are smart enough to re-order the priority list on a change of administration. They don't need to be told and there is no paper trail. They just know what's good for their boss's boss's boss's boss^n is good for them and that kicking a potential hornet's nest is bad for them.
And even if you personally want to hassle someone with friends in the right places, what are the odds every other leaf of every other part of the organization(s) does? There will always be someone who has no morals and wants to climb the ladder who's happy to read between the lines and drop the ball.
It's just how it is. On some level, I'm not even sure this is a bad thing. If the executive can't change prioritization implicitly then the organization is either stupid or unaccountable.
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
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Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
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Pretty bold statement with no evidence.
Here's some evidence that he is, again, badmouthing the PSF without a good reason: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-psfs-2024-annual-im...
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
it never had a claw back clause -- that is the real problem here. And we've seen that the Trump admin is willing to actually claw back granted funds.
not at all the same
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
Did it have a claw back clause? If not, then it's quite different than the current situation?
Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.
Seems you comment agrees with the parent.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
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Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
Even on HN, we're still human and hungry for controversy.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
It doesn't matter if you have used them in this thread or not. An account of your age and your disposition should not have access to automated moderation tools, period.
Moderation via easily gamified populism is the worst kind of moderation.
Because the leftists flagging and downvoting everything they disagree with in this thread are clearly exemplars of excellent user moderation? Knock it off.
> exemplars of excellent user moderation
This is a contradiction. There's no such thing, only shades of bad, and HN has about the worst possible implementation.
For what it's worth, I didn't flag or downvote you. YC is seemingly fine with your behavior, and I've seen much worse out of people who have been here longer. I'd rather your mask-off rants be out in the open than swept under the rug.
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> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
> The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words
Heh. Remember when people fell all over themselves to rename source control branches to "main"?
I don't recall the government making hugely significant financial decisions about science funding on those grounds, any more than people "falling over themselves" to shave two characters off the default branch name. Nor do I remember DEI being quite as harmful to the humans as master/slave relations in the US. But, it is completely in line with these sorts of politicians and their supporters to criticize people for something, and then act 10x as bad.
I didn't engage with the explanation because nobody has provided one. This whole thread is just people asserting that it's OK to change a few words and continue doing what they were previously doing, because Trump. There's no deeper logic and that's not an intricate explanation. It is, in fact, fraud.
Nobody here is actually confused about any of this. You're all defending fraud because you hate the victims of it, not out of any intellectual principle. The government doesn't want to fund certain kinds of work. People who want to grab money for that work anyway are manipulating the language they use whilst refusing to change what they're really doing. That is grant fraud. Merely asserting it's not over and over will not help you when lawsuits start flying.
That's academics. The PSF, despite how awful this blog post makes it look, is at least doing what it's supposed to be doing: taking the requirements seriously and refusing the money.
> First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions
Python hacking isn't science! But if you want to talk about academic research instead, the time for academics to make this argument was 50 years ago. Nobody is going to buy the idea it's unacceptable to be political from academics of all people. There is no group more blatantly political: if it's unethical to impose "political filters" on "scientific positions" then academia needs to engage in massive purges of itself because it's overrun with unethical behavior.
> The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
It and its congressional allies literally makes the law, there is nothing in the constitution requiring the government to fund DEI and it is doing so because it won an election in which it said it'd do all these things. It's academia that's acting lawlessly, ignoring direct orders from its funding sources and has zero regard for the constitution - which puts the executive and Congress in charge of grant funding, not grantees or the PSF.
The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.
And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.
Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.
this and many other grants were singled out because of words used in their description. you seem quite certain that 'diversity' here isn't referring to the degree to which the genome of these animals is similar to different to other of their species, but instead a leftist dogwhistle hiding racist intent, and this researcher lost their position because they are really a secret racist and deserves to be 'blowtorched'.
you celebrate the ruin of the career of a highly trained person, frankly a national resource, because they used a word to describe their work that you think has evil connotations.
we are so screwed
I'd love to know what those stories are.
I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.
For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.
> I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not.
Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.
The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.
Is the restriction on grantees not violating federal law a new one, or has it been around for ages?
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> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
This is mystical thinking. We can establish systems for hiring based on capability.
We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
We can? I'm pretty sure companies have spent billions trying to achieve this and failed. The best they can do is maybe sort of sometime hire people that are good enough
Sometimes those are directly out of the DEI playbook when you see discrepancies in hiring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition
I'd wager that most directors thought they were picking the person with the most merit, and they seemingly were not.
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?
A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
What? Customers do not do hiring and hiring is not done to benefit customers. That is a nonsense viewpoint.
Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't.
The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather than applied for any new minority. The programs always get designed with a specific target in mind.
Similar for the second, if a group get popular support, diversity programs will help those while ignore any similar but disliked group. The program is not there to fix diversity, it is to help the intended group. When the political environment becomes polarized, it becomes very clear which groups get support from which side.
It has been very clear by diversity programs, and those who oppose diversity programs, that no one want a difference in perspectives, or for that matter catching their own blind spots.
Any system that tries to not hire for competence has a known, conscious blind spot. That's much worse than a system that arrives for the best but has accidental blind spots.
No one has a problem with diversity as a competitive advantage. People dislike forced diversity in lieu of meritocracy.
It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.
The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.
And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
I agree with you, and I am a minority, but as someone from the midwest, sometimes people here fail to succeed because they are lazy, like any other person. Midwesterners are modest, and this is great, but the stereotype that we are somehow more hardworking is lost on me.
Entirely ignores? There actually are DEI type initiatives specifically designed to benefit Appalachians, such as https://www.arc.gov/grants-and-opportunities/ or more locally, https://www.ovrdc.org/the-appalachian-community-grant-progra.... Of course, Appalachia isn't just poor white people, there are historically black and native populations within its vast expanse.
Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.
i'm one of those poor whites you're talking about (from another region; ethnic and economic bases covered though). you believe falsehoods.
> And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
i would never ask you that. but i wonder if you should ask yourself how your views could potentially negatively impact your relationships with your family.
What falsehoods do I believe, exactly?
And thank you for the condescending, pious, moral superiority in the "your views" comment. It perfectly encapsulates the quasi-religious nature of the DEI adherents.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.
That's not how the human brain can work.
That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.
If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.
Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.
We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.
And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.
Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
> It excludes the many, many more people
Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time.
Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me".
[1] Edit: I did. And... well...
men's right? I'm shuddering in my chair. Next you tell me they volunteer for a homeless shelter too.
> virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights
So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair?
This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.
The issue is more complex.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
Thus true meritocracy demands accepting diversity, equity, inclusion and fair equal opportunities.
Without it, you're only circumstancially demonstrably the best, and you never know if you truly are the better one.
This complex discussion does exist, you’re right.
At the same time, this complex discussion is not what the present administration is engaging in.
At best they are using it as a cover story.
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one.
> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to > max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.
Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.
If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
You’re arguing against a position I didn’t take.
"Give everyone what they need to max out their potential" is not "give everyone every opportunity". That’s a strawman.
Floor, not ceiling. We set a floor of real opportunity (nutrition, basic health, safety, functional education, accessible selection processes). It doesn’t promise bespoke elite tracks for all. Removing constraints is different from subsidizing every aspiration. By doing so, you lift the average, and allow the best to develop to their fullest, growing society's total output.
If the signal of ability is suppressed by early disadvantage, you’ll misallocate talent. Low cost, well aimed supports (early literacy, assistive tech, unbiased hiring screens) improve matching, which is exactly what meritocracy needs to place the brilliant mathematician in math and the gifted teacher in the classroom.
We have noisy priors shaped by wealth, networks, and bias. They need removed so that comparative advantage can actually surface. That raises both the mean and the max.
We're talking about true meritocracy: merit, not circumstances.
