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Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
the EEOC and Congress will see it differently.
Wonder what *else* Congress will ask while they've got them on the stand...
This just means that Google only employs white males
Our numbers don't look very good. After all, didn't a Google executive pretty much tell us that if we've nothing to hide we've nothing to fear?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Nothing good (from the perspective of the companies involved) could come from the release of the data. Only harm would be likely to result. If the data didn't show anything the Mercury-News could capitalize on for a story about those evil racist sexist tech firms, nothing at all would come of it; that's the best case scenario.
Is Google saying their business strategy actually differs based on the people they employ? In this context, how is that not racist?
...to see so many focused on the color of skin, rather than the content of character.
It's the H1Bs.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If Google and Apple want to succeed in their field, doesn't it behoove them to hire the best and brightest? Shouldn't they be able to do so, even if it results in skewed racial statistics?
It's pretty bad that the government has created an atmosphere where people are ashamed of acting in their own self-interest, even when those actions do nothing to harm others.
Nobody gives a rat's ass what color they are. The important metric is their EVIL QUOTIENT!
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
Yeah, every Google employee I've ever met (~50 or so) was a white male. A lot of them are European immigrants, but all white.
So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?
Oh, and if anyone says, "Journalists are a sort of magical, pure source of good in our society, white knights protecting the people," that attitude belongs back in the Cronkite era.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ignoring the potentially messy, and unbounded, arguments over whether or not anybody should be bothering to collect these data, what sort of "trade secret" could they possibly be?
Does Google not want Microsoft to scoop them on their new blacksploitation search engine? Would knowing how many women work at Oracle be of the slightest use to a competitor?
Even if the data were valuable, they are nothing that you couldn't easily enough gather with a statistics grad and a pair of binoculars and a few days casing the relevant corporate campuses(not to mention the more exotic methods: With modern analytical chemistry, the threshold for what you can detect is pretty impressive. You could probably get an approximate gender ratio for a given building just by sampling the sewer outflow for excreted hormones. You could probably also gauge morale: If you know roughly how many people are working there, you can watch the concentrations metabolites for various drugs and get a rough aggregate sense of what, and how much, the building is on. More SSRIs and anxiolytics? Bad times. More cocaine? Ambiguous, or 80's flashback...) You can sample people for sex or color pretty quickly, and accurately enough, from a fair distance. If the data were worth more than peanuts, it'd already be available.
What is Google hiding?
I can't stand answering this questions on various government forms. Variance within racial groups is larger than variance between racial groups.
Why don't they just ask you what shade your skin is and what your hair looks like? That's really what they want to know; and that's when you realize how absurd the question of "what race are you?" is.
probably not 90% blacks.
Next guess:_
Mercury News: This database includes that Labor Department data for Santa Clara and San Mateo County-based workers at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems, SYNNEX Corp., Calpine Corp., Intel, eBay, Sanmina Corp., and Solectron Corp. The database covers the years 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2005.
Why hide how many african americans you have? In the tech field there aren't that many AA engineers around. By empirical observation, I've noticed that most AA tend to get into management. They have the ability, just no interest. Partially, I believe it is because of the inherent geek culture which I think is very white male. Movie quotes, media stuff and what not. For most racial types including the white female, it isn't particularly interesting. If you're brought up in a mostly black culture, I would think it would be pretty disconcerting. Most of us being pack animals you generally want to go where the herd is. It works well with the other racial types since there are ample representation of the other races. Indians, asians, and africans have good representations and can overcome the geek culture.
Consumers will be furious when they find out there are GIRLS working there!
o hai
why do they wish to compete unfairly with other companies burdened with equal opportunity laws?
I knew it! They have Oompa-Loompas! That explains a lot.
I know I will be modded down into oblivion for this but in my recent 4th year upper year/graduate math classes at a very good math/cs university there is not a single black person amongst everyone (out of i would imagine 150 students spread over 4 400-level courses, two cross listed as graduate). and over the previous 3 years it was about the same. ditto for the CS courses I have taken. this is just plain fact. and can anyone tell me a famous black mathematician or computer scientist?
Mercury News: Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies
The issue isn't that they're hiring exclusively white people. But that they are hiring almost exclusively non-whites outside of the country.
"You know when people are talking about race and colour, and they say ‘I don’t care if he’s black, white, green or purple’? Wait a second... purple or green? I say we need to draw the line somewhere. Screw purple people! Unless they’re choking, in which case, help them.”
*cough* you forgot to post anonymously *cough*
they just don't want us to know that it's about 40%borg and 15%greys
ôó
I'm 35. My father was actively discouraged from pursuing a career in architecture by hostile highschool teachers (he now has a PHD in architecture). Based on a lot of replies (not yours), it takes more than a math genius to understand why there are still very few African American engineers. African Americans remain a numeric minority, only one generation (at best) removed from being told by their own teachers that they are too stupid to aspire to careers like engineering.
But how would a company know the race of the people working for them? I would certainly refuse to answer a question about my race. It should have nothing to do with my work. What if a light skinned person identified themselves as African American? Should an instrument be used to measure their albedo? Why should anybody care? I don't.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If nothing came of it, that would be a defacto admission on the part of the Mercury-News that Google is within the norm for hiring diversity. It wouldn't be front page news, but it would be something that Google could point to if the question ever comes up again. By clamming up, Google is only inviting speculation. By citing an absurd reason like trade secrets, they are inviting skepticism.
