As I understand it, recruiters where told to stop all recruiting of white and asian males, and ramp up hiring of women and people of color. This was at YouTube. The recruiter objected, was fired, and is now suing.
You mean the "highly overrepresented in tech jobs when compared to the general population" bucket?
I agree, the history is quite fascinating. We've got white men who come from a culture that for centuries had an explicit pro-white and more specifically pro-WASP bias.
Part of the bias was to prevent Asians from immigrating to the US. This only changed in the 1960s when the National Origins Formula was abolished. The new policy allowed for skilled people, and people with family ties to the US (including war brides) to come in.
As a result, many of the new Asian immigrants came in with an education and skills. Many of them also come from a tradition with an emphasis on education.
In this way it's similar to the quotas that many colleges used to have on admitting Jewish students, many of whom come from a culture that emphasizes education. The idea of a "well-rounded student" and the SAT were put into place to bias the selection process towards educated WASPs, who could afford the prep schools the included topics like Latin and sports.
Now, I have to say "many" because "Asian" is more a term of geography than of culture. There are many different cultures in Asia. The Hmong people, for example, have a very different history in the US than the Japanese people. Many of the Hmong were poor hill farmers or war refugees with very little education, and in the US they have a high dropout rate and low levels of college completion. A policy which promotes cultural diverse representation but which rejects a Hmong man as being "Asian" because there are too many Chinese applicants suffers from its own sorts of built-in American prejudice of what culture means.
I also find it fascinating how women and Native Americans are also placed in the same bucket, to use your term.
What you regard as an "American interpretation" is simply not true.
I think you have over-simplified the issue such that the result doesn't give a useful understanding of what's going on in the US.
There are far more than two cohorts, and there are multiple levels of privilege, not all of which are hierarchically arranged.
No long-time Bostonian is going to place Boston a blue blood (an example of an upper-class WASP) in the same cohort as a Ukrainian immigrant.
In a test for "is there hiring discrimination on the basis of skin color?" then certainly a Ukrainian immigrant and upper-class WASP would be categorized together ... in the current US context. (I say "current US context" because Finns were once considered non-white because of a presumed Mongolian heritage; Italians and Greeks of course were also considered not-white, even though most now consider them "white".)
But the US also makes it illegal to discriminate based on religion (a majority of Ukrainians are Orthodox) and national origin. For that they would be in different cohorts.
Certainly some Americans might only use a single, simple ranking system where all white men are put together. This lawsuit alleges just such an example.
But it is not the general American interpretation of diversity.
Note also that the alleged focus on "Women, Blacks, and LatinX" does not even consider that Native Americans might apply, so it sounds like this is a rather naive policy to start with.
Also, this lawsuit says nothing about the Google hiring practices involving non-Americans. It may be that a Ukrainian immigrant might have faced different obstacles than an American-born applicant with Ukrainian-born parents.
What I think you're seeing is that race and gender (however constructed) have been the most significant forms of discrimination in the US -- and of course in other countries as well. So those are the ones which are talked about the most.
That's decidedly not what happened, and not even what the plaintiff claims. The plaintiff claims that one manager asked to only consider "historically underrepresented" groups for low-level positions for a while, which Google denies.
Did you read it? It states that hires most be of "Diversity" Meaning not white male, and not asian male. Asking to only consider "historically underrepresented" groups, isnt that in fact, the exact same thing?
The two differences I meant to highlight are that (a) this is only a claim, while your comment represents it as a fact and (b) even the claim doesn't state they were asked to "stop all recruiting of Asian and white males", only recruiting for low-level roles. For higher positions, white males were still considered, which I think gives the claim a very different sound than your representation of it.
The case seems to be that recruiter failed to adhere to positive discrimination policies of Google (YouTube) and was fired for not meeting positive discrimination quotas. (Groups specifically labelled as Black, Female and LatinX.)
Details is that the reason was bad "satisfaction score" but other people who were not fired had much lower scores.
I find it weird that the term "positive discrimination" can possibly exist. A perfect example of an oxymoron. It would be better for everybody involved to admit that it's not "positive discrimination" but just "discrimination", and that it's a part of the belief system of the company. Being honest and open is so rare these days.
> Google has been slapped with a lawsuit by a former recruiter who alleges the Internet giant fired him for complaining about hiring practices to boost diversity that he says discriminated against white and Asian men.
The critics of Google’s effort to promote workforce diversity now include one of its own former recruiters, who claims in a lawsuit he was fired because he didn’t toe the line on rejecting white and Asian male job candidates.
The Alphabet Inc. unit had “irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” according to the complaint filed in state court in Redwood City, California.
