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Code.org: Blame Tech Diversity On Education Pipeline, Not Hiring Discrimination
theodp writes: "The biggest reason for a lack of diversity in tech," says Code.org's Hadi Partovi in a featured Re/code story, "isn't discrimination in hiring or retention. It's the education pipeline." (Code.org just disclosed "we have no African Americans or Hispanics on our team of 30.") Supporting his argument, Partovi added: "In 2013, not one female student took the AP computer science exam in Mississippi." (Left unsaid is that only one male student took the exam in Mississippi). Microsoft earlier vilified the CS education pipeline in its U.S. Talent Strategy as it sought "targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms" from lawmakers. And Facebook COO and "Lean In" author Sheryl Sandberg recently suggested the pipeline is to blame for Facebook's lack of diversity. "Girls are at 18% of computer science college majors," Sandberg told USA Today in August. "We can't go much above 18% in our coders [Facebook has 7,185 total employees] if there's only 18% coming into the workplace."
Fire all your male staff! That'll fix it!
Finally someone standing up and going "The problem isn't discrimination, the problem is those people just aren't THERE to be hired!"
Now let's sit back and watch all the SJWs pile on and declare that this person is a "sexist, misogynist pig" and that everything being said by them is a lie.
In 3...
2...
1...
I graduated in 2001 with a CS degree. There was ONE female student in the program when I was there that I can remember (and maybe 5 female faculty members). And there were NO African American students or faculty. The lack of diversity in tech workforces is no surprise to anyone who has a degree in a technology field.
is diversity "code" for a $ (grant, charity, etc.) thing? is it political optics to "look good"? why are competent coders a problem?
Even at 1 day old, girls look longer at objects with faces and boys longer at mechanical objects. Differences like this are measured at all ages.
As long as the few women that want to get into coding can do so then there's no problem. And it's really easy for any woman to get into it that wants to, for instance at my college CS was controlled entrance for men but any women that applied was let in regardless of qualifications.
tl;dr the only problem is people whining about other people choosing not to get into coding.
An organization should hire the best resource regardless of origin, gender, color etc. which I am sure most for-profit organizations try to do but an organization should not try to be diverse just to report some numbers to media on how diverse they are. Frankly it is nobody's concern on how diverse an organization is, so they should not be even disclosing these numbers.
On the one hand, we are told that the race/gender/etc. of individuals results in very different experiences and desires, and sometimes these are so different that members of one group can't really understand members of another group. (E.g. "It's a black thing.") On the other hand, if individuals in these different groups then turn out to (on average) want different careers than pure statistics would predict (e.g. all professions aren't 51% women), then we are told it's a Terrible Social Problem and Something Must Be Done.
You can't have it both ways, folks.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I'm pretty sure research bears out that both education and hiring processes are deeply flawed when it comes to hiring underrepresented people. One issue may be more "root cause" than the other, but they're both important. I'm actually kind of surprised Code.org went on record saying this...
People before pixels.
It's not the employers or the schools. It's the people. Some people just don't like certain things. That's what diversity is about.
How about we hire and promote based on merit and competency?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Do we have to hear about this every second week, year in and year out? On average, girls are - for whatever reason - less interested in math, physics, chemistry. Meanwhile, boys, on average, are less interested in things that revolve around social interaction. Likely, these preferences are based in biology. Make sure the playing field is as level as reasonably possible, and then leave off. Let individuals decide what they want to be.
The other aspect addressed by the article is race. Here, there may also be biological factors in play, but within the US cultural factors play a huge role - specifically: support for education within the family. Cultural issues are very, very difficult to address - because, cultural change needs to come from within the culture itself. There is very little to be done about it by the tech companies, or even by the educational system.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I know it is terribly libertarian to say that the companies that hire people have no obligation to the community that hire from. But these are the same people spending money on lobbying for more H1B visas. What are they doing to improve the "education pipeline?"
Love of two is ME! It's ooficial goals I personally
"We can't go much above 18% in our coders, if there's only 18% coming into the workplace."
When will sexism end, only when women aren't so completely indoctrinated into the patriarchy that they keep regurgitating stupid, sexist, blatant lies designed to hold their fellow women down. Women make up over 50% of the population and an even greater number when you consider that amount of barbarians in jail. Therefor any company that isn't staffing at 55+% female is sexist. "Qualified Worker" is a weasel word invented by the patriarchy to scare women away from the good jobs. Schools are also sexist hell holes because they don't enforce a strict policy of requiring women graduate per barbarian graduate.
Sorry - but this entire story is bullshit.
There are tons of programmers and technical people that are self taught and are typically light years ahead of any college graduate.
This is all made up shinola to cover up that they just don't want to have to "PAY" for real talent, so they pay even more for all the mistakes, cost overruns, bugs, security vulnerabilities and exposures that come from those (rant mode follows - cheap-assed-you-get-what-you-pay-for-no-talent-no-education-scum-sucking-fuckwads from overseas ).