Why should it matter anyway?
Instead of focusing on the overall diversity of the companies?
I live in Palo Alto and know several people who work for Apple, a handful at Google; and even interviewed at the latter a while back. And I can guarantee that for every black or hispanic that these companies "lost", they gained two asians, an indian, and a gay or lesbian.
The merc is a ridiculous provincial little rag. Everyone here knows it. And that's why they knock up sensationalist nonsence like this story.
Trust me; the klan and aryan brotherhood are NOT going to be successful recruiting in Santa Clara Valley.
What's more important? That these companies deliver the highest quality product at the best price or that they hire the most from underrepresented groups? If minorities can't get a job based on their merits, they don't deserve it, plain and simple.
Black people have a different temperament than white people, women are sensitive and men are practical, and yes, younger people do learn faster, while older people have more wisdom. I'm sure there are some out there, but I have never met a black woman who likes working on computers... it's too nerdy ;-). Though we all have strengths to contribute, we are NOT all equal, so why should a commercial business be forced to hire equally? Hire based on qualifications and maximize peoples' strengths. Sorry if it doesn't look good on paper, but it benefits everyone.
Google cannot afford to hire by anything but merit. If they excluded all the brilliant black applicants as one of those links suggests, they would quickly be overtaken by their competitors because they hadn't hired the best. This is comparable to Jewish German physicists building the bomb for America.
It isn't happening.
This isn't racism. It's realism. If you believe otherwise, you're simply indulging in ignorance for the sake of politics.
As a black nerd, I agree that geek culture can be a turn off. I was always into science and math when I was growing up, but in junior high and high school I just didn't want to be around the other kids with the same interests in science. They were just so.. white and nerdy. But not in a funny way. We just didn't have the same social interests. It wasn't until I got to a mostly black university, that had black nerds with the same academic and social interests, that I could embrace my nerdery.
|In earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
It had a lots of Indians also, Do we not attempt to make Noise??
and They work far better..
We see some of them in presenting WAVE, Chrome, earth, and every Open source contri by Google etc etc.
Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that, if Google were to release statistics, those statistic would show some kind of imbalance in workforce based around ethnicity. I can see a few different possibilities for this.
Perhaps Google is racist in hiring. I doubt it.
Perhaps certain ethnic groups are inherently more capable of the kind of things needed to get a job with Google. I doubt this also.
Perhaps our society is structured in such a way that people born into certain ethnic groups are less likely to get the credentials and skills needed to get a job at Google. If this were the case, you'd likely also see disproportionate rates of unemployment, poverty, and incarceration based on ethnicity. Of course, that couldn't be the case. This is America, after all. We're a color-blind, post-racial society. Everyone is equal here.
So, that's what I can see. Since it can't be any of the three hypotheses I've suggested, it must be something else.
Our equal employment policy is: hire smart people who work hard. Somehow, by paying no attention at all to diversity we now have a workforce of every sex, color, race, sexual orientation, and national origin imaginable. We plan to continue this policy.
We all knew given the naming of iPad, that they had no women in their marketing/strategic decision making (all that synergy stuff) dept.
Good for him.
But if those asshole high school teachers had succeeded in keeping him out of architecture school, it would be their responsibility; NOT that of any architecture firm years down the road. Get it?
If you'd ever worked for tech companies in the Bay Area you'd know: They hire only the best. If you ARE the best, you can be any race, flamingly gay, sport a six-inch mohawk, have steel loops hanging from the dangly bits, and come to work in your bathrobe; as long as you produce. If you're NOT the best, then you can GTFO. And they don't care why you're not the best, and they're not to blame for what did or did not happen to you in high school.
More likely it'll prove this wasn't a joke.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm 35. My father was actively discouraged from pursuing a career in architecture by hostile highschool teachers (he now has a PHD in architecture). Based on a lot of replies (not yours), it takes more than a math genius to understand why there are still very few African American engineers. African Americans remain a numeric minority, only one generation (at best) removed from being told by their own teachers that they are too stupid to aspire to careers like engineering.
Thanks for adding that. Frequently, I forget that there are other mitigating circumstances like what you've stated that contribute to the problem. Extremely unfortunate.
Not to talk about race in general, but I find it difficult to relate to AAs. I can relate to Africans much easier because as an Indian our cultures are fairly similar. Hell we even watch the same bollywood movies as kids.
I find AAs to be very insular and hard to get to know. This seems to be reciprocated as my nigerian friend would frequently tell me stories about AAs telling him they don't know how to relate to white guy or even to know what to talk about. Until they themselves want to integrate, and we in turn encourage it. I don't see how this situation gets better.
*** Mercury News Demographics? ***
Personally, I'd be very interested in knowing the demographics of the employees of the San Jose Mercury news itself. They are a Silicon Valley company as much as Oracle, Google, or any of their targets in this article. Apparently, they've been laying off staff lately, and it would be informative to know whether this was being done in an egalitarian way, or if their own initial and final demographics had something of a slant to them.
