That's a good point. There are many fields that are dominated by women or non-whites, yet there is virtually zero attention paid to those. Why is that?
I don't doubt thats the reason - but I've always felt it wasn't exactly a compelling argument. (Potential) Discrimination is perfectly fine, so long as the job is average. Welders, car mechanics, nurses.... Aren't we somehow presumably stifling the interest of large amounts of kids to enter these jobs based on gender biases? I would assume so based on the numbers.
Quite high for veterinarians, which, at the college level, is as dominated by women as CS is by men (80%). They aren't dominating the work force yet, since in the past men became vets much more often they do now, and we still have those older male vets in the work force, but their numbers are steadily decreasing.
If we imagine the ideal scenario of employment across all jobs being 50/50 men/women then we need to add 2.3 million women to tech and 4.5 million men to healthcare. Arguably, the lack of men entering the healthcare field (good-paying jobs, growing need) is at least as important as the lack of women entering technology, but why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?
> why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?
Who is we? HN? If so, the answer to that is obvious.
Your comparison needs more nuance, in my view. If health care had 100 people, 80 nurses (70% of which are women) and 20 doctors (10% of which are women) then you'd have a breakdown like the following:
Women: 56 nurses, 2 doctors
Men: 24 nurses, 18 doctors
If you said the median doctor has a salary of 200K and a nurse 65k, men are paid 5160K and women are paid 4040K. In other words men are paid 56% of the total healthcare salary despite only representing 42% of the workforce. So despite the majority of health care professionals being women, men are still overrepresented in terms of salary, and in a way, influence. This example obviously uses fake numbers, but is the crux of the problem.
Money allocation is more accurate than job allocation imo. Moreover, if you were to total men's salaries/wealth and compare it to women's wealth it would be overwhelming in favor of men. Discussions surrounding specific job types and their gender allocation are irrelevant and a distraction. If men and women represented the same amount of total wealth in the US I think these discussions would be more meaningful, but the disparity in wealth is reflected influence and consequently opportunity. So, yeah, more men will be reflected with higher percentages of the higher income opportunities. This is reflected in the BLS data:
Employees vs. Managers
Nurses vs. Doctors
Teachers vs. School Administrators
Business owners
etc. etc.
The issue has never been that men have more of the jobs. The issue is that men have all of the money. That's why people are talking about tech, and say, not education. The job discussion (particularly within tech) is just a way to attempt to solve a tiny aspect of the problem.
There’s no attention in getting men teaching. Where 80% teachers are females.
And we still wonder why boys ragequit school at unprecedented levels: There’s only 1 man left for 2 women at university now. And it keeps deflating. Could it be too much effort placed on getting women to succeed, and too much misandry from teachers? and men defending their side of equality systematically being accused of masculinism? No, men can’t be discriminated against, because discrimination only touches women, by definition.
You seem to be assuming that Black people simply have more skill and performance than others. You do this in Basketball but not in other areas.
Currently, hiring males for programming jobs is due to skill and performance, because far more men chose to go through this type of education than women. Huge numbers of men and women don't enjoy straining to grapple with abstract concepts for long stretches of time, sitting hunched over a keyboard, and so on. But, more men do than women, at the moment. So does that mean things are just fine the way they are, as your comment suggests about being Black and skill and performance?
Why not encourage, for instance, more Chinese basketball players to get scholarships, and increase their skill and performance? Why settle for how things are, which currently is not very diverse as anyone can plainly see?
China's basketball team has a lot of great Chinese players.
So when the NBA hires for job qualifications like height, skill and performance, that's OK. But for tech positions they should actively discriminate against skilled applicants because maybe somebody else ought to do it?
Which was: how come drwl accepts the status quo with NBA and not with programmers? Why do they simply assume that some qualities are more prevalent with Blacks but not with males?
I am not taking a position in my comment one way or the other, just pointing out a potential double standard so the reader can make their own conclusions by reconciling them :)
I assume you are clearly on the side of "things are the way they are because that's how biology works". So here is another one, far more politically charged. Are you prepared to endorse this:
"There is general agreement in the literature that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes than are whites in the United States. Whether this is the case for less serious crimes is less clear."
This statement is considered racist. However the equivalent statement for men and women is not considered sexist: men commit far more violent crime than women.
Therefore, should these things be used in profiling people suspected of violent crime?
Correct me if I'm not understanding your argument. What I'm reading is that your argument is there is a "diversity" problem in the NBA and that comes from discrimination against non-blacks. And that this is the same discrimination mentioned in the article?
There's a lot of individual choice involved in the NBA as well. Elite athletes will be elite athletes, but where they choose to devote their efforts early on has ripple effects long afterwards. It's something of a trope that the best US soccer players are in the NFL or NBA, rather than playing futbol like their European athletic counterparts.
Fun fact: professional basketball was once dominated by inner-city Jews
Right, the "path" to be an NBA player starts in high school. You ideally get scouted by a college with a top team and after four years you get an offer to play for an NBA team.
This is very similar to how we do admissions for most college education, except now imagine the basketball scout saying "You crushed it out there, but sorry, we have enough %race players this year".
If I understand it correctly, it is only discrimination if employer cannot demonstrate the criteria are needed for work performance. Race and gender are not related to performance in most work categories. In the case of body types in sports, they are.
And so are problem-solving skills, relevant experience and education in STEM. Is it anyone's fault that white/asian males happen to have more of it than other groups?
>NBA is totally underrepresented by non-black Males, let's sue them.
False equivalency.
How do we encourage short people to grow taller? Or kids to grow up into a tall adult?
Coming to tech, it's possible to encourage people to work in STEM who otherwise may feel unwelcome due to various issues, including gender, age, race, workplace attitudes, glass ceilings etc. That includes trying to have role models that kids may want to emulate.
It is not at all a false equivalency. How do we encourage artistically oriented people to be more mathematical? How do we change ESFJ into INTP? How do we increase IQ?
Just hecause certain traits are mental rather than physical doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
It is not at all a false equivalency. How do we encourage artistically oriented people to be more mathematical? How do we change ESFJ into INTP? How do we increase IQ?
Just hecause certain traits are mental rather than physical doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
So height discrimination is not discrimination? Funny, but no, not to encourage people to grow taller, but to encourage NBA to have height classes, just as boxing has weight classes.
Not at all a false equivalency. How do we encourage artistically oriented people to be more mathematical? How do we change ESFJ into INTP? How do we increase IQ?
Just hecause certain traits are mental rather than physical doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
NBA players on average are 2 inches shorter than listed height because that includes shoes. IT is 5 foot 9 and potentially shorter. Half of the best players in the league are point guards with heights ranging from 6 feet to 6'3 again with shoes. Kyrie Irving, Steph Curry, Lillard, Chris Paul, Westbrook all fall under this. Average American Height is 5'10. 7 foot tall players have mostly struggled last 5 years so you don't have to encourage kids to grow taller to play in the league.
Asians and South Asians are vastly underrepresented in the Music, Entertainment, and Acting industries and Asian and South Asian women are vastly underrepresented in Fashion, Modeling, etc, industries. Sometimes freedom of choice results in outcomes that we shouldn't try to force but it's not white and black. In STEM, gender disparity results in many problems for females, in the other industries I mentioned it's significantly due to connections, glass ceiling, a certain type of "boys club" but also due to choice. I agree with role models, and removing barriers, but I highly highly disagree with excluding individuals based on their race. That is racist and I will oppose that to the core of my being
the median height of NBA players has gone from 6'3" to 6'5" to 6'7". The growth in median height of NBA players has outpaced growth in US population median height over the same period.
Yes, its very much a natural advantage to all things being equal, be tall to play basketball. Source: Am tall guy.
Do you really think there are young people in the US who could be NBA players but are held back by lack of resources, lack of training, and lack of friends/family members who play basketball? I think that's a key difference between the "diversity problem" in the NBA and the diversity problem (no scare quotes) in tech.
Diversity quotas are making this situation actively worse by giving a bad image to those who pass. In German there‘s even a compound slur word for one such cases, „Quotenfrau“ (quota woman). These kind of outcomes were once unforeseen but are very easily to foresee now after lots of experience with that kind of thing. I firmly believe that as a society we should try to make people of all shapes be interested in the most productive and needed professions, but the pushing and pulling should end there. If you want equal, just go ahead and install actual communism, I actually might be on board with thst more, at least with modern technology it should be doable such that people can all live well enough.
People like to say this is a major problem, and I don’t know of any quantification of the effect one way or the other, but I am skeptical. Annecdotally I do know my mother was told (by coworkers and her boss) she was a quota hire in 1975 and it was still the start to a successful 42 year career in sales. She was only with that first company about 4 years. I imagine many other people overcome the stigma associated with getting an “undeserved” opportunity or being told they were hired thanks to a lower standard due to their race or gender.
I personally try not to hold it against my fellow white male entrepreneurs from prestigious schools and affluent backgrounds that I know we had an easier time raising capital and hiring people because of our race, gender, and social connections.
Yes. Jeremy Lin has spoken on multiple occasions of the discrimination he has encountered entering and during NBA, and god knows how many more Asian Americans are kept from a NBA career by these discrimination. (Hint, there are very few Asians in NBA).
You don't solve the upstream problems by doing the exact same wrong that made the problem to begin with. If the institutions that preceded yours bred inequality and bias then yes, you get a biased candidate pool, whether you are the NBA or Google. But the solution is never to get an input of biased applicants and select not the best candidate but the one that meets a racial quota to try to make yourself feel better about racism in the world.
In both cases I imagine there are capable young non-black men who don't pursue basketball because its a "black sport" and there are technically minded young black women who don't pursue software because its a "nerdy white man industry". Regardless of if the NBA is actually biased, or if tech companies are actually sexist, what matters is the average normative cultural perception of that industry or discipline. If you are told your whole life by opinionated outsiders that only white men can program of course you are going to have a hard time finding the willpower to fight that presumption as a young uninformed anything.
women form a majority of new entrants in certain medical sub specialities that were historically male dominated e.g. pediatricians, psychiatry etc.
rather than any of these organizations being overtly discriminatory, can we acknowledge certain groups might just be self-selecting into professions as a part of culture identity and work-life balance or risk/reward preferences. and that's okay!
The idea that male programmers are like professional athletes who are so far superior to women that they deserve a similar level of elevated status and disproportional representation is repugnant and indicative of the problem that needs to be solved.
Black people are severally underrepresented among swimmers in general, not just among competitive swimmers. The BBC had an interesting article about this a few years ago [1].
This is a serious problem, leading to unnecessary deaths of black children. Here's an article by the founder of an organization trying to address this called "Black Kids Swim" [2].
It sounds as though some recruiting leader was told to hit their goals for minority hiring percentages but wasn't given much oversight in how they did it. This sort of thing is often the result of such mismanagement.
You can try to invite a wider audience to apply. Many firms just hire based on a short list of posh colleges and thus inherit whatever racial statistics apply to them. But it's possible to look for candidates of all kinds, to expand internship programs, to go to job fairs at inner-city colleges, and so on.
That really only applies to junior personnel, though. I'm not sure what you would do for hiring more experienced people.
This sure makes sense. Invite a wider audience, go an extra mile to reach those who could meet the requirements but prejudices or other adverse conditions make it hard for them.
This is an opposite to narrowing your audience, because certain people need not apply.
I mean, I think employers should be able to introduce whatever filters they need for the job requirements ("our dance group only accepts ladies with prior dancing experience, older than 18, and no shorter than 6ft".) But I'd like them to be open about these requirements.
They do this already at a fairly large scale, for example the BOLD internship and development program where the goal is to "expose historically underrepresented students in this field to career opportunities in the industry." [https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html]
These programs are fantastic, and I think a great (albeit no silver bullet) strategy to grant greater OPPORTUNITY to underrepresented groups who may never be exposed to CompSci & Tech industries.
Things that are discussed in this article (if true) are clearly about reaching equal REPRESENTATION more than opportunity – and yeah, that's very disappointing since at the end of the day the only way to do that with immediate gratification is discrimination. (pipeline & societal problems don't get fixed overnight)
Discrimination per se isn’t necessarily a problem. You’re discriminating on some basis no matter how you hire someone. A lot rides on the motivation for discrimination.