If you want real talent, hire the best person for the job, forget age/sex/race - just look for the best candidate, and be willing to pay for them.
Paying extra for a top person will SAVE you more money in the long run. Possibly millions or even your entire corporation.
Sure, a few folks have fun jobs, but the majority of the work in this field is miserable and women are wise enough to avoid it.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Brogrammers at Work
In my first year of computer science in CEGEP, we were 60 students. 2 of them were women. They accepted pretty much anybody who applied based purely on your highschool grades. Right off the bat you've got a 97% male program, and there was no bias in that selection either (for what it's worth, the person deciding on applications was female). Women simply did not apply for the program in the first place.
It's always been obvious to me that the reason that there are so few female developers has little to do with hiring practices and a lot to do with the lack of interest in computer science among women. You just have to look threw a stack of CVs when people apply for jobs at your company for it to be obvious: when there are so few CVs from women in the pile, statistically you're not going to hire as many of them.
It's genetics and hormones.
In any event, we already have too many programmers. We need to reduce the supply of programmers so that pay levels increase and it's easier to find a job.
In any event, we already have too many programmers. We need to reduce the supply of programmers so that pay levels increase and it's easier to find a job.
If you're a programmer and find it hard to get a good-paying job, I suggest you take a long hard look in the mirror.
I have not seen a job market this bubbly since 1999.
During one of my years at graduate school there were ZERO female applicants. And this was at a major university with around 90 admissions into the graduate program every year.
It really got the university panties in a bunch as they couldn't lower the standards or pretend they were somehow qualified through subjective means. It's completely backward and demoralizing to others when you lower the bar to keep up admissions based solely on ones gender.
Another major problem was there was a single black female graduate student. The university failed to take disciplinary action when they had ample evidence of falsifying papers that had been published in peer reviewed journals, blackmailing of professors, harassment of other students, and just in general being an *******. That was the point any modicum of respect i still had slipped away.
I see these silly ads on TV, but I think that anyone smart enough to be a really good engineer/programmer, can also see that it's a dead-end job. The corprate execs are going to hire CHEAP, period, whether in the USA, imports, or offshore.
Take your math skills and get into finance.
nigga
Do we have to hear about this every second week, year in and year out? On average, girls are - for whatever reason - less interested in math, physics, chemistry.
How do you explain the large number, often a majority, of doctors and veterinarians graduating who are women? These women obviously studied the hard sciences at some point either during their undergraduate degree or during medical or veterinary school. And when I attended university for my undergraduate degree the best students tended to be women; they also were more willing to ask for assistance of the professors and/or of more knowledgeable fellow students in the computer labs. I enjoyed mentoring them because with few exceptions they wanted to understand the "why" not just the "how." It was the only way I a shy guy like myself could talk to a woman and be seen as normal. LOL
I've heard the stories of harassment from ladies in the tech field, and I have coworkers consistently offend and use harassing language. It's not an enjoyable experience working in that environment.
But that's a work environment. I can't recall hearing any serious stories like that from educational institutions unless it involved an elevated BAC or similar lack of sobriety. Yet, similarly, of all the 200+ CS courses I was in or around, I can recall two woman, three non-caucasian (two of them were ethnic Europeans).
Some people have mentioned fashion. Education is another field I'm aware of that I see some fairly prevalent unequal gender ratios in. At any of the elementary schools in a public district I'm familiar with, of the roughly 50 building employees, there will be over eighty percent women and... call it eight men. Five of those men will be custodial/maintenance staff. That comes up to six percent of the building employees are men who work directly with the children. Ratios start to move more towards 75/25 split out as you get to higher level, but most of them are in, surprise surprise, science and math. Every elementary school principal is a woman. Women are a majority in principals at all levels.
I think the education field is a good example of where part of it, I think, is biological, and I can see where a large portion might be cultural.
... then nothing comes out the back.
When I went back to school in 2003, the CS department had a grand total of zero (0) US women in the graduate program. There may have been one woman in the undergrad program. This despite the following: the department head was a woman; almost 1/2 of the instructors were women; about 1/4 of the foreign students were women; and the _founder_ of the department in the 1970s was a woman. There weren't that many US men either - probably 3/4 of the grad program were foreign students. These folks were there, paying full tuition and working hard, because coming from other countries they knew that for them this was the difference between a comfortable middle class life, and dirt poverty. The plain fact is that engineering, if taught correctly, is hard, and many people don't feel the need to work hard for a distant goal, especially when that work involves technical knowledge and analysis. Plus, not everyone has the analytical bent, and that's OK. We need other talents as well.
