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Facebook Makes Little Progress in Race and Gender Diversity (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: Facebook has said about one-third of its workers are female, while black employees accounted for 3% of its US senior leadership, both numbers only slightly higher than a year earlier. The data released by the world's largest social network on Thursday reflects the scant progress made by Silicon Valley heavyweights in making their workplaces more diverse in the face of criticism for having mostly white, male workers. Last month, Alphabet's Google released data on diversity, saying it had more black, Latino and female employees but still lagged its goal of mirroring the population. Women represented 33% of Facebook's global workforce, according to data from 30 June, compared with 32% a year earlier. Women held 27% of senior leadership roles, up from last year's 23%.
If you set a goal you can't achieve why are you surprised? Facts matter, people should really go back to using them.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Who cares about race or gender? Hire the best. If only 3% are black, should they hire someone less qualified just to meet a quota? That's bullshit. Try being the best instead.
I'm of the mind that this is more reflective of the available talent pool rather than any inherent racism.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
My local elementary school had only women working at it (except a janitor). My doctor's office is dominated by female doctors in the family health department. The office where I work doesn't exactly match the demographics of my street either. For that matter, my management chain is dominated by British ex-pats.
Both companies need to establish a 'Chief Samwich Making Officer'. Voila female Sr exec.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They'll have all workers in india, and india is a diverse country. So facebook will have great diversity!
... is these shitty tax evading behemoths running themselves into the ground trying to constrain equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.
Who cares.
While ignoring age discrimination. The chances of someone over 40 being hired by Facebook is zero.
Why is there never any concern about gender or race diversity in farm labor? Don't we want ALL labor markets to mirror the population?
Sorry to disappoint you, but this white guy said, "SFW?" and went to get some more coffee.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
They've made "little progress"? The word "progress" denotes an increase in a desirable attribute.
Why would any employer want to do anything other than hire the best, most qualified employee for a given job? If that happens to be a black woman, great. If that happens to be a gay Indian man, hire him. But, if Facebook's job requirements are predominantly filled by white males, what is the problem?
sig: sauer
Ethnic and gender diversity are all good, but what about the diversity that actually matters, Diversity of Opinion ? A study recently showed that the Facebook news team are all extreme Collectivists, which mean Individualist/Libertarian points of view get squelched in the news feed.
Last month, Alphabet's Google released data on diversity, saying it had more black, Latino and female employees but still lagged its goal of mirroring the population.
You will find on closer examination that, actually, many of these tech companies' hiring results actually do mirror the population. But the relevant population that you're talking about is those people who apply to places like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And that population is heavily underrepresented in female/black/hispanic people compared to the population at large. That is what many people seem to be willing to be blind to. If the source population from which you draw such workers is skewed, no amount of effort is going to enable you to hire 100 female/black/hispanic workers when there are only 30 to choose from. And yet people will still criticize you for it.
These companies are not going to singlehandedly change the makeup of tech (or even just high paid) workers in the United States, no matter how much they try (or are put under political pressure to do so). And I think that it is rather disingenuous / politically correct of them to simply market that they will do it because it's fashionable to say they will. Addressing this problem is deeper and requires more of the desired target segments to go into these fields to be available to apply to the positions to start with. Which is a much more difficult challenge that most of the advocates for such policies actually don't even want to put in the effort to do themselves.
I will openly say that I do not believe (as many people seem to reflexively parrot the phrase) that a company's workforce "needs to look like the general population". I find that a dubious proposition, usually supported by poor logic. If it happens that the general population has the propensity and skill to become tech workers in equal proportions across all demographics, then that could be true, but I doubt it. But at the same time, I support any effort to make sure that primary/secondary/higher education gives everyone access to succeed in these fields, if they want to.
But I will not subscribe to the idea that we should skew the output of the process to some political goal, when the input of that process is what matters and determines it more than anything else. When you do that, all you get is symbolic, and often detrimental, results.
Which population are we mirroring here? What percentage of the population is female? Every human being in the city -- I believe that 51% are female. How about the workforce population -- I'd bet that fewer than 50% of the workforce is female, probably closer to 30% actually. What about the population who work in office jobs amongst adults -- if we remove day-care, health care, teachers, children services, and government jobs, I'll bet it goes even lower.
If the goal is to mirror the population, they'll have to start hiring more stupid people with no incentive to work.
Now THAT's a real challenge.