Funnily enough, we agree:
> giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human)
That's exactly my point, currently we spend resources on a bunch of people that are only circumstantially better, remember pro-sports before black people were allowed?
Spend your resources to realize the best to be the best, and to make even the worse better. That gives you full global maximum.
It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument.
The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person.
Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people.
This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry.
You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad
And that's exactly the point. DEI and other "positive" discriminatory practices are making the field uneven for people. People should be treated as individuals, representing themselves and standing for their own abilities, instead of being treated as members of whatever group. Those type of racists, sexists and DEI activists are objectively bad people.
Exactly! They try to free us from this thinking by forcing everyone to follow it.
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.
The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.
This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition.
This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it.
No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it.
How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
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How many conservatives celebrated Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting beaten? I remember Donald Trump Jr. said that a Halloween costume would be funny.
Yes, that’s basically the one notable example. Now the challenge becomes whether you can name two more without looking anything up.
Because I can name January 6 (capitol police officers lost their lives, Trump rioters intended to harm Nancy Pelosi specifically), Nancy Pelosi’s Husband as mentioned above, Charlottesville (counter-protestor run over by a car intentionally), the two Democratic Minnesota lawmakers who were injured recently, the pizzagate shooter, pulse nightclub (bonus: perpetrated by an ISIS sympathizer, a right-wing extremist terrorist group)
People don’t wonder why you shy away from the trans movement, we know it’s got nothing to do with left wing violence and more to do with creating a scapegoat class that is rare enough (<1% of the population) so that most people don’t know any of them. Gay men didn’t work as a scapegoat class because just about everyone eventually knew a gay man and figured out that they are normal, nice people.
Agreed it's not really to do with violence per se, even though that is a concerning behavior amongst a small number of activists.
People on both the right and the left, and in-between, are shying away from that movement more because of the demonstrably negative impact on women's rights.
TQ has damaged acceptance for LGB, and we pay the price while they move on to the next fun trend.
True, and even worse than that, their ideology is fundamentally homophobic.
"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US"
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of left-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the right commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the left together, then you can't complain when the right gets lumped together).
But do you care that the gay nightclub in Florida was shot up by a self hating gay / bi Muslim? Well, you don't. Because it doesn't fit your view.
You should check what constitutes the "right-wing terror attacks". You will be surprised to know that they include attacks made by Islamic radicals.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Islamic radicals aren’t that different in belief system from a lot of Christian nationalists.
We have all seen family portraits where people pose with American flags, bibles, and guns.
American Christians talk about how the woman/wife is subservient to the husband, how women should stay at home and forego a career and perform traditional roles at home. Many denounce and try to restrict contraceptive access. Many insist that women should/should not dress a certain way.
American Christian talk about how being gay is a sin and how America is a Christian country, not a secular democracy, how we need to have the Ten Commandments in school and in government buildings.
American Christians even grow beards, wear tactical/military-style gear, and drive pickup trucks just like Islamic radicals! (Okay that last one is a a half-joke but it’s kind of funny how the similarities bleed into the aesthetic).
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
The analyses I saw separated right wing, left wing, and Islamist.
To paraphrase: ``` Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together). ```
Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
If the talibans are the left and progressive, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re too far gone
Exactly this. I am a minority and sinking acceptance of us is due to the behavior of liberals making the rest of us look entitled and truth-averse.
> if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion
No, because we are not talking about Boolean variables where you can discover the logical opposite by negation. These are words with deeply fuzzy meanings. Supporters can support the best possible meanings, and opposers can oppose the worst possible meanings, and be closer to consensus than this binary, polarized, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric might imply.
Isn't the opposite of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion by de Morgan law homogeneity or inequity or exclusion?
Discrimination, Exclusion, Inequity.
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.
If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.
No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.
Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Pretty sure it was an attempt at satire or reductio ad absurdem.
I'm not sure it was
It was the exact same political absurdist talking point, just swapping "DEI" for "America First". Come on.
Go down to their next comments...It clarifies that they are not joking.
Where? The comment about foreign aid? No it doesn't clarify that they were joking.
Seems clear to me
Those things are barely related to each other. You are pretty deep inside your leftie bubble to think what you think.
America first I assume now means “South America First” in regard to financially bailing out Argentina in exchange for political favors.
Yes, better than getting nothing in return for those billions by giving them out to warlords in Africa for luxury cars and airplanes... I mean "aid"
lol, there are so many impeachment-worthy scandals it is hard to keep track of. I completely forgot about the free airplane.
Nixon is rolling in his grave with envy. He has to resign over a parking ticket by comparison.
Almost hourly, I am reminded that Jimmy Carter had to put his unprofitable inherited peanut farm in a blind trust.
I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.
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> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men.
There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews.
That one change helped shift the dial from almost entirely male speaker lineups to a much more balanced speaker lineup. As a result, we get a much broader range of talks.
There is nothing "immoral, hate based, and anti-truth" about efforts like this.
>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews
Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
Making a process blind to the person applying is a common DEI tool. Orchestra auditions are the famous one that I know about off the top of my head. Some links I googled and skimmed for rough quality, not vetted for serious study and may only be a starting point:
2013: https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac...
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI
... I mean, that's because they're the same thing, presuming that you use the literal definition of 'meritocracy'. Now, 'meritocracy' is sometimes used to mean "only hire straight white guys who went to one of about four universities", but that it is being used as a euphemism, not in its literal meaning (however, these days it is so often used in that euphemistic sense that it has become honestly pretty pointless as a term.)
True meritocracy and true DEI are the same thing.
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Do you have any suggestions for how the PSF could fulfill its mission of being more inclusive in a non-immoral way?
Sure. Is it doing anything to push people away? Yes, it pushes away people who disagree with far left ideological ideas, like when it purged Tim Peters who worked on Python for 20 years.
Stop leftists waging ideological war against long term Python contributors and it will be a more inclusive place, whilst acting in a moral way.
if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?
This is called a strawman argument and is functionally worthless for this discusson
This is called Reductio ad absurdum, which takes the claims to their logical point, proving without any doubt how absurd they truly are.
Wrong fallacy. A strawman argument is where you claim someone else said something that they didn't, you put words in their mouth. hn_shill didn't do that.
machomaster says it's reducto ad absurdum. It's not that either. There's nothing absurd about the proposal, it's exactly the same idea as many other DEI policies like female-only shortlists, which are found in politics or female only bonus/prize pools found everywhere.
It's no fallacy! What they did was pose a hypothetical designed to test people's commitment to their stated principles. Does a minor change in context cause someone to recoil from their own ideas? If yes, the ideas are bad and they haven't thought it through.
PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential treatment, where you would get hired because of your race, and not merit.
I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness, and I don't think we should exclude people based on the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status. Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
PSF is just being stupid (or pragmatic) about it.
> Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Are we reading the same thing? You are quoting something that says that the PSF's standard DEI policies are a violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the PSF does not agree with, and likely no court would ever agree with.
Compliance with law is always mandatory, but by signing a contract that misstates the law and in fact endorses a particular and incorrect interperation of the law, means that actually litigating the law correctly lately in the courts is harder.
Further, by carrying out the PSF's existing policies, the PSF is carrying ou their principles, rather than your derisive and inaccurate characterization of that as mere "optics."
> I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness,
If you were actually for those things, you'd be for what the PSF does! That's what they do! Instead you are supporting the oppression of those things with your comment.
> Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
Maybe I'm just exceptionally talented but as a white man I've never lost an opportunity because of DEI.
On the ending of “DEI” (itself an eviscerated approach to addressing the minimal demands to address over two centuries of american slavery, indigenous genocide, patriarchal violence, anti-trans, anti-queer violence) as targeted death making. The list of the scientific establishment’s participation, complicity, neglect is long. Some programs called immediately to mind include:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/543.html
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-shocking-hazards-of-lo...
