Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's
theodp (442580) writes Comparing Yahoo's diversity numbers to Google's, writes Valleywag's Nitasha Tiku, is "like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges." Two weeks after Google disclosed it wasn't "where we want to be" with its 17% female and 1% Black U.S. tech workforce, Yahoo revealed its diversity numbers aren't that much better than Google's, with a U.S. tech workforce that's 35% female and 1% Black. The charts released by Yahoo indicate women fare worse in its global tech workforce, only 15% of which is female. So, with Google and Yahoo having checked in, isn't it about time for U.S. workforce expert Mark Zuckerberg and company to stop taking the Fifth and ante up numbers to show students what kind of opportunities Facebook offers?
I thought that competitive business was supposed to hire the most qualified and motivated candidates? Seriously, get out there, carve out your own space, and get hired! "Diversity" is just a politically correct buzzword and is not guaranteed to lead to an agile workforce..
Shh.
The charts released by Yahoo indicate women fare worse in its global tech workforce...
They indicate nothing of the sort. They indicate that Yahoo has fewer female workers than male workers. That is it.
Insinuating that female workers "fare worse" at Yahoo is akin to insinuating that there is rampant sexism and a glass ceiling going on there, which is most likely simply untrue. The truth is that there are simply fewer females applying for positions because there are fewer female CS graduates, which is the ACTUAL fact.
If you want more women in the tech workforce, you need to start at the source and graduate more first.
The same thing can be said of blacks. Like it or not the amount of black CS engineers in Silicon Valley is very, very small. You can't artificially create diversity when none exists in the talent pool.
When did /. become SJW Central?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to take the top 15% of students in the majors and from the schools they hired from, then compare against the percentage of ethnicity and gender of who they hired? I think the numbers would be much more interesting then (at least from my experiences).
Sad when one has to look at the color of someone's skin to make a hiring decision. Personally I'd rather hire the best candidate.
We desperately want to hire people who are qualified. About half the the people we interviewed were either South or East Asian. One was African American, and she didn't know what multi-threaded processing was.
Just maybe this has nothing to do with race or sexism and they just hired the best people they could find.
Like a lot of people at Slashdot, I work in the IT industry too. Most of our people are male, and either Caucasian or Indian. Does that mean that the company I work for is part of some evil conspiracy to keep aphroditic purple martians out of the IT work force? Nope. We'd hire my dog if she was good at what needed to be done. Nobody cares what your body looks like as long as you're Nice and Competent. We simply don't get a lot of female, Chinese, Norwegian, Mexican, Brazilian, etc., people applying.
Is that a problem? I don't think so. Maybe certain demographics - gasp - have a majority of their interests in other areas. There's far more female nurses in hospitals than male nurses and although I see it mentioned from time to time, I never see hospitals being excoriated and dragged over the coals because they don't have a 50% male nursing force. Basketball is dominated by people with dark skin and I don't see people complaining that the white guys are under-represented.
This isn't any different. The opportunities are there. The education is available. Maybe certain demographics just aren't as interested in IT.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
Love sees no species.
They look for talented individuals in computer science. It's directly related to the diversity of computer science graduates and shouldn't be an indicator of a problem. The problem is hiring people for the color of their skin instead of their talent. If you want an indicator of a problem, then look at the applicants and their resumes along with their ethnicity and THEN maybe you might fight a problem.
Someone want to explain to me how it's "bad" that they hired people they deemed qualified for the job?
Why would Google/Facebook/Yahoo or any other company be paying attention to the race, gender or religion when hiring? Doing so would be prejudicial...
MABASPLOOM!
Tag: whofuckingcares
These companies are made up primarily of software engineers and software engineers are predominately male. How are you supposed to hire more women when the available pool is so small?
is it not feasible quality candidates are unavailable in every spectrum?
Everyone's special snowflake isn't qualified for every job in the market.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I work at a fairly large tech company. We try to hire with diversity in mind, but there just are not many applicants. The change had to start at the education level. BTW, just we hire someone that meets the checkbox for "diverse", they still are highly qualified. The misnomer is that hiring with diversity somehow implies a lower quality candidate. That is not true.
like they apparently did for the analysis of Google?
Here is a shocker maybe not enough women want to work in the Tech field? My wife thinks my job sounds horrible and she has no desire to bang away on a computer and thinks I'm crazy for doing it. Everyone seems to think everyone in the world is just like them and since they want to work in a field where you have very little interpersonal interaction that everyone would flock to that job. The same way I don't see a whole lot of men lining up to be elementary school teachers workers women as a whole don't seem as interested in working in the computer field as men. Can't men and women be different or does society now say all jobs must have break downs of people equal to the same population break down. Why can't we just say 100% of the people in working in tech companies are people and not say Women, Men, Asian, Black, White, Hispanic. Why can't we stop dividing people and treat them based on the individual qualities? If you want to work in tech great! if you don't great!
High tech jobs aren't the best job ever for everyone so lets stop the false outrage that this particular line of work does not have equal population distribution unless we are going to do that for all jobs. Where is the outrage of HR professionals, teachers, carpenters or any other job category.
How about unemployment rates for female and black tech workers?
Given the outrage I would expect atleast 35% of the unemployed tech workers being female and atleast 1% being black,.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Should be "with a global overall workforce that's 37% female and U.S. tech workforce that's 1% Black."
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. "
Oh well... I guess my children and their character can't make it on their own. All our hiring managers at the most liberal companies in America must be racist, so screw qualifications, competency, and competition. Let's judge them on the color of their skin so appearances are good and we feel good about ourselves. That won't have any negative implications (like overall productivity, competency, resentment to minorities from "less preferred" races, resentment from qualified "preferred" races for condescension of the process). Why, it's Utopia!
