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