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:

[uncqual]

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

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.

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]

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

[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]

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.

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".