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?

Comments

objective reassessment ...

[fche]

... becomes subjective bias-reinforcement when using the phrase "even worse" in comparing numbers

What do you expect to find?

[russotto]

The disclosures showed what everyone knew already - there's a lot of white males around, a disproportionately high number of Asian males, not so many Hispanics and blacks and relatively few women. Do you really think picking at the details is going to make things look significantly different?

And why bring up H-1Bs when talking about only counting employees who have Social Security taxes withheld? H-1Bs ARE subject to withholding for Social Security.

Re:What do you expect to find?

[shutdown -p now]

I haven't looked at the report, but from my personal experience, there are some interesting observations that seem to support the notion that gender imbalance in IT is entirely, or at least mostly cultural, and all that talk about "natural differences" is just BS.

Here's why. While there are few enough female coders around, I do notice a definitive trend that the majority of them tend to be immigrants. Generally speaking, China is best represented, there's a good share of Indians and Eastern Europeans, and even some Middle Easterners. But Americans are conspicuously absent. For a while I thought that one girl that I know was born in US, but even she turned out to be from a family of recent immigrants.

OTOH, you can find them quite easily if you stop looking at the engineers - and then you discover them in admin and HR. There, it's the other way around - very few immigrant women, mostly Americans.

Now I'm not claiming that China or India (ha ha!) are less sexist, far from it. But skilled immigrants are a self-selecting category, they're usually people who have already achieved something in their own country and have enough experience to get attention to be hired overseas, and enough money to move. So once you get past that filter, turns out that women actually do very well in IT, engineering, math, and all those other supposedly "not for girls" fields. OTOH, when the workers come from a local pool, that doesn't have such a filter in place, then you see the force of cultural stereotypes firmly implanted in their hands - and they don't even try to go for "male" jobs.

SjwDot.org

[r.freeman]

SJW posts on Slashdot.org are getting ridiculous, why it is some tragedy that both genders choose other things to do in their life?

Re:SjwDot.org

[russotto]

The SJW posts will continue until the commenters acquiesce. Not holding my breath. It's not like we don't recognize the SJWs as being the same damn male-nerd-bashers we've dealt with our entire life, only now claiming the moral high ground of "diversity" too.

Re:SjwDot.org

[Intrepid imaginaut]

More seriously though this nonsense is getting crazy. Story after story about gender diversity, why women are being driven out of tech by rapey neckbeards, a resolute refusal to take a long hard journalistically honest look at gamergate (when gamergate should have been the FOCUS of a site like slashdot), it reeks of complicity with the insidious agenda of the demented hate movement known as feminism.

I'll tell you this "editors", the time for such manipulations is almost at an end.

Re:SjwDot.org

[Solandri]

Ran across this interesting tidbit while looking up some stats for myself last time one of these articles got posted here.

Of the 7.6 million STEM workers, only 24% are women.
Of the 3.7 million public schoolteachers, only 24% are men.

I'll start taking all this gender equality stuff being reported seriously when I see at least half as many articles complaining about the latter as I see about the former. If one is a "problem", so is the other. Otherwise I'll take it there's an implicit assumption that women like to teach (or are better teachers) than men. And likewise men like STEM (or are better at STEM) than women.

Re:SjwDot.org

[Intrepid imaginaut]

This is why it keeps coming up - people here are unwilling to face the simple truths that the rest of the world did long ago

What, truths like "women have always, always worked outside the home even after marriage despite the hysterical narrative being pushed by people such as yourself that they were chained barefoot to the kitchen sink until the psychotics of second wave feminism saved them"? Truths like the fact that white goods did far far more to change the roles of women in society than feminism ever did as they freed up huge amounts of time? Those simple truths? Or maybe you'll take Einstein's word for it:

"Above all things there are the women who, as a literal fact, dominate the entire life in America. The men take an interest in absolutely nothing at all. They work and work, the like of which I have never seen anywhere yet. For the rest they are the toy dogs of the women, who spend the money in a most unmeasurable, illimitable way and wrap themselves in a fog of extravagance."

Dat narrative tho.

It was never about "rapey neckbeards", that's just some nonsense the anti-feminist crowd came up with.

This technique is known as DARVO and I see it a lot among the anti GG crowd. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Order - "No, all lies, scummy anti feminists, feminsts are the Victims here". People are learning about your shabby rhetorical tapdancing, they're learning how you work, how you co-ordinate, how you hustle.

