> "We are clear that the law prohibits us from discriminating on the basis of race," the firm's lawyer Dev Stahlkopf blogged.
Pardon my ignorance... But I thought in the case of affirmative action, discrimination based on race was legal?
Reading on...
> It has informed the tech giant that while companies can set affirmative action goals to boost employment of "minorities and women", they "must not engage in discriminatory practices" to achieve them.
How is an "affirmative action goal" different from just a diversity goal? How can you achieve affirmative action if you can't discriminate on the basis of race?
>How can you achieve affirmative action if you can't discriminate on the basis of race?
Interview training to minimize implicit bias in the interview process. Interview training to minimize acts that make certain groups uncomfortable. Removing employees from the interview pool who show a racial bias. Resume review that omits names and other racial indicators. Etc.
Interview training does nothing. The people who are pushing affirmative action are doing it on purpose because of their political ideology. These people think that if they have more women, LGBTQ, and minorities in the company, those people will support them politically and they will have more power. There is no way you can train away that. Second, you can't remove employees when their bias is in support of the managers and the company board members. Managers are selectively choosing interviewers because of their racial bias. At a previous job managers would have new hire LGBTQ or minority junior employees conduct interviews instead of senior employees who had been at the company for years. Activist board members set CEO bonus goals that scale with race and gender quotas as well. Resume doesn't matter because they recruit through special minority, women, or LGBTQ invite only recruiting events where SWM's are not even allowed in.
I think the idea is that you can achieve the diversity goal while still hiring the most qualified people by broadening the recruiting pool. This way you're not discriminating based on race because you are still hiring the most qualified people. To do this, you might increase recruiting at other colleges that didn't have recruiting before (especially if those colleges have different demographics than the colleges you already recruit from), or similar measures.
Let’s say you have hiring events at colleges with say 10% black population. You start focused on colleges with higher percentages, this you should have more black candidates.
You can change your recruiting strategies to target a more diverse range of candidates without discriminating on the basis of race.
If you are recruiting at colleges you’re going to have a hard time getting many black candidates, since only 7% of STEM majors are black. Which is an under representation based on their proportion of al college students.
I used to wonder the same, until it hit me that current status quo is actually NOT the meritocracy it pretends to be. There are many individuals with both talent and potential who are currently getting passed over simply because of unacknowledged negative bias.
So it's not about picking someone less talented to make numbers on diversity, it's about revisiting the criteria that make us overlook talented individuals who happen to not fit the stereotype, and broaden our approach to considering candidates.
I think you put it very succinctly. In reality this could be as simple as diversifying the people interviewing candidates and getting down to objective hiring criteria. Negative bias is hard to spot and harder to acknowledge. Making an effort to minimize and eliminate negative bias doesn't mean reducing standards.
Affirmative action needs to die. As an Asian, I hate that I have to work harder just to get the same opportunities.
Affirmative action is simply racism against minorities that “don’t matter” to the public narrative in favor of minorities that “do matter.”
Imagine telling an Asian child that they have to work way harder because of their race. While their friends get to go out and play, they have to sit down and study because of a condition they were born with. It’s abhorrent.
Now this same racism is carrying into the job market. No thanks.
Ah, another example of casual racism against Asians. You’re assuming that Asian kids have parents that went to top universities, and to hell with the ones that don’t have an opportunity like that - tough luck.
Affirmative action needs to go, legacy admissions need to go. Make the changes you want by providing resources to the under-privileged regardless of race, before admissions.
Don’t thrust the burden of your societal failures onto innocent children. Asian kids are not the wastebasket for society’s mistakes.
I cannot imagine how you’d think that telling an Asian kid that they are held to a much higher bar for the same opportunities in any way exemplifies “equality.”
Come to the South: affirmative action isn’t a thing here. It’s a breath of fresh air. You’ll find that there are other freedoms that have been taken away from you in the north. All of them are alive and well here.
It's a lot harder to measure how welcomed specific groups are than to measure diversity in general, but it's my (anecdotal, limited) understanding that they're reasonably welcomed. It's worth noting that South Carolina and Louisiana are the only states outside the West Coast to have elected Asian governors.
I can't tell if you're being intentionally ironic or not.
Imagine telling an Asian child that they have to work way harder because of their race.
You do realize that this is exactly what marginalized races have to tell their children, right? "You will have to work harder because of the color of your skin, and it might not matter at all."
I don't know how to change the fallout of centuries of race-based slavery and the immediate drop into generational poverty, outside of trying to elevate people who don't quite deserve on merit alone over others perhaps more fit for the job.
If you don't value diversity, maybe just say so, but let's not pretend that there's an empathy or morality to dropping affirmative action because doing so decreases competition for great jobs among the privileged classes.
> marginalized races have to tell their children [...] "You will have to work harder because of the color of your skin, and it might not matter at all."
Exactly my point - this is basically word-for-word what Asian children are told.
> outside of trying to elevate people who don't quite deserve on merit alone over others perhaps more fit for the job.
And in doing this you condemn others simply because of their race. Ironically, in setting out to solve institutional racism, you merely reinforce it.
> I don't know how to change the fallout of centuries of race-based slavery and the immediate drop into generational poverty,
Provide learning opportunities to the economically underprivileged before important events like college admissions.
> If you don't value diversity, maybe just say so,
I value diversity. I abhor achieving diversity via methods that shift the burden of society’s mistakes onto races that people have decided do not matter.
