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?

Comments

Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[headkase]

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..

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[headkase]

I never said either group was anything. I said the most qualified and motivated people get jobs in a perfect world. Affirmative action for its own sake, conversely, is discrimination against people who worked their butts off for a position and were passed over because they were the wrong gender or color.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[Entropius]

Or, perhaps, there are simply fewer women seeking positions in tech firms for whatever reason?

Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things. Neither is Yahoo/Google's problem. There are plenty of scenarios where they're simply hiring qualified people who apply for positions, and less than half of those happen to be women.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[MRe_nl]

The problem is that most of the factors in achieving and maintaining qualification and motivation, after lots of research, appear to be societal and economical. Therefore we are not getting the most qualified and motivated but a small sub-set of that group (white males) and standards could be raised if we could choose from a larger set. "Carve out your own space and get hired" is simply a gross over-simplification of the situation. Lack in basic nutrition, healthcare, education, credit, role-models and many other factors and their interplay might be a factor perhaps?

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[BobMcD]

I think your definition of "massive fucking problem" is different than the one commonly used.

Where are the women who aren't getting the tech jobs they want? If they're rallying in the streets, the news sure isn't covering it.

No, I suspect this is just another chapter in the Millenials' war on 'privilege'.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[Charliemopps]

I never said either group was anything. I said the most qualified and motivated people get jobs in a perfect world. Affirmative action for its own sake, conversely, is discrimination against people who worked their butts off for a position and were passed over because they were the wrong gender or color.

That's not true at all. I'm *amazing* in interviews. It's truly probably my best skill. If I get into the interview I almost always get the job. How do I do so well? Is it because of my experience? Grasp of the technology? Does my personality exude an air of efficient and dedicated work habits?

No, you get hired based on psychology, and if you know what's going on you can manipulate that. My biggest concern in an interview is that I accidentally get myself hired for a job I can't do... which has happened before. If I can get hired for a job I'm totally unqualified for, there's something wrong with the system.

Hiring managers are biased, from the very start. Your resume tells them all kinds of stuff about you that you didn't realize. Your race is implicit in your name. Your age as well. Do you go my Charlie? Charles? Chuck? That all says a lot about you. The most important part of the interview is the handshake of all things... that sets the tone. Want to know how to do it properly, ask a Marine, they'll show you. What did you wear? Again, this says a lot about you. The hiring manager doesn't even realize that they're being discriminatory. What they are looking for is someone familiar, and they will pick whomever is the most familiar.

The easiest way to game this system is the simple rule: Let the interviewer talk.
Listen to what they talk about, what they are interested in, and then when they ask you a tough question (Almost always something they have written down to remember because it's very hard to keep on topic in interviews) answer in a way that leads you back to a topic they're interested in. If they were talking about football earlier, answer with a football analogy. Lead the answer to a point where you ask them a question "So if a running back were to... etc... would you think that would work?" More often than not the hiring manager will go off on a tangent about football. In the end all they really remember about the interview was how comfortable they were talking with you.

There are lots of other tricks in this regard but they all revolve around the same premise: Make yourself as familiar as possible to the interviewer. The more they have in common with you the more they will be inclined to pick you. They'll later claim it was "instinct" that lead them to you.

As much as I've benefited from this 'flaw' in the system I can't pretend it's because I'm such a desirable employee. It's clearly very easy for this to lead to discriminatory behavior. The only solution to this that I can think of is to treat hiring like a science experiment. Use double blind methodology. There's no reason for anyone to ever meet the candidate either. The hardest jobs for me are the ones where they basically send me a test ahead of time. "Answer these technical questions" even using Google and such, your lack of experience (if you have any) becomes very apparent in the way you phrase your answers. I've also seen places where the interviews/test/etc... are all done by HR, the candidates are scored by HR and then the hiring manager looks at the numbers. This is better but you end up with a lot of employees that would be great in HR but not so hot in IT. HR reps, for some reason, tend to score candidates that dress nicely very high.

