I'm not sure that this isn't bait, but, given enough somewhat arbitrary slicing of the data (gender, age, loose race groups etc.), surely it'd be unlikely that there wouldn't be some biased slices?
It's basically p-hacking: if you come up with enough ways of analysing data, you'll find something "significant".
To be fair, you would need a bigger more representative company. If your slice is CEOs' then that is pre-filtering for a lot of things. Tech role at apple skewed a fair bit, general role less so, a retail apple role thena different population all together.
Amazon possibly has enough employees in the fuller distribution of income / qualifications that would be an interesting dataset for slicing, but of course you will always find rouge slices and while they may have a reasonable explanation othertimes they do not - why are 90% of CEO of a listed companies are >50 years old, 22% of the population is under 18 its unfair they are not represented (lets not get into the number of old people in politics)
I don't think the question of why CEOs are older than non-CEOs is interesting. Highly important roles require suitable experience, which of course is going to bias the sample towards older people.
The problem is that, if the only answer if there's no "reasonable explanation" is to imply the existence of some kind of discrimination, you're going to include a lot of weird things under that category, and often make complex problems appear simple.
Scott Alexander wrote a good article "Black People Less Likely" that discusses a similar idea. There's often possible explanations for local bias, ideas of unfair treatment and rude old white people, but sometimes you hide a lot by addressing at a local level. If what is identified as a problem is present at all levels of the hierarchy from social clubs to CEO positions, it's useless to ask why more xyz people aren't CEOs.
> Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?
Aren't they? Women are worse at pretty much every sport than men, and NBA teams are very far away from average racial representation in general population.
Even with non-physical activities, asians are overrepresented in many technical areas, and there were/are even lawsuits [0] about discriminating asians in favour of other races in colleges.
> Arcidiacono suggested that the applicant's race plays a significant role in admissions decisions.[8] According to his testimony, if an Asian American applicant with certain characteristics (like scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities, family background) would result in a 25% statistical likelihood of admission, the same applicant, if white, will have a 36% likelihood of admission.[8] Hispanic and Black applicants with the same characteristics will have a 77% and 95% predicted chance of admission, respectively.[8]
So yeah... chances of getting a male asian programmer are relatively higher than their representation in the general population.
The flaw with this argument is that all the possibly reasonable examples of differences you mention don’t imply that all other observed differences are benign and there’s nothing to be done.
Sure... give all kids the same minimal starting point (schooling). Workplaces should just pick the best candidates, no matter the race or whatever other protected group status they look at.
I live in a former socialist country (we had red stars, parades and a dictator), and considering race or any other non-merit based factor in eg. high school and college aplications would be seen as wrong (and in case of race/gender, racist/sexist). Same for jobs.
This response seems to indicate that you wish it were, which seems like an acknowledgement that it isn't identically distributed. In which case, it seems a bit premature to jump to "straight up racist hiring practices" being the only explanation for disparities between any given field and the country-wide demographics.
> Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?
No, it seems to be you trying to suggest this. I'm pointing out that there could be alternate explanations besides "straight up racist hiring practices" that could cause any given application pool to deviate from the general population. This could mean anything from small-number statistical sampling fluctuations, to lack of aspirational representation causing a demographic to enter the field, to general structural suppression in society etc etc.
Very few companies are directly in the position to directly influence the development of people who will be in their application pool in several years time.
Couldn't it just be that some races / genders / etc, are just more represented in some markets than others. Has nothing to do with if any of them are better.
So, every field and job market has exactly the same distribution as the entire country?