And they don't like you very much.

It's about the things we have known for a long time put women off, and which are well documented. Things like bad working hours, lack of female role models, and hiring practices that while not actively discriminatory do never the less result in fewer women applying. Tech companies recognize these things as problems because they want the best candidates on the market, not the best candidates from a subset.

Spin like this never, ever stands up to scrutiny. In reality it's the mutants in the gender studies departments who learned their craft at the hoary knees of Dworkin and company looking for excuses to chip away another meritocratic system who want this. Tech companies are going along with it for the same reason they want more H1-B visas and they same reason they're being let into schools for pity's sake, more workers = cheaper workers, supply and demand.

In your own mind, your own narrative,you're an agent of progressive change, change which has been slowly improving society since the 70s, making life more equal, tearing down patriarchal constructs, you and your fellow travellers are the lights that lead humanity out of the dark ages.

But that's not the reality. The truth that almost everyone is starting to see is that your narrative is leaking brake fluid out of a thousand cracks. The changes that have been wrought are almost entirely due to technological advancements like cheaper cars and the free sharing of information via the internet, and the biggie, unleaded petrol. You are in fact representative of a regressive and reactionary hate movement whose conversations must centre around despising someone, whether it's the bourgeouise, the jews, or latterly white men.

The astounding hypocrisy of these sentiments is further compounded by a myriad of minor but still quite horrific hypocrisies, such as the identification with the (genuine) civil rights movement which was sparked off by a false rape allegation resulting in murder. Feminists would have supported the murderers with their blanket insistence that all rape accusations must be believed, and they'd probably have said that men could learn a lesson from it, those big rapey heads.

The only place your kind are leading is into a miserable gulag where merit becomes a curse word and men have to close their legs on subways, keeping their heads bowed when women walk by, a place where achievement becomes failure and failure becomes achievement, a place where the natural love be

Re: SjwDot.org

[Mashiki]

euphemism

No it's a euphemism for a group of people who whine, bitch and moan because they think they're special snowflakes and would rather the world work on their idea of justice, or promotion. Instead of merit, and law. Note that the UVA scandal is an example of SJW's in action, so was the whining and moaning over Mozilla's president being fired for making donations on his own time to a group.

You can try and label it as the "scary conservative bogyman" but you're only proving one thing. That you actually have no substantial argument that people are right in calling them the bottom feeders of society.

Re:SjwDot.org

[AmiMoJo]

The lack of men in education is a big issue, but possibly not one that will get a lot of coverage on a tech news web site...

it all works out

[bugs2squash]

29% of the workforce by weight is female.

I don't think it'll ever really happen

[TWX]

I find it unlikely that the tech sector will ever even get close to parity. Too many boys get interested in tech as a reaction to be ostracized from other groups. They develop a culture all their own, and that culture is usually not particularly friendly to people that are different from them, that have not gotten along with them terribly well, or that they don't think measure-up. Girls, and later women, squarely hit all three for the the vast majority of them, and when that's the base to which others entering technical fields through career planning rather than through personal interest have to deal with, that will turn-off people that don't like what they find.

When one looks at scandals like "gamergate" and other situations where women are finding themselves subject to personal attack when they disagree with other members of the community, you can begin to see the underbelly of the problem. Boys that don't get along with girls, objectify girls because of their own needs, and never are taught to behave otherwise will automatically reinforce an environment that's struggled with gender parity from the beginning.

The solution is to fix this when boys are in their tween and teen years, but that takes effort and a willingness to deal with the social issues that led to the problem in the first place. Screeching about the problem after it's become established won't fix it.

Re:I don't think it'll ever really happen

[Shadow of Eternity]

What's that about gamergate and women you say? Sorry I couldn't hear you over the sound of the actual women that people like you are busy calling racial slurs while trying to pin the blame on nerdy men.

Also women actually IN the tech industry call bullshit on you too.

Re:I don't think it'll ever really happen

[Shadow of Eternity]

Your own citation disproves your claim by pointing out the board behind this has absolutely no connection to gamergate.

This brings up another question ...

[BarbaraHudson]

What is the diversity of the active slashdot user base? Maybe we could have a poll limited to logged-in people only to keep people from tilting the stats?