-- Terry
But how would a company know the race of the people working for them? I would certainly refuse to answer a question about my race. It should have nothing to do with my work. What if a light skinned person identified themselves as African American? Should an instrument be used to measure their albedo? Why should anybody care? I don't.
I think the point was that they were saying it was a trade secret. If they don't know why defend it as such? Just say we don't collect that information. The thing is that they have to collect it. Remember, these guys have to track diversity stuff. It's why I roam the streets daily looking for single black females so I can recruit them in large companies for huge rewards and then I will then waste on a hedonistic lifestyle.
So, let me get this straight. A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies, trying to force them to disclose private data. The media company is doing this purely out of malice, as there is no good that can come from release of this data. On what planet is this sort of thing acceptable?
"Those damn reporters are trying to hurt us.
No good can come from such a disclosure."
There isn't a black man, a woman or Jew above a certain age who hasn't heard that refrain a thousand times before.
The geek celebrates the anonymous wikimedia leak - when it is damaging to those he hates.
When the open and legal pursuit of inside information cuts too close to home - he bleeds for the innocent.
_____
Women at Microsoft is the women's employee affinity group at Microsoft.
More than 10,000 women employees worldwide are currently members of WAM. [2010] More than 3,000 of Microsoft's women employees turned out to network and listen to more than 30 speakers at the Microsoft Women's Leadership and Development Conference [Oct 26-28 09]
There are around forty of these Microsoft affinity groups. The Chinese, with 1,500 members, is the largest ethnic group. Diversity Advisory Councils
Going off on a tangent here, but the term "AFRICAN american" has always struck me as the most idiotic denomination possible. They are black Americans, period. Yes, they are mostly descendants from African slaves, but as of the latest evolutionary theories every single human descends from African ancestors. This is just another way of perpetuating racism and divisionism. In fact, they should just be Americans. Or perhaps the WASPs should be called British Americans. And that way everybody gets to be segregated in their own narrow box, the Chinese-Americans, the Hispanic-Americans, the British-Americans, the African-Americans, the Italian-Americans, etc, etc, etc, ad-nauseam and there would be no plain ones left.
The US "culture" is seriously fucked up.
Every. Single. Person. who one of my company's recruiters speaks to, or who speaks to one of the recruiters, is asked to fill out the blue self-identification form. It's a requirement since we're a government contractor. If they fill it out, as far as I know they can put whatever they want to on it and we take it.
It's their choice to fill it out; it's optional. If they don't, though, the recruiter is required to fill it out, making best guesses.
Google is also a government contractor and I'm quite certain has the same requirement.
I assume this is done (and hammered in at my office) so that we can show the racial diversity at the start of the recruiting process and the final diversity of the subsequent workforce, and then the government can look for patterns that indicate we're being biased in some way.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials.
...who?
that is because they have no african-americans and very few caucasians. there are allot of women so i dont think they are worried about that
Some people need to fit everything in tight boundaries either because that's what they learned from their environment, or because that's just the way they think. There isn't absolutely any reason for a company to keep track of your skin and hair colour like the AC above mentioned. A black man, a red man and a white man for instance should all pretty much know the same basic stuff if the three of them come forward with a diploma that reads "physician", or "nuts and bolts engineer", or any other label. Ideally one would differentiate them by the breadth of their experience.
Asking colours is just an attempt at profiling, at trying to tie assumptions to them. Even if statistics showed that there are more blacks or browns than other shades in jail, the one applying before isn't one of them since he's there and the bloke doesn't share those traits assuming he clears the background checks that everybody is supposed to be subjected to (there are white crooks, thieves and convicted murderers).
Maybe I live in a different world...
+Raider of the lost BBS
"Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
In the 13 months I worked as a contractor on the Mountain View campus I remember seeing 5 or maybe 10.
Kinda screws years of PR and spin when "Don't Be Evil" turns out to mean "Don't Be Non-White."
"But lots of us here like Will Smith and Beyoncé...Eric even has an Obama bumper sticker!...dawg?"
But if those asshole high school teachers had succeeded in keeping him out of architecture school, it would be their responsibility; NOT that of any architecture firm years down the road. Get it?
Firms should not be held to unreasonable standards. However, the point I was addressing was the relative dearth of African American engineers, not whether they are being discriminated in the workplace. Get it?
I grew up in the Bay Area, started programming there and have several friends who did the same. There are plenty of really smart people and plenty of mediocre jack-offs, just like any other place.
I wonder how many "white" Afrikaner South Africans in the USA have registered themselves as African American ;). Some of them might be able to trace their line in Africa back to the 1600s.
sigh, I meant "oh so helpless when it comes to respecting our rights and privacy..."
AC post of the week. Mod up.
I am half black, half white, and don't always relate to either half. One the whole, the black side of my family is much more worldly, educated and open minded. Thats just how it worked out in this particular case. Members of my father's family have spread all over the country and lived in foreign countries. Members of my mother's family have tended to stay in the Western US. Their attitudes are about what you would expect, even if you knew nothing of their skin color.
I think that these stand-offish attitudes are another relic of physical and often legal segregation that is, again, part of living memory for many Americans. Its not as if there was mass migration for the purposes of integration once the Civil Rights movement took hold. Where members of either culture have since moved to seek a better or different life, I think the cultural chasm narrows. Where insular communities (of any race or ethnicity) persist, ignorance and distrust of outsiders persists.
