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WSJ: Facebook's Point System Fails To Close Diversity Gap

Posted by BeauHD on from the diversify-your-workplace dept.

theodp writes: Gizmodo and others are picking up on a Wall Street Journal story (Warning: may be paywalled) which reported that Facebook's failure to move the needle on diversity is all the more surprising because the social network awarded Facebook recruiters double points for a "diversity hire" -- a female, Black, or Hispanic engineer -- compared to the hire of a White or Asian male. Facebook declined to comment on whether this points-based system is still in effect. The WSJ also notes that Intel has paid its employees double referral bonuses for women, minorities, and veterans. The reward schemes evoke memories of gender-based (and later race-based) incentives offered for K-12 coding and STEM programs run by tech-backed Code.org (to which Facebook just pledged $15 million) and Google, which offered lower funding or no funding at all to teachers if participation by female students was deemed unacceptable to the sponsoring organizations. Facebook's efforts also seem consistent with the tech-backed Every Student Succeeds Act, which calls for increasing CS and STEM access to address a tech-declared national crisis, but only "for students through grade 12 who are members of groups underrepresented in such subject fields, such as female students, minority students, English learners, children with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students." Hey, sometimes "every" doesn't mean "every!"

5 of 415 comments (clear)

  1. More proof by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    More proof of systemic racism: even though the white recruiters were given an incentive to hire for diversity, their innate racist tendencies overrode that incentive and they continued to hire cisgender white males.

    - AmiMojo

    1. Re:More proof by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The summary is misleading. The recruiters are rewarded for finding minority candidates, but they only feed them to hiring managers. The hiring managers have no incentive to do anything other than pick the candidate they think is best, with best being some combination of qualifications, interpersonal skills, experience, wage requirements etc.

      Frankly the summary is just flamebait, the way it frames what is happening. It's actually kind of ironic that people are modding me down as flamebait when they have been triggered by the inaccurate trolling summary.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:More proof by HBI · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Molding a definition to fit your politics is 1984-esque.

      Racism is discrimination or bigotry on the basis of race, not that load of crap you just spewed.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    3. Re:More proof by tomhath · · Score: 5, Informative

      The hiring managers have no incentive to do anything other than pick the candidate they think is best

      I really, really doubt that's true.

      Every large company has policies for quotas/affirmative action/cultural diversity/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. In the last Fortune 500 company I worked, a hiring manager had to write a letter justifying why they didn't offer a job to any minority candidate sent for an interview by HR. No letter was required for white males.

  2. Points based systems are inherently racist. by DatbeDank · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So we're going to discriminate white and asian applicants over one of another race?

    Goodness, isn't that similar to what happened to blacks during the early 20th century too?

    Being racist to stop racism doesn't solve the problem. It's just more racism.