Congressional Black Caucus Begs Apple For Its 'Trade Secret' Racial Data

theodp writes: In Silicon Valley this week, Rep. Barbara Lee called on Apple and other holdouts among the nation's tech companies to release federal data on the diversity of their work forces. She was with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus to turn up the heat on the tech industry to hire more African Americans. "If they believe in inclusion," said Lee, "they have to release the data so the public knows that they are being transparent and that they are committed to doing the right thing." Apple has refused to make public the EEO-1 data that it routinely supplies to the U.S. Dept. of Labor on the demographics of their workers. In the absence of the race and gender data, which Apple and others historically argued were 'trade secrets' and thus not subject to release Freedom of Information requests, tech companies were free to make unchecked claims about their Black employee ranks (Google's 2007 Congressional testimony) until recent disclosures revealed otherwise. The National Science Foundation was even convinced to redirect NSF grant money specifically earmarked for getting African American boys into the computer science pipeline to a PR campaign for high school girls of all colors and economic backgrounds.

Comments

This is Ridiculos

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in Apples tech support and there are enough black folks around here.

Re:This is Ridiculos

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

And seeing the typo you made in your title, I'd say there's enough Mexicans, too.

Hey man, if you can be racist, so can I. ;-)

Re:This is Ridiculos

[NicBenjamin]

All races are treated the same?

When's the last time you saw a white guy shot in the head by a cop, for no reason?

invalid data

[swell]

I worked for Apple for a time. And many other companies. I never revealed my race on those forms and I don't know of anyone who did. I doubt there are any valid statistics to be found.

Re:invalid data

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a shop a few years back and got to know one of the HR folks fairly well. They told me that their online system would export all the candidates who applied for a position to a spreadsheet with the click of a button, so the HR manager could review them. It had a column for what the applicant selected under the optional question about race.

It would be directive at some times to not hire anyone who clicked the box for 'caucasian'. That meant the HR manager wasn't going to waste their time investigating the applicants who clicked 'prefer not to answer' and they simply moved on to candidates who marked 'african american'.

I asked them how I got hired, being a caucasian male myself. The response was; "Your row on the applicant list spreadsheet would probably be hidden today."

Re:invalid data

[alvinrod]

Because it is of no benefit for Apple to release it. The only people who care about this data just want to use it to harangue Apple for not conforming to some predetermined standard of workforce racial distribution. Sure, "trade secret" is a bullshit reason, but the reason for wanting the data is just as bullshit, so it's only fair.

Re:invalid data

[NatasRevol]

They do file the EEO-1 reports. It's in the fine summary, even.

They're just not required to do anything else with it. Your obvious bias not withstanding.

Re:invalid data

[cavreader]

Race is the most meaningless metric of all when it comes to evaluating an ideal workforce. The last thing minority activists want is for competence to become the deciding factor when determining who to hire. If competence can be overridden by the color of someones skin than that only bolsters the idea that there are inferior races that need to be graded on a different scale. And justifying a bias based on race to make up for some historical wrongdoing just perpetuates injustice. Why should someone today accept reverse discrimination for the actions of others hundreds of years ago? And releasing data to be "fair" begs the question of who judges what is fair and what is not? Standing around waiting for the world to be fair will only guarantee failure propped up by an appalling entitlement complex.

Re: invalid data

[KGIII]

We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!

Gregor Strasser

Note that I mention that they change but, the reality is that they were socialists. It was very popular at the time. I suspect that was their motivation.

WTF

[drinkypoo]

Apple has refused to make public the EEO-1 data that it routinely supplies to the U.S. Dept. of Labor on the demographics of their workers.

How is this even a thing? Why are these filings not required to be public? We can't figure out if the government is doing its job (in this case, tracking this information) without public disclosure so we can follow up.

Re:WTF

[Brett Buck]

How the hell is it the job of the governement to tell private companies who they should hire?

Re:WTF

[quantaman]

Apple has refused to make public the EEO-1 data that it routinely supplies to the U.S. Dept. of Labor on the demographics of their workers.