The numbers might give the impression that Google and Yahoo are unfairly discriminating against blacks and women. To determine whether that's the case, I think you need to know two things:
--Among Google and Yahoo employees, what percentage are black? What percentage are women?
--Among CS graduates, what percentage are black? What percentage are women?
(I'm simplifying here by assuming that every hire at Google and Yahoo is a CS graduate.)
If the two sets of numbers differ significantly, then it could indicate discriminatory hiring practices. If the numbers are the same, then it would seem to indicate that Google and Yahoo are evenhandedly hiring from the pool of available candidates, and that the cause of the inequality is further upstream.
As a white male, I am flagellating myself mercilessly to atone for my race's crimes.
I'd like to see diversity in every workplace including professional sports. Now, diversity in some sports would mean white guys must be hired to play.
Men, particularly blue collar men, have been disproportionately impacted by the bad economy. Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men. There is also a true shortage of qualified people, unlike in computer-related fields. Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."
Can anyone please go to any college university and look at the class make up in a well balanced school and report back what THAT looks like, then compare it to what is in the work force? I'm sure even requesting data from staffing agencies, who house probably more resumes than anyone else, would yield the best unbiased results of people seeking employment. Since all the white males are -clearly- employed then they should have a minority in something like a recruiter's pool of applicants. Right?...right?!...Come on now... We all know the real answers to these questions and we are all afraid to say it. Lets be honest. Most African Americans and women don't care about IT. You could trace it with scientific "data" and say some left brained/right brained has something to do with it, or you could just say its not a 'cool field' for most people. I work in a nerdy industry, and I'm proud as hell of it. Most people aren't ok saying that.
I understand "WHY" they look at these numbers, to make sure there is no unfair practices going that would limit someones chance to get a position at these companies, but trying to have been numbers does the same thing. No I don't have any supporting information, I just think its common sense if you hire based on the diversity numbers you denying someone else that opportunity as well. I don't know much about these studies, do they look at the area these companies are based on. While there probably a even mix of men an women, some areas would have an uneven mix of different races. I would like to see is if an area is 65% African American and a company only has 1% of its employees of that race. The other issue is colleges, what are the local colleges diversity numbers, and are they higher or lower then local companies.
......we where lucky to have 1 girl in the classroom.
Personally I find IT/Programming is just one of these fields that does not seem to appeal to women in general.
What is Google/Yahoo/Facebook supposed to do? Force them at gunpoint to work for them?
He'll release the Facebook stats if and when there's a compelling profit motive to do so, and not a minute sooner. And I don't hold that against him one bit.
I don't think that it has anything to do with sexism or anything else. There really is little or no employment discrimination going on. It is all based on who is skilled and qualified. I think it is due to the fact that certain demographic sections are just not as interested in IT work and they decide to go into another field. The only reason that we are seeing this pattern is because certain groups are more likely to decide one career path over another. And that is their right. So, why are we trying to force people into jobs they really don't want to do and don't like, and why do we keep trying to punish and slant things against the people who actually do like to do those jobs? A lot of women go into nursing, more than men. A lot of men go into IT. This is because of their own CHOICE and shouldnt it be? But you have people talking about how we need to force women into IT jobs when they are happier in a nursing job.
As well, "diversity" is a deceptive, and overused term. I strongly believe that the citizens of a country should have equal opportunity to pursue jobs they want to do. If a male wants to become a nurse, please do. If a female wants to do IT, please do. But dont do it because of all of this political correctness/diversity crap. But you have these "Diversity" people out there that dont believe in that, they want to force people into jobs they really do not like. Diversity for the sake of diversity is an absurd and ludicrous idea and I reject it.
My company is pretty diverse, and we've been lucky to hire and retain quality people. However, we're small and relatively agile. Google and Yahoo are massive companies, and I'm afraid they will be too heavy-handed in their hiring, and just bring in "diversity" without verifying that they have the skills to do the job. It would be a disservice to those employees to inadvertently be set up for failure.
I do, because I want to see some nice ass and tits while working ;)
Who gives a shit about diversity. When making money the motive is profit.
Who is best for the job is what matters.
Maybe the issue lies elsewhere, Notice I didn't say problem.
Maybe particular demographics have less interest or skills in certain fields and that is why they have a lower representation?
The diversity argument always implies discrimination via race or sex, but notice no-one ever mentions Asians who are well represented in IT and engineering.... though I do not see many Chinese/Japanese/Vietnamese bricklayers, is that a problem?
How are they doing per capita in each of these demographics?
Fuck this : "lets label someone a victim and create feel good bureaucratic nonsense"
As a multi-ethnic interracial black Asian American gender fluid bisexual animal rights activist, in a relationship with a Somali Swede albino agendered homosexual with autism, I find it unacceptable that our particular cases are always ignored when talking about those matters. My partner always it had it worse. Won't someone please think of the Somali albinos?
I think it is time for the NBA and NFL to work on their diversity.
NBA: 76.3% black players (2013)
NFL: 67% black players (2010)
How come no one is up in arms about this?
Where are all the Japanese, Mexican, Indian players?
Well, where are the FEMALE players in the NBA or NFL?
This is an outrage.
These are tech companies. They need to function. So they need the people who can actually do the required work, at least to some degree.
It's not the same as some federal office department, where it doesn't really make any difference if somebody is working or not.
