Silicon Valley Big Data Startup Palantir Responds To Labor Department's Discrimination Lawsuit (fortune.com)

Silicon Valley's big data startup Palantir, founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, has filed a response to the Department of Labor after the agency sued the company for discriminating against Asian job applicants. From a Fortune report: Palantir says that no discrimination took place and that the Labor Department's statistical analysis -- the basis for the recent suit -- is faulty. The suit, according to Palantir's 15-page response, wrongly suggests that the company "should have hired a workforce that matched the racial composition of the group of individuals whose resumes Palantir received, without regard to candidate qualifications." Palantir's response also points out that the suit addressed only three out of 44 job titles for which Palantir hired employees within the 18-month analysis period conducted by the Labor Department. What's more, says the response, 36% of those eventually hired across all the job openings within that timeframe were Asian -- a rate that exceeds the percentage of qualified Asian employees in the external labor market, according to stats from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Comments

Re:guilty!

[AmiMoJo]

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

36%... But in what kind of work? If they are including all the low paid stuff, the call centre staff or outsourced contract coders etc...

I actually bothered to read the Department of Labour's complaint. It's more than just a simply statistical aberration. The response from Palantir is clearly designed more for PR than as a legal argument, e.g. the bit about them only considering 3 job titles. Yeah, they looked at high skill jobs where the problem was, that's the normal way it works because where there is discrimination there tends to be less of it in the less desirable job titles, like "janitor" and "1st line helpdesk technician".