I've often heard that Africans do not naturally relate to African Americans. Is this so surprising? The United States and most African nations are as different as can be. Why do we assume that blacks of vastly divergent cultures would automatically relate?
Can't they simply count Indians as backs?
Firstly, Google never records the race of their employees unless they fill out an OPTIONAL box on the forms at hiring time. They don't actually HAVE this data to share.
Secondly, walking around the Google campus, it's definitely not just a ton of white men. There are lots of women (and darn hot ones...), and a huge amount of East and South Asians and South Americans.
Thirdly, Google is one of the most merit-based companies in existence. Any conclusions based on the race profiles would be completely misguided. Google doesn't care if you're black or white, straight or gay, male or female... there's only one thing that matters - competence.
Duh. Just peek at these company's Buzz profiles.
That'll give you all the private information you ever wanted!
-David
I am half black, half white, and don't always relate to either half. One the whole, the black side of my family is much more worldly, educated and open minded. Thats just how it worked out in this particular case. Members of my father's family have spread all over the country and lived in foreign countries. Members of my mother's family have tended to stay in the Western US. Their attitudes are about what you would expect, even if you knew nothing of their skin color.
I think that these stand-offish attitudes are another relic of physical and often legal segregation that is, again, part of living memory for many Americans. Its not as if there was mass migration for the purposes of integration once the Civil Rights movement took hold. Where members of either culture have since moved to seek a better or different life, I think the cultural chasm narrows. Where insular communities (of any race or ethnicity) persist, ignorance and distrust of outsiders persists.
I've often heard that Africans do not naturally relate to African Americans. Is this so surprising? The United States and most African nations are as different as can be. Why do we assume that blacks of vastly divergent cultures would automatically relate?
That's pretty interesting. I grew up in the U.S. although I was born in India. I can switch between my indian and U.S. identities at will. My U.S. identity is the particular midwest white cutlure I was referring to which makes me very different than other indians who grew up here. I actually have a hard time relating to indians here than indians from India.
I agree that it is going to take some time. A lot of people can't forget they've been wronged. Indians are still mad that the mongols conquered them despite the wealth of culture and architecture they've inherited from them. If you think muslims are bad what do you call the Taj Mahal as an expression of love?
Our workforce by and large reflects the same demographic composition as there was in my college engineering classes. That is mostly white, asian, indian, with hispanics and blacks few and far between. Most of our foreign workers tend to be from Canada and Europe, not India or China. This to me implies that we're hiring a statistically balanced sampling of the available labor force.
Except... women. Since there's so few women engineers, we seem to hire a lot of women in all other roles. We probably have as many women doing project management, marketing, law, and any other non-engineering job as males, just to balance out the workforce. As a large company, we do get in hot water with the government if 95% of our workforce is male (and working in a sausage-party sucks sometimes), so I don't have a problem with trying to hire more women.
I have not noticed any particular traces of discrimination in engineering hiring practices. People are evaluated on merit. We are engineers, and we hire like engineers: the best tool for the job. HR does not get involved in our hiring and they've never given us any policies regarding racial, national, or gender preferences (maybe they do to my managers).
What i wonder: Is it legal in the US to store the race of an employee in his records? If you would do something like this here in germany, you would be in very deep trouble.... Due to the history with the Nazi regime the term "race" has been heavily discredited.
How do you assign a "race" to an employee? Can he dispute that assignment?
How do you determine a "race" scientifically? The Nazis had a complete bureaucracy with scientific staff to do this and the results were still completely at haphazard. Mostly they went for the religion of the grandparents.
Completely baffled, Martin
One, the end demographics are entirely irrelevant, so long as the process is colorblind. And no person or company is under any obligation to right any wrong they did not commit. So basically, you just admitted that you have no point.
Two, someone who is a "mediocre jack-off" by Apple or Google standards would easily be in the top five, and probably still in the top one, percent anywhere else in the world. So my second point still stands.
Simplest way to meet your EEOC requirements is to bring back the 1 drop rule.
Democrats (who started Jim Crow) will love it.
You shouldn't even be he-re.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Where I live people would be baffled if a corporation even kept track of the "race" of its workforce, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.
Is this something you folks actually keep on record? For what purposes, and what "races" are there?
May we live long and die out
My father-in-law hires for a large oil company. The company in question tries to be as diverse as possible, but understands that race doesn't make it diverse. They believe that different personality types are what make the company diverse instead.
Specifically, the Myers-Briggs scale has been used to measure diversity with much more accuracy than what color/nationality a person is. According to my father-in-law, this company has had much greater success in the workplace by having a mixture of people on this scale than by having quotas of blacks/whites/hispanics/etc.
I think it is much more likely that they want to just avoid a tangle with the regulatory agencies.
Google is now big enough that they will be asked "why don't you have exactly 0.03274% female black jewish mentally handicapped" employees, to reflect the population?
Hiring should be blind to race, gender, etc. - that is true equality of opportunity. The agencies don't see it that way - they play a numbers game, and it's worth a lot of effort to avoid this discussion, or at least to avoid having the discussion in public.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Enforcing having a certain number of people of a certain group in a company, is just as much *ism, as enforcing not having them. Because it’s making the decision based on *ism, not on fitness for the job.