40% of Yahoo employees are Asian. If anything having Asian employees should be considered more diversified than even blacks, considering that many come from a totally different culture, and often speak different languages.
Seriously, this diversity issue is getting out of control everywhere. Hell, even in the NBA finals this year one of the announcers said something to the effect of "One of the reasons why the Spurs won this year is because of the team's diversity". Um, really? Like maybe they had a combination of the best players, best coaches, received less injuries, and played well together more so than any other team? Nope, it's because Miami had too many black guys on their team. This coming after the whole Sterling incident is just hilarious. Eg, it's bad when a white guy says something racially offensive, but ok when a minority does as long as it promotes DIVERSITY!!!!
This is meaningless without knowing the gender/race ratios of suitable job applications.
Although I have no evidence to prove this, from my own long experience in the software industry I strongly suspect that high tech companies are actually NOT giving people a harder time getting in the door because of their ethnicity or gender. I am far more inclined to believe that the numbers of different groups actually employed more closely reflect the ratios of suitable job applications received in the first place.
If this is the case then the current balance is and should be seen as completely OK.
If qualified women and black people just aren't applying in as great a number as white males, the worst thing companies can do is artificially bump up their numbers by giving them an artificial advantage in the interview/selection process. Positive discrimination is still discrimination, just against someone that blind societal convention rather than actual fairness makes OK.
Sadly, as a woman who was strong in math throughout school, I know most women don't like math, engineering, or even working in the corporate world. It is all very well and good to pick out a few of Silicon Valley's richest firms and then criticize them for not employing enough females. But the more important question is why don't girls go into math/engineering majors in college? It is a load of crap to say the girls don't have enough encouragement to go into the sciences. Fact is many girls like literature, the arts, and humanities because those majors are fun. Girls also like degrees which lead to education and caring for others (i.e. healthcare), that siphons off even more intelligent females. Fact is rooms full of nerdy computer science guys would love a few more women in their midst so I seriously doubt Google/Yahoo/Facebook are discriminating.
I find the last line in the summary pretty... odd. Both Yahoo and Google in their reports make it pretty clear that there are plenty of opportunities for anyone who is interested in working for them. This isn't about opportunity - it's about outcome. In the interview that Google's Laszlo Bock did with PBS (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/googles-diversity-record-shows-women-minorities-left-behind/) he cites the example of hiring 50% of the Black CS PhD graduates in one year - one person. Both companies, and many more in the industry, are trying to fix the problem at where they see the source is - candidates not going into the programs that feed into the industry.
I'll bet 100% of their employees are human, I mean shouldn't they be hiring monkeys, and parrots too. Talk about bigotry. They must be Animalphobic.
Google and Yahoo can only hire from the available, qualified workforce. Anyone who has been through a degree in Computer Science knows that very few women choose that career path. It's not Google or Yahoo's fault that women don't choose computer careers. I know women who have chosen an IT career path and they are just as competent as the men. Personally, I gladly welcome more women to go into IT and become qualified. But, most women seem to think that IT is too geeky for them. People who write these articles completely miss the real facts. They spread more misinformation and become part of the problem rather than the solution.
That companies are now eschewing profits in favor of pushing diversity. How and why investors/stockholders are pushing for this stuff is beyond me. It does not positively impact the bottom line, and that's all they SHOULD care about. Activist investors looking to make companies waste money on social crusades need to give up.
Is there any business or industry that has some kind of perfect mirroring of the broader ethnic and gender demographics between their own population and society at large -- and whose mirror is the same up and down the pay scale (ie, I wouldn't call some some factory with a big majority of blacks or hispanics on the factory floor and all white men in the office a good example)?
Several posts have said, essentially, "shouldn't you hire the best person for the job, ignoring everything else?"
Thats what both Yahoo and Google are saying about why they want to hire a diverse workforce. Both of them realize that their clients and customers are a very diverse group of people, and they hope that by hiring a diverse group as well, they can better create products to meet a diverse set of needs. You can argue that gender and skin color still aren't great ways to find a diverse set of perspectives, and you'd be right, but its one small tool in the arsenal.
Given that 39% of the US personnel are Asian and only 4.9% of the population, whites are under-represented. Of course this shows how silly the claim that the "diversity is flawed" are - the number of employees reflect the number of qualified applicants
My god this shit needs to stop. Affirmative action is just as ridiculous and hypocritical today as it was the day it was suggested. There is nothing to see here - Yahoo has a female CEO for crying out loud.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Ever notice that there's also a difference in the way women in tech tend to "look"? I'm not saying that every woman in the industry is akin to an animal. In my working history, the girls that I work with tend to definitely be lower on the 10-scale than average. The ones that are cute, well there are two possibilities - either they're not cute, and after working there for a few months, they start to look cute because the talent pool is so shallow, or you find their 'niche' cuteness. There's a real point to what I'm trying to say - the fact is, that women choose their career based on things other than what they find interesting. There are many factors - including how they have been treated while growing up, which totally depends on how desirable they are to the opposite sex. "Hot girls" are generally used to getting things done for them, including their thinking. They tend to not be so smart, because they don't have to be. These girls are all in fields like Marketing - where they can hang around with guys who will make a lot of money and latch on to one of them. They sit in their marketing meetings, make their stupid comments - but no one cares because they are nice to look at. Fact is, most women don't want anything to do with tech. It's hard, it tends to be based on logic - which most women are not, and the pool of men that are in tech are generally the less desirable - prone to make less money. The women that I have worked with, seem to like that they can be a "4" or a "5" and be treated like a "9". The dopey tech guys will drool over them, and will usually let them order them around. They usually fit into a mould - the corporate woman. In the end, what a woman ends up doing from 9 to 5 is based more on finding a suitable mate than it is about the pursuit of a career.