How is this even a thing? Why are these filings not required to be public? We can't figure out if the government is doing its job (in this case, tracking this information) without public disclosure so we can follow up.

So your argument is we should get to see a company's private information so we can tell if the government is doing a good job in obtaining the company's private information?

That strikes me as somewhat dubious.

I'll say that I do think there's a problem but I don't think it's Apple's fault and I don't like forcing them to reveal their demographic information for the purpose of a public round of shaming.

It's pretty obvious that all the tech companies are trying to increase diversity but the talent simply doesn't exist in the industry. There needs to be more minority and female students taking computing science in university, which means better recruitment for girls coming out of high school and better schools for minorities in general.

Re:WTF

[JBMcB]

Slavery was never legal in my state. Why should the federal government stick it's nose in the business of a company here?

Re:WTF

[Gravis Zero]

It's pretty obvious that all the tech companies are trying to increase diversity but the talent simply doesn't exist in the industry. There needs to be more minority and female students taking computing science in university, which means better recruitment for girls coming out of high school and better schools for minorities in general.

but why do there need to be more minorities and females in IT? forced diversity is blatant prejudice.

Re:WTF

[quantaman]

It's pretty obvious that all the tech companies are trying to increase diversity but the talent simply doesn't exist in the industry. There needs to be more minority and female students taking computing science in university, which means better recruitment for girls coming out of high school and better schools for minorities in general.

but why do there need to be more minorities and females in IT?

There needs to be more minorities because a society where certain minorities are largely absent from high end professions is not a healthy society. It's unfair to those minorities who become a lower class, unstable because those minorities are resentful and tend to cause crime, and under-performing because you're losing out on their economic potential.

Imagine how much better the US would be if you could transform the ghettos into middle class communities.

As for females there needs to be females because an office that is 90% male sucks for both the 90% who are guys and the 10% who are girls.

forced diversity is blatant prejudice.

How did you read "better recruitment for girls coming out of high school and better schools for minorities in general" and end up with "forced diversity"?

Re:WTF

[Crashmarik]

And just what monopoly does Apple have ?
Monopolization of hipsters with more dollars than sense ?

Re:WTF

[quantaman]

How is it a false equivalence? IT is a high end profession and I don't see why it should be any different among high end professions with regard to race.

Because there are plenty of non-IT high-end professions that your target groups may actually want to engage in. So it becomes senseless to shoehorn people into IT as a social experiment.

With minorities, the main group in question, there's zero reason to think they'd be less interested than any other ethnicity. And I never proposed to "shoehorn people into IT as a social experiment", you're arguing against a position I didn't propose.

As for women it's possible there's some intrinsic differences between the male and female brains that make women less interested in programming. But from the women I've met in software I find this very dubious and think it's far more likely that young girls are simply realizing it's a male dominated profession and they're seeing some very unhealthy cultural segments so they're looking elsewhere.

It's not lack of interest, it's kids never getting the basic skills to where the have a chance to develop a proper interest.

But that's not strictly true, is it? Women have arguably a more favorable educational experience than their male counterparts. It's a lack of interest for this group.

But really you're presenting an educational issue that, for multiple minority groups, transcends STEM and manifests across the curriculum. You touch on this more below.

The argument was better education for minorities, better undergrad recruitment for women.

I'm not proposing to fix racial inequality by giving minorities IT jobs. I'm proposing to improve racial inequality in primary and secondary schooling, thereby reducing inequality overall and as a side effect increasing the number of minorities in IT jobs.

And that's an admirable proposition, but altogether different from your assertion that we need a certain degree of diversity in IT to have a healthy society. You've drilled closer to a root cause of a problem and rendered your own post a side effect.

Diversity in IT is one characteristic of a healthy society, it's the characteristic we're talking about.

Look at it this way, the ghettos are a MASSIVE drain on public resources. If you throw a crapload of money at improving them, and fail almost completely, you've still probably won because it's such a big problem.

I don't think that's self-evident. Some helper programs degrade self-reliance.

You need smart money but if you just pump it into schools so you recruit better teachers (and either improve bad teachers or send them into other professions) that should be pretty safe.