It's not about equality

[MikeRT]

If it were, feminists would be beside themselves that by every metric, boys and men are losing out and the system favors girls and women. It doesn't matter what someone says they believe, just watch their actions. By the fruit they bear you will know their true character and priorities. Once you realize it's never been about equality, the only thing that matters is the question of whether some women have been truly unjustly denied opportunities. As a class issue, it's dead on arrival once you realize that equality was never the goal.

Force women at gun point to join tech

[Karmashock]

... or they'll choose to do something else. There is no institutional sexism. No one has been able to find it.

All you have is a stat that shows women don't statistically pursue this career. There is no evidence that universities are discriminating and there is no evidence that companies are discriminating.

So what you are really upset about is women CHOOSING to not go into tech.

You apparently don't like people having choices. You want everyone to statistically fall into perfect little patterns and do things according to your numbers.

Only one way to do that. Force women to and men and any other arbitrary group your stupid statistics think are relevant... and force them into tech... or else... scorpions? I'll leave that up to you.

Absent that, people are not going to fall into these statistical patterns. More men are going to get into some careers. More women are going to get into others. How many male kindergarten teachers are there? How many men work at maternity wards in hospitals? Women like small children and babies. They just do. And so that is ONE example of a career women tend to be happier in then men. I am not saying they should be pushed into it or that they should do it. They personally choose to do it because they like it. It is a choice.

And men often like solitary complex tasks working long hours often for no more reason then because it is hard and if they don't do it no one will.

Men like jobs that no one else will do. We gravitate to that stuff. We like being the guy that signs up for a couple years in the Merchant Marines seeing land no more then a couple days out of a month for years. Our contacts with civilization basically being a bar crawl climaxing with a trip to a brothel. Deal with it.

Men and women are not the same. They're not. We like different things. Pretending it is all socialization and otherwise women would love action movies and guys would be crying on the couch eating ice cream while watching romantic comedies is the opinion MORONS have.

I am not a moron. However, there are clearly a lot of morons running around and quite a few people don't seem to be able to tell the difference between morons and normal people. Because the morons are being treated like they're smart.

I think part of it might be that what the morons are saying doesn't make any sense. And we tend to associate things that do not make sense these days with something so smart that it is just beyond us. Except, sometimes things that don't make sense actually don't make sense... because they're stupid.

This whole feminist kick that the media is going on these days is dumb. You are embarrassing yourselves and you're not helping women.

If you actually won, the best you'd have accomplished is cause the competency of women for a generation to be questioned because no one would know if they earned their job or if they were some sort of diversity hire.

Stop being stupid. No really. Stop eating the lead paint chips which I am assuming is a popular ingredient at jamba juice.. and just stop. It is your job to write articles and talk. I don't want you to starve.

Just try harder to not literally have the opinions of literal idiots. Not saying you are idiots... just that you happen to be thinking in much the same way and it is not acceptable.

Re:Force women at gun point to join tech

[Karmashock]

First, there is no evidence you can point to in my post of sexual discrimination. Simply claiming you FEEL that there is can at best be put down to you not liking my conclusion but lacking any rational objection. I can neither respect nor credit your position as valid on this issue absent evidence.

Second, as to your personal feelings about working long hours you must realize we're talking about statistics that average literally millions of people together. Your personal opinions are not even a drop in the bucket. The reality is that on average, men are either more comfortable, more accepting, or outright approving of work conditions that women generally find intolerable. That is not sexual discrimination. That is a statistical observation that some arbitrary group is willing to cope with a certain environment and another arbitrary group is not.

Third, I don't see why we are dividing the population on the basis of gender, age, race, or religion. I don't see the utility of the concept. I would like to be gender, age, race, and religion blind. I'd like to divide people by more meaningful and useful attributes such as education, IQ, criminal record, and "ambition" however you might measure that. Those are attributes that are useful to a business. Why as a business do I give a flying fuck whether you have to sit down to pee or not? That is so completely fucking stupid I don't even know where to start with it. What mattes to me as a business is if you can do the work, how well you'll do the work, what you'll want to be paid to do the work, and how hard you'll try to do the work once assigned to do it. Beyond that why the fuck would I care about anything else? And of all the moronic things to fixate on... Gender? For the love all that is rational in this unvierse why would anyone care in a job where the gender of the person isn't relevant to the work itself what gender you are? Look, if I am selling women's clothing then I'm going to need a female model and if I'm selling male clothing then I'm going to need a male model. But outside of any situation where a specific gender is actually relevant... why do I care if you have a penis or a vagina? For all I care the entire company could be all men or all women or all christian or all muslim or all really young or old or tall or fat or whatever the fuck. It doesn't matter so long as the work gets done with an acceptable degree of quality and efficiency. Your gender is meaningless to me. The only thing that bothers me is when someone presume to get special treatment because of their gender. Try that and you're blacklisted. I want nothing to do with you if you try to get special treatment for your gender, your race, your religion, your age, your fatness, your thinness, your tallness, your shortness. I don't give a fuck. Do your job. Get paid. This is the contract.