WFC
Who Fucking Cares
Always self-selecting. If we are to achieve diversity, the US state needs to drop the bourgeois freedom thing altogether, and simply assign its subjects into educational tracks and positions in public corporations.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
DOES NOT WORK and it is just discrimination none the less.
Northern Ireland all employees for companies with 10 or more (I believe it is circa 10 employees) MUST by law, track RELIGEON. Fuck that, I just run multiple companies each with the maximum number of employees, have them work under contract, becuase, honestly, I don't give a fuck what religeon they are, if they bring it into work, they're fired for causing a hostile and politicising a work environment and attempting to recruit/convert employees.
What you do in your home, is youre business.
Another thing, what if the demographic make up is just what they report? You cannot change what is without discriminating at some level, I simply, refuse to discriminate, by telling people basically what they do in their own time, is their business, bring it into work, yer out.
Bah. When are finally going to stop measuring this stuff. If we need to have a closely monitored equilibrium on the number of people from each gender, race or whatever, then we have zero real equality. Engineers and employees in general should be chosen based on their skills and experience. *That* is equality. Hiring based on gender/racial quota to satisfy some artificial "equality" standard is the exact opposite.
I think the problem with diversity started earlier that beginning in the work place. Just take a look around the computer science and math classes. I am fairly certain that the percentages for women and blacks in the courses are the same as Google's and Facebook's employment.
"That's like killing a unicorn!"
Not only stay at home moms. Indeed, not only stay at home moms and dads.
Speaking personally, many well qualified professional people who have elected not to have families prefer staying at home or working from home to being stuffed in a cubicle. What's more, they're doing the world a favour by not contributing to the extreme waste of physical commuting.
Back when the hot girl only sits behind the nerd when she needs to cheat off my exam, and me, being all too eager to comply because girls just never gave me the time of day.
Seriously, the IT field is getting flooded with the "bullying" types, from both the bros and the hos that claim to hate them. Traditionally, engineering and the bookish, eager to work with one another and do cool shit, we're now infiltrated by assholes and douchebags of both sexes taking advantage of those who are less socially integrated. You can't go a day without reading about some Silicon Valley "magnate" who wouldn't rate a 3 on a 10 point geekscale making some bone-headed, wrong-sided statement, and then the 15 articles about how Silicon Valley is some sort of boys club written by people who couldn't spell Javascript, much less write any.
And we've let them. Geeks, long the whipping boy of the popular, buying into this whole alpha male bullshit. Jesus fucking christ, guys, your Silicon Valley heroes? They're *salesmen*, not geeks. Wolves in sheep's clothing. They talk the talk, because that's what they're good at. Give them an editor and what do they produce?
They're preying upon you (us). They want you to doubt yourself because that's what you do best. Your insecurity is their lock on you, whether that be "come on bro, are you cool enough to hang with the jocks?" or the "come on, geek, I'm pretty, I bat my eyelids and you go fetch." Think for yourselves.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If Yahoo's tech work force is really 35% female, that's astoundingly high, far higher than anywhere I've seen in my 25 years in the industry. More tellingly, it's about double the percentage of female CS grads, which says that Yahoo has managed to draw a far higher share of female software engineers than the average in the industry (Google's percentage of female engineers is in line with the CS graduate numbers).
I really don't think there's any sexism on the part of the companies here. I know Google is trying hard to recruit, hire retain and promote more women and minorities, and not just for the sake of political correctness (I work for Google). Google's numbers, as well as those from other studies around the industry, show that diverse teams are more effective, more creative and more efficient. Diversity has non-trivial value to the business, and the companies would like more.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
...has no place in a discussion where liberals are already in Racial/Gender Grievance Mode.
Can't they post a chart of all their applicants broken down by race and sex, then another chart of the same format showing who was hired? This would put to rest the question of how many females and minorities are applying to work at these companies.
42 USC 2000e-2 flatly prohibits US employers from:
"limit[ing], segregat[ing], or classify[ing] his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."
Note the repeated use of the word ANY in the statute--often "overlooked" in the name of so-called "diversity." Those factors cannot be used to either deny OR "pursue" any group.
Thus, implying that the employment numbers are anything but simply facts seems to presuppose an illegal discrimination practice because an employer may be inherently classifying employees based on prohibited factors rather than on the qualifications for the job--that is, illegally using these prohibited factors to "favor" certain applicants to "get the numbers up." (Euphemistically termed reverse-discrimination--but any discrimination is prohibited-discrimination under the statute.)
The purpose of the Civil Rights movement in the US and decades of federal action was to eliminate all such practices. Instead, we continue to see companies and activists trot out the race/sex/etc. card instead of focusing on building bona fide qualifications/talent and seeking excellence in the workplace.
Your example is a perfect illustration of why societal pressures are causing the imbalance in the male/female workforce, not just that women "have no desire" to work in these fields (a lazy excuse if I've ever heard one). Men don't become elementary school teachers because of pressure and conditioning from society. If a man becomes an elementary school teacher then every day he has to worry about looking like a pedophile. Ask any man who is in education and you'll get this response. People choose their jobs due to pressure from society, and it's a simple fact. That same society is pressuring women not to get CS degrees or work in computing.
How is this Yahoo's (or Google's) fault?
Of all the years I've worked in IT and taught it at college level, one fact remains the same. The people most interested in learning this field in America are mostly white males. Of all the classes I've taught there were exactly 1 black female and 1 black male in total..