As Martin Luther King said:
> History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors.
It’s just a fact that some groups end up with advantages in any society and some end up disadvantaged, and those that have advantages will use their power and wealth to retain them.
You don’t have to lay blame on people to see that it happens, and how it can be damaging to society if allowed to continue to its natural end— massive political and economic inequality.
So how do you fix it? If you go on a purely quote-unquote merit based system, the people who grew up with educated, wealthy parents, in safe neighborhoods, etc, will naturally fill the educational and recruitment pipelines that train people for high status jobs.
And thus you perpetuate injustice and unfairness from generation to generation, which even if you don’t object to morally, you should at least object to out of self interest, because it will leas to instability and civic unrest.
Racial quotas in hiring are a blunt instrument to be sure, and can be grossly unfair to individuals, particularly the less well off members of advantaged groups who get passed over.
I don’t know if I think they’re a good way to solve the problem over a purely class based approach, but if you look at it and all you see is ‘racism’, then I would suggest that you look a little bit deeper, because it’s a much more complex issue than that.
Anyone who has worked for a large tech company in SF in the last 3/4 years knows that this has happened everywhere.
In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.
Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.
It's not about recruiting. It's about lawsuits. Companies with more than 100 employees are legally obligated to report demographic information to the EEOC. The EEOC reviews this information when someone files a complaint alleging discrimination.
If similar companies in the same industry and geography have numbers that show a more diverse demographic profile, the EEOC is much more likely to consider a discrimination complaint non-frivolous, which is required to file a lawsuit alleging employer discrimination (as I understand it; not a lawyer).
Companies play this game a) to protect themselves against lawsuits; and b) to potentiate damage to competitors who are not yet explicitly playing this game, and therefore have correspondingly less demographic diversity.
Then company X gets rightfully trounced by a Chinese firm 5 years from now which does not share our ridiculous racial taboos. Some crimes are self policing.
No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds. Let's face it: the top tech companies have sufficient applicants, so they can choose whoever they want, and most jobs are drone jobs.
No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds.
Many companies have failed due in part to internal politics. Also, weren't many of the companies involved in the financial crisis going along with the prevailing political winds, just before everything changed?
> Management techniques in NASA, the report said, discouraged dissenting views on safety issues and ultimately created “blind spots” about the risk to the space shuttle of the foam insulation impact.
> No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds. Let's face it: the top tech companies have sufficient applicants
Many companies have been trounced by outsiders unconstrained by their political liabilities.
Let's face it: Ford, Chevy and Chrysler all had sufficient applicants, even as Toyota and Honda were building the processes and company cultures that would dethrone them.
Is it? I'm not aware of any company in the history of the United States that has failed because it tried to increase its workforce's diversity. Would you mind providing an example?
Are you seriously trying to suggest that Chinese firms don't have their own racial taboos? Or gender issues? That directly contradicts every experience I've had or report I've heard. Aren't their crimes self-policing too?
All I know is that China has a huge, ambitious, STEM-focused workforce and a smaller economy. They could discriminate against applicants on any arbitrary basis ( I have no idea if they do, but that's irrelevant) and still continue to hire lots of intelligent, highly-qualified, and hard-working employees.
Natural monopolist Google enjoys a "competitive moat" and collects monopoly rent. The combination allows for a lot of unpunished "inefficiency".
And scare quotes around "inefficiency" because I'm not convinced putting pressure on their productive white/asian male majority employees is actually inefficient for Google.
Or, instead of giving in, these companies could actually use their impressive power and reach to halt such practices and not let their brand be so affected. (Hello marketing budgets.) Big_Co is not a victim here, and portraying them as such is vastly unfair to the actual people being adversely affecting by discriminatory hiring practices. These companies can and should do better than "well everyone else is doing it!"
I hope my comment didn't come across as I am portraying them as a victim. I saw first hand hiring based on quotas and I hated it (and I am an immigrant with dark skin).
I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.
don't be fooled by the media. Trump supports legal immigration and is allocating more quota to legal immigrants. As a result, tons of legal immigrants support Trump.
> Trump supports legal immigration and is allocating more quota to legal immigrants
Trump has proposed eliminating many of the major existing categories of legal immigration in the core, family-owned action based system. He's proposed replacing the eliminated categories with a small number of renewable non-immigrant (no path to citizenship or work permission) visas for parents of US citizens.
He's proposed no concrete increase in total permanent allocation in the remaining categories, though he's talked about cancelling the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the quota used there to help clear backlogs elsewhere.
He has also expressed a strong desire to revamp the permanent residence visa allocation process to use an individual-focused, merit-based system that prefers applicants with a high income.
If I had to choose one, I'd prefer more employment visas over family visas and definitely diversity visas.
Don't you find it strange that a nationalist like Trump would advocate for visas for high skilled foreigner which directly competes with citizens for high paying prestigious jobs? Why would a high skilled foreigner with a spouse or children want to emigrate to the US without a family visa?
Young, unmarried individuals will be able to immigrate. Applicants can also bring in their spouses if they are educated and can are fluent in English.
It appeases his nationalist base because it would not give visas to immigrants in low-paid jobs. Most of those voters were never in contention for the high-paying tech jobs anyway. They have no reason to care too much about them.
Anecdotally I only knew two Trump voters in the Bay Area. One is Chinese and the other Indian. Polling was not great in the last election, maybe because pollsters can mainly call people with landlines [1] which excludes large pools of people.
Exit polls are different from opinion polls. The surveying techniques are entirely different, and in general exit polls are considered far more accurate than opinion polls -- because you're polling on a concrete question ("who did you vote for a few minutes ago") rather than a less concrete one ("who are you more likely to vote for").
Considering how many people were shamed for voting for trump I’m not entirely sure how accurate those exit polls were as most of them predicted a landslide for HRC before the count started.
New Asian immigrants moved to Bay Area for high paying tech jobs have very different views from those that were born in America or have lived here for a long time. Many of the new immigrants have no citizenship yet while the latter are simply much less impacted by these diversity movements overall
It's a false logical conclusion really (just as most things related to postmodernism and enforced equality of outcome through diversity are).
You could just as easily reason that companies who aren't implementing these policies and actually hiring based on individual qualifications and not group identity will out compete their competitors in the free market. They'll surely get bad press for a while but eventually their haters will get tired and move on to the next news cycle. In the mean time the company has hired all of the "undesirable" straight white and Asian males (not intentionally but only because their value in the market has been artificially depressed) and they are easily outpacing the productivity of their rival firms.
As the postmodernists reject possible logical conclusions from their actions and claim organization power they will eventually come face to face with the free capitalist market and the firms they overtake will fail. That is of course if they can't act quickly enough in manifesting their utopian vision of the destruction of capitalism itself.
I’m not a lawyer, so I’m curious (and I can’t read the article): are quotas legal? Irrespective of their efficacy or morality, they must’ve held up in court, right? I thought it was fairly obvious that organizations have minority quotas. Then again, I also know that discrimination against ANY gender and ANY skin color (including male and white) is illegal, which was born out recently when Google’s decision to fire a rather opinionated individual who regularly derided straight, white men was upheld. Political beliefs are not a protected class, and you can absolutely be fired for them (although I think in this case the person was let go because railing against vast swaths of your coworkers is disruptive and rude, even if they’re “cishet white boys”).
Employers are allowed to undertake initiatives to promote diversity hiring, employment lawyers say. But under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes. That means they can’t employ practices like hiring quotas based on race or only hiring one type of minority candidate, attorneys say. Such practices would also run afoul of California laws.
I'm not a lawyer either. But I remember that explicit racial quota are illegal.But in another precedence, diversity is considered a valid objective. So having preference that favor minority for the sake of diversity is OK. That is the case for a lot of hiring and admission processes now: No explicit quota, but a soft preference towards diversity, which usually means favoring under-represented racial and gender groups.
I suspect Google, YouTube, YC, and many other Silicon Valley companies have followed a similar pattern:
Step #1 Discriminate against the lower classes through a biased hiring process that favors upper class people over more qualified members of the 99%. A system of "culture" tests, nepotism, and simple favoritism. The "elite" investors fund the "elite" founders which hire "elite" friends.
Step #2 Realize your policy is classist and racist.
Step #3 Disregard the idea of creating a merit-based system.
Step #4 Commit explicit racism in an attempt to balance out your on-going racism.
Step #5 Ignore classism entirely, despite it being the root cause.
I am curious too. Some commentators are saying well if you just make discrimination not happen anymore then there will be no discrimination. Problem solved!
"Merit" as defined by whom, and measured how? I doubt that many companies disregard the idea of hiring based on merit. They all try to do that, they were trying to do that all along, but that only got them to your step 2. So what do you when even your best effort to create a purely merit-based system has empirically failed to overcome unconscious or structural bias? What's your magic prescription?
One way to be more meritocratic is to not allow certain kinds of information to influence the hiring decision. For instance, suppose the ones making the decision are allowed to know what the candidate's skills are and what they've done, but not allowed to know where (or if) they went to school, and they're not allowed to know if their previous experience came from an employer or if it was something they did on their own, or how many years they spent doing those things.
Making the hiring decision would be harder because there's not as much information to go on, and it's not too hard to fake a superficial understanding of some technology. Presumably one would rely more heavily on rigorous aptitude testing (i.e. more of those whiteboard exercises everyone seems to hate and probably have bias problems of their own).
Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.
Anyone from Google or YouTube--or people who applied to work at either org in this time frame--have perspectives to add regarding this claim?
Towards the end of last year I actually did apply to Google in Mountain View for Software Engineering.
I believe my on-site went excellent technically overall, but I had a hard time meshing with a couple of my interviewers and wasn't surprised about my rejection. Nothing strange about that personally.
However, another Google recruiter reached out to me for two other potential positions, said I would be an excellent fit, and said they would set up the interviews for me.
A couple weeks passed and I pinged, no response. A month passed and I pinged, no response. Still haven't had a response from two separate recruiters to this day.
I don't wish to stir the pot -- Anything could have happened, there are some stories about Google recruiters forgetting their candidates, maybe they think I'm just annoying and not a good candidate, but in light of these specific circumstances this is certainly intriguing news.
This happens all the time in recruiting. Companies leave candidates hanging indefinitely. Hell, I've had it happen to me even for an internal position at a company I've worked for.
It used to be that this was just not done. However, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley seem to have adopted much degraded standards. When I was young, a company that did such things would have been marking itself as being comprised of immoral rubes.
Friend of mine had setup interview at Google London, he flew in, came into the office and they completely forgot about him! :D He was just sitting there for a few hours, then left.
He was pretty furious; we talked before interview about how he should prepare, I gave him some puzzlers to solve, and after "interview" I was curious how did that go, and he was like: "they completely forgot about me!" :D He now works for their competitor.
Apparently all the large technical companies do this. I had this happen after I did 2 phone interviews with one of the big silicon valley tech companies after their recruiters called me for 3 years. They had a position they were interested in me for specifically but were waiting for the manager to get back from leave. Said they'd call when she was back. Didn't hear anything. Months later got a call asking how it went and if I was still interested. Told them I'd never heard anything and was still interested. Never heard back again. I've had friends say Twitter is the worst at this, followed by Google, then Facebook. Amazon, too. It's the nature of using so many different recruiters. My friends have said that the companies all seem to treat potential candidates badly and you only get the job if you pro-actively call back again and again and again.
Then I wonder why poeple just don't lie? EG just put down: disabled autistic transgender native american. Everyone wins. Google gets to check a bunch of boxes and helps you jump to the top of the list. I doubt they would check your parents race and examine your privates.
That strategy has been shown to work. And people are more angry about the beneficiary being called out about it, than they are that they stole a reserved spot in the first place.
There's a lot of Indian people with Portuguese surnames from around Goa, but I'd think that Spanish would be very uncommon, unless it's their first name.
The US gov considers Hispanic an ethnicity, not a race. So if you don't consider yourself one of the 5 races (white, black, American Indian, Asian, Pacific Islander) then you'd select other.
Racial identity for Hispanics seems to be a complex personal decision.
The EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [1] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs do not have an 'other' category, but it has a 'Decline to State'. The EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.