I think I misunderstood your perspective. I thought you were saying that you considered yourself privileged and were not happy about the prospect of increased competition or higher requirements due to candidates being added to the pool. I think now that you've clarified that you're not saying this, though, but that asians are also marginalized?
> Provide learning opportunities to the economically underprivileged before important events like college admissions.
I appreciate the sentiment here, I really do. It's wonderful to think that with a little bit better education sprinkled in at the right time you can change an entire history of systemic oppression. Something like education is an opportunity that require a certain privilege to even take advantage of. What about when college isn't even an option because you need a job to help put food on the table?
It's one thing to tell your kids that they're expected to work harder for the same success. From what I've heard directly from asian friends, that's an asian cultural thing as well. In fact, you're the first I've ever heard describe it as racism. Maybe I'm naive.
It's another thing altogether for never have a chance of getting out regardless of opportunity unless that opportunity allows you to also take care of your family as you may have needed to otherwise. Maybe scholarships that also provide social safety nets for the families of children leaving for college instead of working to provide.
Now maybe that fits into your idea of not being affirmative action, since it's clearly not a racial criteria, but I don't think anyone will be surprised when this has disproportionate benefits for marginalized races.
> "If you don't value diversity, maybe just say so..."
Personal attacks are against HN guidelines, no matter how well intentioned your cause.
Implying that Asians, Indians, and so forth are "privileged classes" and not "marginalized races" too and suggesting the diversity they bring is of no "value" is probably why this cause has negligible support among Asians, Indians, and so forth, beyond a bit of token lip service. Why work so hard to alienate and denigrate the very people whose support you ought to be courting to bolster your side?
As for your latter statement, I never said anything like that. You're putting a whole lot of words in my mouth. As far as I could tell, that was the stance taken by the person I responded to.
As for income equality, I'm seeing that, in the US, Asians reported the highest median household income in 2019 at more than double the median black household income. If you really want to talk about value, it seems that the money is indicating plenty of value across the board.
Look at how Caltech went from 15% women undergraduates when I was a student there in the '80s to 45% now without discriminating on the basis of gender in admission.
Rather than making gender a factor in admissions, they concentrated on getting more qualified women to apply. They would contact high school women who were very good in STEM subjects and their parents, and send someone to visit them and try to convince them that Caltech was the place to be.
Once they applied, gender wasn't a factor in deciding whether or not to admit them.
The top tech companies could do something similar for both race and gender. They have the resources to draw from the entire country. It wouldn't work so well for companies that only have the resources to recruit locally.
Caltech, like other private schools such as Harvard, absolutely does discriminate in the admissions process. They are a fervent advocate of “holistic admissions”, which is modern activist speak for “process involving discrimination, most often against Asian races”. Take a look at http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/apply/first-year-freshman-..., which says “We have always reviewed students within the context of the opportunities available to them, and we will hold true to that practice.”
Unlike Caltech, public schools in California are not permitted to discriminate and have different student demographics from private schools for this reason. Prop 209 from 1996, which banned affirmative action in CA, is unfortunately on the current ballot for a potential repeal as part of Prop 16.
Not commenting about the merits of this specific probe, but here is a thought. African Americans are 13% of the US Population. Isn't it reasonable to aspire to have at least 13% of African American staff (proportionally adjusted per state/city populations)? This is a rhetoric question, what causes that to not be the case.
The article doesn't mention the numbers but when a particular race is disproportionately less represented in corporations than its general population equivalent, then clearly there's a broken piece somewhere in the equation.
I'm not even taking a political stance on this one. This is just the mathematical sound interpretation. If every person should have the same opportunities then the corporate populations should be a proxy of the general population proportions.
It depends what you're measuring the proportion against, and depends to such a huge degree that I really feel like we've gotta disregard the idea of detecting discrimination this way. For example, African Americans are only 4% of the population in Microsoft's home state.
That's fair. I think my point is that a statistical representation allows you to see if one race is being favored over another one. But of course it's not a straight forward analysis as you correctly pointed with the WA black population example.
Why would you assume that the racial demographics of a particular corporate entity’s workforce should match the national average demographic breakdown?
Can you think of any reasons why a specific workplace’s demographics might deviate from the mean that isn’t rooted in unequal opportunity?
Yes, read my comment as it seems that nobody is fully reading it. I'm saying that if the final proportion doesn't reflect the demographics proportion then there's a bottleneck somewhere down the line that produces less black professionals.
I think the crucial factor that will skew this is that racial demographics are strongly correlated with cultural demographics, and different cultures will place wildly varying value judgements on different lively pursuits.
It seems to me that what this mathematical approach would be striving for—in trying to make workforce demographics equal population demographics—is total homogenization, which is to say, total destruction of cultural identity.
Because that's how quotas work.
So if the country is 13% black your employees should be 13% black.
Then and only then you have archived true "diversity"
Alternatively you can ofcourse always drop the whole affirmative action bullshit and just hire based on qualification.
But then you no longer receive good boy points for wokeness.
It's not reasonable to use the general population as the reference. Should NBA players' races reflect the general population's? There are better references like the number of African Americans graduating with computer science degrees. And if that number is low, that's the one to boost.
The tech population need not reflect a similar proportion ever. It depends on people's individual interests, who different cultures follow as role models etc.