Should they hire like the Feds? Piss on qualification, we've got to meet our 'minority' quotas!! lol
Just maybe this has nothing to do with race or sexism and we Free Roman Men are the best people.
Like a lot of people in Rome, I work at the Colosseum. Most of our people are male, and either Roman or Italian. Does that mean that the company I work for is part of some evil conspiracy to keep dirty purple Dacians out of the work force? Nope. We'd hire my dog if she was good at what needed to be done. Nobody cares what your body looks like as long as you're Nice and Competent. We simply don't get a lot of Free female, Carthaginian, Iberian, Gaelic or Germanic people applying.
Is that a problem? I don't think so. Maybe certain demographics - gasp - have a majority of their interests in other areas. There's far more female nurses in hospices than male nurses and although I see it mentioned from time to time, I never see hospices being excoriated and dragged over the coals because they don't have a fifty percent male nursing force. Gladiator fights are dominated by people with dark skin and I don't see people complaining that the white guys are under-represented.
This isn't any different. The opportunities are there. The education is available. Maybe certain demographics just aren't as interested in working in a nice job.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
We are simply more qualified, more motivated, simply the best, better than all the rest, there is no discrimination, it's all me and my natural superiority.
I believe we are all equal and should be treated equally under the law. However the media and Progressives will not be satisfied until whites are completely mixed and are the minority in the entire country. So far their white genocide campaign has been a resounding success.
How can anyone not see this diversity for what it is, blatant racism against whites and white cultural genocide.
If people here in the US were reading an article about this in another country the racism would be obvious.
IT has to hire qualified, and intelligent, people or their world will go to shit.
Quality, and intelligence, has nothing at all to do with Diversity.
Here is a shocker maybe not enough women want to work in the Tech field? My wife thinks my job sounds horrible and she has no desire to bang away on a computer and thinks I'm crazy for doing it. Everyone seems to think everyone in the world is just like them and since they want to work in a field where you have very little interpersonal interaction that everyone would flock to that job. The same way I don't see a whole lot of men lining up to be elementary school teachers workers women as a whole don't seem as interested in working in the computer field as men. Can't men and women be different or does society now say all jobs must have break downs of people equal to the same population break down. Why can't we just say 100% of the people in working in tech companies are people and not say Women, Men, Asian, Black, White, Hispanic. Why can't we stop dividing people and treat them based on the individual qualities? If you want to work in tech great! if you don't great!
High tech jobs aren't the best job ever for everyone so lets stop the false outrage that this particular line of work does not have equal population distribution unless we are going to do that for all jobs. Where is the outrage of HR professionals, teachers, carpenters or any other job category.
As long as she's not "banging away" with the pool boy.
Lemme break down the problems with most of these "not a big deal" comments:
1) Women and Minorities Aren't Interested In IT
Wrong on multiple levels. First of all, plenty of women and minorities are interested in IT, for the obvious reason that it pays a lot and it's a white collar job. But there's a long road between being interested and having a job. White men get fast tracked on this road educationally speaking thanks to privilege and social encouragement. Women and minorities, even if they keep up in terms of education, get held back by racist hiring practices (it's a fact, check the studies). But, besides all of that, you don't need to be in IT to work at a tech company. What's Google's excuse with regards to all the non-programming jobs?
2) There's Not Enough Women and Minority Co-Sci Graduates
This is a real problem. BUT I know several women and minority co-sci grads who aren't working in their industry. (Granted, it's anecdotal, but I'm sure the science can back me up.) Part of this is that opportunities are word-of-mouth and very in-network, and it's a white male network. There needs to be more outreach to these candidates. What's really needed is that, instead of white men standing at the gates of every job opportunity, there needs to be a diverse set of gatekeepers, who can do outreach to their communities (and if you think it's racist to imagine a black woman getting a fellow black women a job (provided the candidate is appropriately skilled), just think about how many white men have gotten other white men jobs, not because of racism, but just because their network is all white men). But also, it should mentioned, the industry is hostile on some levels to women and minorities, and if you can get a decent job in another industry (ie banking) that isn't filled with micro-agressions and not-so-micro-agressions against your gender and/or race, you'll probably jump ship.
3) Diversity is Dumb
A) Selection Bias: If a woman or minority is at face value qualified for a highly-skilled job, then they are likely to be in fact over-qualified. Because they faced more obstacles, the one's who do get through will be on average better at what they do then candidates from privileged backgrounds.
B) Know Your Audience: Women and minorities are bigger drivers of social media (the fastest growing segment of the tech industry). Bringing them on board to shape the product isn't about diversity - it's about marketability.
C) Meritocracy: The tech industry loves to talk about meritocracy. It's not your degree, your skin, your anatomy, or your attitude - it's how well you can code. But it's a soft meritocracy. It's still who you know and "how does this person make me feel" (pro-tip: don't let them know you're a feminist). Firstly, it's a lot like "the tyranny of structurelessness", in that the guise of meritocracy is actually a veil that allows informal (and inappropriate) hierarchies to assert themselves. Secondly, you can't have meritocracy without merit-based respect, and the fact is that women and minorities are disrespected all the time in the tech industry. In a real meritocracy, you would show respect to all cultures and communities (not culture-blindness, but real and true respect), because the day can and will come when the club gets busted by someone who looks like Precious and codes like Wozniak, and when they put up, you're gonna have to shut up.
When ever I go to facebook, I have this feeling that it's actually run by stay at home moms in their 20s... maybe that's why he's so tight lipped.
