Python is an Equal Opportunity Programming Language

[Gregory Ewing]

Stephen Hansen wrote:
> On Fri, May 6, 2016, at 11:43 PM, Gregory Ewing wrote:
> 
>>Whether you think this is a good strategy or not,
>>beliavsky is right that it's not "equal".
> 
> This is a pedantically and nonsensical definition of "equal", that
> ignores the many, many reasons why there are 1 in 20 women in that
> conference.

You seem to be saying that if we did take all that into
account, and did the arithmetic accordingly, we would
conclude that Guido was, after all, treating the men and
the women equally.

But that doesn't follow. If it's really the case that for
every woman at the conference there were another 19 that
wanted to go but were prevented simply because they are
women, then treating the women who did happen to make it
to the conference preferentially does nothing to help the
ones who didn't.

I suppose on purely arithmetic grounds you could say that
out of the total population of potential attendees, men
and women ended up with an equal chance of getting a
question answered at the conference. But that assumes the
goal of getting a question answered is the only one that
matters. Missing out on the conference altogether is
surely a much bigger injustice!

So Guido's affirmative action can at best redress only
a small part of the balance. But depending on the
circumstances, it could actually make it *worse*.

Suppose for some bizarre reason the women who made it
to the conference did so because they had red hair. (Maybe
the guy taking the conference bookings had a thing for
redheads, I don't know.) Now we have the situation where
every red-haired female python enthusiast is guaranteed
to get their question answered, simply because of the
colour of their hair. All the non-red-haired female
python enthusiasts might not be very happy about that.

Now admittedly that's a pretty far-fetched scenario, but
without knowing all the reasons for those 19 out of 20
women being barred from the conference, we can't *know*
that there isn't something equally spurious happening.

> Correcting for inequalities can not, itself, be a purely "equal" task
> done in pure blindness of the contextual reality of what is going on in
> the world.

I don't think I disagree with that.

I tend toward the view that it's not possible to fix
those kinds of inequalities by concatenating them with
further inequalities. They can only truly be addressed
by removing whatever barriers are responsible in the
first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Guido shouldn't have
done what he did. But I don't think it makes sense to talk
about it in terms of equality, except in a very narrow
mathematical way, and then only by making some very
handwavey assumptions about the numbers involved.

-- 
Greg