This question somehow only arises in tech. No one cares about making races equitable in other industries as much. What about farming? Or similar proportion of dentists, farmers, chess players?
Where did I mention tech?. Seems that you're equating my statement to saying that 13% of the tech jobs should go to African Americans which is far from what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that the proportions should always match if all citizens are receiving equal opportunities.
Let's imagine a theoretical population somewhere where 80% of the people are white and 20% are black.
Let's say 50% of all the population studies some tech related career and following one of your examples 10% of the population studies odontology. Let's assume the rest of the population studies or prepares for something else. Let's assume for a minute that unemployment is at 0%.
Then 40% of tech employed population should be white, 10% should be black.
8% of the employed dentists are white. 2% are black.
The rest of the employed population is 32% white and 8% black.
That's it. That's all what I'm saying. I'm not even remotely trying or interested to argue politics here. I'm telling you in plain layman's terms that populations should downscale proportionally in an organized, civilized society.
You're talking about whether or not this is a problem in other industries, and honestly I couldn't care less about that for the sake of this argument. I'm just telling you how society should work if it was unbiased and logical, not whether or not this works with whatever belief system or preconceptions of race or professional competency you have (or anyone has).
I agree you did not mention tech. That was my secondary observation regarding the overall issue.
Your original comment reads:
> African Americans are 13% of the US Population. Isn't it reasonable to aspire to have at least 13% of African American staff (proportionally adjusted per state/city populations)?
Your thought experiment does not apply here because it assumes the same percentage of every population desires the same career. That need not reflect what we see in the real world. What if 50% of one race and 10% of another desires a specific career, the outcomes will reflect those numbers.
Again, you are ignoring the statement regarding people's interests and who they consider role models and what they consider as rewarding. In a world of equal opportunities, humans are still the variables, they will choose what they like. If there is a systemic problem that prohibits a certain race from reaching their aspirations, that is abominable and should be cut out.
Ok. That's fair. I now understand your point and you're right. Once you bring human and cultural values into the equation the proportions won't work perfectly, perhaps not even close to what the mathematical reasoning suggests.
My idea is that in a world of loud opinions and poor reasoning, we should be able to understand if there are bottlenecks that have nothing to do with culture or interests and more with how society creates equal opportunities for its citizens. Any competent and ethical politician should understand that, regardless if they are right or left. If that was the case policy making will orbit around controlling systemic variables that put minorities in disadvantage and not so much on the emotional vitriol that comes from both sides when talking about diversity and racial equality.
I would hope that a company like Microsoft is willing to create objectives around diversity, not for the optics but rather because they actually have identified said bottlenecks in their own system and understand objectively why this is problematic.
At the end of the day I think the problem is that people always want to pin the problem on someone else, when it's more than clear discrimination happens as a result of an uneducated, siloed sub-societies that are designed to keep social, economical, racial and cultural boundaries. We should design societies in such a way that when a silo is created it can be immediately be disolved to restore the balance.
Any affirmative action is by definition discriminating on the basis of race. If you want the best candidate for the job, you don't look at race, you look at their abilities to do the job. Period. Any bias towards hiring one race implies bias against hiring from other races. Why is it okay to have almost no Asian players in the NBA while a small percentage of black people in tech is a big fuss? It is all hypocrisy.
And is that mutually exclusive to creating more opportunities for minorities to apply?
And what if the current practices sans AA are already discriminatory (e.g. try having certain natural hairstyles at your interview that don't fit the status quo)...
Setting quotas/goals doesn’t seem like the right approach though. We can try to correct for the biases you name without setting numerical targets. The thing is, there isn’t any correct number to aim for. For instance, some cultures emphasize STEM education/careers and it isn’t surprising or incorrect to see them represented in tech at numbers higher than their makeup of the general population. Setting targets like proportional demographic representation for blacks or any other racial group ultimately amounts to racist discrimination against those other races.
What are 2 or 3 “right approaches” for improving diversity in tech? Unless, the view is that practices until now have been right?
Cultural support for STEM comes through parents who themselves are capable of sitting at the dinner table to help kids with their math and science homework. Parents who encourage careers such as mechanical engineering, not just being a car mechanic because that feels most familiar to people they already know.
So what are some “right approaches” for achieving more diverse workforces?
There’s no getting around the fact. To the point where California is currently debating whether to remove the following phrase from their State Constitution;
The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
Managers tend to take the three most highly qualified candidates and then, "all things being equal", hire the one most similar to them. It doesn't take a big brain to figure out how that has played out historically.
Whether someone can do a job is a mix of experience and potential (y-intercept and slope). It’s difficult for interviewers to assess potential so many rely on experience as the key indicator.
It’s difficult for candidates from disadvantaged to show the same level of experience as candidates from non-disadvantaged backgrounds. Therefore candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds are systematically segmented out from the hiring pool.
Well-run diversity programs aim to better assess the potential of disadvantaged candidates and there are a variety of indicators for success.
The elephant in the room is that due to rather dark times in the U.S. history, there are cultural differences between an average Black and an average White family. It doesn't mean that every family of a certain race will fit the stereotype, but if you look at numbers, they do check out. This isn't fair, this isn't nice, but it's a very important piece of the puzzle and you cannot solve the problem without admitting it.
Many of these cultural differences are crucial to getting high-paid positions. Like nagging on your kids to study. Like making sure their role models are scientists and inventors, and not gang leaders. Like stressing out delayed gratification and showing how planning and persistence pays off in long term.
