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Amazon Releases (Not Many) Details On Its Workforce Demographics
theodp (442580) writes Late to the table on disclosing workforce demographics, Amazon posted a diversity report to its website on Halloween, revealing that its global work force is 63% male and 37% female, while in the U.S., its work force is 60% white, 15% black, 13% Asian and 9% Hispanic. More lacking in granular detail than the less-than-transparent diversity data provided by its tech peers, Rainbow PUSH said Amazon's numbers were not as good as they appeared, and criticized the company for a lack of candor. "Their general work force data released by Amazon seems intentionally deceptive, as the company did not include the race or gender breakout of their technical work force," PUSH said in a statement. "The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses." Following the lead of other tech companies, Diversity at Amazon suggests the e-tailer's undisclosed-but-presumed lack of tech diversity could be blamed on "female students and students of color [who] are opting out of technology and engineering" as early as middle school and high school. Taking a page from Google's playbook, Amazon pointed to its involvement with the Anita Borg Institute, Code.org, Girls Who Code, and the National Center for Women & Information Technology as ways the company's addressing tech diversity deficiencies.
"Diversity" groups don't like to talk about Asians because they disprove the myth than a once-oppressed race in the U.S. can never overcome their oppression through hard work and education. They're embarrassed that Asians don't just sit around on their asses blaming white people for all their problems.
It is not an companies responsibility to address the failures of particular minority communities to embrace technology education.
Actually, it is. Affirmative Action doesn't require a company to hire anyone, but it does require companies to identify that minorities are underrepresented in employment applications and take measures to encourage more applications from underrepresented minorities.
If the diversity of new hires is significantly different from the diversity of resumes, that is potential evidence of hiring discrimination. If the diversity of resumes is significantly different from the makeup of the community, then the company has obligations under Affirmative Action to actively seek resumes of underrepresented minorities. Affirmative Action was implemented the way it is specifically because the problem is earlier in the funnel and makes an easy excuse for lack of diversity in the workplace.
In other words, none of the numbers that are being discussed matter. Given the environment today, it is expected that minorities should be underrepresented at tech companies. There is no cutoff number between a good company and a bad company. Two things matter - are they acting fairly on the resumes they receive (as you stated), and are they being proactive to encourage minorities to apply. Neither of these can be inferred from the data presented. PUSH is using this uncertainty to make its own unfounded claims. Amazon's best course of action would be to disclose more information to shut them up.
Generally the idea is that a broader diversity of backgrounds allows more ideas to pop up, which can mean better software.
In practice, its tricky, because the argument mixes "Both genders are equal! They can do anything the other can!" while at the same time going "One gender can give a different perspective on things because they think differently and approach problems differently!".
A more practical example could be: part of your customer base is female. Having more women on staff could help you get the appropriate perspective to better target them.
The issue with that is: A) companies that have UX departments already have a lot of women in it. B) if the ideas to better target women come from guts feeling and sentences that start with "I think this is better!" instead of analytics data, you're going to make the wrong decision anyway, because the people in the IT department, regardless of gender, will have a different background and a skewed perception relative to the customers, so it won't really help.
My significant other who works at Amazon (a woman software engineer, woo!) had that issue recently. The UX people design a mockup, based on statistics, history, what competitors do, what has been A/B tested, etc. During implementation on the engineering side, one of the PMs (a woman, working with said significant other) goes "No this sucks! Its not intuitive! In Excel things work like this! Lets change everything!", with no backing arguments beyond "she doesn't like it". Then when people explain all the process that lead to that UI, of course: "I'm a woman, i have a different perspective and you refuse to acknowledge it!!".
Which was hilarious said she said that to another woman...
Practical answer: it's cheaper than fixing either the underlying education problem or the underlying social problem.
Other answer: monocultures are natural. Businesses started by white people employ more white people. Not because of maliciousness or discrimination, just because they know more white people than the general population does. Affirmative Action allows particular groups that don't currently have a toe-hold to break into the existing monocultures.
Remember that the AA requires no hiring discrimination. It also doesn't require any success at all. You can say "I put an employment ad at Grambling State University and I got resumes from all white people", and you met your obligation.
I am part of the black community. My sons black, I'm white. I go to "The Black American PTA meetings" as well as all of the black heritage festivals/meetings/conferences (and let me tell you, there are a LOT of them) even blended family clinics, and all that sort of stuff. The lack of black leaders and trying to get the community to stop idealizing sports stars is usually at the top of their agenda. Barrack Obama getting elected was probably the most important thing to ever happen to the black community in this country. My son has literally asked me to paint him white before. That's a hard thing for a father to take. My kids a handsome guy, and when he gets older the ladies will really dig him. But when he looks up to adults, who out there is successful and brown? Now I can point to the most powerful man in the free world and his skins the same shade.
As far as racism goes... yes. It's a big problem. Having a black son makes it abundantly clear. In the white community there's a lot of stupidity. "Why didn't you just get a kid from Murica!" and stuff like that. The only overt racism I've run into as been from the black community. But it was very few and far between and I only had one incident where the person flat out said I shouldn't be allowed to have that child, etc... But I chose to take that as concern for my son and took it in a positive light. They were hating on me and not my kid. I can deal with that.
Things might change when he's older. He's only 6 now. But he will have to get warned about the police. Now that I'm more concerned with the problem I see directly what the police do. The other day I went to the mall and the highschool let out for lunch so kids were walking through the parking lot to get to the food court. Cops rolled up on the 2 clicks of black males. None of the white kids were bothered. I started walking over to the squad car and then thought better of it.
The problem isn't hiring the 1 or one of the 1,000.
It's also not a problem if your 1001 qualified applicants were the entire pool of available applicants.
It's only a problem if you didn't fairly seek out qualified applicants. If you posted your job only on White World Magazine, then you've got a problem.
I worked for a company in the late 90's that was founded by a number of ex-military types. They started actively recruiting ex-military officers. While that certainly sounded to them like a great way to get like-minded people who had a good work ethic and shared their idea of structure and order, it skewed their candidate pool drastically toward white males. They weren't casting the net wide enough.
From a hiring perspective, that's all you have to do -- make sure you're casting the net wide enough, and then fairly choose the best applicants.