What counts is the rules on which people get hired. Not the number of people of a group in a company.
So I accuse “The Merc” of using *ism to make money.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Possibly because some races are over-represented in the lower economic stratas, are unable to afford tertiary educations at top-tier institutions and thus, even though they may be competitively intelligent, aren't able to make the most of it.
Well said. I think this is true too.
That's why I'm happy that here in Soviet Denmark, the government (i.e. the taxpayer base) provide an education to everyone who's able*, for free, and even gives the students money to live off of while studying.
(*) Allocation of students to studies is based on student preferences, their high school grades, and whether they have taken certain subjects at a high enough level in high school (e.g. comp. sci. requires higher level math; medicine might require higher level math and chemistry, etc.)
I come from a family that's poor in material wealth. Despite that, I'm able to make the most of my programming talent and provide more value to society (based on my guesstimated future wages) than if hadn't been able to afford an education.
(Oh yeah, the couple of times I went to the hospital, I got a really great treatment and it didn't bankrupt my family. How I love the people who gave up a part of their material wealth for the common good. I hope I can repay that debt to their children and grandchildren.)
You should try some of that over there in the states. Think of the higher taxes you'll be paying as an investment in the health and skill of the future labour force; the one who'll be working for your children and your grandchildren. And feel free to think of yourself as a person who is willing to help his fellow countrymen when they're down on their luck.
Yet in both undergrad and grad school both of my schools had an abundance of indian, middle-eastern, asian, and mexican students, most of which have similar poverty levels to blacks in the US. The difference is they don't need special programs to get in because their culture values education.
Maybe they don't want us to know the real reason there are no more jobs in the US, because space aliens from Alpha Centauri took all the jobs.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Then that's a problem with the Equal Opportunity Employer status and law. If that's what the OP meant, fair enough, but given he just said "equal opportunity", it was reasonable to interpret it in the more common sense (e.g., the idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to apply for a job, and be judged on individual merit). If, as you say, this isn't even relevant to Google, that's more evidence that he wasn't talking about this law.
The more accurate and specific terms for this are positive discrimination or affirmative action. In fact, even your own Wikipedia link refers to this as "affirmative action plans".
Well there's the kid who got suspended from medical college for calling himself a white African American, though he's from Mozambique, not SA.
It's funny how few people realize that this attitude is actually a cultural trait :
it would certainly bother me in numerous ways if I was hired based on my skin color/nationality rather than my ability. Aside from the fact that it brings one's own abilities and prospects as an employee in question ("Was I hired because I'm qualified or was I hired to fill a quota?"), it's also downright insulting
This is all very protestant of you. You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is based on how much work you do, on how much value you produce for society.
Of course, most cultures see merit in other things. Even something as similar as a catholic, for example, would mostly agree, but would take offence at the implicit connection you draw between money (or value) and a person's worth, which he would consider very improper and very wrong. No, for you a person's worth is related directly to how much worth said (regardless, even, of how much work you put into producing that value, e.g. according to you a ceo who does almost nothing, resulting in a 50% rise in value is superior to one that works 14 hours a day and destroys 50% of the value of the firm, something most other Christian denominations would take offence at).
And that's just the beginning. A nazi, or a black panther, or a tamil tiger, or ... would take offence at your definition of value (like the GP). After all, value is first and foremost defined by how arian/black/"diverse" someone is. Anyone with white/black skin will obviously perform better than anyone with black/white skin. Anyone who claims differently is offensive, and should get beaten, or worse.
A communist would take offence at your implication that there is difference at all. Any difference in performance must be abolished by state decree, and the state is god, after all, doing otherwise would imply no "social justice". If you were hired for any reason other than "the party decided it", you should get fired on the spot. A person's worth is determined by how high one's position is in the communist party, and by nothing else.
A muslim would take offence at your failure to differentiate between the "master" and the "slave". Obviously depending on the job, it would be an insult to hire a muslim for it, e.g. garbage collection, or it would be an insult to hire a non-muslim for it, e.g. a police officer. Also, the job description would determine 100% the required gender of the person filling it. Women are not allowed in many jobs, and men are not allowed in others. Segregation must be enforced, in addition the superiority rules that sharia pushes, which must be respected, and muslims are superior, women inferior, and segregation a requirement from allah ("men are superior to women", quran, ch. 4, verse 34) ("muslims are superior to non-believers", repeated every 5 verses or so).
The list goes on. Just about all cultures (except that one sect of christianity and it's direct descendants) would not agree with your feelings at all. This is one of the things that makes them different.
Employers are not sexists and are not racists. They are impatient and cheap. They will pay the lowest wage that anyone will accept. They will hire the first qualified people to fit their needs.
Business doesn't care and the race or gender of its employees so long as they get the job done.
Instead of looking where women and black people AREN'T, I think it would be better to look where women and black people ARE and to see why they are happy (?) where they are. If the people who see injustice in the workplace want to make changes, it would be easier to interest these groups of people to move into other professions by making them less comfortable in the jobs they populate today.
