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:

[Chess_the_cat]

In this construction it would be "fewer" not "less."

Re:What it means:

[Intrepid imaginaut]

A group of people rigs the game to the where where they have a stranglehold, to the detriment of ALL others.

By all means provide evidence for this rigging.

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?

Re:What it means:

[uncqual]

"less white" might be correct -- maybe AC meant that darker complexioned, i.e. "less white", males should/would be hired.

Re:What it means:

[ArcadeMan]

You're right Rideak.

Most men prefer jobs that are about things.
Most women prefer jobs that are about people.

It's the truth but yet a lot of people just put their fingers in their ears and go "la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you" because they think it's not politically correct. Well, fuck you politics.

Re:What it means:

[zeroduck]

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase. Applicants living in better neighborhoods receive more callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

Re:What it means:

[goose-incarnated]

For those too lazy to read that study - it doesn't support the OP's point that women are discriminated against. Read it and see.

Re:What it means:

[TheGratefulNet]

bay area resident, here. living here for quarter of a century. born and raised in the US.

bay area companies (cisco, etc) are about 95% asian, at this point. wander the hallways, if you get a chance. its not about men vs women, its about US vs non-US. you can walk the hallways and not hear a word of english, for many hours at a time. people think nothing of speaking some foreign language while at work, doing work, in a large open setting.

when I grew up, it was considered rude to 'talk in codes' in front of people. I'm at a loss to understand why english is disappearing from the american tech workplace (again, in the bay area, at least). no one seem to tell the guys who were not born here that its FUCKING RUDE to speak in codes. especially when their english is perfectly fine and understandable. yes, I get offended. I would not 'speak in codes' in front of someone. I just ask that we all speak a common language and maybe I know about the bug or feature or problem you are having with your code. but how the fuck can I help if you avoid speaking in a common language? its rude, guys. just realize it. no one seems to tell you this, so I'm telling you now. ITS RUDE. STOP IT. you are not winning friends this way (maybe you don't want to win local friends...)

this kind of things just separates people. we have enough problems with separations; we don't need to make the problem worse.

just think about this for a bit. maybe you will react negatively to this news, but please just think about it and how you would feel if people went out of their way to hide their communication when around you and allow only a select few to understand what you are saying, working on, etc.

when off-work, do what you want. but if you are at-work, you should think about how you are seen when you act this way.

over the last 10 years, I've seen this behavior skyrocket. please be aware that its not a good thing, to be this way. we all need to work together. speaking in codes does not bring people together.

the men/woman thing is a red herring. the real problem is that the workforce is anti-american and also ageist as can be. show some grey hairs and you might as well be a non-person to many tech companies.

these are the problems we need to fix. the men/women thing is not a real problem.

What it means:

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hire less white males!

Extortion

[Stormwatch]

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

Tech needs more women like...

[Karmashock]

... The fashion industry needs more straight men. I'm all for increasing stem programs for high school. But don't be bigoted about it. Let everyone participate. And if women don't want to go into tech by choice... Get the fuck over it.

Re:Tech needs more women like...

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if women do want to go into STEM by choice but are put off by the wizards and dragons in their way?

On the other hand, you and the other SJWs vaguely refer to these "gender based barriers placed in their way", and then proceed to "address" them without ever identifying them. What are these barriers? Are they actually real?

The most important part of addressing a problem is identifying the problem. You can't just wave your hands and pretend that the problem is whatever happens to fit your preferred solution the best.

Re:Tech needs more women like...

[Altus]

Sex (the biological definition, not the act) and gender are not the same thing

Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is discrimination fought with discrimination...

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

Do a big push to hire male teachers and nurses

[Anonymous Coward]

That way, fewer men will be available to be engineers and scientists. It's foolproof!

Diversity or wages?

[manu0601]

Is it about diversity, or just having more engineers in the job market so that wages can be kept low?

Hmm

[MPBoulton]

I hope the money will not be prioritised to the items at the start of that list, because encouraging everyone to do STEM subjects is the only sustainable solution to this that doesn't pad out a quota at the expense of expertise.

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]

I don't blame Intel.

The idea that corporations control the government is a mostly a myth and these diversity "investments" are proof. Intel knows that an investment in diversity is insurance against the government. It's a payoff. It's protection money.

If Intel didn't have to worry that its business might be in danger from an aggressive government, they wouldn't bother making this pointless investment.

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]

[If you remove identifying information from resumes before they get to hiring managers, diversity goes *up*]

What load of bull. Where do you come by this? Anyone hiring blindly solely based on resumes without interviewing and practical tests has no clue especially in the tech industry as resumes often means as much as politician's promises so your claim seems dubious at best but probably willingly skewed to promote your agenda.

Maybe Dr Manning's Youtube videos are right after all.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just that, but as Neil de Grasse Tyson said about being black and in STEM, who was left behind? Who was told, "No don't focus on STEM, go play sports go do something else, you're black, STEM's not for you." So all of the money being invested in education is also going to mean is to try to stop the meme that, "you're a girl you shouldn't get into STEM. Go into arts or history or become a homemaker."

I work in STEM and I'm going to call bullshit here. Nobody I know would ever say something like that - be it about ethnicity, gender or any other characteristic unrelated to ability. Maybe someone is saying that to black kids or women, but they sure as hell aren't from within the STEM sector - most likely the problem exists within the minority communities themselves. I am utterly convinced that the biggest putter off for women coming into STEM, for instance, is all these feminists from outside STEM who go around pronouncing STEM to be an utterly horrible and oppressive environment for women. I saw a (male) "feminist" the other day criticising people for referring to someone as a "lady professor" yet "feminists" are precisely the people who will make a big deal out of someone's gender. The "less feminist" people I know couldn't care whether you have a penis, vagina or anything else so long as you're good at what you do. But no, feminists have to go around scaring people off by claiming that men in un-PC shirts will eat them alive if they go into STEM.