If you look very carefully at company founders and people on high-paying jobs, almost every one of them will be from a family with these long-term values. Many Blacks have adopted these values and are successful. Nobody is telling them to go to a different drinking fountain, it's not 1930s anymore. So if you want to fix the problem for good, you need to advertise these values more, teach them at school, and give good examples. Maybe, remove roadblocks like providing free textbooks programming lessons for those in need. Unfortunately, this takes time, effort and only pays off for the next generation. So the racial equality movement has been hijacked by politicians that offer a short-term solution: divide people by the most visible factor, such as skin color, then take from the overrepresented and give to the underrepresented.
Except in the long term, it makes the society more divisive. If you hire a weaker candidate based on quotas, other employees will see the weakness and won't respect them. The employee will perceive this as racism and get offensive. If you try to further address it by promotion quotas, you start getting cliques where Blacks always side with other Blacks, and Whites always side with Whites. You've just created racism out of nowhere.
> So the racial equality movement has been hijacked by politicians that offer a short-term solution: divide people by the most visible factor, such as skin color, then take from the overrepresented and give to the underrepresented.
I think this is totally backwards. If anything, the U.S. government takes from the underrepresented and gives to the overrepresented. This is achieved through gerrymandering districts to dilute minority votes, limiting voting sites, and asking "concerned citizens" to "monitor" voting locations. Our social welfare programs pale in comparison to the subsidies and tax cuts given to big businesses, and other overrepresented groups.
I'm not talking about the federal government. I meant affirmative action programs on institution level.
I guess, "activists" would be a better word than "politicians".
So are you talking about "activists" in HR, or management? I don't know what you're talking about with respect to taking from the "overrepresented" and giving to the "underrepresented". Under- and overrepresentation is unusual wording for salaried employees in an institution.
>Our social welfare programs pale in comparison to the subsidies and tax cuts given to big businesses, and other overrepresented groups.
Tax cuts aren't spending and untaxed externalities aren't subsidies. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the use of intentionally misleading language isn't as taboo as lying, so we'll keep seeing this old canard for the foreseeable future.
I am not trying to mislead anyone, this is my reasoning for using the language that I did. A subsidy is a sum of money given by the government to a corporation, so it is analogous to government spending on social welfare programs. A tax cut reduces the government's income, which on a balance sheet, has the same effect as government spending. Sure, a tax cutting policy is not the same as a spending policy, but their net effect on cash flow are both negative.
"Many of these cultural differences are crucial to getting high-paid positions. Like nagging on your kids to study. Like making sure their role models are scientists and inventors, and not gang leaders. Like stressing out delayed gratification and showing how planning and persistence pays off in long term."
Haven't you heard these are racist values? Seriously, many of these values are frowned upon, and deemed "white", even though it's what has worked for so long across the world.
I'm afraid this equity, as best-intention as it might be, will make the problem worse by creating a dependency that will further define the culture as needing this form of victimhood status.
Imagine the year 2143, people will have digital assistants, flying cars and also diversity and inclusion training will tell you how oppressed some people still are. It's easier to blame history than to admit you are stupid and need to make better decisions in life.
> The elephant in the room is that due to rather dark times in the U.S. history, there are cultural differences between an average Black and an average White family. It doesn't mean that every family of a certain race will fit the stereotype, but if you look at numbers, they do check out. This isn't fair, this isn't nice, but it's a very important piece of the puzzle and you cannot solve the problem without admitting it.
I am loving this utter shit assumption that is clearly being taken as gospel given the upvotes.
Do you actually believe the AVERAGE Black person you describe is not only engaging in tech with gusto but also good enough to get an interview for a senior staff position at Microsoft?
Ah, but the assumption is not only that this will be the case, but that Microsoft will also just blindly hire said person to "satisfy quotas"... WHEN HAS THAT EVER HAPPENED!?!?
You don't even have a personal anecdote of seeing this happen, and I doubt few of the people upvoting this dribble actually have, and more than likely not to any significant degree in the aggregate either.
Like, holy shit, if your description of an average Black is true, that entire curve on the bell don't even COME CLOSE to participating in tech AT ALL. Good job on the completely un-contextual resort to "statistical reasoning" to dunk on Black people.
Not to mention you show your colors when you fail to account for the children of African immigrants rather than the descendants of slaves in the US. But no, let's believe there's a line of unwashed Black masses, brutish and poorly educated, standing in an employment line that wraps around the Redmond campus waiting to get that hand-out job.
Fuckin hell, what is really happening in the tech industry is that a number of you aren't hiring perfectly qualified people because their afro or some such made you uncomfortable so they were told they weren't hired for "culture fit".
I am not trying do dunk anyone. I am merely trying to suggest a solution that will be less divisive, because the current one is creating tension rather than easing it.
Also unfortunately, our brains are not naturally good with statistics, so many things may seem counter-intuitive until you look into details. Here's some napkin math model (numbers are arbitrary). Assume that we can assign an abstract "techiness score" to every person that will correlate with their chances of being hired.
Assume we have 10 people of population A and 10 people of population B. For population A it's:
* 1 person with score 0
* 7 people with score 5
* 1 person with score 9
* 1 person with score 10
For population B it's:
* 1 person with score 0
* 1 person with score 1
* 7 people with score 5
* 1 person with score 10
The difference it not that large, but if you simply hire everyone with score 8 and up, you get 2 people from population A and 1 person from population B. If you talk to these 3 people, you will see that there is no difference between them in terms of score and can easily conclude that the 2x difference is due to treating people based on their population.
