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Black IT Pros On (Lack Of) Racial Diversity In Tech
Nerval's Lobster writes While pundits and analysts debate about diversity in Silicon Valley, one thing is very clear: Black Americans make up a very small percentage of tech workers. At Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, that number is a bit less than 2 percent of their respective U.S. workforces; at Apple, it's closer to 7 percent. Many executives and pundits have argued that the educational pipeline remains one of the chief impediments to hiring a more diverse workforce, and that as long as universities aren't recruiting a broader mix of students for STEM degrees, the corporate landscape will suffer accordingly. But black IT entrepreneurs and professionals tell Dice that the problem goes much deeper than simply widening the pipeline; they argue that racial bias, along with lingering impressions of what a 'techie' should look like, loom much larger than any pipeline issue.
http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
they argue that racial bias, along with lingering impressions of what a 'techie' should look like, loom much larger than any pipeline issue.
Having once taught one of the most difficult to understand topics in mathematics, many of my students, after getting comfortable with me, told me they didn't expect me to be their teacher when they forst saw me. On one occasion, at the beginning of school, a this particular class continued with their business instead of acknowledging my presence at the podium, till I called the class to order.
Where I now work, members of the public will gravitate toward an office assistant to help them solve a problem instead of talking to me directly. This assistant then has to advise them to talk to me if anything is to be solved. I am the chief here.
I have gotten so used to this treatment that it doesn't bother me anymore.
I have only a single data point so it's probably not worth anything... My only experience with a Black IT professional was a network admin for the company who took over my employer. I was the previous defacto network admin even though my job description was 'embedded firmware developer'. So this company takes us over and hires this guy as the network admin. I meet him in a conference call and his first task is to come up and migrate our servers over to their corporate platform. So I volunteer to give up my weekend to facilitate since he doesn't know our existing infrastructure... He shows up and I give him the nickle tour, show him to a meeting room where he can unpack boxes and start bolting things together. I go back to my cubicle and work on some bugs telling him "if you need anything, just come get me." ... So everything's cool. He gets things connected, and starts migrating data... Around dinner time I check in with him and suggest we go across the street for a bite and a pint while data copies across the network. We have a lovely dinner and chat about families, school, weather, previous work places, etc.. All the usual stuff when you go out for dinner with a co-worker... Then we go back to the office, stop in the machineroom and it's back to business... So that was basically the whole weekend... I made sure he had what he needed from our old servers and instead of sitting around like a lump, I try to get some work done while he configures his new servers...
Monday afternoon, I get a call from my ex-CEO who says there's been a complaint made against me and I need to fly down to meet with HR. In short, the complaint was that I treated him like a subordinate because he's black and that I should remember he doesn't work for me and that I'm not his boss. Prior to that meeting, it hadn't really registered that he was black. I mean sure, I could tell his skin color was different but so is the skin color of 75% of the people I worked with back then. None of my other co-workers were black though. They were either of asian descent, italian, or middle eastern... To me, they're just my co-workers... So I get this mark on my employee record and everything kind of blows over. My future dealings with this IT guy were subsequently 100% about work and that was that. I stayed away from him as much as possible except when unavoidable. A year later, I left the company but reports from my ex-co-workers were that this guy had complained about at least 2 other people in the company and they had eventually let this guy go... Of course you never find out why someone is let go but they hired someone to replace him in exactly the same position almost immediately so the subtext is "this guy has too much 'victim mentality'."
On LinkedIn, this guy doesn't seem to hold on to any jobs for more than 1-2 years and he never seems to 'move up'.
there's no such thing as a victimless crime.
That's true. But not the GP called it "crime", as in, they are put away for non-crimes (i.e., they were incarcerated despite the lack of an identifiable victim.
The STATE is the victim.
No. The "state" cannot be a victim, it owns a monopoly on "legal" violence, and exists only to protect the rights of its citizens. If the State can claim to be a victim and kill and incarcerate citizens because to protect itself from its people, then it has become a tyranny and should be dismantled. The state should rightly fear its people, not the other way around.
And since you seem to be implying that possession and/or distribution of some state-declared contraband (an act the state punishes blacks for very disproportionally than whites), I'll leave this quote from Lysander Spooner right here for you to ponder:
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Just a note: systemic discrimination operates independently of individual discrimination.
As an example, a business or industry that recruits heavily through word-of-mouth recommendations is likely to end up with a systematic racism problem, because even though the individuals within the system may be well meaning and totally non-racist, any existing disparity, however slight, in social or employment circles, will get cemented, or even amplified given a non-zero percentage of employees will discriminate, by such a strategy.
Given the number of documented and easy to find ways in which systematic racism and individual racism exists, it's not hard to believe someone claiming it doesn't is not being honest.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, according to government statistics, the "Percent Black or African-American" represent about 7.1% of 2011 graduates and about 7.4% of the workforce, and both are trending upwards. Compare the roughly 7.4% of black computer programmers with 10.8% of the general population. So a smaller percent of the population get the training, but those who get the training are not discriminated against for hiring purposes. (Not talking about wages, just hiring diversity.)
From the same report with a 10-year granularity, females make up about 33.9% of the 2011 graduates and about 26.6% of the computer programming workforce. Women are also making up an increasing number of the workforce that changes based on age. The report notes "these estimates could be consistent with an age effect. That is, when women are young, they are more likely to be employed in STEM, but as they age, they move out of STEM employment." The trend lines show 35-year-old females in the group as a growing population, with the growth dropping rapidly by age groups. Compare that with the 48% females in the general national workforce. So in hiring diversity women do make up a lower number by diversity but it is largely by their own choice rather than hiring discrimination.
One of the real problems with the gender gap is that many times it is a sign of wealth or poverty -- that is, in various demographics of wealthy households and poor households women are not part of the workforce. It forms a bell-shaped curve. Poor mothers ($90K) the line starts to rapidly drop again. So splitting out the numbers, if the individuals are making $30K-$50K then often the mother is educated and also the mother works. But once the family has highly paid workers, with the husband highly paid making >$90K then the women again tend to stay home with children rapidly trending back down to about 43% working once you've crossed the roughly $150K husband's income. Since the tech field is very highly paid that puts the gender gap as a voluntary choice, not an involuntary hiring discrimination.
Based both on what I have seen and also what I have read in various reports, the problem (if there is one) is at the source end of the education pipeline. When it comes to "Black or African American" demographics the number of graduates and number of workers is at parity. When it comes to females, the numbers are that women who choose to stick with the field are readily employed and that many women leave as they age at a rate far more rapid than other fields.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement