Check out the literature on "implicit bias". While there are problems in some social sciences, this particular research area has a lot of high-quality reproduced studies. Of course, it is only the start of the conversation and there are many caveats, but I believe it will address your comment.
I am aware of that, good to point out though. However I was wondering because the wording "you can still maintain the discrimination" implies awareness and perhaps conspiracy. For example if I was talking about "implicit bias" I might have said something like - "it doesn't modify existing implicit biases and institutional constraints, which have been responsible for ...". But even then it would be good to see what exactly those biases and constraints are at Google.
On the topic of "implicit bias", it's also useful to add that it doesn't have to be just a personal "implicit" bias, it could institutional as well, incentives and rules that combine to exclude certain groups more than others, in this case women. Though then it's not clear how they would fix it, given that it's implicit. Maybe hire an outside consultancy which will be able to identify it better (since they are not part of the culture and not affected by same incentives)...
Just because brogrammers want to promote other brogrammers does not make them whatever-ist. Claiming that implicit bias is a type of whatever-ism is just BS doublespeak like "if you're not the solution you're the problem".
This strikes me as kind of like saying that evolution is pseudoscience because 95% of professors in the field are not evangelical Christians, or something.
There may be other reasons to believe that implicit bias is pseudoscience, but "People who believe certain things about it tend to end up with personal worldviews that are consistent with their research" doesn't seem like one.
But they do research that should be repeatable and thus it doesn't matter.
Unless you think they have implicit bias.
> As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.
Are you trying to mkae some sort of point?
There is valid concern on how predictive the implicit bias test is in non-test conditions. But "implicit bias" is only the start of the conversation - it is one easy thing to measure in a sea of difficult to measure issues. If you want to jump into this rabbit hole, I have found the researches that work in this field to be eager to describe their more up-to-date work on addressing them (I do try to play a devil's advocate in such conversations and have gained much respect for their rigor). Regrettably, as usual in academia, the easies way to be exposed to those conversations is not that easy: going to talks given by those researchers.
By applying empiricism.
The fact that the political right is ideologicslly opposed to doing that in social science fields rather than accepting dogma (an attitude which also applies to an increasing number of areas of the physical sciences) is problematic, to be sure.
I'm not making a claim about what the political right is opposed to.