What Intel's $300 Million Diversity Pledge Really Means

itwbennett writes Intel's Rosalind Hudnell is responsible for implementing the company's much-publicized $300 million initiative to bring more women and under-represented minorities into its workforce by 2020. But even with Intel's renewed commitment to diversity, the company's workforce will still be just about 32 percent women in five years, Hudnell estimated. Here's a rough breakdown of how the money will be spent: The funds will be applied over five years to change hiring practices, retool human resources, fund companies run by minorities and women, and promote STEM education in high schools.

Comments

What it means:

[kuzb]

Passing up perfectly qualified candidates in order to appease a quota. I'm all for qualified women being seriously considered for tech jobs, but this will do more to harm the industry than it will do to help it.

Re:What it means:

[Rideak]

Exactly my feeling as well.

Equal opportunity != equal outcome. nor should it be.

just watch, the headline in 10 years:
"intel's diversity not reflected in team leads or management" (because they lowered the bar for underrepresented groups the over represented group's relative performance was better and hence will be promoted more)

followed by:
"intel pushes for new diversity initiative in promotions"
10 years later:
"intel files for bankruptcy after repeated market failures related to its line of privilege checking chips which underclock themselves based on the current user's level of privilege metric."

Re:What it means:

[CrimsonAvenger]

There are plenty of qualified candidates who aren't white males, who have been "passed up" for a century

I'm curious. Do you happen to know of any specific people or groups of people who've been, how did you put it, "passed up for a century" for a job at Intel?

Extortion

[Stormwatch]

That's a nice company you got there. It would be a real shame if someone accused it of sexism...

Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is discrimination fought with discrimination...

Do people not know how to hire the best candidate anymore?

Somethig wrong with that

[frovingslosh]

What a Diversity Pledge Really Means is that a company is committed to discriminating against the best qualified candidate if that candidate is a white male. Let the lawsuits begin.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[Anonymous Coward]

What a Diversity Pledge Really Means is that a company is committed to discriminating against the best qualified candidate if that candidate is a white male. Let the lawsuits begin.

I have dumped all my Intel stocks or else I would launch a class-action suit against Intel of wasting shareholders' money to promote discriminatory practices

$300 million is not a small amount, you know?

I rather Intel distributes that $300 million to the shareholders than to use it to promote a discriminatory program !

I do not care what they want to term it - be it 'diversity' or 'reverse-discrimination' --- the whole thing walks, quack, and smell like a racial segregatory and gender segregatory program, and no amount of political correctness is going to help America's technology to become even more advance!

Re: Somethig wrong with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Its an issue If they hire a less qualified woman over a more qualified male just because she's a woman. Thats exactly what programs like this encourage.

Should more women enter technology? Sure. Is anyone stopping them? NO. Is it outside the realm of possibility that less women are interested in the technology sector than men? NO. I have a lot of female friends. I grew up with 2 sisters and no brothers so I have more female friends than male. Only one of them has any interest in technology and ive asked why..ive asked if they were ever discouraged from any stem field and they all said no, they just WERENT INTERESTED.

The one who's into technology works in a robotics lab. She loves it and has never has any issues with the men around her.

This whole current pushing of this nonsense no women in tech is going to turn and bite the sector in the ass. You can't force interest and if you start lowering the bar to meet hiring quotas thats not only unfair to everyone else its also a great way to lower quality output.

Re: Somethig wrong with that

[Anonymous Coward]

People are also getting in the way of *men* entering technology. You're crazy, simply crazy if you think otherwise.

Re: Somethig wrong with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Women are paid less than men with equal skills and equal jobs. And yet somehow there are still fewer women. Could it be that companies are so foolish with their money that even though a just as competent woman is cheaper, they would still hire the male?

