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."

Comments

I'm pretty sure

[jra]

the EEOC and Congress will see it differently.

Wonder what *else* Congress will ask while they've got them on the stand...

Re:I'm pretty sure

[TheKidWho]

Google just doesn't want to be subjected to draconian and racist equal opportunity laws or quotas.

I'm pretty sure they are hiring people based on merit and technical ability, not race or color.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[RightwingNutjob]

In Soviet Russia they kept track of how many Jews people were hiring, just to make sure they stayed in line. Here they're trying to keep tabs on the Blacks. Good intentions be damned, this just doesn't smell good.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[Narcocide]

If I had mod points I would mod you up. Equal opportunity is flawed because it is based on a flawed assumption of equal aptitude. If you think about it just a little you'll realize how applying this at a business level instead of immediately at kindergarten level is doomed to do more harm than good.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[GlassHeart]

No, "equal opportunity" in employment refers to the fact that it is illegal to discriminate against people of certain sex, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. It does not say that you should hire anybody other than your best applicant.

You are probably mixing it up with "affirmative action", which seeks to address historical injustice by bending over backwards for the wronged groups. In this case, because simply freeing the African American slaves still left their descendants at a severe disadvantage in the open market, society decides to give them preferential treatment.

All I'm going to say is that it's quite common for the successful to think that they did it all themselves, without thinking too much about whether they'd be where they are if they were born in a different color or socio-economic background.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[Korin43]

There's a difference between "certain races are inferior" and "certain races are statistically more likely to not be qualified for certain jobs" (as a result of how education funding is related to a neighborhood's wealth, and white people tend to be richer than everyone else).

Re:I'm pretty sure

[Trepidity]

Google themselves go out of their way to claim how diverse their workforce is, though, and their PR shots often show a carefully selected diverse set of employees. If they really wanted to argue, "we pick the most qualified regardless of who that turns out to be", they could, but they're instead trying to argue that they have an exceedingly diverse workforce, and use that for both recruiting and general PR purposes. Yet, they don't want to give actual statistics on that, which makes one suspect they're lying.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[ishobo]

Indians are Asian. I think you mean Orientals and Indians.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[severoon]

From what I see these days, equal opportunity is aiming at the wrong mark. The problem is no longer disparity between races, it's disparity between socioeconomic classes. Historically the issue certainly was race, and consequently there are more of the historically disenfranchised minorities in the lower class...but that doesn't change the fact. When discrimination happens today, it's more likely to be a response to the socioeconomic status than race.

To present a somewhat oversimplified example that nevertheless makes the point, in the '60s it would have been remarkable for a black Harvard graduate to be chosen for a position over a much less qualified white person (not impossible, not unheard of, but remarkable nonetheless). Today, it's remarkable when someone who's scrapped from a challenging background and hasn't quite risen to the same level of achievement is chosen over that same black Harvard grad of privilege, regardless of that person's race.

The culture of equal opportunity has made it politically expedient and very convenient to choose historically disenfranchised minorities today over the currently disenfranchised lower class.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[timmarhy]

"Equal opportunity means that you check for racism first, before trying grand social experiments because of an assumption that certain races are inferior."

that sentence there is EXACTLY why equal opportunity is a farce and people like you keep it alive. while the OP clearly stated certain groups, you tried to turn it into race. there are other groups of people denoted by other factors then race. he also stated if they weren't being hired due to a lack of skills, then they should have training directed to them, you turned it into an assumption of them being interior, again based on race.

I think people who push this EEO agenda are the ones hung up on race, not employers like google.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[h4rm0ny]

The States has serious issues whereby many actually do think that there is something wrong with a particular group but that if they keep changing words fast enough then they can outpace the prejudiced and keep ahead of them. Bollocks. You can see the progression with all sorts of terms - from negro to black to coloured to black to African-American and on again. (knew a black guy from Mozambique who hated how lots of people in the US called themselves African). Oriental to Asian. Cretin to Spastic to Retarded to Learning Disability. On and on, any word that some idiots have an issue with, another group takes it upon themselves to start condemning the word instead of the attitude. The correct response is to say that there's nothing fucking wrong with being black and saying someone is black is not an insult - just a fact if they are and a bizarre statement if they're not. Why should "Oriental" be an insult? Unless you think there's something wrong with being an oriental, then it's just a statement of fact. And if you change the words, then you're implicitly accepting that there is something wrong with being "oriental" and that you wish to disguise or gloss-over that fact.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Ah, now you're asking the correct question. What you do is you send government agents into companies, who then get full access to all materials, and get to dictate their terms to management. ... which will obviously result, as government interference always does, both in *more* racism and *more* power for government.

