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

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-unlike-every-other-corporate-report dept.

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.

11 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Diversity by asylumx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The big lie, I guess.

    1. Re:Diversity by Chas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Pretty much.

      What color a person's skin is, or what equipment they keep between their legs isn't as important as the knowledge they have in their head and their skill at utilizing it.

      Slotting someone into a position ahead of a worthier candidate, simply because they're a certain race/gender, rather than because they're the best candidate is idiocy of the highest order.

      It's not Google/Apple/whoever's problem that a given race or gender has historically been downtrodden. Google/Apple/Whoever didn't do the treading, so why should they be guilt-tripped into settling for mediocrity for some lie about "equality"?

      Because what's being pushed here is not about "equal" treatment. It's about "special" treatment.

      --


      Chas - The one, the only.
      THANK GOD!!!
    2. Re:Diversity by NotDrWho · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Part of the lie is that somehow diversity is somehow going to help your business. "It will open us up to new ideas and a new audience" usually just turns into "Everyone is walking on eggshells around the new hire, the new hire isn't as qualified or hard-working as candidates we passed over, and if we ever try to fire the new hire we're going to get sued for discrimination."

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
    3. Re:Diversity by The+Raven · · Score: 4, Informative

      Your comment is absolutely true. But that's not the whole story... in a study a few years back, "applicants with white-sounding names were 50% more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with black-sounding names." This is a real problem that affects minorities, so while preferential treatment is also a problem the biases have to change quite far before it's likely that minorities are getting actual preferential treatment.

      --
      "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
    4. Re:Diversity by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've actually done this using my real name and a variation of it. My real name didn't get an interview, the fake "English" sounding one did. I didn't go, but man it was depressing.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:Diversity by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While a company like Google likely has all sorts go through their doors, I can tell you what my experience with hiring is.

      Working in a small company, I frequently have quite a bit of exposure to the raw talent pool. Sometimes HR gets involved, but just as often, I am talking to the recruiters myself.

      There is the occasional woman. There is the occasional black man. What there is not are both black and female. Google having only 35 black females mirrors my experience. The percentage of resumes of black females, even for junior positions, is likely so low to begin with that I never see one and Google probably only sees a few hundred.

      And that is even before any question of their skills or experience come up.

      I'm wary of a scenario where the first black female resume in my 5 years as a manager will someday come across my desk and she just happens to not have the skills I require for the job and don't hire her. Am I suddenly discriminating in my hiring practices because I have rejected 100% of my black female candidates? Do I hire her because "diversity"?

      More to the point, if I had two identically skilled candidates, and one happened to be a black female, do I derive an advantage from hiring her over the other person?

  2. Not a popular opionion, but... by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Lie, damn lie, or statistic; these companies are being forced to engage these topics by the increasing social pressure to appear "fair handed."

    If you imagine that you are tired of hearing about it as a reader or tech employee, just imagine how it might be for the people whose job it is to make this bettter at the supposedly forward thinking tech giants.

    How are those numbers coming, Jim?

    Well, we've hired as many somewhat qualified people as we can find, and it's still not enough. Can we count the cafeteria employees again this year?

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  3. Do you want a diversity hire? by prisoner-of-enigma · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google hires people based on talent. Women and minorities are under-represented in the technical and engineering community. That is a fact of life. Until more women and minorities CHOOSE to enter this field, getting a "diverse workforce" would have to mean you exclude more qualified white males in order to hire less qualified minorities and women.

    Think about that for a moment. Suppose hospitals did things this way? If you need critical brain or heart surgery, do you want your surgeon to be one of the best in his or her field, or one that was a "diversity hire"?

    Until you're comfortable with the second option, this "diversity" idiocy needs to stop. It's one thing to exclude perfectly qualified candidates because they're female or minority. It's another thing to make that the primary reason you're hiring them instead of making sure they're the best qualified for the job.

    --
    In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  4. Re:Statistics in School by tompaulco · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've always used an example of how statistics can be deceiving. If you put 99 rocks and a chicken egg in a box, and a baby chick walks out, there was a 99% chance that it came out of one of the rocks.

    --
    If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
  5. Re:Pop culture mental fugue by morgauxo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Google is being evil here"

    Uh, Yah... they are being real evil.

    They should fire a bunch of white people and hire a bunch of non-white people based solely on the color of their skin.

    That would make them not evil.

  6. Re:Pop culture mental fugue by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Its relevant to knowing if their hiring practices are biased for or against people with a certain skin colour, for example...

    No, it's not. To do that, you'd need an analysis that includes much more than just who is working there now. Two huge variables you're leaving out:

    1) How many minorities actually applied for a job there?

    2) Of those, how many were actually qualified?

    Go take your zero knowledge SJW outrage to twitter and/or wordpress where it belongs.