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/education-and-awaren...
https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/infant-health-and-mortality-a...
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
This is called getting high on your own supply. It was never any of those things, but lies like the ones you are spreading were perpetuated to push back against the idea of equal fairness for all.
As proof that you are spreading further lies, one only has to look at the long string of court filings that shows that the administrations' policies fighting DEI are outright racism, words that are coming from conservative judges appointed long ago that operate based on truth rather than whatever misinformation cult has taken over so much of politics these days. Here's just one of many many many instances of blatant racism being perpetrated through Trump's politicization of science funding.
> ‘My duty is to call it out’: Judge accuses Trump administration of discrimination against minorities—The Reagan-appointed judge ordered the NIH to restore funds for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/16/judge-rebuke-trump-...
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
It would be very good for the PSF if it can get grant money without DEI things. Before you needed to have them to get much of a look-in.
Now it can spend the money on important stuff like packaging. uv is amazing, but also a symptom of the wrong people stewarding that money.
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
Grant agreements are not statutes but contracts, and canons of statutory interpretation do not apply to contracts.
Perhaps a better source (but IANAL):
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
> It has no weight; it is inoperative.
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
[1]https://coag.gov/press-releases/weiser-sues-hhs-kennedy-publ... [2]https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/state-c... [3]https://www.k12dive.com/news/state-lawsuit-Education-Departm...
Good for them for putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
> They’ve already chosen a side in this fight
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
Remember doing and saying nothing is a choice.
I’m not American, nor I’ve ever lived there. But I’m not sure what an average Google/Meta employee is supposed to do? Reality is, this is what an average US citizen wants. It’s not like the government was chosen without the support of majority or something.
The government was chosen with the majority, yes. That does not mean that the majority should have its way with everything, nor does it mean that everyone, even those who voted in favor at that time agree and approve of current behavior. I mean, why even hold another election if the majority voted for the current administration? Oh wait...
He got 47%, which is not a majority of the vote. Also, many people decided to just abstain. He got something like 30% of eligible voters to vote for him.
They should organize.
If those tech companies make a habit of funding "pro-DEI" organizations, their contracts with the US government could be jeoparized.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
It is literally quid pro quo right now. you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
> I don't blame them as such.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
I'm watching videos of ICE kidnapping a woman and her kids while shes in their school, to be brought to god knows where, that would not look out of place in the 1930s.
When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.
And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.
I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.
They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.
> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.
Good points. And I'd say that also falls into the "put the money where the mouth is" category. We know where both of those things are for them, so we don't have to have any illusions or fantasies.
Also, Apple, and T-Mobile.
I thought Germany still frowned on policies like Trump’s, though I suppose demolishing the White House was on its todo list at some point in the past.
Sorry, I think they're probably all out of funds after chipping in for Trump's new royal ballroom.
Somebody probably really wanted a spot in the new bunker beneath the ballroom.
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
> putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
I have—fortunately—very little personal experience with being extorted by corrupt officials, but I'd wager another facet is to try to ensure all communication is public and recorded.
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
Can’t. The money went to pay for the Trump’s new ballroom…
[flagged]
> > The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
> The mission explicitly calls for engineering a racial and ethinic composoition to the user base.
If you're going to lie, don't refute yourself right before the lie.
What does 'facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers' mean?
Here 'diversity' refers to race/ethnicity.
If you don't think so, the PSF do, because its their explicit reason for their lawyers declining the grant. It's also the plain meaning of the term in this context.
Yes, the foundation for a programming language has a mission which involves the racial composition of its user base. Yes, this is entirely in-keeping with their comms and practices over the last few years, if you are at all aware of how they've acted.
You're the one applying that extremely narrow definition of diversity here.
No one in this partisan political thread has explained why the foundation for a programming language has a mission involving 'diversity' of people in any sense.
The laywers for the PSF decided that this mission is inconsistent with the government mandate. The PSF did NOT just decline the money.
This entire thread is one big group-think hate dump and has nothing to do with the PSF or why they were legally unable to accept goverment funding conditioned on non-discriminatory practices.
1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?
The PSF and several other organizations that provide public package registries wrote an open letter [1] announcing a joint effort to make this situation more sustainable. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
[1]: https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-n...
Thanks! I want to bring this up as a discussion point when I get the chance at work.
I can't find a date on this letter - is it recent?
Get your company to take the Pledge: https://opensourcepledge.com/
It says "September 23, 2025" right at the top.
The website hides the date on mobile
The date is at the top of the letter and in the url...
September 2025.
I'm rather baffled at the spike in HN folks missing obvious dates. You're not the first..
I wonder if they're mobile. Here the URL is truncated and over on openssf.org/blog they don't show the date unless you switch over to desktop view.
I'm on mobile and missed it. My bad for the spam.
The website hides the date on mobile
A business will always tend towards taking the maximum and giving the minimum. Believing anything else is wishful thinking at best and naive at worst.
So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.
From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.
I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
Yeah it looks like about 1500 grants:
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Yes, that’s what I meant, stated more clearly. The contract is spelling out behavior that both sides agree up front that they consider a violation of the law, so you can’t claim that you didn’t think you were breaching the contract because you didn’t think you were violating the law.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
> I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
The Executive branch can make any claim it wants, but the Judiciary branch has the authority to decide what a reviewable claim means.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
Ok? But that wasn't the OP's argument. Did you reply to the wrong thread?
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
If your point is that corporate lawyers tend to see monsters behind every blade of grass, I agree. This is what they are paid to do. If I am a cavalier, it is to calm this community, to point out that they are over-indexed on this language and that it is the courts jurisdiction to decide what is meant.
There is no language that will magically prevent a government from canceling a grant and requiring a grantee to pursue relief from the court. This type of guarantee does not exist.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
I'd assume it parses however the US government wants it to parse.
Lawyers wouldn't have as much job security if commas didn't matter some of the time
This administration is working very hard to make all lawyers redundant. The law doesn't really matter if the court is at the beck and call of the President.
Honestly who knows, i wouldn't even trust a lawyer's advice, this administration has shown itself to not be a plain dealer or trustworthy, and willing to weaponize whatever they want to punish whoever they think needs punishing. Past experience of what should be legally enforceable or not does not seem very reliable at present.
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF might be just fine taking the grant and giving half to Trump personally, but who knows?
Yeah, HN tends toward treating law as less dependent on human application than it is under normal circumstances; with the current practice drifting away from normal circumstances towards “Quod rex vult, lex fit”, that mode of analysis becomes far more dangerously misleading.
At the end of the day it’s about making sure any attempt to help, acknowledge, or in any way highlight marginalized groups is branded as discriminating against the administration’s preferred (usually but not always their own) demographic. The nuances don’t really matter to them, the goal is to make sure that happens every time. If you’re talking about the wrong group in a way they deem “bad,” they will ruin your life.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
It parses however the Trump administration wants it to parse in any particular context on any particular day. Their legal moves have been a shit-show of incompetence and callous disregard for the law.
More details on the underlying project that the grant would have funded: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
And for those who want to fund the security of one of the few remaining independent foundation-led package ecosystems:
https://www.python.org/psf/donations/
https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options.
(Not an American.)
It's a US-based organization discussing funding from the US government. Why would you expect a different focus in an article about that funding?