Maybe. So after you complete on-site interviews you are reviewed by a hiring committee which goes over the scores in each stage of the process, and decide whether you should move on to project matching. Typically passing hiring committee means you've made it. However this wasn't the case for me in Spring 2017 where after on-sites they told me they would not extend an offer but could not explain why. Oddly, a year later I reapplied and got the job without any further technical interviews (but a recommendation might have factored into this). I found this pretty bizarre and hiring for diversity might be a plausible explanation considering I'm a white male, though what's inconsistent with the story is that they certainly didn't purge my application. They were hounding me with emails to reapply ever since they turned me down.
There are probably a lot of boring reasons this could've happened as well. It's probably boring.
> Anyone from Google or YouTube--or people who applied to work at either org in this time frame--have perspectives to add regarding this claim?
I'm a white male and received a Google offer 8 month ago (turned it down to go work at twitch, because I love gaming). So this is not an across the board discrimination against EVERYONE, if that is what you were implying.
I am just 1 person among thousands, though, so I guess you'd have to get info from someone who applied exactly in the spring, to youtube, and had their interview cancelled.
This is incredibly hard to answer fairly, as those who applied and may not have been qualified may now believe they were discriminated against and it's basically impossible to know.
I mean, I've interviewed with google and my application got "lost", when the interview process restarted I identified that I had already been phone screened and the suggestion from the recruiter was: "Oh, ok, I guess we'll follow up in six months".
The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota. Not good for anyone.
There are no easy solutions, but it would help I think if all effort was concentrated on removing hurdles rather than patching problems downstream with lazy fixes.
I agree. Unfortunately, lazy fixes at clear and prominent decision points are much easier than removing hurdles in, say, the early childhood education system.
This goes beyond a lazy fix. According to another HN commenter here:
> under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes.
The former veteran Google recruiters behind this suit are claiming they were 'instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.'
The entire thing is ridiculous, but I can't help but laugh at how it seems to them that all the different races and cultures have been reduced to being one of: white, asian, black, hispanic. What about Arabs, Persians, Turks, Natives, etc? Would those have gotten rejected as well?
The horror! Who can say what unspeakable acts people will perform in the interests of potentially securing a better life for their children. I for one am reassured that there is at least one voice speaking out against this atrocity.
This isn’t a new problem. Women and POC that were hired following affirmative action reported being called “affirmative action hires” and faced workplace discrimination based on the idea that they didn’t deserve the jobs. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but how was the issue of them being denied jobs based on sex or race to be solved otherwise?
To answer your question the issue of discrimination is solved by not discriminating. If women and others are being discriminated against then stop doing this, rather than just start discriminating against other people.
The phrase "we had to burn the village in order to save it" was uttered by the officer who perpetrated the My Lai massacre, and it was an unironic paraphrasing of "better dead than red". Nothing about addressing the past and ongoing effects of long-term discrimination requires destroying anything. If you think affirmative action is reverse discrimination, then fine: there are other ways to address systemic disparities.
Taking your boot off someone's throat doesn't make them your equal when they're still on the ground.
It seems this is an issue many don’t want to talk about. Is the solution to ignore systemic discrimination that led us to where we are today? That only leaves one group happy.
I know this is not popular, but honestly how do you stop discrimination against women and others? It is easy to say “stop doing this,” but does that happen?
What if the candidate went to Wellesley or Howard? What happens if the person went to university in Africa or Latin America? What if you puts SWE or NSBE on the resume, or obtained a merit-based UNCF scholarship and mentioned that as an achievement? The blind hiring system would fall flat pretty quickly.
The much maligned tech interview is, ironically, the best tool for blind interviews. It is essentially an audition of technical skill. Blind auditions are used effectively to combat gender bias in a different field, https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
> for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
You stop discrimination by changing the brand. Many people have the impression that women aren't good at STEM, so hire more high quality women. Can't find enough of them? Grow your own. Google can start free bootcamps and apprenticeships aimed at women (men are welcomed too of course, just like women in engineering groups), don't graduate them until they meet a certain level of excellence. It might be more expensive, but rebranding is not cheap.
There are actually lots of ways. The most obvious way is to secondary screen using a external party all rejected candidates to make sure that the best candidates was selected. This will also provide you with political cover when you don’t just hire people on the basis of their skin color.
Not good for employees but I don’t see how it’s bad for Google.
Unhappy people are less likely to reflect on things, and more likely to do what the boss tells them to. Which is what you want your employees to do when you attract them with nice “don’t be evil” slogan, and make them optimize an ad server for the market capitalization metric.
Tell that to the white and asian males who get rejected on the basis of their race and gender despite having worked their entire lives to be the most qualified and technically adept candidate.
I'm pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have.
Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists.
I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can some of the conversation be about that?
I think I'd settle for having a proportionate amount of the conversation being about discrimination against white men. So, perhaps, for every thousand comments about discrimination against other groups, we could include a word or two. I am a white man - I have never to my knowledge been meaningfully discriminated against. I think only a fool would suggest that if I was black, or a woman, I could say that - or even say that for a more limited time period.
Did this actually happen to you? Out of curiosity, in what time period and industry? I only ask because I imagine that even the most racist HR person in the world would know to show more discretion.
Yes, in the early 90s (I'm old), and it was the local AT&T office.
I've also been "discriminated" against for not being Native American (Casino Morongo in So Cal), and not being an Evangelical Christian (Cal Baptist University).
As it turns out-- those institutions are legally allowed to discriminate. It absolutely blew my mind being asked to "describe my relationship with jesus" in an interview.
Oh, it was awful. I was perhaps, 26, hardcore atheist. No mention was made of any of what was to come when I accepted the interview.
There was a technical interview with a very nice guy, who said I scored the highest of any candidate who had ever interviewed for the university.
Then, this sallow cow of a woman with a permanent look of disgust on her face conducted my "religious" interview on subjects like evolution, the Trinity, and my relationship with Jesus.
I tried my best to be "reasonable," but I'm sure I looked like a deer in headlights. It's impossible to be reasonable with unreasonable people such as evangelicals.
My position on spirituality has softened quite a bit as I've gotten older and had a few "spiritual experiences"... but sometimes I wonder if, in the intervening years, if it has occurred to them that beliving in provably false things like creationism, (remember, evangelicals won't even accept that "evolution is gods mechanism of creation"), doesn't make for a good engineer.
> I imagine that even the most racist HR person in the world would know to show more discretion
Only cause you mentioned "world", its pretty common for only women, or even women who have taken breaks to raise a child to be eligible for many jobs in India, including at companies considered "Big4" like Microsoft.
There is also a suspension of the right to equality in favour of certain castes, and 50-70% of govt jobs and govt college seats can only be occupied by people from these castes.
No, I didn't mean more discreet than to say that they were discriminating by gender or race; I've worked at a big 4 company in the Bay and they barely even managed to maintain plausible deniability about racism and sexism in their hiring policies. I was just referring to directly using the word "nigger" in that context.
I am trying to wrap my head around this. The level of black employees at Google is at 2% and actually dropped since 2016. How fair is it to say from a statistical point of view that if you did not get hired, you lost out to a lesser qualified black person and not someone from a white or asian of equal or more qualifications? I pick on the black statistic specifically because at the end of the day the blow back for these perceived diversity programs lands on this group in particular.
You’re correct that the difference is in the margins. But, at the end of the day, is any exclusion based on race acceptable? From my perspective, it’s hypocritical to champion equal opportunity while systematically having a different hiring process for different races, not to mention illegal.
That is not the argument I am making. I am asking the question if there is a super majority of white and asian males being hired at these firms (that is present in the Google stats), is it fair to say on an individual basis that the reason you did not get the job was because you were passed over for someone unqualified in an underrepresented group, or is it because said person just did not get hired for some other reason?
If you were to accept the current estimates on IQ, where blacks have an average IQ of 85, Hispanics an average IQ of 90, whites an average IQ of 100 and Asians an average IQ of 105 with a standard deviation of 15 by design, and that Youtube only hires people two standard deviations from the mean, then about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian. I am quite sure that whites are over represented at the expense of Asians.
This assumes that there are equal number of people in the hiring pool in each category. There is nothing to suggest that the applicants that apply are drawn at random from the population.
Also the absolute numbers of each groups also matter. On this basis we should expect far few Asian and Black employees just on the basis that there are fewer than whites within the USA [0].
0. This is assuming the employee pool is drawn from the USA population.
Ok. California is 39% Hispanic, 38.8% White, 5.8% Black and 13% Asian. California has 40 Million people. Let's say half have not graduated college yet and are not in the employee pool. That means 8 Million Hispanics, 8 Million whites, 1.16 Million Blacks and 2.6 Million Asians. Taking this new information into account, Asians should be around 37% of the employees, Blacks less than 1%, Hispanics around 9% and Whites 54%. Google's numbers say 61% White, 30% Asian, 2% Black and 3% Hispanic. So, it's both Hispanics and Asians who are under represented.
Based on those assumptions, which I'll iterate below first, let's get the numbers:
1) hiring based on IQ, cutoff at 2 standard deviations above the global mean (mu = 100, sigma = 15, by design), 2 sigma above that makes 130. You get hired if you're the candidate with the highest IQ, if you satisfy the minimum of an IQ of 130
2) 8/20 hispanic, 8/20 white, 1.16/20 black, 2.6/20 asians (and let's just pretned that sums to 100%). Or: 40% hispanic, 40% white, 5.8% black, 13% asian
3) let's assume 1000 candidates for each position.
So each round has 1000 candidates:
400 hispanics, IQ taken from N(90, 15)
400 whites, IQ taken from N(100, 15)
58 black, IQ taken from N(85, 15)
130 asians, IQ taken from N(105, 15)
The numbers:
33.42% Asians, 10.85% Hispanic, 0.54% Black, 55.20% White
Odds of getting hired under those criteria:
0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White
And that's why nobody's going to be happy with expected outcomes. Just imagine the (completely "fair") news headline "Asians 25 TIMES more likely to get hired than blacks in the bay area".
import random
counts = {'h': 0, 'w': 0, 'b': 0, 'a': 0, None: 0}
experiments = 10000
for x in range(experiments):
candidates = []
for h in range(400):
iq = random.normalvariate(90, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'h'))
for w in range(400):
iq = random.normalvariate(100, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'w'))
for b in range(58):
iq = random.normalvariate(85, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'b'))
for a in range(130):
iq = random.normalvariate(105, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'a'))
# filter iq > 130
candidates = [(iq, typ) for (iq, typ) in candidates if iq > 130]
if candidates:
selected = sorted(candidates, key=lambda (x,y):x)[0][1]
else:
selected = None
counts[selected] += 1
total = sum(counts.values())
print total
for k, v in counts.items():
print "%s %2.2f" % (k, 100.0 * v/total)
print "odds of hire if hispanic : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['h']/experiments / 400)
print "odds of hire if white : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['w']/experiments / 400)
print "odds of hire if black : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['b']/experiments / 58)
print "odds of hire if asian : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['a']/experiments / 130)
print "odds of no hire at all: %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts[None]/experiments)
> Odds of getting hired under those criteria: 0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White
> about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian.
These two comments say the same thing. Mine is standardized.
Your take away from all this is a little strange. The Google numbers say that Asians are 25 times more likely to be hired than blacks. That has happened in real life. No one complains about that. I have read that Google is too Asian though.
People harp about less-talented people not deserving to be there, but that is already the case. From a statistical point of view, Whites are over represented at the expense of Hispanics and Asians with a higher IQ. Real life is messy, but you get the idea.
This battle has been fought already and enough people at Google were convinced that there was a bias in their hiring practices. So, now they are in the process of correcting.
What percentage of those populations have the requisite secondary education and or experience (coding, statistics, marketing, electrical engineering) to work at Google? Before you try to just match up a general population to a workforce let's at least try to have a representative sample of what the "pool of qualified applicants" looks like.
I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.
The level of the problem doesn't matter. Working at Google is an elite job. We could go a level lower to Stanford. Asians are under represented at Stanford. We could go down a level to an elite California High School. Asians are still under represented. Blacks and Hispanics are really under represented at this level. It only gets worse for them the lower you go at elite institutions.
