Tech Workforce Diversity At Facebook Similar To Google And Yahoo

theodp (442580) writes Facebook is mostly white dudes, writes Valleywag's Sam Biddle, cutting to the chase of Facebook's inaugural disclosure of diversity figures. "We're serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics," said Facebook, which has a tech workforce that's 15% female and only 1% Black. By contrast, Wikipedia's Baseball Color Line article notes that "by the late 1950s, the percentage of blacks on Major League teams matched or exceeded that of the general population." So, is it surprising that the company whose stated mission is "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" is having problems connecting with the general population in 2014?

Comments

SO

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? This isn't a national tragedy.

Re:SO

[James Clay]

The article is wrong. Facebook (and Google and Yahoo) isn't mostly white guys. It is mostly white and Asian guys. White representation in tech is not, by and large, larger than their percentage of the population at large. It is that Asians are vastly "over represented". These articles always lump Asians in with the white guys because they have no interest in pointing out that if your metric is proportional representation you are talking about getting rid of Asians.

Re:SO

[russotto]

Non-hispanic whites are 64% of the US population, but only 57% of Facebook's employee base. White people are under-represented.

Re:SO

[Shakrai]

That's because the Asian-American experience doesn't speak in favor of the sort of social engineering desired by the types that favor affirmative action and other sorts of reverse discrimination. They're literally at a loss to explain why the Asian-American community isn't mired in poverty in spite of the best efforts of the evil white man to keep them down. They also ignore the experiences of the multitude of different white peoples (Italians, Irish, Poles, etc.) that faced discrimination and somehow managed to build productive lives for themselves and their progeny.

The only answer they have is to take from the successful and give to the unsuccessful, which brings to mind the quote about teaching a man to fish....

This means nothing without context

[FictionPimp]

What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?

Are there out of work fully qualified programmers that can't work at facebook because they are black? Maybe the ratio is the way it is simply because there are not enough minorities looking for high end development work (Unlike baseball). That doesn't make it Facebook's fault if it is truly hiring the most qualified workers.

Re:This means nothing without context

[neminem]

I'm pretty sure that is factually incorrect, unless you literally have never been to Slashdot, or any other site that allows comments, ever.

It's also completely accurate. It is certainly not completely impossible that there are occasionally racists (or more likely, people who have slight biases and don't even realize it) in hiring departments for major companies. It is, however, much more likely that this issue is more cultural and/or class-based: one, minorities are more likely to be poorer by virtue of having been marginalized in the past, and poor people are less likely to have had the opportunities required to get into the tech field. Two, cultures push different things, and minorities who stick together form cultures. That is not racist, that's, well, obvious. Not all skin-color-based minorities stick together, obviously, but enough do (which is also partially class-based, as you don't really have a choice to have been born in a crap environment, and it's harder to get yourself out of one.)

As for women, there's a lot more evidence that HR departments do discriminate, and some more obvious reasons why they might want to (which are still BS and should be burned mercilessly, but which still make sense why they happen). Still, it is *also* almost certainly true that more men than women have the inclination and ability (more the former than the latter) required to get hired at tech companies, and that's not really the fault of those companies.

Re:This means nothing without context

[hsmith]

I went to a local Google office yesterday to watch the IO keynote.

Number of people in the room? 40

Number of women in the room? 2, 1 was from corporate.

Free to sign up, free to attend, so where were the ladies? I think this is just another made up issue people are looking to find a solution for.

Re:This means nothing without context

[Lab Rat Jason]

I don't think I'd go so far as to call the GP racist, and I can see the point GP is trying to make. I live in an area that is predominately white... and by predominately white... I mean like 99.9% or something like that. During a brief time I was entrusted to do the hiring interviews for my department. I only interviewed one black person and one woman. I ended up hiring them both because they both seemed to have the skills we needed. The guy I hired ended up not really being able to handle the work, and was let go. The woman I hired ended up leaving for a more challenging (and presumably better paying) company. From the outside you could say that the company was racist because we didn't have any black developers, or that we didn't have any women developers... but the truth is much more complex: Our sample size for non-white non-male programmers is too small to be statistically significant, and within the sample size we had one under-qualified, and one over-qualified. We actually hired both, and both left the company for perfectly normal reasons, bringing the development staff back to an all-male all-white mix.(not a mix really)

So when the GP asks about the ratio of available talent, I get the sentiment... although with a company the size of FB or Google and with a local diversity like Kalifornia's, you'd think the statistical significance of those numbers would mean more, which is why people are a bit outraged about it.