I've worked with many men and women over the years... I would say that women, predominantly, are the ones who leave the work force after they have a child or three, only to not return... Some return but many do not... So while you might end up trying to hire 30% women, your demographics will eventually show them to be much lower... I don't think I'm out of line suggesting that about half leave the work force to stay at home... At least around these parts. That gets us down in the range of the numbers reported by google.
I wonder if you are aware that your rationalization "X is OK if it's profitable" belongs to the lowest tier of ethical, moral, societal and rational thinking. It doesn't really get a tick in any of them, but occupies the zero point on all their respective scales of merit.
It's no big surprise that the megacorps work this way, but to find public support for the highly sociopathic profit motive is more surprising, and indeed disturbing. It seems that civilization has a long way to go before the barbarism of past ages is left behind.
And this is counting just those around me:
East Asia: Han, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese,
Indian Subcontinent: Telugu, Tamil, Sinhalese, Punjabi,
West Asia: Syriac, Turkmen, Arab, Persian,
North Asia: Slavs of all flavors,
Europe: Scandinavian, Germanic, Anglo-saxons, Castilians,
Africa: Hamitic, Bantu,
Looks pretty diverse to me, at least once you get past the crippling simplicity of the "White/Asian/Black/Latin" universe in which the race-baiters are forever trapped.
This whole "diversity" debate is nonsense. If there were an equal number of females, minorities and white males applying for the same job and white males were overwhelming getting chosen then you might have a case. But those numbers are never released. We never see how many applicants there are - only the race/gender of current employees.
If there are 10 times as many white males as females applying for a given job it only stands to reason that there will be more white males hired, no?
Why is there no outrage over the fact that females dominate the primary school teaching profession? Or the fact that 75% of NBA players are black? Why is it that there is only outrage when it is white males that dominate a given profession?
This is what the world has come to. Hiring managers are now being pressured into hiring less qualified (unqualified?) candidates in order to meet some arbitrary "diversity" number just so that some smug liberal do-gooder will feel better about themselves. Meanwhile, the better qualified white male gets left on the sidelines.
What I want to know is, what kind of applicant pool do these companies have. If their hiring diversity is the same as their applicant pool, there’s not all that much they can do except maybe try harder to recruit in communities with higher proportions of minorities. If the minority applicants that they get aren’t as well qualified (objectively), we shouldn’t encourage them to hire less qualified applicants. Anything else would be reverse discrimination, which would also be wrong.
Maintaining higher diversity avoids a monoculture and increases the diversity of thought, which is good for problem solving. But you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. (Well, except for blood stones.)
Less African Americans graduate from high school and college so of course they won't be represented in high numbers. Sorry, that's the actual truth. Any company that hires someone due to their gender or skin color to save face to the public instead of simply hiring the best person for the job will go bankrupt eventually.
My understanding is that hiring based on race, gender, and etc. is illegal.
lose != loose
A photograph of his 2012 campaign IT team was taken a stone's throw from precincts that voted 99% in his favor, i.e., African-American neighborhoods. And yet of the 54 people in the photo, none appear to be African-American. Three dark skinned men appear to be South Asian or Middle-Eastern. Three other men appear to be East Asian. There are 6 women, one of whom might be East Asian. Everyone else is young white.
Of course, Obama took great care to cover his campaign's IT needs. The accompanying article says these people were recruited from Silicon Valley and other highly regarded IT environments. And yet, when it was time to serve your healthcare needs, he hired CGI Federal, a crony off-shore government contractor.
...but it wasn't for a lack of trying.
At a former position , I was in charge of the technical department and led all the technical interviews. I actively tried to favor female candidates (so sue me) because I hoped they'd bring a different perspective, and I valued multiple points of view. Admittedly, it was a small company - the tech staff never numbered more than ten - but I only ever managed to hire one female software developer. To my recollection, she was the only female applicant I ever had.
Good to see that we're still beating the shit out of the people at the end of the engineer production pipeline for picking engineers from the output stream instead of looking at the earlier stages of the pipeline to figure out why it looks that way. Seriously, Google and Yahoo are not going to be able to force more 13 year old girls to dream of becoming engineers, and even if they do, it'll be 10+ years before we see the results. You can't hire 50% women out of a pool of 20% women without making serious compromises, and you can't turn most recent graduates in other fields into good engineers without massive retraining.
To get an engineering job at a super selective place like Google, you almost certainly need a CS or engineering degree. To be noticed in their truckload of excellent resumes, it helps to have a top school on your resume, or go to a top school that lets you network with other people who might work at highly selective companies. In order to do that, you need to decide well before your 18th birthday that you're serious about this stuff. You need to take the hard math and science classes in high school and you need to do well in them. You need to prep for tests and plan for your future. Google doesn't make that happen when you're 23 years old. You make it happen starting when you're 13-14 years old, 16 at the latest. If you miss that boat, some serious magic is going to have to happen to even get Google to notice your resume. Maybe you're one of a handful of whiz kids who can make a name in a big open source project, but barring that, you're probably out of luck.
If we want women in engineering, try to get girls interested in it in middle school. Slapping Google around for working with what they have isn't going to do the trick.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Well? Since apparently non-whites in WHITE countries are being 'held down' by evil, 'racist' white people, why are they here? They get to steal OUR country AND keep their own crappy, third world country of origin.
The fact both of these companies are doing more than fine, is that not proof enough that diversity is overrated and non-essential?
Consciousness works by pushing us to recreate the experience the fetus has in the womb in our life experience. Males try to recreate this experience by making the universe into our womb. Females already have a womb, so they concentrate their efforts on the relationships and connections of the experience, while males expand science by the futile and infinite task of making the universe their womb. Political correctness is a religion.
