FB Reveals Woeful Diversity Numbers

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%.

Comments

Re:Symptom

[Anonymous Coward]

How about "people can do what they like and it's none of my business"? If black people/women/transexual Muslim asexuals don't want to work in STEM how about we assume they're capable enough to reach that decision on their own, without the need to engage in social engineering to correct them. Saying "gee, these black people aren't intelligent enough to figure out they should go into science, let's convince them" is just a veiled form or racism.

Re:Black employees. Hmm.

[thermowax]

If there's some Great White Conspiracy to keep the black man down, neither I nor anyone I know are part of it. Indeed, all my cohorts (including the black ones) say the same thing- something along the lines of, "Shut up, raise your kids well, buy your beer, and don't annoy your neighbors". I don't know what's so groundbreaking about that.

I also notice that you've focussed on my second point, while ignoring the first. Care to comment? I have intimate experience, as well as reading about it all over the place- it's not a melanin thing. Black people come to the US from all over the world and do well. It's US black culture that is to blame.

Furthermore, you whipped out the "racist" card, so here we go: shut up and behave. This may take a while to result in change... but isn't this what everyone should be doing anyway?

Asians

[tsotha]

I like how Asians are simply assigned Honorary White People status when they don't fit the narrative.

Re:Culture, not race

[thinkwaitfast]

Long before this became a big (ie, internet/social media) issue, my girlfriend who teaches bilingual immigrant students in a poor area told me these stories. She felt very bad for the parents, many of whom were here illegally. Anyway it went something like this: Parents leave crappy homeland because they know how crappy life is there and want nothing else in life other than to see their kid be able to grow up and succeed.

They come here, work 16 hour days often living with 5 other families living in a studio apartment. They work hard, they learn a skill, they learn a new language and are succeeding beyond anything that could have been hoped for in their homeland. They know what hard work is and to get things they must work for them through adversity.

Now their precious snowflake knows none of these things. She watches tv and sees people driving in Lamborghinis and living in beachfront houses Malibu and knows nothing about their background, but thinks her parents are losers for not having a car and living with other losers. She knows she deserves something better. All of her friends are in exactly the same position.

Meanwhile, she isn't doing her homework and when my girlfriend would talk to the parents at conferences it usually went:we try to make her study, but snowflake threatens to report us and have us deported. Snowflake and her friend knows they'll never have to work as hard as their parents but deserve a lot more because everyone else.