Re:This means nothing without context

[bluefoxlucid]

Not really.

I live in a black suburb (it's cheap) with poor people, 3 blocks down from a Jewish white suburb. The black suburb is full of trash, broken down cars, town homes with no yards, rental properties, liquor stores, and copious gang and firearms violence--all the amenities of a poor, black ghetto. The white suburb is made up of large single-family homes, huge yards, separated residential and commercial zones, and clean, well-maintained roads--because the city sends more road work out there so the people they collect the most taxes from don't leave.

There's also a poor white ghetto out east. Muscle cars, double-wide trailers, booze, slutty girls, drugs, and people occasionally get hit with a pipe wrench. These white folk aren't like those white folk, or like those black folk.

People identify culturally by geographic area, by surrounding interests, and by race and smaller cliques (IT people, security people, bouncers, car people, martial artists, etc.). Putting any critical mass of people together will develop a unique culture. We have plenty of black doctors and lawyers, probably as a result of racial tension: black people get out of slavery, they either become angry, miserable, violent sub-humans or they become philosophers who want to work for the greater good. Time goes on, and black people get rights, but they still get treated like shit. The racial tensions still exist today, and it creates the same forces: they either become angry, miserable, violent sub-humans or they become philosophers who want to do something in the world.

White people, by contrast, are largely just coasting. Racial tensions to us are mostly in the form of black people getting angry at us for saying something stupid. Nobody has told us white folk that the black man is keeping us down. We aren't living under the world's first black president. No white man in history has ever given a speech about how, one day, his children might be allowed to go to school and learn to read and write like all them black children. There is a lot less pessimism, and we just find it natural that everything we want should be at our fingertips.

Trying to cross that barrier is easy for a white man, but a black man has to get over all this shit that basically makes him feel like the world's holding him back. The ones that can push by that naturally have more energy--more optimism--and reach for higher goals. Lots of white folk can't imagine being a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist, but can imagine being a computer programmer or some other mundane job that sounds meaningful but also doesn't sound too hard.

It's just culture. Humans recognize patterns; the most disruptive effect of this is recognizing patterns in human appearance. If we were all white, we would start recognizing round-faced humans separately from square-jawed humans.

Re:This means nothing without context

[pla]

What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?

Black: Blacks make up only 3.6% of CS graduates, 6% of CE graduates, and 7% of generic IT graduates at the moment.
Female: Female CS/CE graduates peaked in the '80s at 37%, and has fallen ever since to a current low of only 12%; the previous link also shows them at about 50% higher rates in generic IT, or 17% total.

Sorry if that doesn't give your axes a nice fine edge, folks, but the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook don't hire only misogynist racists for their HR departments - In fact, all three soundly beat the above graduation rates, making them arguably biased against hiring white males.

Re:This means nothing without context

[Intrepid imaginaut]

As for women, there's a lot more evidence that HR departments do discriminate

Which is ironic given that almost 60% of HR staff are women, apparently. Maybe HR companies should start hiring more men to bring a male perspective and lived experience to these roles?

The problem with all of these stories

[d0rp]

The "general population", and the "population of qualified tech workers" are two very different things...

See: Morgan Freeman

[xdor]

Stop talking about this crap.

Re:See: Morgan Freeman

[Shakrai]

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." -Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

Diversity is not a virtue

[Anonymous Coward]

Why force diversity? There is nothing worthwhile in diversity in and of itself, despite the dogma of 40+ years of social engineering.

I had to laugh at Google's I/O presentations yesterday; they were obviously finding every single non-white, non-male person, sexually ambiguous person they could find for the presentations. Don't get me wrong: None of the talks were bad; everyone was competent. But it was obvious that Google was going out of its way to seem inclusive. It just comes off as needy and foolish. "See, we're INCLUSIVE!". /notes from a white patriarch

Re:Diversity is not a virtue

[bmajik]

There is nothing worthwhile in diversity in and of itself

This is the attitude that needs to stop. Diversity may not be a value in your pantheon, but it's not social engineering to want an inclusive society. It's wisdom.