/rant over

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

[Embedded2004]

Look at the % of females graduating at top colleges with computer science degrees, it's small %. At top schools it's only 14%. A 32% target is only possible if they hire unqualified candidates or the % is balanced by non-tech positions (e.g.: HR).

Or, are you sexist and believe that the 14% of women entering college are proportionally superior to 86% of the males?

Until more women become interested in tech careers expecting to see significant changes in hiring isn't going to happen (other than by failing or soon to be failing companies).

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

[Pentium100]

Or it means discriminating against the best qualified candidate if he's a white male and they currently have too few women hired.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[Mr.CRC]

Who is doing this "guidance counceling" anyway? Is guidance counceling dominated by white males (not in my experience)? Or are the people so concerned about diversity the ones doing the discouraging--to create a self-fulfilling prophesy which can only be solved by... Guess?

No one should be telling kids what they should do or be interested in anyway. And if the kids are so weak of self respect and awareness that they need someone to tell them what to do, this is a profound endictment of the entire public school system. It simply needs to be abolished.

Guidance councelors should only be providing kids with the honest truth about what needs to be done to accomplish what the kids say they want to do. The only exception might be to show an objective comparison of effort vs. probability of payoff for special cases of very hard to enter fields, such as movie star or NFL player. But even still, if someone wants to be an NFL player and falls short, maybe they can leverage their extensive training experience into a career in physical education, research, etc.

Failures rarely have to be total.

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

[Kohlrabi82]

What social justice warriors get wrong is that they say that diversity is the ultimate goal, and everything else must bow to that. They think that diversity is an aim and not a symptom. But what does "improving" diversity mean? There might as well be people who argue that less diversity is an improvement. So SJW have already pre-decided what the "best" outcome without using any form of metric other than the ratio of men to women.

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

[Vintermann]

Which means that we haven't been hiring the best and the brightest. We've been hiring those who are similar to us.

I agree, and I totally support blinding of resumes, and as much blinding as possible in general. But there's one thing you overlook, which leaves your argument vulnerable:

It's possible that hiring the best and the brightest is not the wisest move. It's possible that it's a good idea to hire those who are similar to us. I don't think so, but it's possible, we don't know.

To take a concrete example, take the study that showed lab assistants were rated more poorly with a female name on the resume. That's solid proof of gender prejudice. But playing the devil's advocate here, we don't know that it's unjustified prejudice. Perhaps the people evaluating the resumes have had tons of lab assistants of both genders, and found a clear tendency that the women performed worse than their resumes suggested, and the men performed better.

Thing is, even if that were true, I'd advocate for blinding. It's not for efficiency's sake that we should end discrimination, but for justice's sake: You didn't choose to be born a woman, you deserve to be judged on individual merits. Even if women on average were awful at this job, that information should be off-limits to use in hiring decisions, because using it would be a great injustice to those who are not awful.

This is of course even more salient in the case of race and ethnicity. Because while it is highly implausible that women should be worse lab assistants, we do have crime statistics, and if people were allowed to discriminate based on those, it's quite possible that a shop owner could "reasonably" deny Roma entrance to his shop, for instance. It will probably reduce shoplifting! But it's also a horrible injustice to those Roma who do not shoplift. It doesn't matter if that is 90%, or 10%. It doesn't matter if there's just one honest Roma in the whole country. No individual should answer for the statistical proclivities of a category he didn't choose to be in and can't even escape.

But this also shows why blinding yourself to information about race and gender can't just be a "best practice". That asshole shop owner who denies Roma entrance to his shop, he's doing a great injustice, but he might well a comparative advantage over more fair shop owners. Being just can be costly, and because of that, it's important that we demand sharing that burden fairly. We can hope that when we do, we find that it isn't so costly after all, maybe it's even a net benefit. But we must never base our demand for justice on such hopes. Justice first, then profit.

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

[drinkypoo]

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.

Yeah, and one of the ways to do that is to increase the demand. When intel stops hiring H1-Bs, we can take them seriously. Until then, fuckem.

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.

The ones that actually go to work in the field at all, that is.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[Bengie]

According to many, resumes are a horrible way to hire people, but a great way to limit the number of people you wish to interview.

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.

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[firex726]

Maybe they meant to get to the interview portion?

Remove gender and suddenly more women are being interviewed?

Re:Somethig wrong with that

[NotDrWho]

You're right - it's total segregation to want to bring more women into the workplace with men!

No, idiot. It's total segregation when you attempt to SEGREGATE a particular gender/racial/ethnic/religious group by your hiring practices. You know, like discriminating against one group over another based on gender/race/etc. ....which is EXACTLY what they're doing here.

"But their INTENTIONS are noble," you say. Yeah, so were Hitler's.

300 mil... what about womens wages?

[ThomasBHardy]

I'm curious. I have no knowledge of Intels' payroll policies, but I wonder if the $300 million could not have been better spent insuring that wages are fair across genders at Intel. Unless they already have a perfectly balanced gender neutral payroll balance, any company chasing this dream of more women programmers is just marketing fluff!

Hewlett Packard, a generation ago

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

When the company was still run ethically, the ethics included opening the engineering department to women, not just on paper but in real life.

The word spread. Women in engineering schools knew where to apply when they graduated. HP had a larger pool of bright people to choose from, people who were shying away from their competitors.

There's more to being open than sticking the phrase "Equal Opportunity Employer" on the recruiting ads. Get it right, though, and it's sound business.

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".