Where I work today, there are five black people. Five out of around 150 employees. Two of those black people are women and they are literally in the paper-pushing department. Two of the black men are exceptionally intelligent people and are employed into some highly technical roles and the other is in administration. The three black men have failed to fit within their stereotype moulds and no one seems at all uncomfortable with that... in fact, I doubt anyone gives it any thought at all except to wonder why they are so different from other black people they may known to see.
I seriously doubt the black people we have working with us today were hired because of some quota-guilt system. They seem to have been hired because they are qualified for their jobs and seem to do their jobs quite well. In contrast, where we see most black people employed are in roles that are close to the government -- federal, state and local. Why is this? Could it be all the effort that goes into "fairness and equality" has managed to unbalance distribution in another unfair way?
I guess what I am saying is that perhaps we need to re-examine our current system and philosophy where it comes to "diversity." We have been forcing and enforcing policy for so long, we don't have any idea if the problem has been solved already or not -- or if the solution is actually perpetuating the problem. (By that, I mean to say, are current policies and practices in government actually "guaranteeing" jobs to 'minorities' and therefore making the idea of competing in the marketplace a less attractive option? I think so.)
...we never see similar questions being asked of our national sports teams? It's always struck me that their composition is far, far off what it should be if it properly represented our nation's ethnic diversity. Or perhaps it's that, sensibly, our sports teams are selected by ability and not colour or creed?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
...what I want to know is why none of Apple's executives are white, middle-classed, English, over 6', fat and post on slashdot under the name CountBrass?!?! Every company I've ever worked for had at least one!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
What a collection of stereotypes taken out of context. Almost feels like a bad soap opera. Nazi ideology didn't grow on trees you know. It wasn't some flashy new idea that emerged over the course of few hours or even a few years. Nor did Panthers invent 'black self-defense' thing. Did communist invent struggle for worker's liberation out of whim?
Also, communists didn't believe that everybody should be the same. They put high value on labor, and if you are not a working[wo]man, you are more-or-less inferior. Also, communist society never grew outside their own history and planted into an otherwise 'healthy' society. Conversely, once a communist system is abolished, and a 'democratic' system is installed, values did not change over night. They remained more-or-less stable initially, and only gradually shifted towards the new set of values. And that's despite the fact that installing democratic systems in communist countries was never undramatic. Nazis have their background, too, and so do panthers.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
...if you've got nothing to hide...
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
In all of the companies I have worked in, I have only met 3 US-born black engineers. One in 1982 at a company called OSM, a 2nd at Xerox Parc, and a third who married my wife's best friend about 8 years ago.
A friend of 20 years is an African-born engineer, worked at AT&T.
Perhaps 3 Latino-Mexican-Chicano whatever the PC term is these days.
The total number of engineers I have worked with, and known well enough to identify ethnic group, over 30 years is at least 1000, e.g. 100+ at Xerox, 100+ in consulting assignments at a number of semi-conductor companies, 50+ on several software consulting assignments, 20+ in many consulting assignments, 300 in a company where I was FT 10 years ago, 300 in a company 3 years ago, consulting assignment at PacBell with ??, AT&T ditto, ...
By this sample, .3% of US-born engineers are black, approximately the same number Mexican.
So, no company anywhere can be hiring engineers from these ethnic groups in proportion to their population -- the engineers don't exist.
This isn't prejudice : in some projects, we would have 20+ languages spoken, and US blacks and Mexicans were hired in a lot of other jobs. So far as I could tell, they weren't treated any differently than any other group.
I had an interesting conversation with a Mexican day laborer some years ago. His theory of the world was that black and brown people could not do as well. Maybe true in Mexico, but here in Silicon valley, we have lots of brown --> black Indians who are doing very well indeed.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
I'm pretty sure at such big companies ashkenazi Jews are overly represented. They're overly represented as winners of the Nobel prizes and in scientific/medical jobs as a whole. Be it because of genetic or education they're pretty smart people for a fact. It's interesting to see that it's not "politically correct" to have one group much smarter on average than another (one again, be it because solely of genetics or education or both).
Bottom line: race and gender *do* matter. What would become of our beloved Chocolate Factory if it became known that Willy Wonka exclusively used male Oompa Loompas in his production lines?
60% Earthling (including 42% Human, 10% Monkey, 8% Pigeon)
25% Martian
5% Alpha Centaurian
2% African Alpha Centaurian
8% other
Investigations are ongoing whether African Alpha Centaurians have been discriminated against due to their skin color (greenish-yellowish) or their tentacles.
the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released
Trade Secret = GNOMES
Sun has recently been purchased by Oracle. Oracle doesn't and Sun did (past tense) give up data.
Either way, these numbers need not necessarily be public does it? All it does is give fodder to the racists and the anti-fanboys. The regulators should be able to review the data and make sure everyone is in compliance. I don't see the need for these numbers to be publicized, there is already too much "reverse" racism and feminism going around in this country.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Could we stop arguing whether Google is doing this because they have too few or too much minority workers or the merits of Affirmative action and start talking about how hypocrite and wrong is that corporations can have private secrets as if they were people but those same corporations routinely down play or right out ridicule the idea that privacy is a natural right and need of actual people?
Yes that's one sentence.
But... the future refused to change.
