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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.
Comparing Amazon to Google or Facebook, is really apples-to-oranges, given that they're in very different businesses.
Why are Women and Minorities (not including Male Asians) being permitted to opt out of technology education?
This! Skin pigment and chromosonal quota perfection in every walk of life is so much more important than any other thing that might make someone choose something else to do that we should force people to study things in which they're not interested. Because that way, we can be sure that they'll be passionate about hating it even more, so that when they apply for that quota-mandated position, we know they'll be miserable SOBs to work with, and productivity will be sure to suffer, for which we'll be sure to blame Evil Corporations.
Jesse Jackson is a hypocritical, lying fool. His agenda (which is to extort money from public and private institutions so that he and his entourage can spend their time well compensated for doing nothing but whining) is utterly transparent. But it plugs right into the Nanny State world view, which requires professional quota referees for every last thing, including the size of your drink cup and the precise tone of the skin of the programmer in the cube next to you.
Jackson is complaining that Amazon's stats aren't precise enough, but I notice he's not calling for stats about the measured skills and academic records of the couldn't-get-hired-there folks he thinks should be qualified strictly on cosmetic grounds. If he thinks that the members of a particular racial group aren't landing enough jobs at Amazon, he should be turning to that group and lecturing them about developing the critical thinking, communication, technical, entrepreneurial, scientific, and related skills that make someone a shoe-in for such jobs. ALL of that starts at home, and is pretty well viable or terminally broken by the time a kid is half way through elementary school. And THAT is all about the culture out of which that kid emerges. About which Jackson should be doing some serious introspection, if he could stand to look at himself in the mirror. He not only deliberately confuses race with culture, but he deliberately confuses cause and effect - all so that he can thunder on about it, threaten boycotts, and receive grant money from his extortion victims. This is just another round of his racketeering outfit doing what it does.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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...
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.