Google Diversity Report Straight Out of 'How To Lie With Statistics' Playbook

theodp writes: Among the books recommended by Bill Gates for beach reading this summer is How to Lie With Statistics, the published-in-1954-but-timely-as-ever introduction to the (mis)use of statistics. So, how can one lie with statistics? "Sometimes it is percentages that are given and raw figures that are missing," explains the book, "and this can be deceptive too." So, does this explain Google's just-released Diversity Report and the accompanying chock-full-o-percentages narrative (find-all-%-image), which boasts "the Black community in grew [sic] by 38 percent", while the less-impressive raw figures — e.g., the number of Google employees increased by 5,928, but the ranks of Black females only increased by 35 (less than 0.6% of the net increase) — are relegated to a PDF of its EEO-1 Report that's linked to in the fine-print footnotes? To be fair to Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon didn't want people to see their EEO-1 numbers, either.

Comments

Re:Diversity

[AmiMoJo]

Balls. Grow some.

This.

Stop complaining about your fear of being persecuted by the political correctness police or being accused of racism or whatever. Those are just excuses to keep people different to yourself out of the workplace, to protect your feelings and not fuel your paranoia.

Act like a grown up and stop making excuses. If you do have a problem with minorities then it's your problem, if not then stop worrying and deal with any bullshit as it comes. Don't use it as an excuse to keep others down.