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

Demographics

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:Demographics

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Demographics

[Kohlrabi82]

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.

Re:Demographics

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Re:Demographics

[amiga3D]

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.

Re:Demographics

[BlueStrat]

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

Re:Demographics

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re: Demographics

[mi]

They might go to a shitty underfunded public school.

The very concept of "public school" is fairly recent. Not only did Aristotle grow up without one, neither Benjamin Franklin nor Thomas Jefferson attended one either. Thomas Edison was homeschooled.

They might get harassed by the police on a regular basis, charged with a felony in a situation where a white kid would get a slap on the wrist, and have their lives effectively ruined by a criminal record.

Even if true, how is this different from what Jews suffered in Europe for centuries?

Why are the supposedly "racist cops" (many of them Black, BTW) today only targeting African Americans? If they really were White Supremacists, wouldn't the statistics for Asian Americans be just as gloomy? Immigrant Blacks are doing much better than the native-born ones too.

A theory contradicting observable facts is wrong. Your explanation is thus without merit. Whether or not there really is "institutional racism" or whatever in America, it simply does not explain the woeful underperformance of African Americans.

It's definitely not as bad for black people as it was 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago

Actually, you are wrong again — it is worse than 50 years ago. Despite — or, more likely, because of — decades of various policies advocated by your kind, the Blacks' satisfaction is lower today, than it was in 1964. Although, yeah, it may be better than 20 years ago...

(Note, that I'm not putting forth my own theories here. I'm just obliterating yours.)

Re: Demographics

[lgw]

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.

Celebrate Pride

[codeButcher]

How is being able to turn your profile picture into a rainbow NOT diverse???

Irony

[MikeRT]

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.

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:Obvious

[Inferno Vulpix]

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

Black employees. Hmm.

[thermowax]

Look: I graduated from high school in 1985- far before the intarwebs were cool. I was a geek because I *wanted* to be, societal pressures notwithstanding.

I was bullied on a daily basis. The source of the majority of this bullying was blacks. An Asian friend of mine, years later- in college- mused about his similar experience.

I guess this can go two ways:
1. Black culture can finally start to view academic accomplishment as "cool".
Or:
2. Black culture can realize that the smart kids are in charge, and they'd better adapt or learn to enjoy life in the hip-hop ghetto they've made.

Sorry. Not my monkeys, not my circus, not my problem.

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?

Always check the "Other" box

[NotQuiteReal]

We have an every other hire must not be a white male [policy?]

Wow, so it's a good thing that in today's PC society, I can "identify" as a 28 year old female of color, with 30 years of industry experience the next time I apply for a job. That will increase my chances, because, as a 50 something year old white guy, I am screwed.

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.