Should we cast blame on employers? What if we saw true numbers, and judge by those. I would be interested more in the applicants, than the ones hired. Could it be that simply there's that many less minority/female applicants? Of those minority/female applicants, how many get hired? This is a better number to look at, IMHO. I would guess that the number of white male applicants is just that much higher, so they would obviously have greater probability. Not fair that employers should have to increase their hiring from such a smaller pool. But, that's just my $.02.
Facebook has 13,000 employees. What the F do they all do? What do they need 13,000 employees for?
Is there a single industry that demographically mirrors the population anywhere? It seems an odd goal.
The more you try and force equality the more you'll push companies towards hiring token women/black/disabled/asian/muslim/mexican/martian/decapodian who will either be thrown into roles they simply aren't capable of performing or be shepherded into a corner somewhere with no chance of a raise or promotion.
(And as somebody whose team leader is the former i wouldn't wish that upon them or their subordinates)
It needs to be a natural thing starting from schools encouraging said people into fields that are typically dominated by men and then there will (for the most part) be a natural trend towards equality if the division of qualified people becomes roughly equal.
We like our H1B's and don't give a dam about usc's
My turn to make an SJW go crazy.
What is the correct percentage of black people in upper management of a corporation?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The last time I saw a white female working as a landscape maintenance worker was about 1984. Now they're all mexicans. Where's the justice in that?
Because they seem to have a good amount of asian and indian employees.
How fast would I get sued if I said I was deliberately trying to hire/encourage white men to improve some aspect of my company?
-Styopa
Let's say you run a business with 100 employees, 33 of whom are female. You express a desire to get that number up. But let's say after a year, you still only have 100 employees. You've made a concerted effort to favor qualified female applicants. In fact, half of your new hires are female. Problem in, you only hired ten people, to replace ten who left. Of those who left, 7 were male and 3 were female. So now your workforce is 35% female and people scream "see, you aren't even trying!"
Unless someone expects Facebook to start firing people to make room for the ones that would look good on paper, this change must happen incrementally at best.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
All they need to do is look to their content creation base. 75% women. Pretty damn easy to take the top N% content creators, start paying them to create more content, double your workforce, and claim that you've reached 50% female on the diversity numbers.
Bet the same is true for other minorities as well, at least as far as Facebook is concerned.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
My turn to make an SJW go crazy.
What is the correct percentage of black people in upper management of a corporation?
112%.
But that's because white men are twice as likely to be criminals.
Yesterday we read about `tech' `leaders' profound revulsion for Trump, and all about their "vision for an inclusive country" and just how dearly they "believe in an inclusive country." In actual fact it's a big white sausage fest of hypocrites opining about their expectations of you.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
What population would that be? The US population? The OPEC population? The world population? The population of US computer science graduates? The population of Google search engine users? The population of Android users? I'd like to know what these "diversity" goals for companies are supposed to be and why.
Proving unbiased results is an old problem in science. It's a solved problem. The solution is applicable to many other fields of human endeavor. If you want to hire without bias have someone without hiring authority ask interview questions. Change the names on resumes to "candidate 1, candidate 2" etc. The hiring manager sees the resumes and answers but not the candidates. Sincerity is harder to judge but it's still easy to see who knows what they're talking about.
But Facebook doesn't want unbiased hiring. They want to preferentially hire certain people. Fuck Facebook and every other company with bigotry in its soul.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Does this line of reasoning work the other way, too?
NOT ENOUGH ASIANS IN THE NBA.
NOT ENOUGH MALE NURSES.
filter error: don't use so many caps. It's like yelling
Slashdot you fucking homosexual fruitcake slurping fucking *#*#$
News for nerds not social engineering for lesbians.
Have to agree with you. Nothing proves the point of these articles more than the 'oppressed white male' foaming at the mouth about how he doesn't have a straight parade.
I don't know if you are aware, but it is now expected that all numbers be expressed in values of pi. So instead of 112%, you should say (35.7pi)%.
Because pi is a transcendental number, and we need to be trans allies.
The old boys club of the elites, without realizing it, is uncomfortable with the fact that most Bachelors degrees are going to women nowadays, and from diverse backgrounds at that.
Just look at what the current undergrad population looks like at UCLA, UW, and other schools. It looks like my nieces and nephews, from diverse backgrounds, where women are the majority and graduates are a multitude of racial backgrounds.
It's not hard.
Just HIRE them.
Stop talking about WHY you don't do it and just DO it.