It's a good point that this is a US-based organization, but I don't think the parent is looking for a different focus from this post. Rather, they're asking that given Python's international influence why aren't organizations from more countries (or the countries themselves) contributing? My gut feeling is that it's because the PSF isn't looking outside the US for those sponsors. Here's their sponsor list btw:
https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
For some context on the scale of this grant, the PSF took in only $1M in "Contributions, Membership Dues, & Grants" in 2024: https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
Yes, it's crazy. I think a lot of people see it as a question of "how can we give the PSF (or orgs like it) more money" but I see it a bit differently. Basically if something like Python can arise and become so effective and useful in so many ways with so little funding (and even less in earlier stages), it suggests that money isn't really the bottleneck here. What we need are people doing good work with good motives and not chasing dollars.
That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.
The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.
That is another great point.
I do see a lot of companies trying to cut corners and make things as cheap as possible but I fundamentally believe that this ends up increasing costs in the long run. Which is a bit weird since I know a lot of business people and most seem to be familiar with Boot Theory[0] and even agree with it. But maybe it is one of those things that is just not realized in practice. Yet I constantly see these sacrifices being made. Profits over product. I don't think that actually leads to more profits. Maybe in the quarter, but not long term. It's a sustainable strategy if you've monopolized the market though...
I also notice that when layoffs come around that the people who decide who to lay off tend to not lay off themselves. Great way to become management heavy... When in reality, if you have a lot of "rockstar programmers" they should be able to mostly manage themselves. You want to keep them from going down too many rabbit holes and help them prioritize, but for the most part experts know what is most important in the system they're working in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
> Maybe in the quarter, but not long term. It's a sustainable strategy if you've monopolized the market though...
It's also a sustainable strategy if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad. This is a pervasive problem these days. It may still be the case that a good pair of boots will last you 10 years, but how can you tell which pair is the good one? There are 10,000 brands, all of them have 4.7 star ratings because of bots, most of them have a picture that looks nothing like what you'll receive, and if they wear out in two years you'll have no recourse because the brand was just a facade over a "ghost workshop" that's now producing the same crap under another name. Trying to vote with your dollars is like pushing on a rope.
> When in reality, if you have a lot of "rockstar programmers" they should be able to mostly manage themselves.
I'm not so sure about this. There are many people who are good at doing things but not at organizing that activity in a coherent way (especially across a team). Also when the people doing the "real work" are also managing, they often have a tendency to give the managing short shrift because they'd rather do the "real work".
I agree we could do with a lot fewer managers than we currently have, but I think we do need some. (And this isn't just about software, it's about companies and organizations in general.) But I think we would be better off with more democratized company structures where the managers' power ultimately rests on the consent of the workers, so that when you have these clashes that currently result in "half the staff resigned in protest" they would instead result in "the CEO was fired due to lack of support from the staff".
So I do agree that we need managers. Their job is to validate direction, ensure people are able to do their specialized job with minimal interruptions, and all that jazz. I think we often confuse "speed" with "velocity." The experts know the direction things need to go, but a manager's job is to ensure that those vectors are aligned across teams and aligned with the company goal. But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.". It's easy to drop that part off, but doing so shifts your customers from those that purchase your product to "shareholders". Even if shareholder price is based on people buying your product...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742272
[2] https://westviewnews.org/2019/11/01/bell-labs-second-best-ke...
> If you didn't know, there's a formal name for this: Lemon Markets[0]. Which yes, I agree. I think it is an accurate description of tech.
Well, but I'm saying it's not just tech, it's becoming everything. (Unless by "tech" you mean "tech has made all markets act this way".) I guess one way to look at what I'm saying is that online marketplaces are inherently more "lemon-leaning" because the buyer's ability to assess the quality of the good is inherently limited (since they can't actually see, touch, or use it).
Interestingly the "solution" that e-commerce seems to have settled on is "free shipping with free returns". This limits the damage of buying a lemon, since the customer can just send it back. But it creates a sort of moral hazard for both buyers and sellers: the buyer has an incentive to essentially operate like a spammer, selling crappy goods just on the off chance that a few won't get returned; and the seller is encouraged to just buy willy-nilly since they can just return anything that turns out to be crap. This generates an enormous amount of waste and churn and exacerbates the downward spiral of the lemon market.
> But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.".
This is the crux of the issue. I don't see that as an issue of "management" really though. I mean it is an issue of management but at a higher level, in the way the executives manage the whole company, or the way the board manages the executives, rather than the way mid-level managers manage actual workers.
But ultimately it's an issue of values. As you say, too many people have drifted away from any value system that would place any kind of constraints on "the goal is to make money".
Not to mention that the inconvenience itself creates enough friction that people are just more likely to keep garbage. Especially if it is very cheap. I think this was also true with physically purchased items but just that the rate of "false positives" was lower since you could physically inspect them.
It is definitely a complex issue and I don't want to create too much simplification. I agree that it goes all the way up the chain, each step having more and more slip.But I think something that is more actionable and that we as the developers and engineers can address is recognizing that we had a shift in culture. There used to be some contention between the managers and engineers. It was adversarial by nature. While I think that creates friction, that this was a beneficial feature, not a flaw[2]. To be a tad over simplified, the engineer's focus is on the product. When push comes to shove, profits get sacrificed in order to ensure the quality of the product. On the other side the business people take the opposite role. This contention helps navigate the complex setting where we need to create good products but also stay in business. If the engineer gets to much weight then the business goes under while trying to fix all the problems. Perfection cannot exist, so the endeavor can be endless[3], and the business fails. On the other hand, if the business people have too much weight then they'll ship the lowest quality product that customers will still buy. The contention often resolved around what "minimum viable product" actually meant. To the engineer, it is a product that generally works in the sense of the intended design. To the business person, it is what the customer will buy.
The shift I've seen is that I see fewer and fewer engineers care deeply about the product. They aren't personally vested in it, beyond a monetary sense. When I've talked to others about bugs which should be reasonably quick to resolve I find more often the response is "but what's the (monetary) value in that?" This is not our job as an engineer! Our focus is on the product. It may be the job of the engineering manager to make that argument to the business side if the solution is going to take long enough, but I've seen this response given to bugs that may take only a few hours to fix or even have a PR already set up! To me, this is insane.
Don't get me wrong, I love that coding pays very well, but that's not why I do it. There's plenty of other ways to make money, and make even more. My cousin sells insurance and spends all his days golfing, eating at country clubs, and makes over $300k/yr[4]. My neighbor is a plumber who started his own business and hires guys starting at $100k/yr and they provide on the job training. There's a lot of ways to make good money. The reason I do this work is because I enjoy the work. Because I can take pride in this type of work. Because I'm good at it. Because I can finish my day or a project and take pride in my accomplishments. But I feel that this is the shift. Coding is not just for nerds anymore. Many coders now care about money first and product second (if at all). The "tech bros". I wouldn't mind them so much if they just didn't need to justify their mindset and interfere with mine. I feel that's part of the problem. They've become the dominant force in the coding world and normalized the exaggeration of their abilities that they believe they are the best. Like what, we send people through months of interviews, to do tons of leetcode and standardized tests to what... end up with shit work? I don't think we're hiring "the best". I think we're wasting money.
I think we fix these issues by pushing back a bit more. Explain why the manager's idea of a MVP is not a real MVP. Support our coworkers who raise these concerns in a meeting. Just a small comment will do. Push back against the engineers who offer overly simplified solutions and promises that lead to tech debt. To remember that we can both make good money and good products at the same time. To remember that pushing back is not disloyalty to the company. That pushing back is in fact loyalty to the company, because we do it because we care about what is being made.
There's no easy fix here, but I think there are things we can do and we should be more open about this culture shift. I grew up dreaming of the Sci-Fi utopia of Star Trek and of Asimov. I got into STEM because I wanted to help create that world. Is that no longer our goal? Do we really believe this goal is at odds with making a good living?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069062
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018803
[2] I think we believed it to be a flaw. Certainly management did as it is employees undermining them. Engineers see it as a flaw too because they have to spend time arguing and it is frustrating. Easier to just shut up and get paid, right?
