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Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's

Posted by Unknown on from the hiring-bias dept.

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?

9 of 435 comments (clear)

  1. Most qualified and motivated candidates? by headkase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..

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    Shh.
    1. Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? by headkase · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      Shh.
    2. Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? by BobMcD · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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'.

    3. Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Sensationalist summary by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Just Maybe... by KermodeBear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Love sees no species.
  4. Equally Divided! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Sexism by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."