If our current job market really did go after the "best" candidate for the job, and that resulted in racial disparity, I'd agree with you. But it doesn't. Our current system leads to hiring people that are most like the current employees at the company which is bad for the company, the people interviewing and the current employees. Monocultures are bad for everyone.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[Calsar]

66% of Computer Science graduates are white, 15% Asian, 3% black, and 5% Hispanic. I'm surprised they have such a high percentage of Asian workers. Of course 60% of students graduating with master's degrees in computer science aren't Americans so maybe that's where they are coming from. Also 80% of Computer Science graduates are male and 20% are female, so it's not surprising that tech companies have primarily male workers.

http://cra.org/uploads/documen...

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not data, but. I recently was involved in hiring in a STEM field. Saw dozens of resumes a small number of them were from women. I don't know how many may have been from minorities because we don't ask. Of all of the candidates only three were considered qualified enough to interview. One was woman. She got the job.
However if you start at the beginning of the process the pool of people we had to chose from contained few women. Just so happened that this time a woman was the best candidate. Other times that might not have been the case, but in every hiring action I've been involved with the number of women who apply is always vastly smaller than the number of men.
According to Economix the number of women graduates in computer science last year was 20%. Computerworld claims it's even less at 18%. With a workforce of 35% women they are actually significantly above the average of new graduates.
So if there is a problem it's not Google's or Yahoo's. It goes back to why are so few women going into computer science? Perhaps for the same reason that so few men are going into nursing or veterinarian medicine? It just doesn't interest them as a profession.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[boristdog]

My wife changed careers 10 years ago from teacher to network engineer. She tries VERY HARD to get other women insterested in going into tech fields. She has oodles of money from her job, while all her female friends make less than half what she makes. But none of her friends or relations are even remotely interested in changing their career, even though they all complain about not making enough money.

Hell, I try to get more women interested in the tech fields all the time to no avail. I've even gone to career days at local high-schools to try to get women interested in tech careers. Last time I interviewed a woman for a programmer-trainee job she decided she wanted to do something else after we offered her the job, she didn't even try it.

So the problem seems to be pretty cultural. Even with someone offering to mentor them, most women (based on my limited sample) have little or no interest in the tech fields. And these are all smart, educated women. I imagine we really need to change the way we bring up girls if we want to fix the situation.

So it will remain a sausage fest wherever I work until I retire, I guess.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[fahrbot-bot]

I'm *amazing* in interviews. It's truly probably my best skill.

My condolences to your girlfriend. :-)

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[gfxguy]

Plus 1 insightful, but no mod points. I recall almost 20 years ago the single black person working in our department stood up at a department meeting and asked when more blacks would be hired, and the VP of the company stood up to field the question and answered, quite simply, "when more qualified black people apply for open positions." And then he sat down. And that was that. We did hire more black people... the guy that asked the question made it his goal to seek out talented black people for open positions, and succeeded on several occasions; but he realized there was no racism going on, there was just good business going on.

Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates?

[BobMcD]

A tiny bit of research shows most women decided to study something other than tech after high school. So there's a cause closer to the root right there.

If Google/Yahoo is supposed to hire qualified workers and only 20% of tech grads are women, how do they get their number higher than 20%?

Further if the decision is between a man with a tech degree and a woman without a tech degree, all else held equal, why is it appropriate to select the woman?

But no, no, facts be damned, it's the toxic environment. Go with that.

Sensationalist summary

[brunes69]

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.

Re:Sensationalist summary

[mwvdlee]

According to this page: http://www.economicmodeling.co...
At the very best, females make up 30.4% of IT graduates.
The workforce is 35% female, so on average females are more likely to be hired for IT positions than men.

Just Maybe...

[KermodeBear]

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.

Equally Divided!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sexism

[MikeRT]

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."

As a woman I know most women don't like math

[Andover Chick]

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.

"opportunities"

[OpenYourEyes]

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.