I use the general population because that is where the workers are coming from. If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.
> If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.
That's an interesting conclusion, statistically and as a societal commentary. Assuming for a second we take your conclusion as given, and we look at the legal liability question that someone in alphabet legal or HR has to be thinking about when the make hiring policy decisions: which population should their workforce be representative of: the base population, or the population of qualified applicants?
Edit:
>I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.
I don't care I'm here for the legalities and statistics discussions, see my other comments here about judging people based on melanin or Genetics. It's silly where it isn't insulting to reduce a real person based on their inclusion/exclusion to poorly defined groups with little to no impact on actual ability to perform/qualify.
The guy asked a question, can we stop making these assumptions? It's childish, it's more constructive to provide the statistics the inquirer asked for.
A pretty straightforward explanation is that ⅔ [1] of the tech workers in Silicon Valley are immigrants. Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world, and it doesn't make sense to apply US demographics to an industry that recruits from such a pool.
If you assume that the Silicon Valley percent of immigrant workers holds for Google you conclude that 6% of the American Googlers are African Americans, since none of the foreigners can be. About 2.4% [2] of computer science degree recipients in the US are African American.
The GP was arguing a point that is agreed-upon by many who argue against affirmative action — that the minorities ostensibly helped are harmed in the bigger picture. Yet you rip on the GP for not thinking enough about the whites and Asians who are also the victims of affirmative action? You could be a bit reflexively polarized about this issue.
The GP didn't post their resumé and CV -- nor should that be some kind of pre-requisite for discussion -- so I'm limited to judging and critiquing the content of their comment. Likewise, we shouldn't be interested in each other's character beyond the personal viewpoints we each have relating to the discussion.
I don't see how their race affects anything. Race and gender affect the outcome, but only in negative ways. Either by preventing a fair outcome, or by casting doubt on the fairness of the outcome.
That's fine if everyone starts from the same base and has the same opportunities which, currently, they most assuredly do not. Let's knock this privileged bullshit on the head until then.
That will never happen. Life isn't fair and never will be, just by virtue of the natural world itself.
We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity (not outcome) but it's important to realize what is actually reasonable and achievable vs impossible.
Human society will NEVER provide absolute equal opportunity to everybody. If you want that, please first work on rethinking capitalism.It's not practical and has been tried in the past.
Some of these Asian males may have come out of abject poverty in countries like India - worked all their lives for a chance at better living, were that given the "same" opportunity ?
Please stop this entitled thinking.
We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.
Most of these are also misclassified as white and asian Americans. ⅔ [1] of Silicon Valley tech workers are immigrants that risk discrimination due to being misclassified into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs.
It is currently impossible for an immigrant to avoid being mis-classified because the EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.
The misclassified immigrants is by far Silicon Valley's largest source of diversity, and the misclassification also makes diversity statistics incorrect for Americans in tech.
That's an ideal to strive for, but if society as a whole seems hellbent to keep punishing people who have neither themselves nor had their grandparents do anything wrong, then shifting it to people whose grandparents did can be a better solution than doing nothing.
Original sin is a heinous concept, and so are blood feuds, and this sounds like both. If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes? It seems like that is what you are asking of people as 'better than nothing'. I'm not being hyperbolic either, your logic, applied to criminal law would condemn me to suffer due to the actions of a person I have ever met once.
You seem to be happy to ignore that the larger context is this:
Non-white people are discriminated against because society as a whole accuses their parents as a whole of being degenerates.
> If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes?
I'm a german. Ask me about the amount of paying back my entire life has consisted of.
--
You're also veering very off-topic from the fact that op made the claim "more discrimination is being proposed as the solution" to which i replied by disagreeing that it is more, and claim it is the same amount of discrimination, just moved around.
> "...i replied by disagreeing that it is more, and claim it is the same amount of discrimination, just moved around."
How is this an acceptable solution??
So its more like "discrimination is bad, but only against some groups, if we discriminate against this other group though, its okay"...I still don't how this is "fair" or "just" in any sense
I don't think it is fair to discriminate against anyone at all and certainly don't think that this "shifting discrimination around" game is going to work well at all in the long run...
Just to be clear, holding modern Germans accountable for the actions of the third reich is also absurd, and and I would speak to defend you from those sorts of attacks.
The sins of the father should not condemn his children.
I appreciate the thought. However i do think that it has ultimately made germany as a whole a better country, so i don't entirely agree. Then again i also don't wholly disagree. There are plenty situations and cases where children absolutely should not suffer for parents' sins. I think it must be considered in each case, and especially so if the children derived benefits from the sins.
What's your proposal for a solution that doesn't discriminate? Do nothing?
Can you fix the existing imbalance without doing something?
What if the affirmative action were only temporary, and was designed to stop once balance is reached -- is it still discrimination?
The solution can't be to do nothing, doing nothing is why we are where we are, doing nothing is why discrimination exists. We need to fix #1 and #2 on your list before we can fix #3.
I would love to hear of an alternative thought process, please please suggest something better than affirmative action that might fix discrimination.
> The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota.
The thing I hate about it is that it involves rejecting candidates on the basis of the colour of their skin.
Well, we certainly should concentrate on removing hurdles, of course. But patching problems is not necessarily a bad idea, especially from the point of view of the employers themselves.
Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking people are just hired to fill a "diversity quota checklist", which may or may not be true.
For example, say I'm an employer that wants the best performing employees. I know that, for whatever societal/biological/whatever reasons, the black population in the US tends to have worse schooling (maybe the schools have less money, maybe the parents tend to be less wealthy, it doesn't really matter so long as I believe that the black population has some biases against them).
I can deduce just from these biases that the black population will tend to have lower grades, just because of these biases. I may choose to "correct" this bias by preferring equivalent hires that are black, on the assumption that if they have equivalent grades, they had to work harder/be smarter to achieve them, because of the aforementioned biases. I do this entirely from a selfish perspective - I want the best, and if my beliefs about the world are right, this gets me the best!
The same reasoning can theoretically be reversed for e.g. asian populations (maybe their schooling tends to be better, because e.g. wealthier or stricter parents causing more focus on school? Which would imply higher grades without necessarily translating into better workers).
Note: This is a hypothetical case for why an employer might voluntarily and correctly choose to use some form of "affirmative action". It is not necessarily what I think is right or what I think is happening, and is based on a lot of possible assumptions which I have no idea if true. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a case, which doesn't rely on "social justice" or anything other than correct self-interest of the employer.
This approach only works if someone higher up in the education food chain hasn’t already correct for any earlier poor schooling by using some form of “affirmative action” in grading.
The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0].
Of course. My assumption can be stated as: the employer, for whatever reason, sees that empirically the correlation between e.g. GPA and work performance is different for different populations, and therefore corrects it. If the "correction" is done beforehand, then the employer won't see this phenomenon.
The only thing you can really measure is motivation, merit and output. How much "harder/smarter" someone worked to achieve something seems incredibly vague, and in your instance it seems like you're just guessing? How does this get you "the best" in any objective way?
Well I'm talking totally theoretically, just to show that it's possible to discriminate in order to achieve a better end result for the business.
But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man.
An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this.
(No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).
That doesn't make sense. Reviewing by motivation + results already delivers you the best people, which is the best for the business.
Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business.
You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.
Look, I don't think we really disagree on anything fundamental here. Of course you should judge people as individuals. Of course looking at past performance is probably better, and fairer, than anything else. I'm completely with you on that. The only thing I'm saying is, there are logically plausible situations, in which you might want to use generic group attributes. Especially in cases where you have no prior knowledge - e.g. everything you say is great, but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience?
I mean, let's take an extreme case and see if we can at least agree on that. One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity, since if for example everyone is refusing to hire black people because of racial discrimination (think 1930s), then an employer will come along and offer to hire black people for cheaper, and will therefore outcompete other companies, who will have to also hire black people at slightly higher wages, etc.
If we were in such a (1930s-like) world where every employer refuses to hire black people, and we were deciding who to hire, and our normal practice would be only to hire people with 2 years' worth of job experience. We would never hire a black person, because none of them would fit our requirements. In such a world, wouldn't it make sense, from a purely self-interested economic perspective, to change the requirements for black people to compensate for the screwed-up biased world we find ourselves in?
If not, then is the classic economic argument wrong?
> there are logically plausible situations, in which you might want to use generic group attributes.
I do not see what the logical situation is, because it is overruled completely by the individual's data which you already have right in front of you. It just sounds like applying biases by guessing with group membership instead of looking at the person. Anytime the group membership overrules the individuals' attributes, it's going the wrong way.
Also while I understand the context, some things just don't matter because life is fundamentally unfair and full of chaos. Yes everyone works differently at the same task even with similar results. Maybe they're smarter, or maybe they had a bad year, or got sick, or something else... how can you possibly account for any or all of that in a reasonable sense?
> but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience?
Judge their school experience. Give them responsibility commensurate with their skills and measure continuously to establish the history, then promote or fire.
> One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity
Yes, it does. However capitalism isn't perfect and is still up to legal, political, and generally irrational whims of the people. If you're talking about 1930's then there were actual laws segregating people. If you move forward to WWII, then it was the political climate where it was accepted to not work with others regardless of the money. If anything, I think a common love for profit actually does a lot to remove these barriers once people realize they're all better off generating and spending wealth instead of hating each other over looks and other useless attributes.
The goal posts of equal _outcome_ continue to move, from university enrollment, to employment enrollment. And there are some people who want to see it go further. (What societal engineering scheme does this resemble?) With no apparent regard for what it costs.
Do you want to live in a world where you are judged by the color of your skin, your gender, your "ethnicity"?
Or do you think that, maybe, we should judge people by who they are? The substantive characteristics that define an individual. Not a fantasy, not a PR story, but _who an individual is_.
We should all have the decency to look beyond the superficial traits of a person, to not make assumptions about their character, positive or negative, and to truly try to understand one another.
Blatant discrimination of such superficial features has no place in a healthy society, or one that wishes to become one. This arrogance, assumptions, and short-sighted thinking cost more than we can afford.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Is it a systemic bias that men choose to study CS and Engineering majors and make up 80% of graduates and the talent pool? Should we discriminate against them for this reason?
It's a systemic bias when you send out two resumes, one with a traditionally african-american name, and one with a traditionally white american name... And have 50% more callbacks for the one with the white name.
And the solution is to fight fire with fire? When Asian students apply to universities, they will have better chances if they change their names and activities in their personal statements to be less typical Asian, because of this affirmative action.
In govt IT(mid Atlantic region) as a Caucasian I am always a minority amongst my awesome Indian and a Asian (few) male & female peers.
I often wonder why many Caucasian complain about foreigners taking jobs yet those complainers never bothered to learn an in-demand skill. Thus those nice high paying jobs are going to those who are qualified no matter their race, creed or sex.
Its also systemic bias when you won't even interview men...
I have first hand experience with this. As a normal working-class white guy with poor parents and no connections (I worked my way through school), I had a hard time even landing an interview at first. As a social experiment, I changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, kept everything else on my resume the same, and reapplied to all the jobs that didn't want me previously. Every single company that rejected Joe was overjoyed when Joanna applied. In every case I got a email within the week wanting to meet and interview me. It was kind of eye-opening. I didn't follow through as "Joanna" because the sexist hiring policies were enough to put me off working at these companies entirely. I eventually found an employer that wasn't sexist and have been happy with them so far...
>Do you want to live in a world where you are judged by the color of your skin, your gender, your "ethnicity"?
Reading that sentence as a black person was cringe inducing to say the least. It truly never ceases to amaze me the complete lack of awareness that white males have of their elevated position in society.
Sure! Except when left to our own devices to "look beyond the superficial traits of a person", we usually end up hiring people who remind us ourselves.
There is a place for consciously paying attention to race, ethnicity, and gender in that case. (Admittedly, the alleged situation in the headline is too far.)
> Except when left to our own devices to "look beyond the superficial traits of a person", we usually end up hiring people who remind us ourselves.
Speak for yourself. Also, like similarity goes beyond skin color. I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race.
Some biases are on the surface and you might be able to avoid them. Others are unconscious and without knowing it exist you can't avoid it.
