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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...
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.
It's the H1Bs.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
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?
We all knew given the naming of iPad, that they had no women in their marketing/strategic decision making (all that synergy stuff) dept.
More likely it'll prove this wasn't a joke.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
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
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.