22 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] thread
It's almost as if the guy who wrote that their approach isn't working had a point. Nah, crazy talk!
Recently the board voted against recommendations made by employees to increase diversity. It's pretty clear what priority the Google board gives to diversity, which is their right even if wrong.
How is it wrong? Who are you to know better what is good for Google than the Google executives?
Wasn't that a proposal to increase view point diversity? My understanding was that they wanted more conservative board seats. That's different from the diversity this article discusses.
People often write about how outreach efforts such as Google's are illegal. They are not. There's a very specific law that encourages it. I learned about it because Karen Sandler told me about it when she explained to me why Outreachy went from outreaching to women to also outreach to specific US minorities. It's the only change that this US law allowed.

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2017-title29-vol4/xml/CFR-...

(comment deleted)
Interesting to see for the first time attrition statistics.

It's higher across the board for men versus women (and the gap is wider for tech roles but no figures were given here). And for ethnicity in 2017, attrition was highest for Black Googlers followed by Latinx Googlers, and lowest for Asian Googlers.

Is there evidence supporting Google denies diverse hires of the same skill levels at others in the position? Or is this just a byproduct of our countries failures and all the best computer scientist applying at Google are actually white males? Should Google attempt to diversity hire less skilled individuals for the sake of changing the status quo? Would that even change the status quo?
Actually Im probably getting ahead of myself, from what Ive seen google doesnt even have a good way to gauge its candidates abilities.
There's an assumption in your post that current hiring practices somehow select the best candidates from a pool of suitably qualified candidates.

Anyone who has been hired, or has hired other people, know that recruitment is terrible and includes huge amounts of randomness and you are - hopefully - avoiding terrible candidates from a pool of qualified candidate.

Given that, it makes sense to change the random factors of recruitment that select against women to be selecting for a few more women. So long as you're still mostly achieving the previous avoidance of terrible candidates.

I just had a look at the BBC's equivalent report ("BBC Equality Information Report 2016/17").

Interestingly:

- p38 says that 42.1% of 'Senior Leadership's staff are female

- p39 shows the real number (35.7%). It seems like on page 38 they define senior leadership as around 3000 people, rather than the smaller (and less diverse) group that has the actual senior management job grades (SM1 and SM2).

- The report has almost no historical information. The top level actuals are compared with targets, but the only numbers that are compared with, e.g. 2014, are things like # apprentices.

> In the US almost 90% were white or Asian, 2.5% were black and 3.6% Latin American.

I've always found it curious how asians are treated as honorary whites when it comes to talking about diversity in American companies. This is the most egregious example.

If you go to Google's own diversity report the breakdown becomes 36.3% asian and 53.1% white. Considering white people maybe up like three quarters of the population in the US they're actually under represented at Google, ironically.

Report: https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_our-workforce

Diversity proponents seem to generally want every conceivable minority (like -women-) represented 50%, completely ignoring how the math doesn’t add up.

And if not everyone is at 50%, it’s obviously the fault of all the racist and sexist white men everywhere.

(comment deleted)
Why was this flagged? This is the second story I've noticed this week on diversity in tech that was an early top 10 link and then got flagged.
Because it tends to stir a discussion about the merits of current “diversity”-initiatives.

This often leads to polarized debate. And the San Fran pro-diversity crowd being stripped absolutely naked.

I’m guessing it’s a little bit of both.