Re:Force women at gun point to join tech

[Karmashock]

As to the paper, I addressed that previously. That was on ONE university. That is not a large enough sample to base a systemic conclusion on.

As to your anecdotal examples, I can answer yours with mine. That accomplishes nothing.

As to purging the evil males, there is no just way to do that so you're likely to do it arbitrarily which by definition will punish innocent people while also failing to get bad people. So it is pointless.

As to your kindergarten point, all you're doing is admitting to systemic anti male legal practices. So if anything you're arguing men are discriminated against instead of women. Is that your intention?

As to happiness, it is a question of choice. Men are happier in fields where they're alone then women in the same jobs. How many women sign up to do solo isolated jobs where they don't interact with anyone? You're going to claim discrimination in a fiend where no one talks to you? Kindly get real.

As to assuming liking... it is quite obvious they like it. Women go into the care of children and maternity wards because they like it. They like the children and the babies. Men find such things cute as well of course but they don't get the same sort of satisfaction out of it.

What you seem to want is a society where people don't have choices. Where everyone is forced to take given careers based on arbitrary statistical targets based on arbitrary divisions of the population into groups that should not be treated as groups. In regards to the labor force, the number of women, men, people of given races, or religious groups is not relevant. What is relevant is competence, diligence, and initiative. Your fascination with sexual ratios is odd and serves no utility.

Merchant marines are not the military. They're the people that run cargo ships. So my citation is valid.

Why is diversity an objective?

[jackspenn]

How does being diverse help a company or team?

Why stop at Microsoft?

Let's look at the NBA Portland Trail Blazers. No women, not enough south-Americans, Asians, native-Americans or even whites!

Doesn't the NBA realize they would be so much better off if they focused on diversity instead of their narrow minded goal of getting the best basketball players?

That Paul Allen guy is a performance and results bigot. Just look at what he is doing with the Seattle Seahawks.

I see anti-diversity examples all over Allen's successful investments, with a clear focus on talent, skill, work ethic, etc. instead of a person's race or sex.

What kind of world will this result in, if people are rewarded for what they contribute instead of what they look like and whether or not they have any balls?

Re:White wimmin?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: This is tragic!

[Anonymous Coward]

But in C#, an int technically is a struct (or value type).

Meh, gender diversity sucks in tech

[Richard_at_work]

The company I work for (roughly 300 employs, fairly major UK national insurance broker) had to hire a new web dev last year. We put the feelers out in June, ended up interviewing throughout July and August, eventually hiring someone in September.

The job went out to all the usual boards, the HR dept (two women) hunted for candidates on LinkedIn, and we were also passed résumés by several agencies.

We saw well over 100 résumés in that time, with Indian and Chinese candidates massively over represented. How many résumés did we see from women for the position? Not one. Not a single, solitary one.

So yes, gender diversity sucks in tech, but when women aren't applying for the jobs, how can we diversify?

Teachers and Nurses?

[Teckla]

How come there are never any reports on the fact that elementary and middle school teachers are overwhelmingly female? How come there are never any reports on the fact that nurses such as LPNs and RNs are overwhelmingly female?

What's being done to close these gender gaps? Why is it never reported? Why is it not important? Wouldn't it be good for kids, who spend a lot of their life in school, to also have male teachers as role models?

What about college admissions? Female admissions have been much higher than male admissions for quite a while now. Why isn't this being reported? Shouldn't we be discussing what to do about that?

Forgive me, but I've seen this "gender gap in technology" thing reported over, and over, and over and over and over and over and over and over ad nauseum, the last few years. It's a discussion that's worth having, to be sure, but it astonishes me how gender gaps in other, probably much more important areas, are completely ignored.

