Slashdot Mirror
Lies, Damn Lies, and Tech Diversity Statistics
theodp writes Some of the world's leading Data Scientists are on the payrolls of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Apple. So, it'd be interesting to get their take on the infographics the tech giants have passed off as diversity data disclosures. Microsoft, for example, reported its workforce is 29% female, which isn't great, but if one takes the trouble to run the numbers on a linked EEO-1 filing snippet (PDF), some things look even worse. For example, only 23.35% of its reported white U.S. employee workforce is female (Microsoft, like Google, footnotes that "Gender data are global, ethnicity data are US only"). And while Google and Facebook blame their companies' lack of diversity on the demographics of U.S. computer science grads, CS grad and nationality breakouts were not provided as part of their diversity disclosures. Also, the EEOC notes that EEO-1 numbers reflect "any individual on the payroll of an employer who is an employee for purposes of the employers withholding of Social Security taxes," further muddying the disclosures of companies relying on imported talent, like H-1B visa dependent Facebook. So, were the diversity disclosure mea culpas less about providing meaningful data for analysis, and more about deflecting criticism and convincing lawmakers there's a need for education and immigration legislation (aka Microsoft's National Talent Strategy) that's in tech's interest?
First, man, check your phrasing. You make a fair point, but the connotation of phrases like "white wimmin" and "smart chicks" isn't going to help you sway anyone you want to sway.
I'm paraphrasing but there was a line I read a short while back in a book called Pinched, I believe by Don Peck that said something like "society has learned to deal with women in the workforce far better than it has learned to deal with men being out of it." Ultimately I think that's true. If we're going to have more gender parity, we need to acknowledge the fact that the self-selection of women into other fields, and removing themselves from the workforce entirely, has an awful lot to do with these numbers.
It's true that being a woman interviewing for a job in a field that is 70% male is going to have some problematic difficulties. It's also true that today in the US unemployment is a great predictor of divorces -- but only the male's unemployment. I don't conflate the two things to say that like, hey, it's all net fair, men are oppressed too. I just think it's unbelievably naive to not think they are part of the same issue.
But in C#, an int technically is a struct (or value type).