If you introduce a hiring quota, you are forced to hire 1 person with score 5 from population B, and that's where the problem starts because they will be perceived weak and will trigger divisive behavior I mentioned.
As I said several times, I'm not concluding that ALL or MOST Blacks are bad or anything. I'm saying that there are statistical differences that are hard to measure and that can explain workforce underrepresentation. Other metrics you may want to look at is:
* Black-on-white crime vs. white-on-black crime.
* Families with both parents.
* Change in student loan principal after 5 years. This shows whether a certain population is choosing degrees that pay off.
MS could increase their diversity by broadening where they advertise job listings, developing mentorship programs at schools with more diverse populations, or even simply changing the language used in job postings. Building a diverse work force need not (indeed should not) be as simplistic as hiring inferior candidates because they meet some quota.
Building a diverse workforce should be about making sure you get the very best people in the job. If the composition of their leadership team is dramatically skewed from the demographics of the general population, how can they argue that they scoured the country and found the very best?
The reason the NBA is different is because sports are based on physical abilities. Race, by definition, is a difference in physical traits. It is therefore unsurprising that race has a bearing on diversity in sports. Race has not been shown to have any bearing on one’s ability to do the work MS needs.
Why am I even explaining this to you? Can you seriously not understand the difference. FFS.
Race is very strongly correlated with culture. And many cultural traits are crucial to doing work that companies need. It's just very hard to measure one's culture and it's very easy to measure their skin color.
I don't think forcing companies to be diverse per skin color is a good idea. A much better way could be finding aspiring people from underrepresented populations and removing roadblocks on the way of specific people.
I think the list of board members of major companies that have lost their seat due to real or perceived racism is extremely short, unless you have a long list of them lying about.
I seriously doubt a whole board was strong-armed by a single person, and if it was a plurality of board members that suggested this, then that's how boards are intended to work.
I support the rest of your comments in this thread, but this comment seems irrelevant at best. Our position is better served by attacking the argument, not the person.
The thing is, Affirmative Action is one of those topics where having a "wrong" opinion is seen as treason by these in power. And far too many people here had the "wrong" opinion. The good news is, the tide is turning.
It's worse than hypocrisy, it's accomplishing the opposite of what it's supposed to do. It's only a matter of time until there is an obvious gap in skill, which will only hurt the reputation of that group and then the situation could backfire when conflict starts arising among people with different skillset.
If the existing system discriminates based on race you're going to have a pretty hard time combating that without using race as a factor to identify who's been discriminated against.
Discrimination is discrimination no matter how you package it. It has been tried everywhere since probably first humans in a manner which “fit” opinions prevalent during particular times.
I've worked at places where I ended up realizing I was hired mainly because I'm black. Not that I'm not a good engineer, mind you, but some of these places just wanted a "token black guy" or they actually had quotas as part of some social responsibility/inclusiveness BS.
You know what? I absolutely hated those places and didn't last long there. I definitely don't want to be excluded because of how I look, but I don't want to be hired or treated differently because of it either. I'm much happier at my current employer where there is no such BS and black people are a very small minority, which is absolutely fine since we are also a very small minority of CS students where I live.
Also on the topic of education - don't create quotas or special programs for people with a certain appearance or ethnic background. Instead, create programs for the disadvantaged.
You need to speak up more about this, man. If a White person publicly advocates for what you just mentioned, they will be labeled racist, canceled and will have hard time finding a job for the rest of their life. As a Black, you have a much higher chance to be heard, and maybe even seen as a role model by other Blacks who would otherwise consider themselves victims. That's the only realistic way to solve the problem.
For context I'm European but I did live in the US (TX) for 5 years. I need to go get some sleep, but very briefly:
I would say that the focus on race is a real problem over there - there's discrimination, hate, taboo topics and excessive PC, affirmative action, it's a political talking point, you have to identify as one of a few races in all kinds of forms (which is ridiculous - is a Portuguese person white or hispanic? What if they are black or mixed?)... The list goes on.
Minorities are generally of a lower socioeconomic status than the majority. People of a lower socioeconomic status are less likely to get a proper education (particularly in the US where university is super expensive). People without an education don't get white collar jobs, and thus have more trouble moving up the societal ladder. Therefore, there's less role models. I think you see where I'm getting at - it's a vicious cycle and I think ensuring everyone has access to proper education should be one of your top priorities.
Real racism is also a problem there, of course. But I fear that quotas will not help with that and just compound the problem instead.
Perhaps this is a cynical view, but as someone who spent a thousands of hours in MS offices throughout the world, they could hit this target essentially overnight if they brought many of the vendor employees on staff as FTE's. Microsoft outsources an astonishing amount of their support roles to external companies and many (perhaps even most) of those employees are minorities. If MS brought some of those jobs in house and worked on creating opportunities for those employees to learn and advance their careers they I think they it could eventually yield some very positive results for all involved.
At my work we simply do not have qualified black people applying very often. At all. We have one single black person in the 50ish management roles because that is all that we could hire. Our problem isn't with them being rejected or discrimination during interviews, but simply that we cannot hire a person who doesn't apply for an open position. Black people are not applying to our company. Does that make us non equal opportunity or discriminating for hiring 98% non-black workers?