[3] I think all but junior engineers understand this. I hate the phrase "don't let perfection be the enemy of 'good enough'" because the contention was never about perfection. The contention was about what is 'good enough'. The phrase shuts down that conversation, which is an important one.
[4] I don't intend to say his work is easy. It is easy to look at what he does and think he doesn't work hard. But I've seen him in action and it is clear he has honed his skills.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. > That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
The PYthon Software Foundation does not develop Python. They manage the package repository, do marketing pro-Python, and distribute money among people they like (in theory to promote the language).
10 of the 13 people of their staff doesn’t even know how to write a hello world program https://www.python.org/psf/records/staff/
I think people are overlooking the most important part:
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
Read to the end. Ways to financially support this important work can be found there.
Step One: get them to a better payment processor than PayPal! I waded through it, but that's a high friction funnel.
I made a donation. Props to the PSF for standing up.
I would hope another funding source with no interest in this kind of legalistic politics emerges. Conditionality like this is going to be much more common for another 3 years at least.
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
It truly is not easy IMO. I am just picking a nit here but "if you have the fortitude" is doing a lot of work. I ran a company for a while and you not only have to have the fortitude, but principles and an ability to weather the consequences of a choice like that. If you are in a tough position and you have employees who are counting on you and the business it is anything but easy. Even if you have fortitude. These decisions can be existential. Of course there are and should be red lines based on your ethics and morals, but none of that is easy. To me it is very hard.
DEI has become such a contentious term that we should consider retiring it, in my opinion.
Renaming your ideological movement because most people don't like what it stands for won't change peoples opinion.
What about DEI makes it an “ideological” movement as opposed to other movements who are presumably not ideological?
And I’m not sure what “most people”, is supposed to mean; you do realize you’re talking about 49% – that is, under half, so definitively not “most” – of the US of A’s population?[0]
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
Maybe the demonizing everybody who does not agree with it or the agenda driven financial investment by mega corporations with ESG scores invented by the WEF folks
Most Americans are growing skeptical of DEI as an ideological framework and that helped Trump.
This suggests two possible paths forward: either we move beyond the theoretical underpinnings and focus on practical inclusion — supporting people from diverse backgrounds through approaches with broad consensus.
Or DEI becomes increasingly marginalized, championed primarily by masked activists who struggle to maintain relevance.
The concept that it represents is contentious.
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
Anyway, I signed up to be a PSF member.
This is what happens when people who take things seriously take seriously things said by people who don’t take things seriously.
Under discussed is that it should not takes months of work to apply for scientific funding.
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
DEI is actually a bit of red herring here. It's worth reading again the commentary from simonw's blog:
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
This is the real problem. It's not about DEI really. It's the same problem as so much else this year: the US government is currently wildly unpredictable and doing business with such an entity is a liability.
It's the right move.
DEI has always been a weird thing because half the people supposedly doing it were always just trying to curry favor with people in positions of power who supported it, and now that the winds have shifted they're equally happy to curry favor by getting rid of it. They signal virtue or vice depending on how virtuous or vicious the leader.
I think the PSF actually wants to do the right thing, which in the current perverse environment makes them more likely to be targeted. The wisest move is not to play.
I'm strongly in favor of the US federal government requiring that recipients of federal grant money affirm the statement that they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.". I'm a US citizen and taxpayer, and I don't want my tax dollars going towards organizations that are unwilling to affirm this.
As a Python user, I do wish that the PSF wouldn't institute DEI policies on their own volition; but ultimately they're a private organization that I have no relationship with, and they're entitled to make political decisions differently than I would. But in terms of receiving taxpayer money, I'm glad that these US federal government grant rules are putting real financial pressure on them.
Bummer about the funding (and for a small org, almost more importantly the wasted application work), but all around an excellent decision. And a good reference for non-profit backbone.
Time to amp up my Xmas donation.
Bold and right decision!
The government didn’t have to spend more money, and this organization didn’t have to take money with strings attached they didn’t like…
It seems like a win-win to me
>> "Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities."
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed).
Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.
I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.
In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.
The PSF itself is an activist pro-DEI/partisan organization. If US federal money is going to go to an activist organization no matter what, I would prefer that it does to one that denounces DEI rather than supports it.
It's a general issue with budgeting grants but at the same time companies need to be talked to in numbers. If there's no known money jar, I don't believe anyone will partake and it'll all get more sketchy. 'Why did money appear for them but not for us?' type of thing
That's what we like to hear! Read to the end and donate!
Six million is peanuts for guiding probably the most popular language on the planet these days
I mean is OSS effective despite the funding problem, or if we gave every maintainer a million quid, would they all stop making tough decisions ?
I suspect that it’s the organisations that define the decision quality - but that’s just a hunch.
Donated, and happy to.
It's shocking how fast this administration has gotten institutions to abandon their beliefs, and ones that don't should be rewarded.
Makes me wonder what strings were attached to that Allen AI NSF grant. I noticed that they were suddenly using more hawkish language around China.
Under the grant rules programming languages must be strongly typed. No strings identifying as an int, etc. :-)
I realize this is a joke, but honestly, I wouldn't mind if US federal government grant funding policy was targeted towards promoting strongly typed programming languages. It's actually bad if your programming language allows a string to identify as an int!
I wonder if we need a GPL v4 that revokes itself if the end user violates other people’s human rights.
That way, this sort of situation would result in the revocation of the python license, instead of the grant proposal.
Python doesn't use the GPL, and such a license wouldn't meet the FSF Four Freedoms, nor the OSI Open Source Definition, so it would likely lead to a fork, less usage and less redistribution.
DEI is racist. It's picking people because of skin color instead of merit.
Great job from PSF ! Taking the stand rather them submitting themselves to dictatorial/thought-policing terms.
pypi put out a survey a while back that was full of bs questions about dei fluff. the lack of subject matter made me really question the competence of the project staff.
Now that's what a backbone looks like.
Choosing to advocate your personal political beliefs over the interests of your organization should be grounds for dismissal.
Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.
Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.
Their position is logically inconsistent. If they are worried about being eventually targeted by the Trump administration, they have done more to paint a target on their back now then they ever could've done by quietly accepting the money.
I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.
> If they are worried about being eventually targeted by the Trump administration, they have done more to paint a target on their back now then they ever could've done by quietly accepting the money.
That's probably not true given their prominence and the conservative people who've grumbled about them for years, but let's assume that it is the case. Think about what happens next:
If they took the money, they have a substantially non-zero risk that they would be asked to return _all_ of it based on politically-motivated enforcement triggered by anything the PSF does and would face the prospect of spending at least that much money defending themselves in court if they disagreed. You can't rule out that being as simple as someone at PyCon does something which a conservative influencer dislikes.
If they don't take the money, they don't have to estimate the likelihood of the clawback provision being exercised or spend any time trying to protect themselves in that event.
If you're a small non-profit, recognizing when you don't have the resources to fight a particular battle is a very useful skill. It seems very consistent to say that in the choice between a potential trap and no trap they had to avoid a small but non-zero risk of something which could bankrupt the organization.
> I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.
Their motives were never secret – it's literally in the mission statement on their website! – so it's a bit unclear what the point of this paragraph was. Reporting political interference in technical organizations seems like something which is pretty broadly of interest to the community and the amount of positive attention it's getting seems to support that.
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
Anti-DEI forces, once in power, turn out not to favor putative “diversity of opinion” after all.
Spelling things out helps with the euphemisms.
Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion forces turn out to be (gasp) against all of diversity, and equity, and inclusion.
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Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
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> Playing nice seemed to not work for White people because they are systemically discriminated against in almost every Western and non-Western country.
I'm white and not discriminated against in my Western-adjacent country (Czech Republic) and think most of Europe is the same.