It's the perfect democratic policy. It appears to have good intentions, it has bad results, and results in more direct power for government officials, and as a bonus, results in more government officials. After all, pretty soon there will be negotiations about those required percentages, which means all races that don't want to be screwed will have to have a union-like internal government, obviously under control from Washington.

Why is bad results good for democratic policies ? Well quite simply, as their "anti-racist" policies result in more racism, they "clearly" show the need for more "anti-racist" policies, and more and heavier enforcement, resulting once again in more centralized government power.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[stdarg]

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.

I'm sure you're right but look at this bit from the EEOC manual on racial discrimination:

EXAMPLE 4
RACIAL STEREOTYPING OR BIAS

Charles, an African American, files a charge alleging that the employer, a retailer, used an interview to discriminate against him in favor of a less experienced White applicant. During the EEOC investigator’s discussion with the hiring manager, she notices that the hiring manager’s statements are peppered with comments such as “we were looking for a clean cut image,” and “this is a sophisticated upscale location . . . I have to make sure the people I hire have, you know, the ‘soft-skills’ we need.” Knowing that these statements could be reflective of racial stereotyping and bias,(39) the investigator evaluates the employer’s decisionmaking very carefully. The investigator interviews Charles’s most recent employer, who tells the investigator that “customers just loved working with Charles . . . he was one of our most effective and motivated employees.” The investigator also interviews the person hired and finds no basis for believing her “soft skills,” or her “image,” were any better than Charles’s. In addition, the investigator notices that, like the person hired over Charles, the rest of the staff also is White even though the qualified labor market is significantly more diverse. The investigator concludes that the employer rejected Charles based on racial stereotyping or bias.

The racial makeup of employees compared to the racial makeup of the applicant pool is definitely a factor, though not the only factor. In other words, if you don't have x percentage of blacks, that's a strike against you and adds weight to any claim of discrimination against blacks.

Translation

[base3]

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?

Of course they fought it.

[russotto]

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.

It's not the white males they're hiding.

[base3]

It's the H1Bs.

Re:It's not the white males they're hiding.

[Helen O'Boyle]

It's the H1Bs.

I don't think that's what's going on, because the government already makes H1B statistics available. They can't be hiding something that's already out there in plain sight. If you want to know how many H1B's have been granted to your least favorite employer, you can look it up! True, the statistics are a couple years behind the current year, but the statistics are THERE.

Take a look at Microsoft's for example, and take a look at the salaries offered (for those of you who know MS salary levels). And then factor in a good portion of Wipro and other Indian contracting firms requesting H1B's for positions in Redmond, as also likely working at MS. Given how desperate MS is for staff that they'd be importing that many workers, it doesn't make sense that there'd be more than 1-2% tech unemployment in this area, but there is. Still, I don't think that's what Google and Apple don't want others finding out.

Google/Apple/others MIGHT think (for example) that they're carefully crafting their image to every country they serve, and that a country hearing google only has 7 people on staff from that particular country might feel a bit put out and find reason to, maybe, make a search deal with a competitor who offers more employment to its countrymen. This would be the kind of logic that would lead someone to claim that divulging that information would be too much of a window into strategy.

Gender, I can't explain as easily. But one look around the annual Microsoft "MVP Conference" occurring in downtown Bellevue, WA this week (near MS) tells me that if they're primarily male, they're not the only ones. So I'm not sure why it'd be an issue, except that it could be as simple as preventing someone from being successful with the argument that, "If you divulged your gender mix, why won't you divulge your racial mix?".

Despicable journalists

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:Despicable journalists

[Jeff DeMaagd]

[quote]A media company wages an 18-month lawsuit against private companies[/quote]

I don't think that's true, it looks to me that the lawsuit is against the regulators, not the private companies themselves. The FOIA doesn't apply against companies directly.

Besides, because Google claims it is diverse on their own site, the only damage would come is if they're lying about it and the slide shows are just tokenism, all the photos appear to be of the same group of 20 or so people. Of which I would shed croc tears if it's an exposed lie.

Google's CEO said it best

[martin-boundary]

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

What is Google hiding?

No: translation "leave us alone"

[bradley13]

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.