Problem is people think they are not bias when they actually are!
Let's try something, for the next 10 person that you meet, try to come up with a reason of why you like or dislike them.
And those reasons are just coming justification for your feelings, and it is coming from your unconscious!
> I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race.
Is that unusual freedom from unconscious bias reflected in the history of what engineers you have chosen to interview, made offers to, or subsequently promoted? Everyone thinks they're free from bias, until the empirical results show that the majority of them mathematically must be wrong.
From what I've seen, the workforce closely mirrors the demographics of CS and Engineering students enrolled at top universities, i.e. the educated talent pool.
I believe what you describe. I believe there are plenty of people who have the problem you describe--to a significant extent. And of course it's not limited to who you hire, but also who you associate with, and how you treat people. Many people, of all walks of life, act based on their assumptions of others, to some degree.
I'm a scientist. I believe in the power of observation, action, and assessment (further observation). If I perceive that a problem exists, then I: do my due diligence to determine the extent to which it exists (if at all), determine if and how I should solve it, and carry out that determination. I believe there are plenty of people that could use an adjustment, at least for the matter you describe.
But I'm an even bigger believer in priorities. Of investing energy and time--of our one, limited life--towards the goals that I think matter the most. The health of our planet and power inequality, for two. There are just some people for whom any such "adjustment" would only serve to (at best) distract them from other endeavours, where they may be sorely needed. Good people, who do truly good things. At what point do you stop this (re)education? Can we hope for a complete disassociation from our biological tendency to observe and encode patterns? Do we even want that? At some point, the energy expended on a perceived problem may greatly outweigh the returns you get from the investment. Energy that could have been better spent.
Right now, I see much energy--mostly talk--being devoted, in a "shotgun" approach, to this problem and other social problems. I see it talked about in mass-consumed venues, and I see others parroting talking points. But for me, my colleagues, and my friends, it just isn't a problem. I interact with individuals all over the world and we are able to work together toward common goals. And I think that's what matters most.
Note, this lawsuit is being brought by former Google recruiters who say they were ordered to "purge" certain groups from the interview queue.
> YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.
I'd like to remind people of what Denise Young Smith, who ran HR at Apple, said, before suddenly stepping down after the outrageous repsonse.
> “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.
> “Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
She's gone now, instantly, after working there for 20 years and rising to senior executive VP. What is going on in our industry?
It’s a purity death spiral. Model diversity as a sacred belief with no central authorities. With no pope of social justice to tamp down on the overzealous all actors ratchet towards increasing absurd signaling behaviours, limited only when the enterprise is outcompeted.
What seems to be going on, I think, is largely a one-sided story. There are many people with bullhorns who speak, for whatever reasons, but who seem to go largely unchallenged. Whether that's due to unawareness, lack of critical thought, laziness, or perceived distance (e.g. "I think things are still fine with me; I can't or don't see how this could affect me."), I can't say for certain, but I imagine many people are affected by some combination of them all.
What I can say we do need more of, however, is well-engaged, open and honest discussion. Having leading voices speak your mind can be very good, but central figures can be fallible. A better solution would be to have input from humans in the "silent majority", whatever that might be.
From personal experience after having talked to several colleagues about this in private, all of whom feel this is wrong, the simple reason for why people don't speak or engage in open discourse is fear. And after having seen what happens to the ones that speak up it seems like legitimate fear.
If you 'whiten up' your resume, you're more likely to get callbacks. Even if the company indicates that they're pro-diversity or equal-opportunity [1]. Employees with black-sounding names are in general less likely to receive callbacks even when accounting for economic status and skill level [2]. Depending on your name, you will be perceived as being more violent or lesser in status [3]. For minorities, this sort of thing is what they already and commonly experience.
So while we can claim that diversity hiring and so forth has swung too far in the opposite direction, studies and research in general has shown this to not be the case. I'm skeptical of any lawsuits like this brought against Google and while I don't doubt there are instances of terrible hiring managers going too far I imagine people will use this lawsuit as vindication for why they weren't hired.
It solves a little bit of the issue. But software development in general has been far from a 100% merit-focused occupation; networking and having people that can get a foot in the door for you is often far more important than your explicit skill level.
That entire process amplifies both unconscious biases and discrepancies of economic status. People without economic means to network, made worse by prejudices and expectations.
You are right, however that is a systemic bias in equal opportunity – not representation.
Foot in the door is a huge step, and it's totally okay for companies to push initiatives that allow more minorities to get their foot in the door / exposure to the company and industry. It's not okay for them to push that agenda in assessment to reach better distribution numbers in representation.
> studies and research in general has shown this to not be the case
Not really. It can still be true that this white/asian discrimination is happening in tech, whereas the listed papers appear to test non-technical job fields. Ideally, racial profiling shouldn't happen anywhere! But be careful in applying those specific findings to the entire field of hiring/jobs.
Have there been any experiments that stripped all identifying characteristics from resumes (gender, race, age) including things like name, graduation year, college, etc., and recorded the resulting hiring outcomes? A company as big as google could easily do something like sanitize resumes to ensure impartial hiring.
> try to understand one another
> ...
> arrogance, assumptions, and short-sighted thinking
What happened to trying to understand one another? Or should others only try to understand you, without you trying to understand them? The premise behind affirmative action is that it is needed in the present to correct for other forms of systemic bias that we haven't been able to eliminate yet. Practically all of the people who believe this, whether they do so rightly or wrongly, have color blindness as an eventual goal, just that pretending we're already there will never get us there. If you disagree with the premise, engage with it. Accusing others of arrogance etc. because you haven't tried to understand their POV - it's so well explained so many places that if you had tried you would have succeeded - isn't constructive.
I suppose these white and asian men are better off not being employed by a sexist and racist company. Even if they got in the door who's to say that "no raises for white/asian men" isn't the next step (if that policy isn't already in place).
I hope Google gets raked over the coals for this though. Not only are they hurting these men (and their families -- if they have them) but they're also hurting women. What man wants to be an "ally" to the women in tech movement when that movement's goal is to put them out of work? This is just going to create more hostility between people who should be working together, not at war with each other.
Garbage comments like yours are what perpetuate the rift between the Asian/White (what I refer to as the "upper-class") super majority in tech and the infinitely smaller minority that are brown people and women in tech. I'm part of the latter group and there is nothing funny about how marginalized we feel around the rest of you.
I don't think making light of a otherwise sad situation, is "fueling hatred". It's actually lightening the mood while pointing out room for improvement. Trying to stay positive is something we can all do, even when there are injustices.
> "So you being poor is justification enough to spread divisive comments and fuel further hatred (on either side)"
This is over-dramatic...
I'm just saying in today's world you can identify as whatever the hell you want, and nobody can question it apparently...so It might be a good strategy for white males to "identify" as the race/gender that seem to get additional points on their applications based on their race/gender.
Ambulance chasing lawyers seem to have focused their efforts on large tech. Reminds of that joke "Why do robbers go after banks?". "That's where the money is". Wonder what the lawyer vs individual split is in these cases....most of them land up settling any way.
Shouldn't the demographics of new google hires look roughly like the demographics of university graduates? If say 80% of graduates are men, how could google hit gender parity without discriminating?
This is a question I have as well. The trends currently seem to heavily favor white males right now.
Maybe part of the issue has to do with the early education system? I'll admit this idea is not originally mine, but I like it. For some reason is sounds right?
This doesn’t surprise me. I can’t speak to what it’s like to be a white man but for some reason Asians especially men are excluded as being part of what contributes to diversity despite being visible persons of colour.
I read more than once on diversity related posts or comments that East-Asian are considered privileged or even... white.
That shows the real motive is not the one stated. This diversity stuff is a power game used by some minorities go get some advantages for themselves. They do not care about the minorities that can achieve things by themselves, with education and hard work.
Right, because splitting people up into arbitrary groups based on melanin levels and ancestral migration does a world of good in promoting trust and good will.
Well when Asians are discriminated against in university admissions and now even when searching for a job (at least in the case of Asian males), exactly what kind of privilege do Asians really have?
Asian males are generally, without knowing them, considered to be smart, hardworking, nonviolent, helpful, family and work oriented, and stable. And they likely (I would guess) on average be more likely to be raised by both parents, who model school and work and family to them. So, in terms of what is termed as priviledge...theres that.
As far as I can tell, they are still deeply infected by toxic ideologues who will witch-hunt anyone who openly disagrees with their politics. So many of my old classmates did this vehement un-personing of James Damore, even when they had no factual basis for what they were saying. Someday someone should write a play about it. In the meantime, there's "The Drumhead."
I don't know what the position was and diversity for PR sake alone is nuts and it's harmful. Also agreed, any discrimination is discrimination and not OK.
That being said, it is YouTube. Sure most programmers are white or Asian males but many YouTube viewers are not. It could be in this case that a broader demographic more representative of end users was desirable for actual practical reasons and it was more than about slinging code fast and a PR quota stunt.
Just a note to acknowledge that user IntronExon predicted stories and comments exactly like this being raised in reaction to the stories about endemic sexism that were briefly on the front page today. Now replaced by these tales of unfairness to men. You called, it, Intron.
I really hope that this marks a turning of the tides, because what has been going on in tech, as well as certain non-tech industries, in the name of "diversity," has been nothing short of abhorrent.
The doublespeak is inescapable. They claim to stand against racism and sexism, but will not hesitate to discriminate based on race or sex to meet some kind of nonsensical demographic parity targets which are absolutely not reflective of the actual qualifications of applicant pools.
Meanwhile, with the other hand, they claim that the existing industry leaders are in the wrong for supposedly doing just that, when merely conflating equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. How the hell do you seriously expect to achieve something like gender parity, for example, through hiring, in a competitive industry when incoming male graduates outnumber female graduates 10 to 1?
How can people be so disconnected from reality and blame biased hiring practices?
It is abhorrent to hire one of two very similar people, but prefer the black to overcome the huge bias for white people? In an attempt to redress the 100s of years of imbalance?
But it is not abhorrent to treat black people like shit and disclude them from many roles for many years?
Absolutely, but those slights do not justify harming other innocent people. Especially in a business context, where the rationale for hiring is supposed to be about productivity.
And it isn't fair to presume that we benefited from some kind of historic opression based on the color of our skin either - some of us are immigrants, or first or second generation descendants, having faced persecution of our own, pre and post immigration.
I remember back in college when I applied for a job in a multi-national company, I didn't get a math screening quiz that applicants from outside of United States had to take. The quiz was pretty easy middle school math that would take 15 minutes to complete.
It turns out that the reason is that screening for basic math competency could be discrimination, because it reduces the chance of hiring for minorities who do less well at math testing. If the quiz were carried out in US, the company would need to prepare some report stating that math is essential to the job, which would be very cumbersome and costly to do scientifically.
I found it ridiculous as the position clearly needed math and I believe basic arithmatic is a valuable skill to ask for majority of the jobs, even for low-skill positions like cashier at Walmart. While eliminating discrimination is a great cause, all the band-aids to make the issue look less bad is shameful. Instead of improving basic education for minority communities (which costs some money now with high return from enhanced labor productivity and less welfare), our governments/society artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
It turns out that the reason is that screening for basic math competency could be discrimination, because it reduces the chance of hiring for minorities who do less well at math testing.
If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.
artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
Eroding meritocracy is ultimately bad for everyone. It's through climbing meritocratic ladders that minority groups throughout history have raised their prospects.
While it's clearly not genuinely discriminatory to filter people based on math skills, this is something that gets pushed internally at some companies by the people they hire to improve their diversity. They see that the people they "want to hire" can't pass some standard so they call it discriminatory. It's an easy way for them to show "success".
If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.
But you can still be challenged to prove in court that it's not only not directly racist, but also actually useful and related to the job requirements. Which can get expensive.
> If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.
Lets say that Google added a test for its engineers, that screened for writing and communication skills. Think, SAT verbal questions or something. And lets say that it just so happens that women are a lot better at SAT verbal questions than men.
Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?
I don’t see a problem with that as long as everyone takes the same test. An individual’s skills are not bound by the race and gender to which they belong.
Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?