I see race-based politics as primarily a US thing: both the militant "diversity advocates" and the white supremacists. From my point of view over the ocean they are quite similar: putting importance of skin colour over other things.
As a white American, this feels insulting to all those around me. Diversity is what made the US so great. White people are just one tone of the human palette.
pro-skin-diversity is a real weird way to say "against racism."
They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
We can debate whether doing this rights historical wrongs but we can't pretend it is not racist to treat different people of different skin colors differently.
> They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
"Racism" means the oppression of one group because of race.
In an historically racist society (writing this in New Zealand) righting those historical wrongs involves some treating "...one group different from others based on race."
It is bad enough here, and it continues here explicitly by the current government (indigenous people just lost a bunch of property rights because they were indigenous, blatant, official, statutory racism), but according to people I respect in the USA it is considerably worse there.
Are you talking about:
"ACT New Zealand party, a junior partner in the governing centre-right coalition government, last week unveiled the bill, which it had promised during last year’s election, arguing that those rights should also apply to non-Indigenous citizens."
How does grant others the same rights turn into racism. Shouldn't everyone have those rights including groups that are bigger minorites in New Zealand like blacks of Indians from India?
When we single out groups for special treatment we exclude others who might need it more but who's voices are softer.
It might be worse in the US compared to New Zealand but compared to most of the rest of the world: Middle East, India, Africa, Europe, Russia, China, Korea the US is the least racist place but also has the biggest anti-racism industry which makes their voiced louder.
No
I am talking of the Foreshore and Seabed Act (under a different name) that overturned settled case law and disapropriated IWI claims for property rights.
Māori have their property rights confiscated regularly. About every twenty or thirty years there is another round
That said the racism here is mild compared to reports from the USA
We don't have to pretend it's not racist when it's factually not racist.
And there's not really a debate about whether it rights historic wrong. There is a debate about whether righting historic wrongs is even possible.
The debate is whether we can/should counterbalance existing wrongs in society.
And I have hard time taking anyone seriously who says we shouldn't.
When you become what you are fighting against you become the problem.
If the issue is not using a person's race to make blanket judgements against them then using someone's race to to counterbalance historical is equally as wrong.
The message you are telling everyone is you should use someone's race to judge them. The people in power changes but the racism never goes away.
You end up with foolish ideas like reparations where the people demanding money are a product of a union between a slave and slave owner where half of you should pay the other half.
Or quota systems that exclude minorities because they aren't the right race.
The racism you want to keep needs to be let go. You can't say racism is bad but then use it to enrich yourself.
Golly
People have been getting the message "you should use someone's race to judge them" in my country for over a hundred years
In the USA since the seventeenth century
Here Māori property is confiscated with gay abandon, laws written specifically for that purpose
In the USA there was slavery. It has cast a long shadow, and still politicians are moving mountains to corral the black vote so it does not threaten entrenched privileges
Golly!
Are you talking about:
"A significant portions of Māori land were confiscated by the New Zealand government, primarily after the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s through legislation like the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863. This process, known as raupatu, resulted in the seizure of over a million hectares of land from various iwi"
Wasn't there a Waitangi Tribunal investing breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi? Isn't there a Māori land court setup to deal with those issues?
Are there specific instances you want to refer to? We would like to understand a little more.
No one is trying to corral the black vote in the US. It generally goes to one party. It does not threaten the powerful. Black vs rich powerful isn't really an issue as many powerful people are black. Working class vs rich powerful is more of the classic stereotype.
Nothing in my post mentioned reparations, nor did it imply that all efforts are equal or even valid.
The foolish idea is that you can't do anything about racism because it'd require helping some people while not helping others.
Which is a bit like thinking you can't feed the hungry because you're not giving food to the obese.
You can do a lot about racism from education to fairness laws but the one thing you can't do is use racism to stop racism. That's my core message.
That's my point. Why not give food to all? You just want to give food to who you think is hungry based on great grandparents being hungry. Everyone should eat even the obese.
The entire issue is that, despite the law, some people refuse to feed everyone. And not a small handful of people, but a sizable enough population that their actions mean millions aren't fed.
That's my point.
Your "solution" only works if racism is eliminated. It is not eliminated, despite eduction and fairness laws.
So we can either chose to feed the hungry or let them starve in the name of a false, ignorant, and naive position of neutrality.
> Playing nice seemed to not work for White people because they are systemically discriminated against in almost every Western and non-Western countr
What utter ignorance of the prevailing social conditions in the West
No one takes them to jail; companies and organizations can run however they want, unless they break laws. It doesn't mean that the government that runs and wins on an anti-DEI agenda should give them money.
> Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
Agreed. And it is... quite revealing that many people in these comments are so insistent to view the text in isolation.
> discriminatory equity ideology
Isn't that when you let your mates buy into your corrupt private investment vehicles for cheap?
I have no idea what point you think you're making, but this happens all the time. Do you really think you should be obligated to let strangers buy into your private business?
Ah yeah you're right. What they actually mean is that DEI is when you build so many equity preference multiples into your term sheets the employee option pool becomes entirely worthless.
And do really think they think that?
I understand what you're driving at but at this stage of the game it's quite American.
Could you clarify that you're suggesting that "it's un-American" for the government to require that the grantee not violate any of its anti-discrimination laws?
> The government dictating how you run your business ?
Yes, these terms are usually called "laws", you might've heard of them.
Federal money always has lots of strings attached. The specific rules differ by the specific funding vehicle. The main vehicle is the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR); you can review their rule here:
https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-52
This is basically the US Federal Government’s standard Master Services Agreement (MSA).
I think people defend anti discrimination or are against it depending on how the anti discrimination policy discriminates discrimination.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
I agree that humans discriminate inherently, although I would argue that what differentiates us is whether we struggle against that impulse.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
> "[yadda yadda yadda] in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Should not be a new or surprising statement at all in this type of thing, let alone a question of if it's un-American.
> Is that even legal to
Does it matter for the Trump administration what is legal and what isn't?
The fascist language is a no-op because it optimizes to: "don't violate federal laws" which presumably is reasonable.
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's probably a reason someone wrote it into the grant agreement, and that they're declaring DEI stands for something other than the familiar Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Federal funding of research is un-American.
> Federal funding of research is un-American.
Federal funding of research created the Internet that you are posting this idiocy on.
Before you attack the last poster, he does have a point. Federal funding of powers that belong to states is unamerican.
I agree. The gvt should not care if DEI is used, or if someone is gay or transgender m
Oh really? So what pro-DEI requirements did the federal funding for that grant require?
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that funding for research that lead to the various tech powering the modern internet was done only by organizations that never before or since considered trying to source candidates from a variety of places because they believe different viewpoints have value?
Or are you trying to hang this entire thing on a definition of DEI that somehow always and exclusively means illegal race or gender based discrimination (I assume against white men)?
These conversations are so absurd sometimes. I'm baffled by how spitting mad people can decide they are to fight these straw men. Then I'm annoyed by (and suspicious of) the overwhelming silence from most of these sources when it comes to other obvious examples of racial discrimination or things like the government trying to remove history books that mention slavery.
These things don't look like good faith to me.
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
the original idea of DEI "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" is good but it got twisted. it became the rally crying for the other side.
God, it is so humiliating to be an American these days. :(
I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.
What's happening guys?
About 50 years of slow deliberate destruction of the country's trust in institutions and trustworthy media and communications systems and culture.
I think people were worn down over many years by traditional politicians and just wanted something different
And then someone came in and took advantage of that
This, and most people still don't realize it. It goes back to Nixon and Roger Ailes.
Yes, that is 100% the moment I had in mind when I said 50 years.
> What's happening guys?
The people who benefited from those who sacrificed for rights and equality over the past century got complacent and lazy.