If you do it properly you've got those kids for 5+ hours 5 days a week for 9-10 months for up to 12 years in an environment where you have almost complete control.

It's inexcusable for those schools to be underfunded.

The only reason your office works better without women is if you have a really dysfunctional culture, and in that case you're severely limiting your talent pool because there's a lot of guys who won't want to work in that environment either.

My experience is from equally dysfunctional offices prioritizing equality stats, not a frat boy club house. Some people won't work for an environment mired in the identity politics raffle for promotions. Sadly, some of the most talented will meekly sit by and take it year after year.

That's why I suggested recruiting first years into CS as a solution.

Re:WTF

[thinkwaitfast]

come to our universities and kicked the ever living hell out of African Americans

This is important and I don't know why it's rarely brought up. The people I knew in Africa (Tanzania) hated blacks from the US. They also considered them white as black/white was a money thing and not skin color.

You'd Have to be an Idiot

[BECoole]

to voluntarily give up racial stats to politicians & lawyers.

Diversity? Of the CBC?

[bradley13]

The CBC, of course, has openly stated that they refuse entrance to people of other races. So their diversity is exactly zero.

Get rid of protection to increase diversity

[trout007]

The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group. If they are not a good fit for the company there is a substantial legal risk to firing them and overhead for carefully creating a paper trail to CYA. It is much easier to hire people from non-protective groups. If they don't work out you fire them and try someone else. Of course for businesses they like the H1-B's the most because if you fire them they get deported which really puts them in a position of power.

Re:Get rid of protection to increase diversity

[chipschap]

The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group.

File this under sad-but-true. The very laws and rules that are intended to protect a group can end up causing them harm.

I'm totally opposed to discrimination in any form. Hiring based on qualifications and competence--- period--- is, in my thinking, absolutely non-discriminatory.

If there are disadvantaged groups, tackle the problem at the source, not at the hiring table. If certain ethnic groups are not being hired in the ratios that might be expected, figure out why they are not becoming qualified in the first place and look for solutions to that. Is it economics? Culture? Something else?

For sure, hiring someone who is not qualified and/or competent, just to meet a demographic requirement, doesn't help anyone and only makes things worse.

Re:Get rid of protection to increase diversity

[dj245]

The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group. If they are not a good fit for the company there is a substantial legal risk to firing them and overhead for carefully creating a paper trail to CYA. It is much easier to hire people from non-protective groups. If they don't work out you fire them and try someone else. Of course for businesses they like the H1-B's the most because if you fire them they get deported which really puts them in a position of power.

There is a substantial risk in firing anyone. My company creates a paper trail for anyone who isn't performing. Making a bigger paper trail for someone in a protected group would be discrimination. We treat everybody the same. Not performing? We'll try to help them. If they can't help themselves, we start building a paper trail. The people who can't be bothered to help themselves usually make it pretty easy to document their ineptitude.

I'm sure

[TsuruchiBrian]

I'm sure this subset of congress doesn't have more important things to do, like working on getting better schools in impoverished areas.

Apple is a for-profit corporation. They are not racist. They care about profit. If there were tons of qualified applicants of the right colors (whatever they may be), apple would hire them and profit from it. If you want a different distribution of colors of employees at apple, work on making those colors of people the best educated in STEM.

You could just try to pass a law forcing Apple to hire people they don't want to hire, but then they would probably end up like all the companies who no one cares what kind of diversity they have.

If diversity matters to you, work on diverse talent, not diverse employment. Furthermore, I would suggest the idea that diversity is more than just skin color and gender. Simply hiring people who look different doesn't guarantee that those people think differently.

God damnit

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Stop it with this stupid "diversity" crap already. Not everyone is predisposed to like doing the same thing. It varies by race, sex, beliefs, interests, etc. Asking or even forcing the tech industry to have the same numbers of white/black/asian/etc and 50/50 male/female employes is just incredibly dumb and short-sighted.

Why are women under-represented in construction yards? Why is there a lack of men in nurses and flight attendants jobs? You will find discrepancies like that in all domains. Some are due to male chauvinism but for the most part I think women, in general, are more interested in particular types of jobs and the same goes for men. It's not about inequalities, it's just life. Get over it.