Why does it need to stop?

A huge problem -- that few people seem to speak about -- is that using gender, nationality, or, most frustratingly -- race, as a measure of "diversity" is implicitly bigoted.

The diversity that people _claim_ to want is one of perspectives, life experiences, etc.

The things that are relatively easy to bucketize - gender identity, race, socio-economic status, etc.... these things in and of themselves are not a valuable source of "diversity"

The implicit bigotry in the "diversity" argument says that, if you hire more black people, you'll get much different ideas than what you already have. Why? Because all black people are different from the white people you already have.

I've never seen a more stark illustration of _racism_ then that.

The conjecture here is that if a population distribution doesn't' look the way certain people expect it to, then there is some upstream social problem that needs tinkering with.

That conjecture is only ever true or false on a case by case basis. The real problem that needs to stop is for people to believe this conjecture in the general case; the real problem is that people don't even agree or are not willing to state what their expectations are for the "ideal" population distribution, but, are still willing to cry foul and to assert that a problem exists.

Companies can't create a diversified talent pool

[Brannon]

out of thin air. The internal demographics of these large companies reflect the demographics of graduates in the relevant fields. The right answer is to get a more diversified college population in computer engineering and computer science, which requires getting more K-12 interest in those fields amongst underrepresented groups. And that's exactly what the big companies are doing--investing in programs that will build a more diversified pipeline of future employees.

The comparison against MLB is outrageously stupid. African-Americans were already playing baseball in high numbers in separate leagues; MLB just started poaching players from those leagues. Are you claiming that there are some all-female or all-black companies full of millions of computer engineers that Facebook could start hiring from tomorrow?

I call bullshit

[JustNiz]

can we get over these complete bullshit stories about gender and race prejudice in high tech offices? Nothing I have seen during my 35 years of being a software developer at many different companies has suggested this is even remotely true.

Literally every company I have ever worked at has gone above and beyond all existing laws to make sure there is absolutely no racial or gender-prejudice in hiring in any way . In fact they err on the side of caution so much it actually seems to be a positive advantage at interview time to be a female, or racial minority, or disabled. if you're all 3 you could probably name your own salary (joke).

I refuse to believe that these days anyone can't get a job at a high-tech company just because of skin color, gender or racial origin. Not least because if they could even slightly prove that, they could sue and it would be all over the news, and the companies themselves are hyper-sensitive to this.

I'd bet a stack on that the fact that high-tech companies are still more filled with white guys than anything else solely because that where nearly all the (actually suitable) job applications come from in the first place.

If you want to force an actually very biassed and unnatural 50% racial and gender balance in the work place, then you need to look at why its still mostly white guys that apply in the first place, not blame the companies for hiring from the pool of suitable applicants who are actually out there.

Awesome

[PeeAitchPee]

So when can we expect to see the diversity reports on players in the NFL and NBA? How about gender diversity as it relates to employment in the healthcare industry?

Careful what you wish for....

[erp_consultant]

You know, the deeper we look into these kinds of issues the more interesting it gets.

The real question here is not "why are there so few minorities at Company X" it's "why are there so few qualified candidates from minority group X to fill open positions?". We already have diversity legislation in place at Universities in America. In fact, there are more women graduates than men. Yet so few of the females grads are getting degrees in CS. Why is that? It is certainly not because of lack of opportunity. Could it be that maybe - just maybe - women don't want to be programmers?

How about African Americans and other minority groups? Well, clearly the number of University students as a percentage of the total population is much lower than society in general. The question is why? Partly economic to be sure. But loans and grants are available to nearly everyone. Yet the number of black and latino college entrants is far lower, on a percentage basis, than they are for whites. Why is that?

Is it possible that, in general, black and latino kids just don't put as high a value on a college education as white kids do? And, therefore, just don't work as hard to get the good grades necessary to get into a good college? What part does having children out of wedlock play in this? Black and latino women have a much higher instance of this than either white or Asian women.

I'm not trying to point fingers or cast blame here and I certainly don't pretend to have all the answers. But it does raise some interesting questions.