The current rhetoric is exactly the same as was used to discriminate against my ancestors 100 years ago. The only substitutions are the different slurs. Everyone who wants to talks about race and immigrants should be required to listen to 8 hours of radio programs from the early 1900s saying the exact same thing about them and their ancestors.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
You fight or you lose. Every time; all the time. Politics is a contact sport and you don't get to opt out.
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That is not the problematic part of the grant conditions.
The following antidiscrimination laws part was the part quoted in the article linked here. The part they said was recently added. What part are you referring to?
Nope, you cherry-picked around the part where they say no to DEI.
You misread it. It says no to DEI, that violates nondiscrimination laws.
It includes "DEI, that violates nondiscrimination laws" presented as an accepted fact. So that includes a statement that is opinionated and political, not based on facts or rationality, and roughly half the US population at least does not agree with it.
So, besides how dishonest your comment may be, at least all the readers (who somehow missed that unmissable point, but I digress) get the idea.
Edit: the presence of the comma forbids any interpretation as "{follows DEI} AND {violates nondiscrimination laws}", and instead it reads as "{follows DEI} AND {by the way you already know/agree that DEI violates nondiscrimination laws}". Which any project leader that doesn't believe that DEI violates nondiscrimination laws will reject instantaneously.
But I have the sense that you are not discussing in good faith anyway, so...
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American, you mean American.
> American, you mean American.
No
I mean to exclusive Canadians, Columbians and Cubans
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If you read
> support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers
as a racist statement, you need to step back and re-evaluate things.
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That would be true if the society was already perfectly fair and neutral (which some people believe).
However, there is racism and sexism in the world (it's systemic, in a sense it's not about one person not liking another personally, but biases propagated throughout the society). To counter that, you need to recognize it, and it will be necessary to treat some people differently.
For example, women may not feel safe being a small minority at a gathering full of men. If you do nothing, many potentially interested women will not show up. You could conclude that it's just the way things are and women are simply not interested enough in the topic, or you could acknowledge the gender-specific issue and do something about it. But this isn't a problem affecting everyone equally, so it would require treating women specially.
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.
The way how you respond and means of addressing the issue very much matters. It's possible to have equitable objectives, but using discriminatory means. For example, just declaring quota and filling to order will fulfill the objective, but will be very discriminatory in practice.
Equity vs. Equality. Google it, “my dude”.
I do think a lot of these people who claim reverse racism just have no idea what the word “equity” even means.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio of 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
If they picked any of the conferences based on the gender of the attendees, then they were pretty obviously discriminating based on a protected characteristic and should face legal ramifications for it.
So unintentional discrimination is ok, but intentionally counterbalancing (even extremely tepidly) is very bad?
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Kevin McCarthy, former GOP House leader and Speak of the House.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/30/mccarthy-...
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Thanks dad, I missed you
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DEI programs are fundamentally racist. You don't fix racism with more racism.
How do you fix racism?
Not by continuing to use racism, just flipped the other way. That just created more resentment and anger, and eventually hate.
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Wow. What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For that kind of money, I would put a large national flag in the banner of the socketcluster.io website, I would relocate HQ to whatever country and state they want. I would never utter the word 'diversity' for the rest of my life and upon receiving the money, I would take a screenshot, frame it, put it up on the back wall of my new office and I would pray to it every morning to give thanks.
> What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For a non-profit backing a community, an important goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability and viability of the org, because the community relies on it to keep infra working, legal representation in place, and other vital needs.
Accepting those $1.5mio would have come with significant "we want that money back" risk, as the post explains. At a $5mio annual budget that could seriously destabilize a small org like this, from the money shortfall to community unrest. Taking this money would be irresponsible.
My two cents, as treasurer of another large FOSS non-profit.
You either think DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others, or that the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
Uh, what?
There's no contradiction, or even tension, between these three positions:
1. "DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others"
2. "the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better"
3. "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
so what exactly are you trying to say?
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
> do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
No you are not reading this correctly, but I suspect that was willful
> No you are not reading this correctly
Okay, so can you help me interpret that correctly, then? What other conclusion should I draw from this?
"Or" means at least one of multiple alternatives. Alteratives contrast with each other, they differ. Of course, the original author could be repeating the same thing for emphasis, but more likely they are saying two different things. Since the second thing is discrimination, the first thing, "DEI", must necessarily not be discrimination. If they merely wanted you to not discriminate, they could have just said "follows federal anti discrimination laws" which are quite stringent.
They are saying the same thing twice. They repeat themselves specifically because certain groups hold a strong belief that "discrimination" only goes one-way, and have effectively twisted the meaning of the word in their minds.
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
That may be what they mean, but it is a sufficiently dubious interpretation that one can't reasonably use it to obtain the funding unless clarification is provided by the administration.
You're free to disagree with anyone here, but playing stupid is only a waste of time. It's not a difficult topic to understand both sides of, regardless of where you come down.
No, the PSF doesn't want to expose its finances to special risk from the Trump Administration’s attempts to paint inclusion as discrimination as a pretext for exerting control that the law itself does not justify over institutions receiving federal funding, finding the risk:reward ratio unjustified for a $1.5M grant. (Note that the actual term purports to prohibit only what the law already prohibits, which is a clue that a naive reading cannot reveal their motive, since under a naive reading they would be equally risk for the behavior that would violate the terms whether or not ot agrees to them or received the grant. So you have to look beyond the agreement to the context of the behavior of the Trump Administration in regards to the issue addressed in the terms and federal funding.)
Oh come on.
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, but in principle it can't be applied 'at any point'.
Appreciate it. I still wouldn't take the risk tbh, not with the current administration's terrible track record on stuff like this.
Anyone that signs something like this either can't read or hired lawyers that can't read.
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If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio is 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
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I'd be 100% okay with the government stating no grant money can be used for funding DEI, but the actual wording in the grant prevents organizations like the PSF from any DEI, whether or not it is funded by the government grant. That's overly broad and seems likely to be an infringement of the first amendment (though I'm not a lawyer, so this is my lay interpretation).
It was clear to me where this was going in January, but a more explicit version can be found in the beginning of June 2025:
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-college-first-de...
But hey, some of the same people that celebrated the cancellation of Tim Peters are celebrating the "bold" and "audacious" step of the PSF now (I don't mean you, I mean others).
EDIT: The Python fascists can get this one down to -4 as well to distract from their incompetence.
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I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
Well welcome to the club..
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> the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
It has high overlap with the rad trad Catholic wing, believe me. I am a fairly traditional Catholic. I had heard of Yarvin via the Haskell world, and was floored when a parishioner at my parish brought him up. Such a strange crossing of worlds.
I imagine by LGBTQ colleagues must have the same feelings at whatever it is they do on Sundays
Honestly I sometimes think I'm the most normal person in the field, but we all probably think that. I think if my colleagues found out that I only go to a traditional Novus Ordo on Sundays where we use a lot of Latin and not a full-fledged Tridentine Mass, all of them would be angry at me. The LGBTQ crowd for being Catholic and the rad-trad crowd fro not being the right kind lol.
But anyway, I guess what I meant with my last point is: where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field? Everyone agrees it attracts the neuro-diverse? Then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to encourage the neuro typical? Imagine how great PLs would be if they were actually eloquent haha.
> where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field?
I won't say they are particularly effective, but the group behind the LIVE workshop is at least self-aware enough to try and build things that neurotypical people might use. There binding force in that group is best expressed by Jonathan Edwards (author of subtext) when he said something along the lines of "most programming languages are built by high functioning autists for high functioning autists", the upshot being if we want more people to be able to use programming languages they will probably have to pay more attention to usability and alternative representations.