My verbal scores happened to be better than my math scores on both the SAT and the GRE, so I'd be all for this! Someone did a study in the 80's that suggested that programmers had to do more interaction involving details than other jobs. Good verbal abilities are going to help out, in my view.
>The quiz was pretty easy middle school math that would take 15 minutes to complete.
Racist, discriminatory, or whatever you might think this would be, I cannot imagine being any type of manager in any type of corporation and wanting to hire someone above retail clerk-level who could not pass such a test. I just wouldn't want any company business passing through the judgement and perception of someone that never learned mathematical reasoning beyond single-variable algebra, even if it seems like math abilities are irrelevant to the position. Innumeracy might be less of a big deal than illiteracy, but it is still a fundamental gap.
If it was being pushed on international hires, it could have just been a trivial check against unreliable international standards and qualification reporting or something.
This begs the question, what is Latino and what is white? I was born in a Latin American country to a Latin American mother and a Canadian father, have lived here my entire life but if you saw me you wouldn't even think I spoke Spanish.
Likewise, I've made friends in the US who are of Mexican descent and look very much like it but don't speak a lick of Spanish.
This has led me to feel not at home in either my country of origin or Canada. Since I'm too white to be from here and don't know enough about Canadian lifestyle to relate to anyone there.
Many aspects of how we categorize humans fall apart when you start asking questions like this. Best I can say is there are no logically satisfying answers.
People outside of tech think there's this silent discrimination and hostility against women and minorities, but it's the complete opposite. If you could choose your race and gender going into these interviews, you would be a complete idiot to choose male or white or asian.
It's not just in hiring either. Another thing I've noticed is if you fail as a male engineer, you get fired. If you fail as a female engineer, you get reassigned to product management. These positions seem to be reserved for non-males. Women get reassigned, men get shown the door.
It's getting to the point where all of this is so overt and so undeniable. It's all to avoid lawsuits, but what if they're just exposing themselves to more lawsuits on the other end of that pendulum?
I have to think at some point the race- and gender-based meddling these companies do in people's careers will have to stop.
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Swim tournament is severely underrepresented by deep skin colors. Meanwhile track and field is the opposite.
Let's mix all colors everywhere based on population percentile, to achieve diversity, equal rights and fairness.
Or do something like Dr.King hoped, that is, don't judge a person by color.
Nurse Practitioners: 92% women, median $107k
Veterinarians: 83% women, median $88k
All data from BLS.
[1] Computer and mathematical occupations (engineers, programmers, etc):
> 4,804k jobs, $78k median, 25.5% women, 7% projected growth
[2] Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (doctors, nurses, technicians):
> 9,141k jobs, $63k median, 75.0% women, 18% projected growth
If we imagine the ideal scenario of employment across all jobs being 50/50 men/women then we need to add 2.3 million women to tech and 4.5 million men to healthcare. Arguably, the lack of men entering the healthcare field (good-paying jobs, growing need) is at least as important as the lack of women entering technology, but why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home.htm
[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/home.ht...
[3] Percent women info: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
Who is we? HN? If so, the answer to that is obvious.
Your comparison needs more nuance, in my view. If health care had 100 people, 80 nurses (70% of which are women) and 20 doctors (10% of which are women) then you'd have a breakdown like the following:
Women: 56 nurses, 2 doctors
Men: 24 nurses, 18 doctors
If you said the median doctor has a salary of 200K and a nurse 65k, men are paid 5160K and women are paid 4040K. In other words men are paid 56% of the total healthcare salary despite only representing 42% of the workforce. So despite the majority of health care professionals being women, men are still overrepresented in terms of salary, and in a way, influence. This example obviously uses fake numbers, but is the crux of the problem.
Money allocation is more accurate than job allocation imo. Moreover, if you were to total men's salaries/wealth and compare it to women's wealth it would be overwhelming in favor of men. Discussions surrounding specific job types and their gender allocation are irrelevant and a distraction. If men and women represented the same amount of total wealth in the US I think these discussions would be more meaningful, but the disparity in wealth is reflected influence and consequently opportunity. So, yeah, more men will be reflected with higher percentages of the higher income opportunities. This is reflected in the BLS data:
Employees vs. Managers
Nurses vs. Doctors
Teachers vs. School Administrators
Business owners
etc. etc.
The issue has never been that men have more of the jobs. The issue is that men have all of the money. That's why people are talking about tech, and say, not education. The job discussion (particularly within tech) is just a way to attempt to solve a tiny aspect of the problem.
http://blog.diversitynursing.com/blog/topic/male-nurse
And we still wonder why boys ragequit school at unprecedented levels: There’s only 1 man left for 2 women at university now. And it keeps deflating. Could it be too much effort placed on getting women to succeed, and too much misandry from teachers? and men defending their side of equality systematically being accused of masculinism? No, men can’t be discriminated against, because discrimination only touches women, by definition.
That’s not true.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/22/male-teacher-...
You seem to be assuming that Black people simply have more skill and performance than others. You do this in Basketball but not in other areas.
Currently, hiring males for programming jobs is due to skill and performance, because far more men chose to go through this type of education than women. Huge numbers of men and women don't enjoy straining to grapple with abstract concepts for long stretches of time, sitting hunched over a keyboard, and so on. But, more men do than women, at the moment. So does that mean things are just fine the way they are, as your comment suggests about being Black and skill and performance?
Why not encourage, for instance, more Chinese basketball players to get scholarships, and increase their skill and performance? Why settle for how things are, which currently is not very diverse as anyone can plainly see?
China's basketball team has a lot of great Chinese players.
The NBA is actively recruiting/training for elite talent in China: http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/12/news/companies/china-nba-bas...
Which was: how come drwl accepts the status quo with NBA and not with programmers? Why do they simply assume that some qualities are more prevalent with Blacks but not with males?
I am not taking a position in my comment one way or the other, just pointing out a potential double standard so the reader can make their own conclusions by reconciling them :)
I assume you are clearly on the side of "things are the way they are because that's how biology works". So here is another one, far more politically charged. Are you prepared to endorse this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United...
"There is general agreement in the literature that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes than are whites in the United States. Whether this is the case for less serious crimes is less clear."
This statement is considered racist. However the equivalent statement for men and women is not considered sexist: men commit far more violent crime than women.
Therefore, should these things be used in profiling people suspected of violent crime?
You can go on and on about these things.
Fun fact: professional basketball was once dominated by inner-city Jews
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/11/25/when-jews-d...
This is very similar to how we do admissions for most college education, except now imagine the basketball scout saying "You crushed it out there, but sorry, we have enough %race players this year".
But don't forget to represent people of different body types by weight and height as well.
As a very short, fat, and white dude who can't jump...but has a decent jumper, I still want my shot at Lebron James in the NBA.
False equivalency.
How do we encourage short people to grow taller? Or kids to grow up into a tall adult?
Coming to tech, it's possible to encourage people to work in STEM who otherwise may feel unwelcome due to various issues, including gender, age, race, workplace attitudes, glass ceilings etc. That includes trying to have role models that kids may want to emulate.
Just hecause certain traits are mental rather than physical doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Asians and South Asians are vastly underrepresented in the Music, Entertainment, and Acting industries and Asian and South Asian women are vastly underrepresented in Fashion, Modeling, etc, industries. Sometimes freedom of choice results in outcomes that we shouldn't try to force but it's not white and black. In STEM, gender disparity results in many problems for females, in the other industries I mentioned it's significantly due to connections, glass ceiling, a certain type of "boys club" but also due to choice. I agree with role models, and removing barriers, but I highly highly disagree with excluding individuals based on their race. That is racist and I will oppose that to the core of my being
Yes, its very much a natural advantage to all things being equal, be tall to play basketball. Source: Am tall guy.
I personally try not to hold it against my fellow white male entrepreneurs from prestigious schools and affluent backgrounds that I know we had an easier time raising capital and hiring people because of our race, gender, and social connections.
In both cases I imagine there are capable young non-black men who don't pursue basketball because its a "black sport" and there are technically minded young black women who don't pursue software because its a "nerdy white man industry". Regardless of if the NBA is actually biased, or if tech companies are actually sexist, what matters is the average normative cultural perception of that industry or discipline. If you are told your whole life by opinionated outsiders that only white men can program of course you are going to have a hard time finding the willpower to fight that presumption as a young uninformed anything.
rather than any of these organizations being overtly discriminatory, can we acknowledge certain groups might just be self-selecting into professions as a part of culture identity and work-life balance or risk/reward preferences. and that's okay!
The idea that male programmers are like professional athletes who are so far superior to women that they deserve a similar level of elevated status and disproportional representation is repugnant and indicative of the problem that needs to be solved.
This is a serious problem, leading to unnecessary deaths of black children. Here's an article by the founder of an organization trying to address this called "Black Kids Swim" [2].
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11172054
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-stereotype-is-k...
Either state officially, like "we do racial profiling of candidates", if you in fact do, or, well, don't if you don't.
That really only applies to junior personnel, though. I'm not sure what you would do for hiring more experienced people.
This is an opposite to narrowing your audience, because certain people need not apply.
I mean, I think employers should be able to introduce whatever filters they need for the job requirements ("our dance group only accepts ladies with prior dancing experience, older than 18, and no shorter than 6ft".) But I'd like them to be open about these requirements.
These programs are fantastic, and I think a great (albeit no silver bullet) strategy to grant greater OPPORTUNITY to underrepresented groups who may never be exposed to CompSci & Tech industries.
Things that are discussed in this article (if true) are clearly about reaching equal REPRESENTATION more than opportunity – and yeah, that's very disappointing since at the end of the day the only way to do that with immediate gratification is discrimination. (pipeline & societal problems don't get fixed overnight)
Reminds me of this controversy from not too long ago:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/30393117/ns/us_news-life/t/asian-a...
As Martin Luther King said: > History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors.
It’s just a fact that some groups end up with advantages in any society and some end up disadvantaged, and those that have advantages will use their power and wealth to retain them.
You don’t have to lay blame on people to see that it happens, and how it can be damaging to society if allowed to continue to its natural end— massive political and economic inequality.
So how do you fix it? If you go on a purely quote-unquote merit based system, the people who grew up with educated, wealthy parents, in safe neighborhoods, etc, will naturally fill the educational and recruitment pipelines that train people for high status jobs.
And thus you perpetuate injustice and unfairness from generation to generation, which even if you don’t object to morally, you should at least object to out of self interest, because it will leas to instability and civic unrest.
Racial quotas in hiring are a blunt instrument to be sure, and can be grossly unfair to individuals, particularly the less well off members of advantaged groups who get passed over.
I don’t know if I think they’re a good way to solve the problem over a purely class based approach, but if you look at it and all you see is ‘racism’, then I would suggest that you look a little bit deeper, because it’s a much more complex issue than that.
In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.
Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.
If similar companies in the same industry and geography have numbers that show a more diverse demographic profile, the EEOC is much more likely to consider a discrimination complaint non-frivolous, which is required to file a lawsuit alleging employer discrimination (as I understand it; not a lawyer).
Companies play this game a) to protect themselves against lawsuits; and b) to potentiate damage to competitors who are not yet explicitly playing this game, and therefore have correspondingly less demographic diversity.
Many companies have failed due in part to internal politics. Also, weren't many of the companies involved in the financial crisis going along with the prevailing political winds, just before everything changed?
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077541/ns/technology_and_science-...
Many companies have been trounced by outsiders unconstrained by their political liabilities.
Let's face it: Ford, Chevy and Chrysler all had sufficient applicants, even as Toyota and Honda were building the processes and company cultures that would dethrone them.
And scare quotes around "inefficiency" because I'm not convinced putting pressure on their productive white/asian male majority employees is actually inefficient for Google.
I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.
No wonder many Asians sigh relief when Clinton failed her presidency, or she surely would have pushed for more.
Making it difficult for families to immigrate together via family visa and reducing work visas does not play well.
The polling methodology is present in the report I posted.
Trump has proposed eliminating many of the major existing categories of legal immigration in the core, family-owned action based system. He's proposed replacing the eliminated categories with a small number of renewable non-immigrant (no path to citizenship or work permission) visas for parents of US citizens.
He's proposed no concrete increase in total permanent allocation in the remaining categories, though he's talked about cancelling the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the quota used there to help clear backlogs elsewhere.
