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

[Renraku]

They probably want to pick the most qualified worker rather than the most politically correct one. If they end up with an entire workforce full of white employees, perhaps an investigation should be done as to why there are no other qualified candidates in the area.

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

[OakDragon]

In Soviet Russia...

Ha ha ha! Wait, that's not funny... Did you mean something like "In Soviet Russia, diversity tracks you!"?

Re:I'm pretty sure

[foo fighter]

They probably want to pick the most inexpensive worker rather than the most politically correct one. If they end up with an entire workforce full of H1B employees, perhaps an investigation should be done as to why there are no other qualified candidates in the area.

FTFY

Watching people get excited about and defend Google gives me terrible nostalgia of Microsoft's history.

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

[Dishevel]

We have seen equal opportunity here. Equal opportunity means that you research only the number. You do not look at why. You look at the number and regulate that. That is what equal opportunity is. It may not be what we wanted it to be but nonetheless it is what it is.

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

[FooAtWFU]

Please. This is Google. Money is not an object.... value is. Their goal is to pick the most cost-effective worker. For some jobs, yes, that's the inexpensive one, but for others you want someone who knows what they're doing.

Give them some credit.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[ishobo]

That is your problem, not mine. There is nothing wrong with the word oriental. The idea that it is a slur has happened within my lifetime. What is most odd is my Oriental friends, that live in the Orient, do not think of it as a slur. I often hear in the States that Oriental is seen as a way to denigate people from the Far East because it ignores unique cultures. Well, Asian is worse in that regard. Look at map, look at how many countries are on that continent. Political correctness run amok.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[bennomatic]

You're absolutely right. I've got nothing against US companies using some level of outsourced labor, but if it turns out that they imported 15,000 Serbians (or whatever group) and are using that number to vaunt their "diversity" metric while not tapping the local market for labor, it's the height of cynicism.

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

[Korin43]

How am I a racist? By pointing out that how education is funded in the US is unfair to the poor? Or the fact that statistically speaking, white people are less likely to be poor? It's a fact. You don't solve problems by pretending they don't exist.

US Census, median incomes for 2006:
White: $50,000 / year
Black: $32,000 / year
Hispanic: $38,000 / year

The percentages are also interesting.

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

[mjwx]

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.

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.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[h4rm0ny]

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.

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

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Great post, technically correct, but totally ignoring the elephant in the room.

Yes, "equal opportunity" is what you say. "Affirmative action", however, is exactly what you say "equal opportunity" is not.

Both are law. So your whole diatribe basically makes one point : "you're misidentifying the law you're complaining about". Of course, you're acting as if this little mistake invalidates the whole argument.

That's just not how you present your argument : it's a direct attack against complaining about the obvious stupidity of this law. In other words, you agree with affirmative action, with racist quotas (oh sorry I meant "racial" quotas, which means the same thing), and you somehow feel the need to attack anyone disagreeing with you with tiny little details.

Your argument is as idiotic as saying "watr" isn't wet, due to misspelling.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[Geeky]

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.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[elnyka]

Equal opportunity is not flawed... everybody should have the equal *opportunity* to work for Google. Should everybody actually get hired equally? No, absolutely not... that should depend entirely on aptitude, effort, suitability, etc.

For starters, there is some cognitive dissonance between these two things you said:

everybody should have the equal *opportunity* to work for Google.

and

Should everybody actually get hired equally?

You can't work on google equally if they don't get hired equally. Perhaps what you want to say is that everyone with the minimum requirements for a job should have a right to apply for that job. And this I totally agree.

As a minority myself, I got to say, indeed equal opportunity in many cases *is flawed*. It works in education. It levels the entrance (and playing fields) for ethnic groups that have historically been at a disadvantage (there is a racial component to this which makes the topic rather inflammatory *for some*, there is no way around it, and it's a topic better served with its own thread.)

It works in at work (no pun intended) as it makes it illegal to use race, ethnicity (and similar attributes) as factors in the hiring process. But that's about it.

But, as you have said, getting hired should strictly depend on qualifications. And this is where affirmative action is flawed.

I am a Latino, and do you know how many Latinos I've seen in engineering and science schools? Not that many, even perhaps in areas with a high % of relatively affluent Latinos like Miami-Dade County.

How many African American students I saw in engineering and science schools? Not that many either unfortunately. The number of African American IT/engineering colleagues I have had in the last 15 years is very small, almost dismal.

What are predominant groups studying and working IT/Engineering fields in the US? Non-Hispanic US-born Whites (the majority), and South Asians (India/Pakistan), Chinese and Eastern European immigrants (three minority groups.)

The problem certain (not all) minorities face in this respect are of a cultural nature and multi-variable. This is a problem to be fixed by the government, by minority leaders, and to a large degree, by the minorities themselves. It is in large part an ethos problem and lack of information and role models conductive to the pursuit of education in the engineering and science fields.

It is not up to corporations to execute social policies.

If the overwhelming majority of students in science and engineering fields *are not* Hispanics or African Americans, in proportions that are substantially smaller than their proportions with respect of the total population, then it is obvious to anyone that is not a retard (or a sensationalist politician), that overwhelmingly you will have a truckload of White and Chinese/South Asian people next to a miserably small number of equally qualified Hispanics and African American applicants.

Let me re-iterate this again: It is not up to corporations to execute social policies.