It's not that simple. Like most business decisions in the real world there are plenty of mitigating factors. Knowing nothing else about the candidates it can be shown that a woman hire is statistically much more likely to take time off for family reasons or maternity. This has a non-zero cost to ongoing projects, long term productivity and the like, all of which must be discounted to balance the risk a company takes when hiring a woman instead of a man who is much less likely to take time off for family reasons and even less likely to take any substantial maternity leave. This balance comes in the form of a pay cut to the woman to balance out these risks. The business world is tough and companies aren't charities. The directors are duty bound to maximize value for the owners and they cannot do that by running the business as a charity or at least not without the permission of the owners. Now of course there are always individual exceptions to these general rules. Indeed, there are many excellent female executives working in corporate America these days and a fair share of worthless men, but it's best not to delude ourselves with misguided reasoning on why companies prefer to hire men for some jobs. Just because you don't see the reasons doesn't mean there aren't any, especially when one considers the goal of any company, and especially publicly traded companies, which must be always and everywhere to maximize shareholder value.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[Mr.CRC]

Under no circumstances will SJWs allow the problems they tirade against actually be solved, or progress constituting effectively 90-99% improvement, be recognized. Thus they will certainly contribute to the problems, in the most insidious ways.

Re: Somethig wrong with that

[Loki_1929]

If there are some women who are perfectly capable of learning to do the job, and they're being steered away from tech careers by well meaning guidance counselors because "vaginas!" then it is NOT an issue. Even if it *is* an issue of emphasizing genitals over ability, that is NOT "segregation," as the GGP poster stated.

It isn't "segregation", but it is discriminatory hiring practices. If we take the view that less qualified individuals should be hired on the basis that they are "perfectly capable of learning to do the job", then Intel and other companies shouldn't be targeting women, but high school drop-outs, illegal immigrant farm workers, and convicted felons who will be cheap and easy to find. Those groups are most certainly more under-represented than women in that field.

We can debate the merits of a strategy utilizing apprenticeships for certain jobs, but the fact is that there are plenty of people who don't need to learn to do the job who are looking for work. Until it comes to pass that that's no longer the case, then hiring anyone but the most qualified for the job, especially when race, sex, or other such factors are overriding job qualifications, is prejudicial and discriminatory and it ought to be illegal. That goes both ways; excluding women or minorities as well as excluding whites and males.

If we want fairness, let's have fairness; not unfairness in the other direction.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[Vintermann]

Intel knows that an investment in diversity is insurance against the government.

It's not government they're afraid of, it's their rivals' PR teams, and powerful people in media who on a whim might decide to throw their power around.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[AmiMoJo]

Look at the % of females graduating at top colleges with computer science degrees, it's small %. At top schools it's only 14%.

That's why they are spending so much money at the school level. If they can get that number up to 32% then naturally when selecting the best candidate 32% of the time they will be female. A company like Intel needs a lot of good talent, and when you need something that is in limited supply one of the obvious things to do is increase the supply.

This scheme will work well for Intel, because when the those women that they helped do graduate with high marks Intel will already have a relationship with them and Intel staff will be well networked at university/college level, so get the first pick of the best minds.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[hairyfeet]

This is what I hate about that section of the left now called "Social Justice Warriors" which we used to call "East Coast liberals" is that they are NOT for what Dr King marched for, the right of ALL PEOPLE to be judged by the content of their character, no they are for racism and the only difference between their racism and the racists of the early 20th century is the colors they discriminate for and against! And you can bet your last dollar that its this group that let loose the waaahmbulance and got Intel to throw money at this racist crap to get them to go away.

But I want to thank Intel, I've said ever since it came out Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging benchmarks (which they do to this very day BTW, just recently Cinebench was caught using CPUID to tell the software to slow down if the chip was AMD) that we should vote with our wallets and go AMD, which I have exclusively ever since, but this kind of bullshit just gives me an extra warm and fuzzy feeling to know that not only am I saving my customers money while giving them really good performance but the icing on the cake is I'm not supporting racism...thx Intel!

Re: Somethig wrong with that

[firex726]

Also ignore the STEM aspect, if women were paid so much less then men, then the natural effect of capitalism would make it so they are much more desired.

As a business owner, you'd be able to cut your employee salary by 30%, that is a lot to most businesses.

How to slow America down

[mi]

By breaking, what works:

1. change hiring practices,
2. retool human resources,
3. fund companies run by minorities and women

. No, there will be no "PROFIT!!!!" at the end — elimination (or, at best, reduction) of profit is the goal here.

Why would various corporations suddenly start doing that to themselves? The only possible reason is undue pressure... Some free country we got ourselves into...

Stop making people like things they don't like

[ZankerH]

I could think of a few other fields that are much more patriarchically male-dominated than tech. Garbage disposal, oil-rig maintenance, construction, homelessness, etc. Take your fake moral crusade elsewhere, or at least stop pretending you somehow support "equality".