...any numbers they supply will be the wrong ones. Regardless of what the numbers indicate, the companies will inevitably get beat up about it from some sector - either by the government, some minority rep with an agenda, or anyone that thinks they can gain some publicity by hammering on a large company. There simply is no benefit whatsoever to releasing information about the racial or gender mix of your employees. None.
Race warfare and class warfare: they never go away. Maybe it's time to stop trying to make everyone get along, because we are radically different.
Diversity doesn't work. Not of religion, not of basic philosophy, not of intelligence, and not of race and ethnicity. Our modern deconstructive society can't see that, but observers of history can. Human beings have not fundamentally changed since the dawn of time.
And the same problems remain, without us learning. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place for solutions. Maybe diversity is one of these failures. Well, things to ponder.
Futurist Traditionalism
Makes me wonder about previous posters claiming they've never seen an African-American engineering student in their classes. Its possible that they are there and yet unseen by certain people.
Stop that bull.
I don't know to which posters you are referring to, but the number of US-born Hispanic and African-American students in engineering fields is dismal.
I am Hispanic, and this I have discussed with the very few African American and Hispanic engineers I've worked with (we, minority engineers concerned about increasing awareness of science and engineering into our racial groups as opposed to ignore the fact, or worse, assume racial profiling in the corporate sector.)
This disparity is not originated by companies doing racial profiling. It is an ethos problem, and it is a problem mutually shared by the government, the education sectors and the minorities in question.
People can choose to surreptitiously turn the statement of this fact into a race game, or they can choose to acknowledge the nature of that disparity (which is necessary for exploring solutions for it.)
It is easier to say that "they" are there, but are not seen "by certain people" than to really dig deep into a very complex problem for which there is no simple (read simple-minded sloganish) explanation or solution.
Could we stop arguing whether Google is doing this because they have too few or too much minority workers or the merits of Affirmative action and start talking about how hypocrite and wrong is that corporations can have private secrets as if they were people but those same corporations routinely down play or right out ridicule the idea that privacy is a natural right and need of actual people?
Yes that's one sentence.
So you think talking about corporate hypocrisy is more important (and possibly more evil) than exploring the causes of the very important social and economic problem of having so few members of a given ethnic group in one of the most important sectors of the industry?
That's... uhm... an interesting way of prioritizing social issues I guess.
It's none of the Department of Labor's business who they decide to employ. Google and Apple are a success. The US government is a failure. If the government weren't able to leech off of successful companies, they wouldn't even exist.
If they were all H1B employees, that data MUST be reported to the government. This isn't an issue of the citizenship status of employees, but rather their ethnicity.
To be honest, it probably is a trade secret. If the population of Chinese-American workers suddenly spikes it might be a safe assumption that Google is planning something in China. Gender/ethnicity also have trends. African-American women typically have a greater population in certain career fields than others. If google suddenly had hired a bunch of these women, it might be enough information to start "tipping their hand" to other companies.
This all makes perfect sense. Businesses want to keep their activities private, because privacy is beneficial in a field like technology development. Trying to hide any information about your company that is not legally required to be public knowledge is important.
As an aside, they also may have wanted more than a ethnic/gender makeup of the company. They may have wanted to know the salaries and positions of these employees. Sounds fine, you would want to know if every person of a certain ethnic group was actually part of the janitorial staff.(since that wouldn't really be diversity) Think about it though, do you really think Google wants the salary/position of every employee listed? Going back to the hypothetical influx of Chinese-Americans. Might it not indicate something if they were all either highly paid translators or programmers? This is all just companies who realize that this data could be used for nefarious purposes.
Does the federal government have the proper percentage of races among its employees? Or the IRS, DOD, NSA?
There's a word for that: hypocrisy.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
It wasn't some flashy new idea that emerged over the course of few hours or even a few years.
No ? Because my histories say it kinda was. Of course, the full extent of the ideology was formed not even in years, but in decades, but still, at one point it was a flashy new idea.
Even the "eugenics" that sparked the holocaust was, at the communist international of 1920(thereabouts) a flashy new idea, and at that time it was based on a mostly correct interpretation of darwinism. Of course, that wasn't true anymore 10 years later when it became clear that for some reason evolution refused to obey the fuhrer.
Nor did Panthers invent 'black self-defense' thing.
I'm not sure. I'm not sufficiently familiar with it. In my defence, the black panther party has been somewhat lax when it comes to writing down their ideology and events leading up to ideological changes.
But as a careful guess, my answer would be "yes they did". And even if I were to be wrong about this, that would mean they willingly copied it from some other party, which still makes them guilty of using this.
Rome got the idea of poisoning opposing villages water supplies from the (a sect of the) Jews, including a poison that could actually be used for that. And then they used that weapon 1000x as much as the Jews ever did. Romans are guilty of that act, not the Jews, and it is very much part of what the Roman Republic was (wasn't yet an empire at that point). The fact that they did not invent it neither excuses it, nor means that it is not part of their ideology.
