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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.
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!
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?
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."
Graduation rates do not indicate talent, skill or grades.
Merely passing a course with a D average does not entitle you to a job at the biggest and most sought after IT companies in the world.
MABASPLOOM!
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.
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
I'm intrigued, care to elaborate?
From what I've seen they seem to be some of the few companies willing to actively campaign for gay rights equality and so forth for example and they don't seem to have any qualms hiring people from different ethnicities overseas, and in fact have been campaigning for more.
Is your suggestion that because the numbers aren't 50/50 that they're obviously discriminatory or something?
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.
You weren't ignored, you were included in the two+ races.
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.
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.