If I create my own software company, and in my hiring process I overwhelmingly get resumes only from white people or say, just 3% (a # I just pulled out of my ass for the sake of argument) from Hispanics and African Americans, and if race is not a factor in favor or against anyone, obviously then, my employees would be predominantly white.

Would that be my fault? Would the white dudes who got hired be at fault? My business is to make business and only hire those that qualify, independently of race.

And that's primarily a function of who applies, itself a function of who studies in science and engineering fields.

Unless we have evidence that google is doing racial profiling (do we actually believe that shit), the onus is on the government (local and federal) to investigate why certain mi

Re:I'm pretty sure

[samkass]

Yes, "equal opportunity" is what you say. "Affirmative action", however, is exactly what you say "equal opportunity" is not.

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.

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.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[stdarg]

Are you sure? From http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html

In the 2004-05 school year, 83 cents out of every dollar spent on education is estimated to come from the state and local levels (45.6 percent from state funds and 37.1 percent from local governments). The federal government's share is 8.3 percent. The remaining 8.9 percent is from private sources, primarily for private schools. [ * * ] This division of support remains consistent with our nation's historic reliance on local control of schools.

Local funding is certainly a big part but state funding is the biggest and federal funding isn't insignificant. What's also hidden in these numbers is the fact that schools in poor areas get more of the state and federal funding than schools in rich areas. Of course, a lot of that money is wasted on special education and magnet programs, depending on your opinions of them... for instance, how is it helping poor kids to have a magnet program that buses in smart kids and puts them in their own insulated program within a larger dysfunctional school? Well, that just highlights the fact that increasing funding without changing how funds are allocated isn't going to have the effect you're looking for.

Honestly I'm surprised there are so many people left on Slashdot who haven't given up the funding argument and accepted that parental involvement and other environmental factors of the children have a lot more to do with performance.

Re:I'm pretty sure

[tomhudson]

You might argue that computer geeks are a uniquely rational breed,

This is slashdot. Thee is NO way anyone looking in here would think the "computer geeks" are uniquely rational, or that they breed ...

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?

Re:Translation

[Rennt]

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.

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.

[rsborg]

It's the H1Bs.

Someone please mod this up! A friend of mine works at Apple, and all her co-workers who are SW developers are from IT contracting outfits in India (yes, they're all Indian, too). She couldn't name a single developer who wasn't a contractor (even the non-Indian was a contractor).

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?".

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

[sodul]

Disclaimer: I used to be on H1-B and am a permanent resident now.

Do not forget that it is 65,000 "new" H1Bs, they are valid for 3 years, renewable once for a theoretical total of 6 years. It is also extendable from year to year pending a change of status, usually while the green card application is being processed. Some people can be on H1-B for 12 years with this. Add to that the fact that H1-B are usually concentrated in a few areas and you get more than 1% of the local "workforce" (not the same as population).

That said I would estimate that the average H1B last 5 years. Personally I think the green card process is broken, if the queue is taking many years to process either the US should put more resources into it (it cost lost of money so it got to be profitable) or be more picky about application and reject them sooner.

I'm a bit annoyed at all the bad press H1-B visas get. Sure there is a lot of abuse, but I like to believe that in my case there was a genuine need for a foreigner. While being on a H1-B I've quit twice and each time for a significantly larger salary. On my last H1-B year my total compensation was double the required H1-B salary. I have a few friends that have been on H1-B and most of them were much more qualified than the average software developer here in Silicon Valley.

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

[Nazlfrag]

You know what else doesn't apply to contractors? Equal opportunity hiring practices.

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.

Trade Secret?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Trade Secret?

[russotto]

Does Google not want Microsoft to scoop them on their new blacksploitation search engine?

Too late. If you search for "Shaft" in Google, the top result is the IMDB page for the 2000 remake, which no one wants to see. Bing brings up the wikipedia page for the 1971 original.

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?

Re:Business Strategy?

[jra]

Well, let's be clear: "we're going to hire the smartest people, even if they're "white" and male" is *not* racist, but will probably get them in trouble anyway.

(As Carlin notes: "Indians are very dark 'white people'. What's that all about?")

Merc: SV Blacks, Latinos and Women Lose Ground

[theodp]

Mercury News: Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies

breakdown

[binarybum]

they just don't want us to know that it's about 40%borg and 15%greys

As for Apple...

[doomy]

We all knew given the naming of iPad, that they had no women in their marketing/strategic decision making (all that synergy stuff) dept.

Re:As for Apple...

[Trepidity]

I'm not usually one to demand any particular degree of "diversity" of companies, but it is rather immediately noticeable how Apple's executives all come from the same demographics: white males between 40 and 65. You'd think there'd be at least one person from some other demographic--- it's not like this is the uniformity you see if you walk into a CS or engineering department at a university (ever seen one without a single asian?).

Re:As for Apple...

[PeanutButterBreath]

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.

No Joke?

[Frosty Piss]

More likely it'll prove this wasn't a joke.

Re:Why does race or gender matter?

[LordLucless]

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.

Re:Apparently "Evil" means "Non-White"

[Trepidity]

Having walked around the Googleplex, it'd be hard to describe it as dominantly white. There are not too many African Americans, but asians are not absent by a long-shot.

Oh this is ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Question

[gujo-odori]

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: 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.