Another example would be muslims' suicide terror. They did not invent it, in that they weren't the first to use it. The Jews of Israel did it before them, and they learned it from their neighbours (who never bothered to write down their history, so possibly they got it from somewhere else too). Even strapping dynamite to an unwilling victim, then sending said victim into a crowd of people and detonating the dynamite is not a muslim invention, they got that from the Tamils of India (who used it against muslims and buddhists, to great effect I might add). Unfortunately, as anyone can testify, suicide terror, including using unwilling terrorists, or even children, is very much part of islam. Terror has always been a part of islam, as can be found in history books that were used in Persia, long before the west even knew what a history book was. The fact that they "did not invent" the tactic is hardly relevant at all, excuses nothing and doesn't change the ideology one iota. It is barely an interesting historical sideline. And as a general rule, if muslims claim to have invented something, you can safely bet they stole it from some far away place, there are only one or two tiny exceptions to this.
Did communist invent struggle for worker's liberation out of whim?
Marx certainly did. He had lots of whims, this was just one he felt particularly whimsy about. Well, at least that's what he wrote down himself, while mooching of his family. Marxism wasn't invented out of some great moral need. It wasn't invented to fix class struggle at all. Marxism was invented for one reason, and one reason only : to find a way to amass power. The sad thing is that that was true from day 1, from the first letter of "das kapital", and it still is, suitably disguised or not.
One, the end demographics are entirely irrelevant, so long as the process is colorblind.
The process is not colorblind.
Two, someone who is a "mediocre jack-off" by Apple or Google standards would easily be in the top five, and probably still in the top one, percent anywhere else in the world. So my second point still stands.
My contention is that they are mediocre by common standards, so your point is still just you kidding yourself.
I am sure, ideally, this threat would mean something if the EEOC and Justice Dept could enforce the laws. However the departments legal staff are overburden with ADA discrimination cases until far into the future.
Anyway I've seen the Google Staff and they are mostly Martians. That is how Google is so productive.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. By his own logic, Google must be doing something wrong if they want to withhold information about whom they are hiring.
in all US hightech co.
white: 50%
oriental: 40%
others: 10%
It wasn't some flashy new idea that emerged over the course of few hours or even a few years.
No ? Because my histories say it kinda was.
That takes things out of context, and that's dangerous. Why? Because by saying 'invented' instead of 'reacted to some known previous state', you make it sound like Nazism, Communism, Black movement, Affirmative action, and everything out there, just grows on trees, people stumble upon them, and they say "Wow, this looks edible! Let's eat." That's hardly a rational explanation, let alone fact. Of course, for many people, thinking like that is just convenient, because deeper analysis of all mankind's struggle inevitably leads to personal struggles and suffering of each and every individual involved. It's easier to say that Hitler did it, instead of saying that the whole German nation at the time, who supported such a reactionary and destructive movement had their own problems that got vented on Jews, Serbs, Romani, Poles, and all the others. And that, in turn, leads to humans, and how they react to their own painful realities, and to a realization that it can (and does) happen anywhere and everywhere in many different forms. Did you histories maybe mention that? I'm sure they did not. Neither did mine.
Marx certainly did. He had lots of whims, this was just one he felt particularly whimsy about.
Firstly, equating Marxism (i.e., Marx's theories) with Communist movements, and also equating all Communist movements, is just not practical. Did Communists follow Marx's teachings? No, they didn't. At least not the part after smoking barrels.
Secondly, did Marx invent worker's suffering? Nope. It was there. It was there long before Marx, actually. Marx was just describing a possible remedy for what was the current situation in his own time: he was reacting to his own times. He also forewarned that his theories won't be valid in different times, something we call dialectical materialism. Communists, of course failed to see that, and the movement failed. It also failed because they failed to see what Nazis failed to see, and that is the reactionary mindset of humans in the times of revolution.
Marxism was invented for one reason, and one reason only : to find a way to amass power.
The fact that totalitarian regimes sprung out of Communist revolutions in some countries has nothing to do with Marx. As I said above, do not equate the two. Communism was not even supposed to end up like that. It was supposed to be "power to the workers" kind of trip. But it never happened. For the very same reasons Germans turned a socialist revolution into a horrible accident you now call Hitler for convenience and denial.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
They're just trying to hide the existence of aliens or Oompa-Loompas working in their lairs.
Public release of race composition of Google, Apple, or other company employees would show market interests. It would also show where outsourcing activity is happening (while the government has data on work location with employment tax, they don't have a picture of contract workers.) Overall this is useful data for the government who is interested in local economic development, very useful for a competitor who is wondering how they keep labor rates so low. Gender is not that useful in terms of competition.
If you had everything you wanted, you'd just want more.
Excuse me ? How is oppressing the masses not part of Marx' ideology ? Do tell, does "Das Kapital" say anything about pluralism ?
Of course, we all know it does, it say to supress it with violence.
So what exactly did the soviets do that was not in line with Marxism ? Oppressing everyone IS part of Marxism, and it's part of every socialist movement since.
Tolerance for differing opinions, even when they are backed by scientific experiments and/or mathematical proofs has never been high in socialist parties. Even today ... we all know what economic theories are believed by socialists (when, rarely, they are more complex than "capitalists evil, we good").
Of course, we all know it does, it say to supress it with violence.
It is mildly amusing that you see yourself as multiple people.
Tolerance for differing opinions, even when they are backed by scientific experiments and/or mathematical proofs has never been high in socialist parties.
Then you must be from a socialist party.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.