It's easy for me to think / assume that part of the problem lies in the way education is done. If a real engineering and analytics approach with the self-discipline to think the hard thoughts were imbued into students early - primary grades, at least - perhaps the pipeline would have something going in the front. I'm hoping that our future robotic/AI childhood learning specialists that will be replacing much of the education system will be able to make a difference.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
"In 2013, not one female student took the AP computer science exam in Mississippi.”
Undercover feminazi cops (creepstalkers) are typically too dumb to pass any CS exam. Most of them are just intelligent enough to be capable of autonomous function. Also, most nerds tend not to fall for they’re hilarious trolling tactics.
Too many people just want to program in C. You really need 15 different languages & new languages every week.
Huh, Google is around 18% too. Go figure.
programmers over age 40.
Now the companies have no easy excuse about the 'education pipeline' or any such nonsense, when there are plenty of applicants with both experience, knowledge, and a strong intent and interest.
And yet.....
Somehow this discrimination, which is overt and very deep, doesn't ever matter.
Or, you know, people could be doing what they want to do. Shockingly, not everyone wants to do the same things in the same numbers as overall population demographics.
Try being an automechanic or driving tow trucks for a living.
I, and all the other programmers I know, are doing fairly well. In general it's not a lucrative career but it pays the bills and there a LOT worse things to do for a living.
At my workplace - financial services firm in East Coast - I can see about 30% of IT workforce being women - coders, testers, managers and so on.
All are from India except for one from China.
Tat Tvam Asi
Ada Lovelace, Top Secret Rosies - http://sites.temple.edu/topsecretrosies/
"We can't go much above 18% in our coders [Facebook has 7,185 total employees] if there's only 18% coming into the workplace." Umm your total workforce is not the same size as the amount of students coming in to the workplace. Of course your gender ratio could change with those students available and looking for work.
The Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of this world don't allow themselves to become concerned with the facts about discrimination or equal opportunity or anything else that doesn't advance their agenda. When the facts don't support their case, which is 99% of the time, they ignore them and silence dissenters by playing the race card. Essentially, these guys are after hush money when it comes to corporate America and their strategy is to make such a nuisance of themselves that companies agree to public concessions, to allow a face saving retreat, while Jackson and Sharpton get their money in exchange for quietly dropping the matter. The Silicon Valley tech people are even more foolish than I thought if they honestly believe that they can win a logical argument with these people. As I've said, they're not interested in facts or logic. They deal in emotion, grievance and the culture of victimhood. If you really want an honest take on discrimination and its actual status as a non-issue in the American workplace today, I would strongly recommend Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies.
It's always been obvious to me that the reason that there are so few female developers has little to do with hiring practices and a lot to do with the lack of interest in computer science among women. You just have to look threw a stack of CVs when people apply for jobs at your company for it to be obvious: when there are so few CVs from women in the pile, statistically you're not going to hire as many of them.
How dare you speak truth and use a logical argument to further your observation. Don't you realise as a male, we are all guilty of oppressing women. ;-)
The average IQ of an African is 70.
SEVENTY.
Why don't all these poor, hard done by non-whites MOVE to their OWN countries, and live around their OWN kind, if 'evil', 'racist' whites are 'holding them down'?
Why don't they want to live around their own race? I just can't imagine...
ANYBODY promoting 'diversity' is committing GENOCIDE against white people, who clearly do not want to live with non-whites - otherwise they wouldn't have to be FORCED on us. Anybody committing genocide will face trial and the death penalty. So carry on - while you can...
I'm pretty sure research bears out that both education and hiring processes are deeply flawed when it comes to hiring underrepresented people. One issue may be more "root cause" than the other, but they're both important. I'm actually kind of surprised Code.org went on record saying this...
Correction. HR is the flaw in the hiring process across all sectors and careers. I regularly see companies repeatedly running the same advertisement for the exact same position. Is the salary offered too low to attract an applicant to accept an offer of employment? Has the company tried recruiting on-campus at the local college or university including community colleges? Does the company really intend to hire anyone or is it a subterfuge used as smoke and mirrors against competitors? Do any of the applicants get their resume pasted the human resources drone and into the hands of the appropriate manager? Unless a person writes in a style indicative of a particular demographic there is no way to tell their ethnic or cultural background because even names can be misleading. Oh your family name is Boisvert...you must speak French. Or your surname is Shakespeare...we're looking for a Latin-speaking candidate. Age discrimination is another factor at play in some situations.
If companies want a diverse workforce then the people who are not well represented would command a higher salary, for the same skills, since companies in essence would be bidding for a scarce resource. While the pay gap is large, small or non-exsistant, depending on the study you use; the existence of a gap or parity indicates companies do not value diverse workforces enough to pay for them. However they want to appear to do so and thus need to find a reason why it's not their fault; the educational pipeline is convenient and kills two birds with one stone; "we can't hire more women because schools aren't producing enough with STEM skills and by the way that's why we need more H1-B's." As Hal Holbrook said, "follow the money..."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
About 25% of AP computer science test takers are women, which is about representative of tech companies.