Is it because there is a concerted effort to keep those people out? Is it because those groups are not as interested in technology? As a former hiring manager I can say that those numbers are fairly consistant with the pool of applicants. Meaning that most of the applicants were white and hispanic males. I noticed that they didn't mention hispanic numbers. Could that be because it doesn't fit the story they're trying to tell? Should I pass over the best candidate for the job because they're not female or black? That seems discriminatory in itself. Any time you're not taking the best candidate for the job that's bad for business as well as racist. All affirmative action adds up to is racism against the majority.
Political correctness is indeed be communist godlessness, but dude, I just have to ask, what on Earth are you smoking?
You know who has an even worse track record for diversity?
The NBA
There isn't a SINGLE woman player in the NBA league, even though women comprise about 50% of the population.
White and asian people are vastly underrepresented in the NBA player roster. I would like to see a diversity slide on this. It must be investigated! This is unacceptable! We need a congressional hearing on this.
Not only that, but Indians are vastly underrepresented in the NBA. I don't think there's a single Indian player, and considering that there's a double digit percentage of Indians in the Bay Area, CA, I demand that the Golden State Warriors have a similar percentage of Indian players.
"IQ is mostly genetic, therefore heritable" Woah there cowboy, that's just utter poppycock. IQ is basically a measurement of your social/economic advantages in education and a nurturing environment (http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm) so little wonder people from certain social/economic backgrounds score higher. IQ is what IQ tests measure. Genetics is just one small part of the picture. Trust me, every baby is born stupid, no matter what your mother told you : )
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Exactly. It's not lack of opportunity or encouragement. It's lack of interest. While I have a fairly short pool to assess from I can tell you of my sisters, wife, extended family, friends wifes and coworkers there is one (a coworker) who is female and interested in computer science. All of the rest think I speak a foreign language. They're not being shut out of the industry. Businesses exist to make money. If you were a purple female who was dedicated, smart, and capable of producing a quality product you'd be snapped up in a heartbeat. Money does not care about your gender or the color of your skin.
I worked at yahoo for almost 7 years, 5 of which in the headquarters. At one point my team was me (white male), another dude (indian) and 9 other women (indian). Most of my colleagues were asian or Indian. Half of the white people I worked with were Russian. All of the comments saying that jobs at yahoo are exclusively for white males are talking utter rubbish.
Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's
You know, as a minority (foreign-born Hispanic, naturalized citizen), I'm tired of hearing and reading these kind of headlines. Companies are not supposed to actively try to correct failures in the social fabric or failures in government policy when it comes to access to education across racial and income barriers.
It is nice when companies donate to charity, or hire interns or have outreach programs to increase their diversity pools. But those are nice-to-have, those are not imperatives.
If companies have few African-American or Hispanic engineers, or female engineers, shit, that is not the fault of the Yahoos, Googles, Facebooks and many other (comparatively) progressive companies in this country. It is not a fault that need to be corrected by them.
It is a social issue. African American and Hispanic communities should ask themselves why they do not produce more engineers. And yes, they they have suffered from discrimination and lack of equal access to resources (even now). But that doesn't completely explain their reduce representation in the STEM workforce. It is about culture.
I mean, as a Hispanic, I see it all the time. At least in my community, we have zero role models, zero focus on education when it comes to the media that is targeted to our community, etc, etc. Same with the African-American communities.
We have Chinese-American, Japanese-American, Indian-American, Hmong-American, -American communities with old and recent arrivals that produce engineers. Why not us?
There is a cultural component that we need to be responsible for, as well as a government policy that needs to ensure education is affordable, geographically accessible and, more important, diversified beyond the mere 4-year college goal (.ie. vocational training.)
Asking a company why it has so few X-ethnicity engineers is barking at the wrong tree. We should be asking those communities why you don't produce as many engineers as this other minority group.
It is barking at the wrong tree, it is putting the blame away from where it belong.
Source: Minority engineer fucking tired of seeing fellow community members dumbing down their own potential.
If you're trying to draw a parallel here, it's a really bad one. Most basketball players are tall because being tall makes you better at basketball. Being male on the other hand, doesn't make you better at computing, but it sure looks like that's what you want to say.
It's pretty obvious that being male makes you better at programming. And this is not a case of me confusing correlation and causation -- if you like, we can bet on the future programming skill of young males and females, rather than the current ones. The better question is why males are better at programming -- is it interest, stereotyping, opportunity, or something directly related to being male? Next you'll be telling me that women are not inherently better at nursing (giving milk to) young children.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
On a similar note, I would expect the average female CS graduate to be better than the average male CS graduate. This is because they were willing to go against the flow to get their degree, possibly indicating grater interest or skill. Also because of the relative ratios in graduates, applications, and hiring at tech companies.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Do as they say, not as they do. These companies are owned and run by wealthy left wing donors and sycophants. They love Obama and Hillary. They will brazenly lynch the career of anyone who dares to be conservative in their midst. You can expect in vain for them to honor the spirit of their own alleged ideals.
As the Supreme Court recently found, race/ethnicity are only one form of diversity, and a limited form of diversity at that. There are so many forms of diversity other than the color of one's skin or the ethnicity of their surname. It'd be easy to find a black guy and a white guy who have the same opinions and skills, I don't know why it is considered more diverse just because one guy is black.
" I said the most qualified and motivated people get jobs in a perfect world."
That's a pretty big qualifying statement, which makes everything else you write entirely removed from reality. You should have asked for a pony while you were at it.