It's 2016 not 1916.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem is that employers in the USA, unlike European countries, make themselves liable for discrimination claims if they ask questions like "Are you male or female" , or "What is your race?" before or during the interview. It's only when the person is hired so they can get this information. This means that there is no good metric to say how many black people, Females, or whatever other protected class, is applying for jobs and/or getting interviews at tech companies. Facebook cannot say things like '3% of the people applying for us were female, and we hired 80% of them' -- they can only say 'We hired N females' or 'N females make up our workforce'. I work for a large, international tech company, and we are gung ho about diversity -- but we just don't get very many candidates that express interest in doing the job that fall outside of the industry majority. I've interviewed 2 women and 25 men in the last year, and we hired 1 of the Women. Based on that , people will say 'hire more Women', and I'm all like 'What Women?'. That's why this is such a great focus point for social justice bullies. They will never be wrong that the tech industry doesn't hire many minorities, and you cannot prove that it's because they don't even knock on the tech door without making companies targets for lawsuits.
Where I live, I see so many african-americans on broadcast DTV, that white/caucasian people look like albinos to me.
Yes, I live in Yakima, WA, the most psycho-pathological place in hell that has ever existed.
I do not believe (as many people seem to reflexively parrot the phrase) that a company's workforce "needs to look like the general population".
And let's apply a little critical thinking to the nauseating cliche, "Diversity is our strength," by performing the following thought experiment.
Suppose your goal is to develop a cure for psoriasis. Would you choose to hire
Team A: a very non-diverse group that consists entirely of black Nepalese lesbians who all have PhDs in biochemistry from Stanford.
or
Team B: an extremely diverse group that consists of an Asian female former trash collector, a black female high-school dropout, a white male retired groundskeeper, an eight-year-old Basque boy who's really good at playing the spoons, and Caitlyn Jenner.
I, for one, believe the very non-diverse Team A is far more likely to attain the stated goal.
The politically correct would flog me for this, but instead of "Diversity is our strength," the saying should be "Quality individuals are our strength."
Has the NBA made progress with its diversity?
...is to scrape off the cream of Africa's technical talent and relocate them all to San Francisco so they can think up new ways to persuade housewives to post juicy gossip on Facebook!
And there were a number of times in the US where I experienced what I can only call, "reverse-reverse discrimination". That is, those treating me differently for the sole reason they feared I might "play the race card", which I would never do in a million years. They would walk on egg shells around me, or distort the facts, etc.
I even had to endure the humiliation of the government doing a "race audit" at one firm I was at. I was pulled aside and asked very awkward questions. I didn't know what was going on at the time and nearly walked that very day. I will NOT be hired because of my dermal chromatics. I will NOT be chosen because of my "race". I want to be considered SOLELY on my MERITS and past ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Period, end of sentence. If anyone is better than me for the job, by all means take him. As I would when I am looking to hire. I pay no attention to gender nor dermal chromatics nor any other bullshit. I look to see if the person can do the job and work well with the team. That's it. The rest walks. And I don't expect to be treated any differently.
Affirmative Action, thank goodness, is NOT an issue in Deutschland. Here, they hire solely on merit. My fellow germans can be quite thorough in their background checks, too. They don't use some stupid service like many American firms do, and typically don't even check references, either. Nope. They check YOU out directly.
I am proud of my GitHub account and my participation in Open Source. Anyone can go look at my code, download it, run it, and see what I'm capable of. And there is nothing stopping others from doing the same.
The Internet does not care if you are pink, green, or blue. It does not care whether you are male, female, transgendered, or otherwise. It does not care if you look like a Hollywood star or something that came from the bottomless pit. You have the knowledge? You have the skills? You have the passion? Then Just Do It already and the world can see what you are.
Thanks for destroying our countries, JEWS, we won't forget nor forgive you nation-wrecking scum.
I'd like to see a Venn diagram of "people who think there is no bias against black people" and "people who think there is bias against programmers who are over 40".
Content creators are already financially rewarded. Plenty of artists make a good living on Youtube. Not all, and not a majority, but not all content/art is equal.
Perhaps you are attempting to claim that the lady who made the 20 minute "art" program shoving Spaghettios up herself is worth as much as the person managing services, selling products, building hardware, etc? Society disagrees with you, as does every economic model and civilization since we have recorded history.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
From the article and summary: "...in the face of criticism for having mostly white, male workers."
According to the article, Facebook employs 38% asian, 4% latino, and 2% black employees, meaning there is at most 56% of white employees.
According to wikipedia, 63.7% of the US population is white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So whites are underrepresented at Facebook, and yet there are too many?
So should Facebook be required to hire less-qualified persons just to fit a certain quota? Is there some sort of proof that somehow shows FB is intentionally not hiring minorities?