I think Bret Victor does a good job with this "seeing spaces" in the form of Dynamics Land: https://dynamicland.org
Also the Logo programming language was a good example of designing a language for where the users are, where in that case the users were gradeschool children. Obviously children can't build programming languages for themselves, so they used cognitive development principles to design a language which was approachable given their cognitive abilities as 7 year olds.
All you have to do to encourage nuerotypical white males from elite schools is to have high remuneration. They see highly paid jobs as the best jobs. This is not discrimination. If a job is too hard for the pay offered then this class will choose something else.
They are also not excluded from working in sewers, even though they are underrepresented!
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
> We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces.
The flag simply acknowledges that certain people have the right to exist. Extrapolating anything else out of that is you being weird.
> I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade.
It seems to be necessary because you want to "turn the power of the state against you". All because of a rainbow?
> We won the last election.
Did the whole of humanity have an election that I missed? Just because an election at one time and in one place went one way or the other doesn't mean much to something that is global. If you're speaking of the US Election, a certain person didn't even get 50% of the vote. So, I don't see how you act like this is some mandate that means you get to silence other people.
> We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
You don't seem sad about this at all.
My small site now sports a flag because it is clear it is needed. Are you going to come after me too?
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
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Waving a flag is protected speech under the 1st amendment.
Non sequitur and false. The US constitution only guarantees that the government won't ban your speech. Non-government entities are allowed to ban speech.
What are you talking about? The commenter above says "We won the last election" and goes on to say:
> Don't trouble yourselves with removing the flag. We will be removing it for you soon enough.
They are very much talking about the government doing this.
> Don't trouble yourselves with removing the flag. We will be removing it for you soon enough.
tf is this nonsense
It's a variant of what Alan Turing heard before they chemically castrated him. Same shit, different century.
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Of course. DEI is for "community" members from the right families to get jobs through PyCon networks regardless of qualifications.
The leadership is generally white affluent virtue signaling male. A PSF fellow was canceled for pointing exactly that out (at the same time as Tim Peters was canceled).
So it is understandable why they want to preserve DEI but do not go after other economic or corruption or foreign policy failures of this administration --- after all, they have to preserve the same corporate sponsors who also sponsor Trump.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726973 and marked it off topic.
Please don't post flamebait like this on HN. I wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729503
I’m not sure why you would think the “top N” of any given field would be men. There aren’t more men than women overall, and men aren’t inherently any smarter or more talented. If you’ve only ever worked in tech, though, maybe you have a skewed perspective.
Some traits are more variable in men. So there are more men at the top and bottom of the distribution. But not enough to explain 80% men in a field as large as computer science.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
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> Men are inherently smarter and more talented.
This is about the purest form of flamebait there is, and thus is not welcome on HN. There are several guidelines that ask us to avoid this style of commenting, notably:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously...
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wish you recognized the confirmation bias in your logic.
Men & women are socialized to compete in very different arenas & women are generally socialized not to compete with men.
None of that is proof that men are smarter or more talented. Men's intelligence may be more jagged than women's, but even if so, that doesn't mean 'better'.
It would mean that men & women's intelligence complements each other.
> Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants.
Try to support this with data and you run into some real messy analysis: in a few cases where testosterone matters such as sports or hand grip strength, this is true and there’s a well-understood biological explanation for it. In most other cases, however, there isn’t a known mechanism and the data usually has shifts over time which strongly suggest that it’s either an issue with data collection or learned behavior (e.g. the famed engineer gender gap showing very different results in former communist countries where girls were socially encouraged to strive for those jobs).
Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board.
Lastly, even if there was a proven biological link between gender and peak performance, we haven’t established that Pycon talk slots only go to the top 1% performers on such a narrow metric. I don’t think even the angriest internet dudes try to make that claim, and once you’re saying something isn’t Olympic Games-level elite you’re saying there are a ton of women who perform just as well as the median man giving a conference talk.
> Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board
CS/EE as a field is about 80% male, depending on the year
When the pipeline is that thin, it’s hard to get an equal outcome at the professional level
I definitely agree it’s a problem. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that it’s innate rather than social in origin. Human neuroplasticity is our species’ big defining trait so it seems far more likely that we have a complex mix of feedback loops based on socialization.
I'm not sure its really a "problem". Why does everything have to be 50/50 ?
Exactly 50:50 doesn’t need to be the target but when you’re talking 80:20 on a large, lucrative field it’s more likely that there are interested people being deterred rather than just lack of interest. There certainly are many reports of social pressure supporting that conclusion as well, which is why many people want to make it more welcoming.
i have no take on this comment, but i like the model in this paper for considering whether it could be possible or appropriate wrt different levels of vetting:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.03533
Misunderstanding the GP. Possibly deliberately?
In the parent’s view, the top N% is fixed.
In the GP’s view, it’s the top N% of the applicant pool, so a more diverse applicant pool leads to more diverse talks.
Talk selection is blind (per GP), so the increasing % of female-led talks is evidence for the GP viewpoint. If the Parent view were correct, the same 98% male talks would be selected because they are “objectively better” than the lower-quality female-led talks that are bulking up the applicant pool.
I have not verified the claim about talk selection being blinded. A source (or contradicting source) would be welcome.
th asserts “If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.”
I didn’t misunderstand. That is simply nonsense.
Good game. Trump 2.0’s Maoism is becoming boring.
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In what way?
This whole manufacturing of a fear culture, the emphasis on us-vs-them (ICE), loyalty oaths (MIT, pledges of CEOs), purging of institutions (doge), attempts to reorganize higher education (Harvard), control of media (Kimmel), the symbolism (maga), it’s all Trump 2.0 boring attempt at a ‘Cultural Revolution’ a la Mao. It’s just a bit messier because Trump never commits to much and blatantly chases much of his own selfish interests (crypto schemes and market manipulation).
I believe that the parallels that someone may draw between Biden and Mao are much much weaker.
This hurts two things at once: people and security.
Anti-DEI clauses push out under-represented contributors, and the lost funding delays protections millions rely on.
Shame on the decision-makers who made that tradeoff.
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Welcome to government funding. This is par for course. It's not just dei or anti dei. If you want to take government funding, you have to not read the fine print and swallow hard.
Thanks for posting this. I just made a donation to the PSF.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
thats not true....
https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...
All of those are marked as "PURCHASE ORDER", I don't think the PSF applies for those. I don't think they are what one would consider funding
Grants are at the bottom.
The grants to the 'University of Georgia Research Foundation'?
rip... You are right. Sorry. I exported it into excel and just looked at the column... interesting they have the same UEI?
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
Confused about this decision. Why not take the money and then do only DEI activities that don't break the law?
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Some predictions on how the current admin is going to probably retaliate for the PSF withdrawing their proposal:
* IRS audit into the PSF's 501c3 status
* if the PSF has received federal funds in the past, they'll probably be targeted by the DOJ's "Civil Rights Fraud Initiative"
* pressure on corporate sponsors, especially those that are federal contractors
> discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
Striving for equality according to MAGA is discrimination. Make systematic racism and sexism great again like it’s <1950s?
Racism and sexism is illegal under Federal anti-discrimination laws.
Note that many universities still have DEI offices. I believe that they are interpreting as described here: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08.... So as long as they can show that they are not doing any of those, they seem to believe that they will be okay.
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...
Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":
- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
It was not temporary. The victims spent substantial amounts of money suing and still lost: https://www.eenews.net/articles/appeals-court-says-epa-can-r.... Technically litigation is ongoing but there is no reason to believe they will succeed.
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
According to recent events of this US administration, there are two things that could follow after a court decides in favor of the PSF:
* They will ignore it and still claw back the money, with force if needed
* They go higher and higher through the courts until it lands on the table of the supreme court that conveniently sides with the administration.
You can't win a fight in the system. Law is broken and not reliable anymore.
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.