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%.

Comments

And?

[s.petry]

If you set a goal you can't achieve why are you surprised? Facts matter, people should really go back to using them.

Re:And?

[frovingslosh]

You just don't understand. " ....while black employees accounted for 3% of its US senior leadership,... Clearly this isn't PC. So more blacks must be hired and put into these positions, even if we are not capable of doing the work. Sheesh, next thing you're likely to criticize the quota system that pushed through colleges and universities the many black students who displaced more qualified white students and call it racist, even though some of those receiving degrees are still not capable of doing the work. White people must stop using the ability to actually do the work as a racist way to keep the black man down, it should be enough that we were pushed through the system and given a token diploma.

Re:And?

[liquid_schwartz]

If you set a goal you can't achieve why are you surprised? Facts matter, people should really go back to using them.

Political correctness cares not for facts nor reality. Never has, never will.

Hire the best or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hire the best or not?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

"The best" is rarely fully quantifiable. For instance, in a purely arbitrary way, solving PC issues is one problem that one person can "be the best".

But there's rarely a need to be "the best". It's a rare position where the top 5% aren't all capable of producing practically identical work output. In some jobs (e.g. burger flippers) that number is a lot higher.

Racism or availability?

[grasshoppa]

I'm of the mind that this is more reflective of the available talent pool rather than any inherent racism.

Re:Racism or availability?

[MillionthMonkey]

Apparently the most talented programmers in the world are all H1-Bs from India. I've worked at two companies so far where everyone got laid off and replaced by them.

Re:Racism or availability?

[ooloorie]

Even the most diverse Silicon Valley tech firms are at 2 percent or under in terms of blacks in technology jobs, yet across the U.S. blacks earned 4.4 percent of master’s degrees in engineering and 3.6 percent of its Ph.D.s in 2014

You may find this hard to believe, but engineering degrees aren't all interchangeable, either in quality or in areas of expertise. Furthermore, many American born engineers don't want to move to Silicon Valley, and many engineers find it offensive when they are hired not for their skill and expertise, but to satisfy some diversity quota.

Re:Racism or availability?

[liquid_schwartz]

You can't be one of the guys while simultaneously being a protected class that can start a witch hunt off of any stray comment or misinterpreted comment. Indeed, with the microagression BS even casual conversation can be a problem. It's completely unsurprising that given today's state of cultural McCarthyism people are profession but not personable. SJW - you created this problem but I doubt you can fix it.

Age discrimination

[BradMajors]

While ignoring age discrimination. The chances of someone over 40 being hired by Facebook is zero.

"Little Progress"

[ichthus]

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?

wrong premise

[supernova87a]

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.

Mirroring the population

[holophrastic]

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.

mirror the population

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This goal was easy

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.