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadPardon my ignorance... But I thought in the case of affirmative action, discrimination based on race was legal?
Reading on...
> It has informed the tech giant that while companies can set affirmative action goals to boost employment of "minorities and women", they "must not engage in discriminatory practices" to achieve them.
How is an "affirmative action goal" different from just a diversity goal? How can you achieve affirmative action if you can't discriminate on the basis of race?
Interview training to minimize implicit bias in the interview process. Interview training to minimize acts that make certain groups uncomfortable. Removing employees from the interview pool who show a racial bias. Resume review that omits names and other racial indicators. Etc.
I would like to see some evidence that this actually achieves the desired outcome.
You can change your recruiting strategies to target a more diverse range of candidates without discriminating on the basis of race.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-majo...
So it's not about picking someone less talented to make numbers on diversity, it's about revisiting the criteria that make us overlook talented individuals who happen to not fit the stereotype, and broaden our approach to considering candidates.
Affirmative action is simply racism against minorities that “don’t matter” to the public narrative in favor of minorities that “do matter.”
Imagine telling an Asian child that they have to work way harder because of their race. While their friends get to go out and play, they have to sit down and study because of a condition they were born with. It’s abhorrent.
Now this same racism is carrying into the job market. No thanks.
Affirmative action needs to go, legacy admissions need to go. Make the changes you want by providing resources to the under-privileged regardless of race, before admissions.
Don’t thrust the burden of your societal failures onto innocent children. Asian kids are not the wastebasket for society’s mistakes.
I don't know how to change the fallout of centuries of race-based slavery and the immediate drop into generational poverty, outside of trying to elevate people who don't quite deserve on merit alone over others perhaps more fit for the job.
If you don't value diversity, maybe just say so, but let's not pretend that there's an empathy or morality to dropping affirmative action because doing so decreases competition for great jobs among the privileged classes.
Exactly my point - this is basically word-for-word what Asian children are told.
> outside of trying to elevate people who don't quite deserve on merit alone over others perhaps more fit for the job.
And in doing this you condemn others simply because of their race. Ironically, in setting out to solve institutional racism, you merely reinforce it.
> I don't know how to change the fallout of centuries of race-based slavery and the immediate drop into generational poverty,
Provide learning opportunities to the economically underprivileged before important events like college admissions.
> If you don't value diversity, maybe just say so,
I value diversity. I abhor achieving diversity via methods that shift the burden of society’s mistakes onto races that people have decided do not matter.
> Provide learning opportunities to the economically underprivileged before important events like college admissions.
I appreciate the sentiment here, I really do. It's wonderful to think that with a little bit better education sprinkled in at the right time you can change an entire history of systemic oppression. Something like education is an opportunity that require a certain privilege to even take advantage of. What about when college isn't even an option because you need a job to help put food on the table?
It's one thing to tell your kids that they're expected to work harder for the same success. From what I've heard directly from asian friends, that's an asian cultural thing as well. In fact, you're the first I've ever heard describe it as racism. Maybe I'm naive.
It's another thing altogether for never have a chance of getting out regardless of opportunity unless that opportunity allows you to also take care of your family as you may have needed to otherwise. Maybe scholarships that also provide social safety nets for the families of children leaving for college instead of working to provide.
Now maybe that fits into your idea of not being affirmative action, since it's clearly not a racial criteria, but I don't think anyone will be surprised when this has disproportionate benefits for marginalized races.
And this is what my nieces and nephew are told.
We don't really have to imagine what it feels like to be marginalized. In your own words, we already are.
Personal attacks are against HN guidelines, no matter how well intentioned your cause.
Implying that Asians, Indians, and so forth are "privileged classes" and not "marginalized races" too and suggesting the diversity they bring is of no "value" is probably why this cause has negligible support among Asians, Indians, and so forth, beyond a bit of token lip service. Why work so hard to alienate and denigrate the very people whose support you ought to be courting to bolster your side?
As for your latter statement, I never said anything like that. You're putting a whole lot of words in my mouth. As far as I could tell, that was the stance taken by the person I responded to.
As for income equality, I'm seeing that, in the US, Asians reported the highest median household income in 2019 at more than double the median black household income. If you really want to talk about value, it seems that the money is indicating plenty of value across the board.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/demo/p60-...
Rather than making gender a factor in admissions, they concentrated on getting more qualified women to apply. They would contact high school women who were very good in STEM subjects and their parents, and send someone to visit them and try to convince them that Caltech was the place to be.
Once they applied, gender wasn't a factor in deciding whether or not to admit them.
The top tech companies could do something similar for both race and gender. They have the resources to draw from the entire country. It wouldn't work so well for companies that only have the resources to recruit locally.
Unlike Caltech, public schools in California are not permitted to discriminate and have different student demographics from private schools for this reason. Prop 209 from 1996, which banned affirmative action in CA, is unfortunately on the current ballot for a potential repeal as part of Prop 16.
The article doesn't mention the numbers but when a particular race is disproportionately less represented in corporations than its general population equivalent, then clearly there's a broken piece somewhere in the equation.
I'm not even taking a political stance on this one. This is just the mathematical sound interpretation. If every person should have the same opportunities then the corporate populations should be a proxy of the general population proportions.
Can you think of any reasons why a specific workplace’s demographics might deviate from the mean that isn’t rooted in unequal opportunity?