Complaining about diversity is like women complaining that guys prefer blondes or men complaining that women don't like their fat ass. Everyone is different, the population of the planet doesn't come from a dozen pre-made moulds to help you sort them all in neat little boxes afterward.

Re:God damnit

[PopeRatzo]

Stop it with this stupid "diversity" crap already. Not everyone is predisposed to like doing the same thing. It varies by race, sex, beliefs, interests, etc. Asking or even forcing the tech industry to have the same numbers of white/black/asian/etc and 50/50 male/female employes is just incredibly dumb and short-sighted.

Why do the very same egalitarians that are outraged by calls for diversity and demand a "meritocracy" suddenly piss down their legs whenever they hear about companies hiring people with H1B visas?

Re:God damnit

[godrik]

I do not know Apple's worker demographic. But at college level, we see wide variations. In CS majors, females only represent about 20% of the student population. Provided that female are also more likely socially to be the one to sacrifice their career for their family, it might be VERY hard to get to over 35% of female worker in your software business.

The issue with diversity in CS is not a college level problem. Only few female student register for the class and they do not really come to information sessions about the program. Overall, I'd say the root cause is much before college. It is in the gender stereotypes. I was in Barnes and Nobles last week and passed by the children's book section. One side was labeled boys books and had books about trains, cars and plane. The other was labeled girls books and was about princesses, fashion and poneys.

Re:Modern society at its finest

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

But somehow, that's not racism...

Re:Social justice!

[trout007]

Yes. It's not like we have had 12+ years to teach and train people in our state run schools.

Re:WTF Not Prejudice, Discrimination.

[Technician]

Using the definition of Discrimination, that needs to be called out for what it really is.
This Affirmative Action is by the action and expectations, is Discrimination based on race and gender. Get it right.

We need to end all discrimination.

All lives matter is correct.
All black lives matter is discriminatory because it is race based discriminatory protection by race.

United Negro College Fund is openly Discriminatory. It does by name and action, discriminate by race. Why are we allowing intentional race discrimination.
Affirmative Action is openly Discriminatory. It does by name and action, discriminate by race and gender. Why are we allowing intentional race and gender discrimination.
How long would a United Caucasian College Fund be allowed to exist if it's charter and campaign was exactly the same as the United Negro College Fund?

Help call out and end All race and gender discrimination.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Norway, the sickest country

[SuperKendall]

There needs to be more minorities because a society where certain minorities are largely absent from high end professions is not a healthy society.,

So that means every sort of insular culture in Europe (like Norway or Iceland) is not healthy?

Perhaps the unhealthy thing is propagating a society or ideology that allows for lower education standards for those of specific races and skin colors.

If you want to end racism, stop treating people differently by race... you'd think that would be pretty obvious but a lot of people have not yet figured that out.

Re:Norway, the sickest country

[quantaman]

There needs to be more minorities because a society where certain minorities are largely absent from high end professions is not a healthy society.,

So that means every sort of insular culture in Europe (like Norway or Iceland) is not healthy?

If they're discriminating against minorities I'd say yes.

If it's simply the case there's not many minorities, or the ones who are there aren't disadvantaged but simply haven't had the generation or two it takes to integrate into the economy I'd say no.

Perhaps the unhealthy thing is propagating a society or ideology that allows for lower education standards for those of specific races and skin colors.

If you want to end racism, stop treating people differently by race... you'd think that would be pretty obvious but a lot of people have not yet figured that out.

I think that's part of it. The other part is a lot of US schools have effectively segregated schools, and since schools are locally funded the black schools end up being extremely low quality schools immersed in a culture of underachievement and underclass that's hard to break.

I think simply allowing school choice would help a lot in allowing parents to break up that culture.

Re:Norway, the sickest country

[quantaman]

No not knowing anything about your circumstance I'd say you had two distinct advantages over your black classmates:

1) Your parents had enough education to help educate you and create the expectation that you would be going to college.

2) Being of a different ethnicity you were a bit of an outsider never internalized the idea that you were part of the black community that ended up stuck in that poor neighbourhood.

