YouTube Hiring For Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Men, Lawsuit Says (theverge.com)

Kirsten Grind and Douglas MacMillan report via The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn't help the world's largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee. The lawsuit, filed by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years, including four years as a recruiter at YouTube, alleges the division of Alphabet's Google set quotas for hiring minorities. Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren't female, black or Hispanic, and to "purge entirely" the applications of people who didn't fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.

A Google spokeswoman said the company will vigorously defend itself in the lawsuit. "We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity," she said in a statement. "At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products." People familiar with YouTube's and Google's hiring practices in interviews corroborated some of the lawsuit's allegations, including the hiring freeze of white and Asian technical employees, and YouTube's use of quotas.

Comments

Easy Solution

[alvinrod]

Here's the easy solution to this problem. Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously. If it gets the point of the interview and you've still got people being biased or discriminatory, then you've got bigger problems because at that point there's no excuse for falling back on some preconceived notions as everyone who makes it there should be qualified to work at your company or your screening process sucks.

Anything else is going to create a perception of unfairness regardless of what kind of noble intentions you might have. One thing that always astounds me is that the people who constantly bang on about white or male privilege and how that provides unfair benefits for some always seem to want to enact policy that enshrines unfairness as a fundamental concept. If you think that unfair treatment results in people being dissatisfied or outright disgruntled, then why the hell would you think that actively creating unfair conditions wouldn't result in the same conditions. To some degree I think this is partially (among a great many other things) responsible for the rise in what's been called the alt-right and has played a part in why someone like Trump was able to win the election.

Re:Easy Solution

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It wont work.

The accusation is, the general American population is 78% white, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Arab, x% Jewish, 51% female. If your work force does not have the same percentages you are discriminating.

Instead of general population as the criterion, if you use STEM graduates of the top 100 or 200 US colleges, the percentages might not look so terrible for Google. If Google could say, "our workforce reflects the talent pool we recruit from" and that argument is accepted it would be good.

Google is not making that argument, "the population of top grads from top schools differs significantly from the general population. What can we do?".

The reason is, this argument has been used in the past to actively discriminate against the minorities. So it does not carry much weight among the general public. So Google is in this no-win situation.

Racism

[TheCount22]

I think this has gone too far. Fighting for equality of opportunities is one thing but being racist to achieve it is another.

Reverse racism is simply racism it doesn't matter what group in targeted. Social justice isn't justice. Feminism is not about equality anymore it doesn't care about other genders it's only about women. People fought long hard against racism and inequality. The last thing we need is to find new victims (ie. Men, Caucasians and Asians this time around) .

Re:remember

[Kohath]

...So the smarter choice is to shutup about it while you're at work, advocate for change as your personal hobby at home, and leave your employer out of it. There's a reason the tired old rule exists about not talking politics or religion in polite company....

You don't understand. It's not a hobby, it's a religion. It's how they know they're better than you. Without it, their shallow misanthropic lives would be seem meaningless — just an endless series of bitter score-settling and grievance dramatization that leaves them surrounded only by smug, unhappy people like themselves.

Re:It's not surprising

[iamhassi]

You are posting as anonymous coward, but let me be on record to say that Youtube and their parent company have been taken over by the biggest racists on this planet.

This ^^^^ no one should be judged by skin color or gender. It's strange to see people who claim to not be racist say it's ok to not hire a white or Asian person because of their skin color but to not hire a black person is racist. It's all racist.

Minorities, Behold! This is what success looks lik

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Minorities, Behold! This is what success looks like Asians were not allowed to become citizens till recently, 1960s. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese who came to California during the gold rush were harassed, and their better claims were usurped, they were relegated to working on less productive claims, they were paid less for their gold, and when the gold rush ended they were mostly chased out of the country.

In 1906 an Indian man named Bhagat Singh Thinde made the crazy argument that he was White, (He argued he was from a high caste, despised low caste people, had enough prejudice in him to qualify as White. No one was offended by that argument, but Judge Sutherland, SCOTUS, ruled that he was Caucasian but not white ;-)).

They worked steadily, played by the rules of the game, concentrated on getting ahead personally. No long marches demanding equality, no serious law suits alleging discrimination, ... Over the years they are punching 10 times their weight. 2% of the general population, 20% of top STEM grads, 20% of Intel scholarships and 99% of top spelling bee and 85% of top geography bee ...

Yes, they had to much better than general population to get there. Asian kids need to score 150 points more than the White kids in SAT to get into the top colleges. Yes, the average Asian kid is suffering and is in stress because the expectation is set so high by the other Asian kids. But these are the problems of success, ....

I do hear complaints of discrimination among my friends, but it is more like to be something like, "I am the senior most nephrologist with much better publication record and I should have been named the head, but they gave the post to some White Guy. Anyway chairmanship involves mostly talking to the donors and getting projects from the pharma companies, so I don't care"... sour grape syndrome?