It seems to me that what this mathematical approach would be striving for—in trying to make workforce demographics equal population demographics—is total homogenization, which is to say, total destruction of cultural identity.
Alternatively you can ofcourse always drop the whole affirmative action bullshit and just hire based on qualification.
But then you no longer receive good boy points for wokeness.
This question somehow only arises in tech. No one cares about making races equitable in other industries as much. What about farming? Or similar proportion of dentists, farmers, chess players?
What I'm saying is that the proportions should always match if all citizens are receiving equal opportunities.
Let's imagine a theoretical population somewhere where 80% of the people are white and 20% are black. Let's say 50% of all the population studies some tech related career and following one of your examples 10% of the population studies odontology. Let's assume the rest of the population studies or prepares for something else. Let's assume for a minute that unemployment is at 0%.
Then 40% of tech employed population should be white, 10% should be black.
8% of the employed dentists are white. 2% are black.
The rest of the employed population is 32% white and 8% black.
That's it. That's all what I'm saying. I'm not even remotely trying or interested to argue politics here. I'm telling you in plain layman's terms that populations should downscale proportionally in an organized, civilized society.
You're talking about whether or not this is a problem in other industries, and honestly I couldn't care less about that for the sake of this argument. I'm just telling you how society should work if it was unbiased and logical, not whether or not this works with whatever belief system or preconceptions of race or professional competency you have (or anyone has).
Your original comment reads: > African Americans are 13% of the US Population. Isn't it reasonable to aspire to have at least 13% of African American staff (proportionally adjusted per state/city populations)?
Your thought experiment does not apply here because it assumes the same percentage of every population desires the same career. That need not reflect what we see in the real world. What if 50% of one race and 10% of another desires a specific career, the outcomes will reflect those numbers.
Again, you are ignoring the statement regarding people's interests and who they consider role models and what they consider as rewarding. In a world of equal opportunities, humans are still the variables, they will choose what they like. If there is a systemic problem that prohibits a certain race from reaching their aspirations, that is abominable and should be cut out.
My idea is that in a world of loud opinions and poor reasoning, we should be able to understand if there are bottlenecks that have nothing to do with culture or interests and more with how society creates equal opportunities for its citizens. Any competent and ethical politician should understand that, regardless if they are right or left. If that was the case policy making will orbit around controlling systemic variables that put minorities in disadvantage and not so much on the emotional vitriol that comes from both sides when talking about diversity and racial equality.
I would hope that a company like Microsoft is willing to create objectives around diversity, not for the optics but rather because they actually have identified said bottlenecks in their own system and understand objectively why this is problematic.
At the end of the day I think the problem is that people always want to pin the problem on someone else, when it's more than clear discrimination happens as a result of an uneducated, siloed sub-societies that are designed to keep social, economical, racial and cultural boundaries. We should design societies in such a way that when a silo is created it can be immediately be disolved to restore the balance.
And what if the current practices sans AA are already discriminatory (e.g. try having certain natural hairstyles at your interview that don't fit the status quo)...
Cultural support for STEM comes through parents who themselves are capable of sitting at the dinner table to help kids with their math and science homework. Parents who encourage careers such as mechanical engineering, not just being a car mechanic because that feels most familiar to people they already know.
So what are some “right approaches” for achieving more diverse workforces?
The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
Tell that to the Asian kid that just learnt that he now has to slave away at his studies because of his skin color.
It’s difficult for candidates from disadvantaged to show the same level of experience as candidates from non-disadvantaged backgrounds. Therefore candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds are systematically segmented out from the hiring pool.
Well-run diversity programs aim to better assess the potential of disadvantaged candidates and there are a variety of indicators for success.
Many of these cultural differences are crucial to getting high-paid positions. Like nagging on your kids to study. Like making sure their role models are scientists and inventors, and not gang leaders. Like stressing out delayed gratification and showing how planning and persistence pays off in long term.
If you look very carefully at company founders and people on high-paying jobs, almost every one of them will be from a family with these long-term values. Many Blacks have adopted these values and are successful. Nobody is telling them to go to a different drinking fountain, it's not 1930s anymore. So if you want to fix the problem for good, you need to advertise these values more, teach them at school, and give good examples. Maybe, remove roadblocks like providing free textbooks programming lessons for those in need. Unfortunately, this takes time, effort and only pays off for the next generation. So the racial equality movement has been hijacked by politicians that offer a short-term solution: divide people by the most visible factor, such as skin color, then take from the overrepresented and give to the underrepresented.
Except in the long term, it makes the society more divisive. If you hire a weaker candidate based on quotas, other employees will see the weakness and won't respect them. The employee will perceive this as racism and get offensive. If you try to further address it by promotion quotas, you start getting cliques where Blacks always side with other Blacks, and Whites always side with Whites. You've just created racism out of nowhere.
I think this is totally backwards. If anything, the U.S. government takes from the underrepresented and gives to the overrepresented. This is achieved through gerrymandering districts to dilute minority votes, limiting voting sites, and asking "concerned citizens" to "monitor" voting locations. Our social welfare programs pale in comparison to the subsidies and tax cuts given to big businesses, and other overrepresented groups.
Tax cuts aren't spending and untaxed externalities aren't subsidies. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the use of intentionally misleading language isn't as taboo as lying, so we'll keep seeing this old canard for the foreseeable future.