"""
I think the issue wasn't so much the discrimination but the retaliation when it was brought into question.
13. In April of 2017, Google's Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black or Hispanic, and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. [The recruiter] refused to comply with this request.
Another bit:
In response to Plaintiff's complaints, Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees to purge any and all references to the race/gender quotes from its e-mail database
Not to mention said HR boss was openly hostile to the person refusing to adhere to these policies - retaliating with bad reviews in direct violation of other Google policies...
Big old mess. Probably some illegal company policy and they will only burn the HR boss for it...
For the past several years Google's highest-level managers have discriminated against white and asian males for PR reasons. White applicants where immediately purged (quote) out of the hiring process. They fired an HR recruiter that didn't want to discriminate.
He sued them.
I think the title is misleading. The recruiter was fired for a bad satisfaction score, and only _claims_ he was fired for other reasons. The title makes this sound like a fact.
21 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] threadI agree, the history is quite fascinating. We've got white men who come from a culture that for centuries had an explicit pro-white and more specifically pro-WASP bias.
Part of the bias was to prevent Asians from immigrating to the US. This only changed in the 1960s when the National Origins Formula was abolished. The new policy allowed for skilled people, and people with family ties to the US (including war brides) to come in.
As a result, many of the new Asian immigrants came in with an education and skills. Many of them also come from a tradition with an emphasis on education.
In this way it's similar to the quotas that many colleges used to have on admitting Jewish students, many of whom come from a culture that emphasizes education. The idea of a "well-rounded student" and the SAT were put into place to bias the selection process towards educated WASPs, who could afford the prep schools the included topics like Latin and sports.
Now, I have to say "many" because "Asian" is more a term of geography than of culture. There are many different cultures in Asia. The Hmong people, for example, have a very different history in the US than the Japanese people. Many of the Hmong were poor hill farmers or war refugees with very little education, and in the US they have a high dropout rate and low levels of college completion. A policy which promotes cultural diverse representation but which rejects a Hmong man as being "Asian" because there are too many Chinese applicants suffers from its own sorts of built-in American prejudice of what culture means.
I also find it fascinating how women and Native Americans are also placed in the same bucket, to use your term.
The American interpretation of “diversity” considers a Ukranian immigrant and an upper-class WASP part of the same “privileged” cohort.
I think you have over-simplified the issue such that the result doesn't give a useful understanding of what's going on in the US.
There are far more than two cohorts, and there are multiple levels of privilege, not all of which are hierarchically arranged.
No long-time Bostonian is going to place Boston a blue blood (an example of an upper-class WASP) in the same cohort as a Ukrainian immigrant.
In a test for "is there hiring discrimination on the basis of skin color?" then certainly a Ukrainian immigrant and upper-class WASP would be categorized together ... in the current US context. (I say "current US context" because Finns were once considered non-white because of a presumed Mongolian heritage; Italians and Greeks of course were also considered not-white, even though most now consider them "white".)
But the US also makes it illegal to discriminate based on religion (a majority of Ukrainians are Orthodox) and national origin. For that they would be in different cohorts.
Certainly some Americans might only use a single, simple ranking system where all white men are put together. This lawsuit alleges just such an example.
But it is not the general American interpretation of diversity.
Note also that the alleged focus on "Women, Blacks, and LatinX" does not even consider that Native Americans might apply, so it sounds like this is a rather naive policy to start with.
Also, this lawsuit says nothing about the Google hiring practices involving non-Americans. It may be that a Ukrainian immigrant might have faced different obstacles than an American-born applicant with Ukrainian-born parents.
What I think you're seeing is that race and gender (however constructed) have been the most significant forms of discrimination in the US -- and of course in other countries as well. So those are the ones which are talked about the most.
I don't know what actually happened.
Details is that the reason was bad "satisfaction score" but other people who were not fired had much lower scores.
We'll see how it goes.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/01/google-a...
I can't seem to copy paste from scribd, so from Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/google-su...
"""
The critics of Google’s effort to promote workforce diversity now include one of its own former recruiters, who claims in a lawsuit he was fired because he didn’t toe the line on rejecting white and Asian male job candidates.
The Alphabet Inc. unit had “irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” according to the complaint filed in state court in Redwood City, California.
"""
I think the issue wasn't so much the discrimination but the retaliation when it was brought into question.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498586
13. In April of 2017, Google's Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black or Hispanic, and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. [The recruiter] refused to comply with this request.
Another bit:
In response to Plaintiff's complaints, Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees to purge any and all references to the race/gender quotes from its e-mail database
Big old mess. Probably some illegal company policy and they will only burn the HR boss for it...