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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."
Mercury News: Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies
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.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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.
And the word "pad" has no other meaning than sanitary napkin. Good luck finding a word that isn't a euphemism for something.
"Pad" is not a euphemism. If Apple came up with some kind of electronic tabloid reader and called it the "iRag", that would be a euphemism.
It's not only legal, it's mandated by law, or almost. When you get a job here, somewhere on your forms (often on the application itself) there is a section called race, with a bunch of check boxes. You don't have to answer it, and often there is a check box called something like "decline to state" or something else along those lines. My kids are all mixed race, and it's rare in my experience to see any kind of mixed-race box on these forms. It will be interesting to see what they fill out when they reach that age.
The reason it's there has to do with federal reporting requirements. If, say, 10% of your applicants are black, 10% are hispanic, and 25% are female, yet the total of your black, hispanic, and female hires is something like 5% of your work force, the government might be interested in that. So might more than a few lawyers.
This has to do with a doctrine/policy called Affirmative Action, which in the simplest terms, holds that in order to prove you aren't discriminating in hiring, you'd better make sure you're hiring at least X percent minorities. I have, in the fairly distant past, worked with people who were most obviously hired solely because they were part of a protected class. Certainly, they were not hired because of either their competence or their work ethic because they had neither. One particularly stands out in my mind because he earned the nickname "deathbed" because at least twice a month (including every payday - how convenient) would call in sick, claiming that he felt like he was on his deathbed.
Other times, he just didn't show up. On many of those occasions, his wife would call and ask to talk to him and we'd have to say "Uh, sorry, he's not here."
It was quite obvious that he had never done the work he claimed he had done (mainframe operator) on his resume at his previous job. We eventually figured out from the one thing he could sort of do that he must have been a tape librarian. Later, a couple of us met someone who worked at his previous employer and who told us "Oh, that guy? Yeah, he was a tape librarian. We fired him. He's working for you guys now?! That's too bad."
In his first three months on the job, his absense rate exceeded (by far) the number of absences at which a person could be terminated, yet he didn't even get reprimanded. I assure you, those of us who worked our way up through the ranks in that company would certainly have been reprimanded, most likely fired. The PHB who hired him was obviously going to take no action, however. He was well known for making bad outside hiring decisions and never disciplining those people.
Finally, after about a year, we got a different manager, and he'd heard all about deathbed and was going to have none of his crap. Within a couple months, deathbed was fired and there was great rejoicing. And deathbed himself? He robbed a nearby liquor store a few days later and was arrested. No one was surprised.
That was in the early eighties. Things like that don't happen too much anymore, at least in my experience, although they probably do at government agencies.
There was a lawsuit that ended not long ago in which some city had held promotional exams for firefighters (for lieutenant or captain, IIRC). None of the firefighters that passed the exam was a minority, so what did the city do? They threw out the results completely. They'd made up their minds that they were going to have minorities pass the test and be promoted. Naturally, the firefighters who had passed the test and would have been eligible for promotion sued. A few months ago, they won and had their eligibility for promotion reinstated.
On the flip side, there are charter schools in the US that are 100% minority, or nearly, and are so by the choice of the students and their parents, who believe that the programs, specifically tailored to the ethnic groups and the challenges they face in often high-crime neighborhoods, give them a better chance of a good education and completing school. I wholly support them. Nobody knows better than the
No, your understanding of equal opportunity is flawed.
Equal opportunity is not "you must hire x percentage of blacks", equal opportunity is "you may not refuse employment on the basis an employee is black". It's a very big difference.
Equal opportunity is never used pro-actively, only defensively. Otherwise it becomes racism whether used to enforce a certain number of minority workers or to limit the number of minority workers. So a convince store owner is not obliged to hire an Asian man but may not refuse employment on the basis that the man is Asian.
Corporations and government departments in Australia may maintain ethnic diversity policies (hiring X number of aborigines) for their own reasons (PR, accounting and so forth) but in no place is this mandated by law. Saying "we don't hire abbo's" is however.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
He, like a lot of other people in this thread, seem to say "equal opportunity" when they mean "affirmative action". I don't know why this is, but I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of US laws or media have actually confused the terms themselves, saying that ethnic quotas are "equal opportunity". They are not. Equal opportunity can only apply to individuals. Ethnic quotas are a form of affirmative action and very dubious indeed.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Nope, he said if you've got something to hide, don't do it on the internet. The difference is subtle but huge. Reasonable advice really, though it shouldn't be news to anybody with half a brain.
Well, Asian is worse in that regard. Look at map, look at how many countries are on that continent. Political correctness run amok.
Being from the UK, I always have to do a mental translation in my head - Asian, in the US, seems to refer to what we would call Oriental - generally East Asia.
In the UK, Asian means India and Pakistan. A chinese person would never identify themselves here as Asian.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I'm not sure what country you're from or which one you're talking about, but here in the United States that's not true. In the US Affirmative Action cannot place quotas, and several court cases including the Supreme Court have upheld that strict racial quotas of any sort are unconstitutional (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger). Colleges, for example, are allowed to consider race as a means to an end such as "diversity", but they are not allowed to set any quotas or use race-based admission as a redress for historical racism. Although the "right wing" in our country likes to raise affirmative action as a boogie-man, things don't actually operate that way in this country.
E pluribus unum