I think expectations and roles play a much bigger role than we realize. Quite simply a kid who thinks their education finishes after HS might never try to do more than finish, one who is told they're going to University will put in the work to be near the top of the class because they know that's where they're supposed to be.

For reference consider how critical motivation is to your work in IT? I know I can sometimes spend an hour or two solving a problem I could do in 5-10 minutes if I were intensely motivated and I suspect most have experienced the same. Imagine that effect applied to your entire education and you could see how being permanently disnengaged would turn you into a moron.

Re:Norway, the sickest country

[quantaman]

I can't argue with what happened in your personal experience but from this paper I found your experience was the exception, not the rule:

for blacks, school desegregation significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status; desegregation had no effects on whites across each of these outcomes.

Jobs:Do you know how many black engineers we have?

[theodp]

From Steve Jobs' Passion for Diversity: "Can you help us hire black engineers?" he said. "Do you know how many black engineers we have?" Before I could say anything he shared a shockingly low number and confessed how poorly Apple was doing in finding black candidates. I'll skip the full exchange, but suffice it to say, I got an intimate peek into Steve's passion and energy. He was seriously upset at Apple's efforts in that area. His last words to me that day were, "If you have any ideas on how we can hire more black engineers, send me an email."

Re:That government is gone

[NatasRevol]

No, they fought a war so that federal rights > states rights, in spite of the constitution.

Ha ha ha ha.....

[argStyopa]

Dear Apple,

Please give us the employment data that you otherwise aren't in any way obligated to, so if it doesn't show the results we prefer, we can attack you publicly.

Thanks,
Stupid democrats

wish for mod, points. Insults and harms my daughte

[raymorris]

> If competence can be overridden by the color of someones skin than that only bolsters the idea that there are inferior races that need to be graded on a different scale.

I wish I could mod this up. It's infuriating that Jesse Jackson and the other race baiters tell my daughter that's she's too stupid to compete on her merits, that everyone should give her extra points to make it fair because black people like her aren't as good as white people.

My daughter is smarter and harder working than than you, Mr liberal whiner, and therefore more competent. Se doesn't need your pity, protection, or special favors. She needs you to get the heck out of the way so she can fix the mess you made because you refuse to do simple arithmetic and planning, instead thinking everything will work out if you wish hard enough.

Re:wish for mod, points. Insults and harms my daug

[KGIII]

I am mixed racially and have always thought that affirmative action was them telling me that I can not do it on my own and that I need help. No, I can do it just fine - thanks. I not only do not need help, I find such help offensive. There is no just reason for it - none. I was there during the heady days of the fight for equality. None of us, not one, wanted things like affirmative action. That came after the uproar when the movement was co-opted (some of whom are still in 'power' within the community and have tainted it forever) by people who were not interested in equality. I see the same thing happening to the feminist movement. They are no longer about equality. Once a group has advocated and has what it asked for there is no reason for it to exist. I suspect that this may have something to do with it.

Why isn't there a "Congressional White Caucus"?

[Thing 1]

Why are people with racist names for their organizations seeking racist data?

Re:wish for mod, points. Insults and harms my daug

[NicBenjamin]

I really hate to be the one who breaks this to you, but affirmative action is the reason your daughter has a chance to get into Harvard.

I can say this conclusively because your name is Morris, not Chan. If they let people into Harvard purely on the merits, then no white people at all would ever get in because when white people hear a fifth grader ask "Mommy can I skip a grade in science?" they don't go "Thank God! She's finally showing some fucking ambition!" They think "Fuck! If I let her do this she'll try to skip a grade, her social development will be stunted, she'll be too small to make the basketball team, and she'll kill herself before she hits legal drinking age!"

Literally the only things she has going for her on her application are a) she's female, and b) they'll be tired of admitting Asians with 2400 SATs, 4.7 GPAs, and six courses to transfer in from the local community college.

It always stuns me that white guys (and they're almost always guys) think that the Affirmative Action programs implemented by Nixon, years before most of them were born, are still in place, with no changes whatsoever. It's like dude, do you have any idea how many Supreme Court decisions have been issued since then?