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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.

3 of 448 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Easy Solution by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

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  2. Does anyone doubt it? by Kohath · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think we can all agree that Google and YouTube probably did this. If they didn’t do this exactly, they're basically saying they'd like to do it if they could get away with it.

    All applicants to Google and YouTube should say they "identify" as a lesbian refugee from Honduras named "Sofia Espinoza". After you're hired, you can say you had an epiphany and you now "identify" as who you were born as. You can change it back to Sofia the week before performance reviews. If they doubt you, call them racist and transphobic.

  3. Re:It's not surprising by iamhassi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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