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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?
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.
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!
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
The Asian mix shows wonderful diversity. In fact, Asians and folks of Northern European descent get along wonderfully as witnessed by the large amount of inter marriage. About 75% of my white friends got married to Indians, Chinese, Koreans, etc. But yet no one wants to get involved with the African-Americans. The African-American neighborhoods are terribly dangerous, the kids get involved with guns & gang activity young, and they've got constant animosity with teachers and police.
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.
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.
Of course it's true. If you had 2 equally qualified candidate and picked the one that is the race/gender of your chosing then yes,
your choice of race doesn't affect the quality of the candidate (it still seems unfair to the other guy who didn't even get a coin toss).
Back here in the real world though you rarely have 2 equally qualified candidate so you're passing over a more qualified candidate
for a slightly less qualified candidate. The only way you don't get a less qualified candidate is if race/gender was only used as
a tie-breaker in the rare circumstances where you can't decide but even this seems stupid and unfair.
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.
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.
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.
I thought your comment was going to be offensively stupid, but it's not. In fact, turn it around and look at men in sales vs. men in tech. No one would dispute what you're saying if you applied it to that population. I don't know if there's anything to it, but...interesting.
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.
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.
That's not my rationale. In this case, Facebook declining to release these stats does no direct harm to anyone. Facebook doesn't "owe" us transparency w.r.t. the composition of its workforce. Shareholders are potentially owed that data, but only if enough of them decide they want to see it and vote accordingly.
Nothing wrong, per se, with the "profit motive" as you put it. Obviously much wrong can be done (and is done) in the name of profits, and its not something I support. What irritates me is the sense people have in this case that Facebook is somehow doing something "wrong" by not releasing its data. Why is that the case? Do they have a moral imperative to be transparent w.r.t. the diversity of their workforce? Why?
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
"Hey, Facebook, can you give us some information about your company that couldn't possibly help you so we can almost certainly use it against you?"
"Uh, no thanks."
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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"
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"
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
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.
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"
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. )
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.