Why is that?

So

[ShieldW0lf]

Is there a way to reclaim Slashdot from this constant barrage of psychological assault on IT professionals by outsiders?

I'm a bit of a nerd and I'm an IT professional. This place used to be a place to find news of interest to nerds and IT professionals. Now it's a place where there's going to be a daily article about how shitty a person I am and how shitty my industry is.

Is this what the rest of you guys come here for? To get shit on daily? It's kinda feeling like Slashdot has just become a bad habit I do when I'm bored because I've done it so many times before.

Is your target audience people who are nerds, or is it people who are envious of nerds? It's kinds feeling like this place has become the latter.

Re:So

[Shadow of Eternity]

To quote Dr. Hoff-Sommers: "In early 90s, my side won all the arguments. But the other side quietly assumed all the assistant professorships." Despite an overwhelming majority of even women rejecting the SJW's toxic branding they have disproportionate clout due to actively seeking out media influence.

Re:So

[mvdwege]

Is there a way to reclaim Slashdot from this constant barrage of psychological assault on IT professionals by outsiders?

Yes, it is called "stop being misogynistic whiny manbabies if you're called on some of your misbehaviour".

The other way is of course time. There is a movement for more diversity, and it will win eventually when said manbabies die out. Given their obnoxious whinging, they are not recruiting faster than they are dying out, and every flare-up into uglyness like GamerGhazi throws off more moderates.

Re:8chan in the House!

[russotto]

Men in tech are just pitiful. Reading these mewling, whining comments, one does not need to wonder why big tech companies are trying to encourage diversity.

The funniest part is that male Slashdot readers actually think their opinions matter on the topic of diversity. So, just for the record, nobody cares what you think. The industry is trying to recruit women because you are so awful to be around, and you are not half as irreplaceable as you think.

Ah, thank you. Remember when I said SJWs were the same male-nerd-bashers we've dealt with our entire life? Case in point right here.

Yeah, we know; we're nerds. Non-nerds hate us and when they're not using us for punching bags or as the butt of their jokes, they wish we'd just go away. Too bad the world has provided two ironies

1) You need us. We are, indeed, as irreplaceable as we think. You can't do tech without nerds. And you need us more than ever; the days where you could simply steal the spear-inventor's idea then drive him out with his own invention are over.

2) SJWs manage to be even more awful to be around than nerds. Once they run out of external targets they turn on each other, and with the same viciousness.

Our opinions on diversity don't matter? Perhaps not. But yours don't either; we can see that from the fact that you've been beating the drum for a very long time, and you haven't gotten what you want; not even a significant move towards it.

Re:This is tragic!

[dell623]

I read these meaningless PR releases utterly devoid of any context (proportion of female applicants, proportion of female applicants meeting the skill requirements etc.) and find myself getting rather annoyed as they seem to suggest that employees in these companies, the whole industry, and by inference, I, did not get a job through merit but because of some kind of gender bias.

But then I read posts straight out of Mad Men like this one, purportedly written by someone who would have a say in hiring, and I think that maybe somewhere behind this whole misguided campaign, there is a very real problem.

- The reference to women as 'girls'. Do it in a bar, not in a professional context, not to a colleague, not in written professional communication.
- 'Brightening up the workplace'? Really?
- That running gag in your company - do the female employees share in it? Or there literally aren't any?

You can claim it's all bar chatter and you're all professional at work, but your office really does not sound like one where women would feel comfortable working.

Re:How to influence the innumerate with CS Ed stat

[arth1]

The very best engineers, programmers and wizards are not school taught - they are autodidact.
To the point that many have a CS education, that is only pro-forma so they fulfill employment requirements.

Anyone who takes CS to learn CS is already behind. If you actually learned something you didn't already know, you probably didn't have much of an interest or a knack in the first place.

To get more [insert favorite minority] into STEM/CS, the members of [insert favorite minority] have to take an interest in it. Schools can't teach you the drive and curiosity that makes you worth keeping as an employee. They can only teach you what you can pick up in a fraction of the time by reading and playing around.

To expect to be a successful engineer because your parents sent you to UCB is as silly as expecting to be a successful musician because you took music classes. Without an inner drive and interest, it won't do much good.
And the problem is that women in general don't take a personal interest in maths, science, engineering or similar. That has to come first.