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FB Reveals Woeful Diversity Numbers

Posted by timothy on from the talent-on-hand dept.

theodp writes: There's more work to do," said Facebook's Global Director of Diversity Maxine Williams, who issued a straight-out-of-How-to-Lie-With-Statistics diversity update on Thursday that essentially consisted of a handful of bar charts labeled with only percentages for select measures of the social networking giant's current demographics. In search of real numbers, the Guardian turned to Facebook's most recent Equal Employment Opportunity report filing, which showed that the ranks of black employees swelled by a grand total of seven (7) (1 woman) in the year covered by the filing, during which time Facebook saw an overall headcount increase of 1,231. Comparing Facebook's new bar charts of US tech employees to those issued last year shows the proportion of Hispanic and Black employees remained flat at 3% and 1% respectively, while a decline in the proportion of white employees from 53% to 51% was offset by an increase in the proportion of Asian employees from 41% to 43%.

10 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Demographics by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder what the demographic breakdown of people who actually apply for jobs at FB looks like? Comparing the two would be a more valid way of looking at it.

    1. Re:Demographics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As would be a further breakdown across something like school grades or other performance metric of those applications. Lack of diversity is a problem that is not mostly caused by discrimination but by lack of suitable candidates with a decent education, which is an issue with a nation's educational system. Once education provides equal opportunity you'll see these differences go away rapidly (what will remain are cultural differences about what young people want to become when they're still in school).

    2. Re:Demographics by Kohlrabi82 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe it's every person's own business which career and jobs they want to go for. I know, it's preposterous to assume that blacks, women, and all the other "minorities" can make decisions and their own.

    3. Re:Demographics by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or more aptly, those who apply and are the best fit for the job - there is no point in berating a company for woeful diversity hiring figures when all they did was concentrate on hiring the best candidate.

      When it can be shown that Facebook turned down a better qualified minority candidate in order to hire a more poorly qualified white candidate, then there is an issue in hiring standards - if minority candidates are being failed by the education and social support systems to the point where we have a noticeable disparity in hireable candidates, well thats something we all need to fix properly rather than just tut at companies who would rather hire the better candidate regardless of race, colour or sex.

    4. Re:Demographics by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I went to school to speak with my daughter's teacher when she was in the third grade and struggling. We discussed her situation at length for about 30 minutes and covered a lot of possible actions to help her improve. At the end of that time her teacher thanked me profusely for coming to the meeting. I was rather surprised and stated that I was thankful to her for her time and help and would not have dreamed of failing to come. She then told me that over the past week she had scheduled 7 meetings with parents and I was the only one to actually show up. Parents are the biggest shortcoming in the education of children today. If parents do not get involved then no amount of money spent on education will accomplish much. When I was a child my parents involvement consisted of beating my ass when I had problems at school. This method, while crude, was effective. It would have been much better if they had taken the time to do more but what they did do was better than the apathy so many parents exhibit towards their children's education.

    5. Re:Demographics by BlueStrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh, good. I was wondering how long it would take for someone to say "Black people just don't want technology jobs." I suppose they prefer working in fast food and sports?

      Well, it's not like black youth are inundated with the glorification of "thug life" and "gangsta" culture, or that blacks that *do* do well are often labeled by their peers as "actin' like dey white", "uncle Toms", "house niggas" (all things I've heard blacks say personally, as well), and any that profess anti-entitlement-society, pro-family views are excoriated by both their peers and "news" media.

      I frankly greatly admire minorities in the US that have the courage and determination to run that gauntlet instead of cave to the pressure to "stay on the plantation" and instead go on to use their intelligence, talents, skills, and strong work ethic to do well and become an asset to their communities and to society.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    6. Re:Demographics by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Be nice if parents were paid for the time they had to take off to attend these meetings.

      Poor academic performance is strongly correlated with poverty. Households in the bottom quintile have an average of 0.4 people employed. I doubt if the parents failed to show up because they were too busy.

    7. Re: Demographics by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I went to a shitty underfunded public school in a major city, located in a poor neighborhood and only black people live there (magnet schools: because rich people object to "bussing"). I lived in a variety of poor neighborhoods during and after my college years (admittedly Houston doesn't have the problems with escape-proof ghettos that the Democrat-only cities do). The main problem keeping people there, where I lived, really was either "attitude and culture" or "spending money on someone else".

      Don't get me wrong: attitude and culture are no small thing! The strongest prison bars are the ones in our minds. But if you want to actually fix the problem, instead of keeping the problem around on purpose to serve your political goal, then you must understand the fix has to be cultural. I was stuck there myself for a few years due to my own attitude.

      Everyone I talked to (and you do spend time talking to your neighbors when there fuck-all else you can afford to do) fell into one of these 3 groups:

      1. Hardworking recent immigrants, legal or otherwise, who were already making enough to live somewhere better, but were sending most of their money back home (these are the best neighbors, BTW). They were here because the opportunities were good, and were anything but trapped. I'm sure their kids are doing great here.

      2. A hardworking woman who wouldn't still be in this shitty neighborhood except for some layabout relative, always male, she was unwilling to force to work or throw out on the street. (I always suspected I only saw the ones who hadn't done that yet, but either way the problem wasn't lack of opportunity).

      3. The majority: people who were convinced that working a regular, full-time job was some sort of scam. They were just too smart to fall for that scam, you see, to be tricked into working long hour for shit pay. They knew that wasn't the right answer, and any day know their next scam would work and they'd be rich. I was definitely trapped there by this, for years.

      There's nothing in entertainment that glorifies, or even explains, that working long hours for shit pay is what the start of the path upwards looks like. That living with roomates in a ghetto apartment longer than you have to, spending less than you can even when that sucks bad, is how you make the space to change to a better job. That working a job that sucks so bad that you sit in the parking lot in a daze sometimes unable to walk inside and start the workday is just a temporary step on the path. None of that is explained, but it's normal when you start from the bottom. My immigrant neighbors understood it - I wish they'd have been able to explain it to me at the time.

      Software development is more open to non-traditional backgrounds than most fields. I've participated in a couple hundred interviews and phone screens while working with a variety of the big names in my career, and no one ever cared about anything but "can you code, are you self-motivated, and are you an asshole". The opportunity is there, if you have the talent and the training, but its ultimately on you to make the changes to get the training and go after the opportunity.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. Irony by MikeRT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Asians make up less than 6% of the population according to Google, whereas blacks are 13%. Yet the former are over 40% of the company at Facebook. If Facebook were to be made to "look like America" then a significant percentage of its labor force would have to be laid off.

    There's nothing "woeful" about these numbers. They tell us nothing about qualified black and Hispanic candidates not getting jobs. Given the interest in diversity, it's perfectly reasonable to rule out the probability that there were any because the interest in diversity would have almost invariably lead to them being given hiring priority if they applied.

  3. Re:Obvious by Inferno+Vulpix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Anyone arguing that a quotia is needed for equality dislikes freedom.