Haven't you heard these are racist values? Seriously, many of these values are frowned upon, and deemed "white", even though it's what has worked for so long across the world.
I'm afraid this equity, as best-intention as it might be, will make the problem worse by creating a dependency that will further define the culture as needing this form of victimhood status.
Imagine the year 2143, people will have digital assistants, flying cars and also diversity and inclusion training will tell you how oppressed some people still are. It's easier to blame history than to admit you are stupid and need to make better decisions in life.
I am loving this utter shit assumption that is clearly being taken as gospel given the upvotes.
Do you actually believe the AVERAGE Black person you describe is not only engaging in tech with gusto but also good enough to get an interview for a senior staff position at Microsoft?
Ah, but the assumption is not only that this will be the case, but that Microsoft will also just blindly hire said person to "satisfy quotas"... WHEN HAS THAT EVER HAPPENED!?!?
You don't even have a personal anecdote of seeing this happen, and I doubt few of the people upvoting this dribble actually have, and more than likely not to any significant degree in the aggregate either.
Like, holy shit, if your description of an average Black is true, that entire curve on the bell don't even COME CLOSE to participating in tech AT ALL. Good job on the completely un-contextual resort to "statistical reasoning" to dunk on Black people.
Not to mention you show your colors when you fail to account for the children of African immigrants rather than the descendants of slaves in the US. But no, let's believe there's a line of unwashed Black masses, brutish and poorly educated, standing in an employment line that wraps around the Redmond campus waiting to get that hand-out job.
Fuckin hell, what is really happening in the tech industry is that a number of you aren't hiring perfectly qualified people because their afro or some such made you uncomfortable so they were told they weren't hired for "culture fit".
Also unfortunately, our brains are not naturally good with statistics, so many things may seem counter-intuitive until you look into details. Here's some napkin math model (numbers are arbitrary). Assume that we can assign an abstract "techiness score" to every person that will correlate with their chances of being hired.
Assume we have 10 people of population A and 10 people of population B. For population A it's:
* 1 person with score 0
* 7 people with score 5
* 1 person with score 9
* 1 person with score 10
For population B it's:
* 1 person with score 0
* 1 person with score 1
* 7 people with score 5
* 1 person with score 10
The difference it not that large, but if you simply hire everyone with score 8 and up, you get 2 people from population A and 1 person from population B. If you talk to these 3 people, you will see that there is no difference between them in terms of score and can easily conclude that the 2x difference is due to treating people based on their population.
If you introduce a hiring quota, you are forced to hire 1 person with score 5 from population B, and that's where the problem starts because they will be perceived weak and will trigger divisive behavior I mentioned.
As I said several times, I'm not concluding that ALL or MOST Blacks are bad or anything. I'm saying that there are statistical differences that are hard to measure and that can explain workforce underrepresentation. Other metrics you may want to look at is:
* Black-on-white crime vs. white-on-black crime.
* Families with both parents.
* Change in student loan principal after 5 years. This shows whether a certain population is choosing degrees that pay off.
Building a diverse workforce should be about making sure you get the very best people in the job. If the composition of their leadership team is dramatically skewed from the demographics of the general population, how can they argue that they scoured the country and found the very best?
The reason the NBA is different is because sports are based on physical abilities. Race, by definition, is a difference in physical traits. It is therefore unsurprising that race has a bearing on diversity in sports. Race has not been shown to have any bearing on one’s ability to do the work MS needs.
Why am I even explaining this to you? Can you seriously not understand the difference. FFS.
I don't think forcing companies to be diverse per skin color is a good idea. A much better way could be finding aspiring people from underrepresented populations and removing roadblocks on the way of specific people.
Microsoft is not being forced hire more diverse leadership; this Microsoft's own internal initiative.
That is effectively being forced.
I seriously doubt a whole board was strong-armed by a single person, and if it was a plurality of board members that suggested this, then that's how boards are intended to work.
You don't get that high up without playing the political game, and the rules of the game at this point are very clear.
What are these rules of this game, explicitly? And who enforces them?
The thing is, Affirmative Action is one of those topics where having a "wrong" opinion is seen as treason by these in power. And far too many people here had the "wrong" opinion. The good news is, the tide is turning.
You know what? I absolutely hated those places and didn't last long there. I definitely don't want to be excluded because of how I look, but I don't want to be hired or treated differently because of it either. I'm much happier at my current employer where there is no such BS and black people are a very small minority, which is absolutely fine since we are also a very small minority of CS students where I live.
Also on the topic of education - don't create quotas or special programs for people with a certain appearance or ethnic background. Instead, create programs for the disadvantaged.
I would say that the focus on race is a real problem over there - there's discrimination, hate, taboo topics and excessive PC, affirmative action, it's a political talking point, you have to identify as one of a few races in all kinds of forms (which is ridiculous - is a Portuguese person white or hispanic? What if they are black or mixed?)... The list goes on.
Minorities are generally of a lower socioeconomic status than the majority. People of a lower socioeconomic status are less likely to get a proper education (particularly in the US where university is super expensive). People without an education don't get white collar jobs, and thus have more trouble moving up the societal ladder. Therefore, there's less role models. I think you see where I'm getting at - it's a vicious cycle and I think ensuring everyone has access to proper education should be one of your top priorities.
Real racism is also a problem there, of course. But I fear that quotas will not help with that and just compound the problem instead.
Maybe I'll blog about this stuff one day.