This video explains the lack of women in math and science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...Out of college if they're decent they're ONLY in the top 6%* of income in the country...
Even though your statistic is not supposed to be real, it's conceptually incorrect and should be lower when you normalise it with initial investment.
Then you should also give it some context by considering initial investment in terms of time and effort - i don't think many would disagree that if you put in the effort then you are at least deserved of an equivalently better income and not just lucky or greedy.
Now take your normalised statistic with context and apply it to "that software developer in the US" who is being manipulated into lower pay... "Poor" would be an exaggeration, but "Cheated"... perhaps.
>anyone smart enough to be a really good engineer/programmer, can also see that it's a dead-end job
I'd be giving that advice too ... if I were a third rate engineer/programmer who wasn't worth a damn at anything. Amazon, Google, etc. are hiring like mad and they pay hella good money for dev, PM, and even QA.
Having children is a lifestyle choice. If one isn't OK with the compromises that choice brings, one should make a different choice. From what I hear, having a kid or two is pretty rewarding in it's own right. Despite what people say, it's unlikely a person can really have it all without taking something from someone else.
The American educational system is a capitalist educational system , not a meritocratic educational system.
'Nuff said (or else it should be, if not eveyone qualifies as an Ameritard today!)......
bradley13, otherwise people might begin to wake up and realize that with all the offshoring of jobs, the insourcing of foreign visa scab workers, any actual education is besides the point when the jobs base has been decimated!
One-fifth of the US workers were laid off over the past five years. The president mentioned in a speech the other day that 10 million new jobs have been created in the private sector (but only 5.5 million can be verified, and a job can't be verified when it doesn't exist! ).
By all these so-called "studies" from Pew Research Center (FYI: the very same guys who, a few years back, claimed the American corporatemed was majority "liberal") and elsewhere, which are psychometrically balanced to divide and conquer, people have their attention redirected from the real causes, their real enemy.
Again, ranton, this is all besides the point. The other week, our weak AG, Eric Holder, filed EOE lawsuits against companies allegedly practicing biased behavior against transgendered individiuals, yet for how many decades now have entire IT departments at corporations and organizations been entirely replaced with foreign nationals from India, for chrissakes?
That is also against the EOE laws, yet zero attorney generals have acknowledged this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I am not addressing the need for diversity and more access for women and non-white people to tech. There are too many white male geeky engineers in tech, and it shows in product missions and designs. There is not enough humanity in tech, as yet. But this is not why I have something to say about this topic. It is that Facebook, of all companies, has the least justification to say anything about the quality of software, of product design, or of product engineering and its relationship to hiring diversity. I have a Facebook account and use the site to keep tabs on friends and family members and yet I am disgusted by most of what it is, and my objections have to do with business and engineering and if that means that fewer women work or want to work at Facebook, I would not be surprised. The OP cites that Facebook has about 7100 employees, in my view most of what those people do is misdirected and a waste if my freedom of expression is encumbered by manipulation and spam as a result of their business model and Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy. So, it hardly matters that Facebook has 31% women or more as long as the result of its design is so bad as to limit conversation and exchange between its users in a design that is designed to create problems for users. Facebook needs an alternative. Judging from reactions I've heard from women in my life, I'd say to them, go and bury Facebook in a service that is kinder to people and better designed for humane communication. Do away with the three-fold grid and the blog and allow for real exchanges. I sincerely hope that Facebook fails.
Hire the best. If you worry about headcounts that mirror the population, help the schools, help children get interested in something besides the latest clothes fashions and entertainment flavors of the month.
Anyone ever stop to think that it might be remotely possible that more women just don't want to work in this IT field? I mean, I don't hear anyone complaining that there aren't enough male cosmetics workers at the Sephora counter at JC Penney; is this because men are driven away from it or because they are not drawn to it? Good Grief, folks.
When I was in grade school, it was made real clear to me by my friends and family that showing I was bright in Math or Chemistry or Physics was not cool. My female friends were praised for winning piano or horse-riding competitions - I received very high marks in Math and Science and even participated in the Science Fair - no praise for me. In high school, I got straight A's in advanced level Math courses and had to put up with a friend of the family (he was an engineer) castigating me at a dinner party for even thinking I had the brains to do Math. In college, I had to deal with guys staring at me when I was the only woman in class. They would sit in a group in the Math Library and work on problems together, but if I asked to join them, the group would either split up or say, something like, well, this might be over your head. The final straw came when one instructor said, "You know, I really don't want you in this class. Anything I teach you will be useless, because all you'll ever do with your life is get married and have babies." Granted this was pre-70s when things started changing for women. I pretty much gave up on Math and didn't use any of it until I got into the tech industry years later. I still see the same prejudices come up when assignments go to men who are less qualified.