If I had to choose one, I'd prefer more employment visas over family visas and definitely diversity visas.
It appeases his nationalist base because it would not give visas to immigrants in low-paid jobs. Most of those voters were never in contention for the high-paying tech jobs anyway. They have no reason to care too much about them.
Overall immigration will decrease.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/12/t...
Exit polls are different from opinion polls. The surveying techniques are entirely different, and in general exit polls are considered far more accurate than opinion polls -- because you're polling on a concrete question ("who did you vote for a few minutes ago") rather than a less concrete one ("who are you more likely to vote for").
You could just as easily reason that companies who aren't implementing these policies and actually hiring based on individual qualifications and not group identity will out compete their competitors in the free market. They'll surely get bad press for a while but eventually their haters will get tired and move on to the next news cycle. In the mean time the company has hired all of the "undesirable" straight white and Asian males (not intentionally but only because their value in the market has been artificially depressed) and they are easily outpacing the productivity of their rival firms.
As the postmodernists reject possible logical conclusions from their actions and claim organization power they will eventually come face to face with the free capitalist market and the firms they overtake will fail. That is of course if they can't act quickly enough in manifesting their utopian vision of the destruction of capitalism itself.
Employers are allowed to undertake initiatives to promote diversity hiring, employment lawyers say. But under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes. That means they can’t employ practices like hiring quotas based on race or only hiring one type of minority candidate, attorneys say. Such practices would also run afoul of California laws.
Step #1 Discriminate against the lower classes through a biased hiring process that favors upper class people over more qualified members of the 99%. A system of "culture" tests, nepotism, and simple favoritism. The "elite" investors fund the "elite" founders which hire "elite" friends.
Step #2 Realize your policy is classist and racist.
Step #3 Disregard the idea of creating a merit-based system.
Step #4 Commit explicit racism in an attempt to balance out your on-going racism.
Step #5 Ignore classism entirely, despite it being the root cause.
EDIT: Also, double down on the ideological fervor until th problem is solved.
Making the hiring decision would be harder because there's not as much information to go on, and it's not too hard to fake a superficial understanding of some technology. Presumably one would rely more heavily on rigorous aptitude testing (i.e. more of those whiteboard exercises everyone seems to hate and probably have bias problems of their own).
Anyone from Google or YouTube--or people who applied to work at either org in this time frame--have perspectives to add regarding this claim?
I believe my on-site went excellent technically overall, but I had a hard time meshing with a couple of my interviewers and wasn't surprised about my rejection. Nothing strange about that personally.
However, another Google recruiter reached out to me for two other potential positions, said I would be an excellent fit, and said they would set up the interviews for me.
A couple weeks passed and I pinged, no response. A month passed and I pinged, no response. Still haven't had a response from two separate recruiters to this day.
I don't wish to stir the pot -- Anything could have happened, there are some stories about Google recruiters forgetting their candidates, maybe they think I'm just annoying and not a good candidate, but in light of these specific circumstances this is certainly intriguing news.
It never happened to me until I moved to the Bay Area.
Seems like a way to filter for people with low market value.
The end result of all this sort of game playing is not going to be pretty.
That strategy has been shown to work. And people are more angry about the beneficiary being called out about it, than they are that they stole a reserved spot in the first place.
There's a lot of Indian people with Portuguese surnames from around Goa, but I'd think that Spanish would be very uncommon, unless it's their first name.
Racial identity for Hispanics seems to be a complex personal decision.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...
There are probably a lot of boring reasons this could've happened as well. It's probably boring.
I'm a white male and received a Google offer 8 month ago (turned it down to go work at twitch, because I love gaming). So this is not an across the board discrimination against EVERYONE, if that is what you were implying.
I am just 1 person among thousands, though, so I guess you'd have to get info from someone who applied exactly in the spring, to youtube, and had their interview cancelled.
I mean, I've interviewed with google and my application got "lost", when the interview process restarted I identified that I had already been phone screened and the suggestion from the recruiter was: "Oh, ok, I guess we'll follow up in six months".
There are no easy solutions, but it would help I think if all effort was concentrated on removing hurdles rather than patching problems downstream with lazy fixes.
> under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes.
The former veteran Google recruiters behind this suit are claiming they were 'instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.'
To answer your question the issue of discrimination is solved by not discriminating. If women and others are being discriminated against then stop doing this, rather than just start discriminating against other people.
No one expects it will be easy to end discrimination, but it is hard to see how it will be solved by piling on more discrimination.
Taking your boot off someone's throat doesn't make them your equal when they're still on the ground.
To ignore gender this should be combined with gender-neutral voice processing for phone interviews, but it’s doable and not that hard.
What happens after the person is hired?
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
(yes, its inconclusive, but)
> for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment
Not good for employees but I don’t see how it’s bad for Google.
Unhappy people are less likely to reflect on things, and more likely to do what the boss tells them to. Which is what you want your employees to do when you attract them with nice “don’t be evil” slogan, and make them optimize an ad server for the market capitalization metric.
I'm pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have.
Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists.
I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can some of the conversation be about that?
I've also been "discriminated" against for not being Native American (Casino Morongo in So Cal), and not being an Evangelical Christian (Cal Baptist University).
As it turns out-- those institutions are legally allowed to discriminate. It absolutely blew my mind being asked to "describe my relationship with jesus" in an interview.
There was a technical interview with a very nice guy, who said I scored the highest of any candidate who had ever interviewed for the university.
Then, this sallow cow of a woman with a permanent look of disgust on her face conducted my "religious" interview on subjects like evolution, the Trinity, and my relationship with Jesus.
I tried my best to be "reasonable," but I'm sure I looked like a deer in headlights. It's impossible to be reasonable with unreasonable people such as evangelicals.
My position on spirituality has softened quite a bit as I've gotten older and had a few "spiritual experiences"... but sometimes I wonder if, in the intervening years, if it has occurred to them that beliving in provably false things like creationism, (remember, evangelicals won't even accept that "evolution is gods mechanism of creation"), doesn't make for a good engineer.
Only cause you mentioned "world", its pretty common for only women, or even women who have taken breaks to raise a child to be eligible for many jobs in India, including at companies considered "Big4" like Microsoft.
There is also a suspension of the right to equality in favour of certain castes, and 50-70% of govt jobs and govt college seats can only be occupied by people from these castes.
Also the absolute numbers of each groups also matter. On this basis we should expect far few Asian and Black employees just on the basis that there are fewer than whites within the USA [0].
0. This is assuming the employee pool is drawn from the USA population.
1) hiring based on IQ, cutoff at 2 standard deviations above the global mean (mu = 100, sigma = 15, by design), 2 sigma above that makes 130. You get hired if you're the candidate with the highest IQ, if you satisfy the minimum of an IQ of 130
2) 8/20 hispanic, 8/20 white, 1.16/20 black, 2.6/20 asians (and let's just pretned that sums to 100%). Or: 40% hispanic, 40% white, 5.8% black, 13% asian
3) let's assume 1000 candidates for each position.
So each round has 1000 candidates: 400 hispanics, IQ taken from N(90, 15) 400 whites, IQ taken from N(100, 15) 58 black, IQ taken from N(85, 15) 130 asians, IQ taken from N(105, 15)
The numbers: 33.42% Asians, 10.85% Hispanic, 0.54% Black, 55.20% White
Odds of getting hired under those criteria: 0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White
And that's why nobody's going to be happy with expected outcomes. Just imagine the (completely "fair") news headline "Asians 25 TIMES more likely to get hired than blacks in the bay area".
> about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian.
These two comments say the same thing. Mine is standardized.
Your take away from all this is a little strange. The Google numbers say that Asians are 25 times more likely to be hired than blacks. That has happened in real life. No one complains about that. I have read that Google is too Asian though.
People harp about less-talented people not deserving to be there, but that is already the case. From a statistical point of view, Whites are over represented at the expense of Hispanics and Asians with a higher IQ. Real life is messy, but you get the idea.
This battle has been fought already and enough people at Google were convinced that there was a bias in their hiring practices. So, now they are in the process of correcting.
The level of the problem doesn't matter. Working at Google is an elite job. We could go a level lower to Stanford. Asians are under represented at Stanford. We could go down a level to an elite California High School. Asians are still under represented. Blacks and Hispanics are really under represented at this level. It only gets worse for them the lower you go at elite institutions.
I use the general population because that is where the workers are coming from. If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.
That's an interesting conclusion, statistically and as a societal commentary. Assuming for a second we take your conclusion as given, and we look at the legal liability question that someone in alphabet legal or HR has to be thinking about when the make hiring policy decisions: which population should their workforce be representative of: the base population, or the population of qualified applicants?
Edit: >I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.
I don't care I'm here for the legalities and statistics discussions, see my other comments here about judging people based on melanin or Genetics. It's silly where it isn't insulting to reduce a real person based on their inclusion/exclusion to poorly defined groups with little to no impact on actual ability to perform/qualify.
If you assume that the Silicon Valley percent of immigrant workers holds for Google you conclude that 6% of the American Googlers are African Americans, since none of the foreigners can be. About 2.4% [2] of computer science degree recipients in the US are African American.
[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf
[2] https://cra.org/crn/2015/09/expanding-the-pipeline-the-state...
How about we judge people on their merits ?
That's fine if everyone starts from the same base and has the same opportunities which, currently, they most assuredly do not. Let's knock this privileged bullshit on the head until then.
We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity (not outcome) but it's important to realize what is actually reasonable and achievable vs impossible.
And that's why "we should just judge people on their merits" is a bullshit statement.
> We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity
I am 100% behind this if it actually results in equal opportunities (spoiler: it never will.)
Some of these Asian males may have come out of abject poverty in countries like India - worked all their lives for a chance at better living, were that given the "same" opportunity ?
Please stop this entitled thinking. We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.
I know. Which is why "just judge people by their merits" is a nonsense argument.
> We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.
But since there's little chance of the former happening within the next decade or two, we're stuck with the latter.
It is currently impossible for an immigrant to avoid being mis-classified because the EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.
The misclassified immigrants is by far Silicon Valley's largest source of diversity, and the misclassification also makes diversity statistics incorrect for Americans in tech.
[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf
[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...
2. Minorities have faced discrimination the most.
3. Let's discriminate against Whites/Asians to correct #2, even though we accept the truth of #1.
I don't get this thought process at all..."lets fight discrimination with more discrimination!"
I though we left that behind a 100 years or more ago?
Non-white people are discriminated against because society as a whole accuses their parents as a whole of being degenerates.
> If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes?
I'm a german. Ask me about the amount of paying back my entire life has consisted of.
--
You're also veering very off-topic from the fact that op made the claim "more discrimination is being proposed as the solution" to which i replied by disagreeing that it is more, and claim it is the same amount of discrimination, just moved around.
How is this an acceptable solution??
So its more like "discrimination is bad, but only against some groups, if we discriminate against this other group though, its okay"...I still don't how this is "fair" or "just" in any sense
It is however an improvement, unless you think it is fair to discriminate one group massively and one not at all.
> It is not acceptable in the sense of "ok, we can stop now."
That means: It is not supposed to work well in the long run.
The sins of the father should not condemn his children.
Can you fix the existing imbalance without doing something?
What if the affirmative action were only temporary, and was designed to stop once balance is reached -- is it still discrimination?
The solution can't be to do nothing, doing nothing is why we are where we are, doing nothing is why discrimination exists. We need to fix #1 and #2 on your list before we can fix #3.
I would love to hear of an alternative thought process, please please suggest something better than affirmative action that might fix discrimination.
The thing I hate about it is that it involves rejecting candidates on the basis of the colour of their skin.
Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking people are just hired to fill a "diversity quota checklist", which may or may not be true.
For example, say I'm an employer that wants the best performing employees. I know that, for whatever societal/biological/whatever reasons, the black population in the US tends to have worse schooling (maybe the schools have less money, maybe the parents tend to be less wealthy, it doesn't really matter so long as I believe that the black population has some biases against them).
I can deduce just from these biases that the black population will tend to have lower grades, just because of these biases. I may choose to "correct" this bias by preferring equivalent hires that are black, on the assumption that if they have equivalent grades, they had to work harder/be smarter to achieve them, because of the aforementioned biases. I do this entirely from a selfish perspective - I want the best, and if my beliefs about the world are right, this gets me the best!
