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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.
That organization has embodied weaponized identity politics to such an extent that an article quoting them non-ironically deserves dismissal.
What is the diversity deficiency really mean? Asians are overrepresented as a share of the general population, there seems to be underrepresention in whites. Why do Asians not count for the purposes of this diversity calculation?
Let's be honest and admit you really want more blacks admitted at the expense of other groups. That's what the diversity these race baiters really want.
Why are Women and Minorities (not including Male Asians) being permitted to opt out of technology education? If anyone is going to take this problem seriously, those under-served communities need to be disproportionally encouraged to peruse technology education.
Comparing Amazon to Google or Facebook, is really apples-to-oranges, given that they're in very different businesses.
I'm just not sure how much I hold them responsible for lack of diversity in their ranks. Show me the diversity in the set of resumes they receive and interviews they conduct and I'll get on your bandwagon, but until then my experience says that the reasons for lack of diversity begin much earlier in the funnel.
They'll get no more of my money until Bezos has a sex change.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Google, Facebook, etc. need to just come out and say it: there are simply not that many blacks and Hispanics getting the basic credentials required to even sit for the interview. Demanding "diversity" then is literally demanding a lowering of standards to the point that people who would never be hired there can have a shot. There's no other way to read the demand. It's magical thinking at best and at worst, resembles the sort of logic that in Africa lead to confiscating white-owned farms and giving them to black Africans who had no clue how to run a farm.
Yes. Because it take a pair of balls to tell the CEO the e-mail server crashed in the middle of an audit.
j/k
Life is not for the lazy.
"The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses."
You mean they discriminate against White and Asian warehouse employees?
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...
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.