African American culture celebrates, encourages, and supports crime. They make going to jail a rite of passage, they encourage young fathers to shed responsibility for their girlfriends and children, they value making money easily (crime, drugs) as opposed to honest, legal work. Their culture stresses that there are no consequences for your action, and you need to get whatever you can out of life, at any cost, to further yourself at that moment in time.
What do African American students want to be? Athletes. Rappers. Pimps. Rich and famous. Nobody wants to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a teacher. They want fame, money, and power, all gained in a way that takes no effort, no knowledge, no skill. It doesn't matter that hardly anybody can make it as a successful rapper or athlete. It doesn't matter that pimping and selling drugs leads to a dead-end future. They don't think that far ahead, because of the YOLO mentality. They'll die young and rich and that's all that matters. They don't consider old age, retirement, supporting their children and family, or saving for the future.
I went to a highly diverse university and every engineer, from all walks of life (mostly Latino, Indian and Asian) , of every color and gender, all believed in hard work and knew crime was wrong. They believed you had to earn what you wanted, that you couldn't just wish for it, or take it by force. That's the difference. Students from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia absolutely could not fathom why African Americans who "had everything" did absolutely nothing and squandered the very opportunity they came to America to get. I'm glad they took up those opportunities, because African Americans aren't using them.
Anybody who went to a public highschool knows what it's like to have African American students who disrupt class every day, do no work, and intimidate and harass those who excel. It's no surprise people like that don't end up working for Google or Yahoo. That's not racism, or the "man", or American society at fault, that's their own culture, their own values, their own beliefs holding them back from accomplishing anything. When you view education is a joke and crime is a goal you cannot succeed.
If you think I'm full of shit, read what Bill Cosby said about this, and read about how the African American community vilified him for encouraging his own people to change their culture.
I generally get my ideas by thinking and reading about a subject and discussing it with friends?
Here's an English article with (some of) the research that I base (some of) my ideas on;
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/17/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/
IQ tests test a set of skills which are heavily culturally influenced. A San bushman could score 50 on an IQ test and you could score 150, but in the Namib desert you would be depending on his skills and intuitions. Neither forms of intelligence are mostly genetic in my opinion. The parents of geniuses aren't necessarily geniuses themselves, although often well off enough to supply their progeny with ample food, free time and education etc. to develop themselves. The children of geniuses are not always geniuses, even with all the advantages of having genius parents. Ergo other factors must be, if not dominant, at least weighing in heavily.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
You can't argue that there is absolutely no difference what so ever between the different groups and then turn around and cry about diversity. Can't have it both ways.
I generally get my ideas by thinking and reading about a subject and discussing it with friends?
My point was that your citation didn't support your argument. The question was rhetorical.
IQ tests test a set of skills which are heavily culturally influenced. A San bushman could score 50 on an IQ test and you could score 150, but in the Namib desert you would be depending on his skills and intuitions.
Sure, but long-term, over the generations, it's going to be somebody with an IQ of 150 who builds a desalination plant and makes his own oasis. The guy with an IQ of 50 will still be "surviving."
The children of geniuses are not always geniuses, even with all the advantages of having genius parents. Ergo other factors must be, if not dominant, at least weighing in heavily.
Of course, having genius parents might lend more to the "nurture" than the "nature" side, depending on the genetic complexity of genius. It's not a simple gene like eye color right? Even if intelligence were 100% genetic, genius parents might have dumb kids and vice versa, depending on how many possible combinations of all the alleles there are and what proportion of them lead to genius.
Is it because I am racist, or have a toxic environment, or am biased? No. The reality is that in my entire career, I have only received a single black candidate. (That I know of - some may have failed to get past the resume screening, without having known what their race was).
As for women - we hire them - but a disproportionally smaller percentage of out applicants are women - so that explains the smaller hiring numbers. It's not like we get billions if candidates for the super-skilled positions I hire for. It's not like we have a colossal pool of qualified candidates from which we just pluck-out all the white males. It's a small pool of qualified applicants.
(BTW That one guy? We made him an offer - but his current employer countered it and we lost him. )
Why do you need to point out that increase in diversity from Google levels to Yahoo levels causes a decrease in quality from Google levels to Yahoo levels? The difference in tech competence between the 2 companies is night and day. But why pay attention to the fact that there is such a stack inverse proportionality between quality and diversity? This is soooo racist.
...a diverse workforce does not mean a successful one. Diversity is a liberal agenda forced on corporate America decades ago that has cost companies billions in wasted dollars to implement. My last team happened to be a small group of white males in our mid-40s. HR didn't like it on paper, but they liked the results. That isn't to imply at all that we were successful because we were less diverse, only that we were successful regardless.
So yahoo hires the best people for the job, and this is supposed to be news?
I'm sick and tired of whiny losers complaining that they can't get a job because of their ethnicity.
NO. You can't get a job because you SUCK. The job market does not care what color you are, what church you go to, or where your ancestors migrated here from. The only thing the job market cares about is your ability to produce value. If you can't do it, the market will choose someone else who can. If you can do it, then welcome to the winner's circle my son.
This nonsense about juding a company's hiring practices by the skin of their employees is woefully pathetic peurile garbage.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The United States is almost 75% white. So what do they expect to find when they look at a large company?
If Yahoo or Google were over half American Indian THAT would make me think something funny is going on?
If it's mostly white? YOU'RE IN AMERICA, what do you expect.
I would like to see the diversity statistics of some big Japanese or Mexican companies? Let's see how they compare
with us in the "diversity" realm.