The same reasoning can theoretically be reversed for e.g. asian populations (maybe their schooling tends to be better, because e.g. wealthier or stricter parents causing more focus on school? Which would imply higher grades without necessarily translating into better workers).
Note: This is a hypothetical case for why an employer might voluntarily and correctly choose to use some form of "affirmative action". It is not necessarily what I think is right or what I think is happening, and is based on a lot of possible assumptions which I have no idea if true. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a case, which doesn't rely on "social justice" or anything other than correct self-interest of the employer.
The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis
But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man.
An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this.
(No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).
Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business.
You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.
I mean, let's take an extreme case and see if we can at least agree on that. One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity, since if for example everyone is refusing to hire black people because of racial discrimination (think 1930s), then an employer will come along and offer to hire black people for cheaper, and will therefore outcompete other companies, who will have to also hire black people at slightly higher wages, etc.
If we were in such a (1930s-like) world where every employer refuses to hire black people, and we were deciding who to hire, and our normal practice would be only to hire people with 2 years' worth of job experience. We would never hire a black person, because none of them would fit our requirements. In such a world, wouldn't it make sense, from a purely self-interested economic perspective, to change the requirements for black people to compensate for the screwed-up biased world we find ourselves in?
If not, then is the classic economic argument wrong?
I do not see what the logical situation is, because it is overruled completely by the individual's data which you already have right in front of you. It just sounds like applying biases by guessing with group membership instead of looking at the person. Anytime the group membership overrules the individuals' attributes, it's going the wrong way.
Also while I understand the context, some things just don't matter because life is fundamentally unfair and full of chaos. Yes everyone works differently at the same task even with similar results. Maybe they're smarter, or maybe they had a bad year, or got sick, or something else... how can you possibly account for any or all of that in a reasonable sense?
> but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience?
Judge their school experience. Give them responsibility commensurate with their skills and measure continuously to establish the history, then promote or fire.
> One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity
Yes, it does. However capitalism isn't perfect and is still up to legal, political, and generally irrational whims of the people. If you're talking about 1930's then there were actual laws segregating people. If you move forward to WWII, then it was the political climate where it was accepted to not work with others regardless of the money. If anything, I think a common love for profit actually does a lot to remove these barriers once people realize they're all better off generating and spending wealth instead of hating each other over looks and other useless attributes.
The goal posts of equal _outcome_ continue to move, from university enrollment, to employment enrollment. And there are some people who want to see it go further. (What societal engineering scheme does this resemble?) With no apparent regard for what it costs.
Do you want to live in a world where you are judged by the color of your skin, your gender, your "ethnicity"?
Or do you think that, maybe, we should judge people by who they are? The substantive characteristics that define an individual. Not a fantasy, not a PR story, but _who an individual is_.
We should all have the decency to look beyond the superficial traits of a person, to not make assumptions about their character, positive or negative, and to truly try to understand one another.
Blatant discrimination of such superficial features has no place in a healthy society, or one that wishes to become one. This arrogance, assumptions, and short-sighted thinking cost more than we can afford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream
We already do, through systemic biases.
Sadly, as the downvotes indicate, reminding people of their privilege seems to be an unpopular thing.
I often wonder why many Caucasian complain about foreigners taking jobs yet those complainers never bothered to learn an in-demand skill. Thus those nice high paying jobs are going to those who are qualified no matter their race, creed or sex.
I have first hand experience with this. As a normal working-class white guy with poor parents and no connections (I worked my way through school), I had a hard time even landing an interview at first. As a social experiment, I changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, kept everything else on my resume the same, and reapplied to all the jobs that didn't want me previously. Every single company that rejected Joe was overjoyed when Joanna applied. In every case I got a email within the week wanting to meet and interview me. It was kind of eye-opening. I didn't follow through as "Joanna" because the sexist hiring policies were enough to put me off working at these companies entirely. I eventually found an employer that wasn't sexist and have been happy with them so far...
How is being denied employment a "privilege"?
Reading that sentence as a black person was cringe inducing to say the least. It truly never ceases to amaze me the complete lack of awareness that white males have of their elevated position in society.
There is a place for consciously paying attention to race, ethnicity, and gender in that case. (Admittedly, the alleged situation in the headline is too far.)
Speak for yourself. Also, like similarity goes beyond skin color. I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race.
That being said furries are weird.
https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-the-science-actually-says-about...
Is that unusual freedom from unconscious bias reflected in the history of what engineers you have chosen to interview, made offers to, or subsequently promoted? Everyone thinks they're free from bias, until the empirical results show that the majority of them mathematically must be wrong.
I'm a scientist. I believe in the power of observation, action, and assessment (further observation). If I perceive that a problem exists, then I: do my due diligence to determine the extent to which it exists (if at all), determine if and how I should solve it, and carry out that determination. I believe there are plenty of people that could use an adjustment, at least for the matter you describe.
But I'm an even bigger believer in priorities. Of investing energy and time--of our one, limited life--towards the goals that I think matter the most. The health of our planet and power inequality, for two. There are just some people for whom any such "adjustment" would only serve to (at best) distract them from other endeavours, where they may be sorely needed. Good people, who do truly good things. At what point do you stop this (re)education? Can we hope for a complete disassociation from our biological tendency to observe and encode patterns? Do we even want that? At some point, the energy expended on a perceived problem may greatly outweigh the returns you get from the investment. Energy that could have been better spent.
Right now, I see much energy--mostly talk--being devoted, in a "shotgun" approach, to this problem and other social problems. I see it talked about in mass-consumed venues, and I see others parroting talking points. But for me, my colleagues, and my friends, it just isn't a problem. I interact with individuals all over the world and we are able to work together toward common goals. And I think that's what matters most.
> YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.
I'd like to remind people of what Denise Young Smith, who ran HR at Apple, said, before suddenly stepping down after the outrageous repsonse.
> “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.
> “Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
She's gone now, instantly, after working there for 20 years and rising to senior executive VP. What is going on in our industry?
Her crime was not having ideological purity...
What I can say we do need more of, however, is well-engaged, open and honest discussion. Having leading voices speak your mind can be very good, but central figures can be fallible. A better solution would be to have input from humans in the "silent majority", whatever that might be.
If you 'whiten up' your resume, you're more likely to get callbacks. Even if the company indicates that they're pro-diversity or equal-opportunity [1]. Employees with black-sounding names are in general less likely to receive callbacks even when accounting for economic status and skill level [2]. Depending on your name, you will be perceived as being more violent or lesser in status [3]. For minorities, this sort of thing is what they already and commonly experience.
So while we can claim that diversity hiring and so forth has swung too far in the opposite direction, studies and research in general has shown this to not be the case. I'm skeptical of any lawsuits like this brought against Google and while I don't doubt there are instances of terrible hiring managers going too far I imagine people will use this lawsuit as vindication for why they weren't hired.
[1] http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
[3] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/5494/black-sound...
That entire process amplifies both unconscious biases and discrepancies of economic status. People without economic means to network, made worse by prejudices and expectations.
Foot in the door is a huge step, and it's totally okay for companies to push initiatives that allow more minorities to get their foot in the door / exposure to the company and industry. It's not okay for them to push that agenda in assessment to reach better distribution numbers in representation.
Not really. It can still be true that this white/asian discrimination is happening in tech, whereas the listed papers appear to test non-technical job fields. Ideally, racial profiling shouldn't happen anywhere! But be careful in applying those specific findings to the entire field of hiring/jobs.
I hope Google gets raked over the coals for this though. Not only are they hurting these men (and their families -- if they have them) but they're also hurting women. What man wants to be an "ally" to the women in tech movement when that movement's goal is to put them out of work? This is just going to create more hostility between people who should be working together, not at war with each other.
Turns out you can be a poor white (like myself)...just an FYI.
This is over-dramatic...
I'm just saying in today's world you can identify as whatever the hell you want, and nobody can question it apparently...so It might be a good strategy for white males to "identify" as the race/gender that seem to get additional points on their applications based on their race/gender.
That’s pretty flippant and insensitive to the struggles that trans people go through.
“Gender is ephemeral and a personal decision but also women are different than men, let’s hire more women.”
Maybe part of the issue has to do with the early education system? I'll admit this idea is not originally mine, but I like it. For some reason is sounds right?
That shows the real motive is not the one stated. This diversity stuff is a power game used by some minorities go get some advantages for themselves. They do not care about the minorities that can achieve things by themselves, with education and hard work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjJN08uqt70
That being said, it is YouTube. Sure most programmers are white or Asian males but many YouTube viewers are not. It could be in this case that a broader demographic more representative of end users was desirable for actual practical reasons and it was more than about slinging code fast and a PR quota stunt.
The doublespeak is inescapable. They claim to stand against racism and sexism, but will not hesitate to discriminate based on race or sex to meet some kind of nonsensical demographic parity targets which are absolutely not reflective of the actual qualifications of applicant pools.
Meanwhile, with the other hand, they claim that the existing industry leaders are in the wrong for supposedly doing just that, when merely conflating equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. How the hell do you seriously expect to achieve something like gender parity, for example, through hiring, in a competitive industry when incoming male graduates outnumber female graduates 10 to 1?
How can people be so disconnected from reality and blame biased hiring practices?
But it is not abhorrent to treat black people like shit and disclude them from many roles for many years?
And it isn't fair to presume that we benefited from some kind of historic opression based on the color of our skin either - some of us are immigrants, or first or second generation descendants, having faced persecution of our own, pre and post immigration.
It turns out that the reason is that screening for basic math competency could be discrimination, because it reduces the chance of hiring for minorities who do less well at math testing. If the quiz were carried out in US, the company would need to prepare some report stating that math is essential to the job, which would be very cumbersome and costly to do scientifically.
I found it ridiculous as the position clearly needed math and I believe basic arithmatic is a valuable skill to ask for majority of the jobs, even for low-skill positions like cashier at Walmart. While eliminating discrimination is a great cause, all the band-aids to make the issue look less bad is shameful. Instead of improving basic education for minority communities (which costs some money now with high return from enhanced labor productivity and less welfare), our governments/society artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.
artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
Eroding meritocracy is ultimately bad for everyone. It's through climbing meritocratic ladders that minority groups throughout history have raised their prospects.
It's as if they think people can't do math based on ethnicity. Those people are the true racists.
But you can still be challenged to prove in court that it's not only not directly racist, but also actually useful and related to the job requirements. Which can get expensive.
Lets say that Google added a test for its engineers, that screened for writing and communication skills. Think, SAT verbal questions or something. And lets say that it just so happens that women are a lot better at SAT verbal questions than men.
Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?
My verbal scores happened to be better than my math scores on both the SAT and the GRE, so I'd be all for this! Someone did a study in the 80's that suggested that programmers had to do more interaction involving details than other jobs. Good verbal abilities are going to help out, in my view.
Racist, discriminatory, or whatever you might think this would be, I cannot imagine being any type of manager in any type of corporation and wanting to hire someone above retail clerk-level who could not pass such a test. I just wouldn't want any company business passing through the judgement and perception of someone that never learned mathematical reasoning beyond single-variable algebra, even if it seems like math abilities are irrelevant to the position. Innumeracy might be less of a big deal than illiteracy, but it is still a fundamental gap.
If it was being pushed on international hires, it could have just been a trivial check against unreliable international standards and qualification reporting or something.
Likewise, I've made friends in the US who are of Mexican descent and look very much like it but don't speak a lick of Spanish.
This has led me to feel not at home in either my country of origin or Canada. Since I'm too white to be from here and don't know enough about Canadian lifestyle to relate to anyone there.
It's not just in hiring either. Another thing I've noticed is if you fail as a male engineer, you get fired. If you fail as a female engineer, you get reassigned to product management. These positions seem to be reserved for non-males. Women get reassigned, men get shown the door.
It's getting to the point where all of this is so overt and so undeniable. It's all to avoid lawsuits, but what if they're just exposing themselves to more lawsuits on the other end of that pendulum?
I have to think at some point the race- and gender-based meddling these companies do in people's careers will have to stop.