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Diversity At Google Hasn't Changed Much Over the Last Year (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Not much changed at Google over the last year when it came to the diversity of the tech giant's workforce. Google released its annual diversity report on Thursday detailing the composition of its workforce. The percentage of female employees rose by .1 percent to 30.9 percent. The percentage of Asian employees grew by 1.6 percent to 36.3 percent. The number of black and Latino employees grew by .1 percent to 2.5 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively.
"Google's workforce data demonstrates that if we want a better outcome, we need to evolve our approach," said Danielle Brown, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google, in the report. "That's why from now on ownership for diversity and inclusion will be shared between Google's leadership team, People Operations and Googlers. Our strategy doesn't provide all the answers, but we believe it will help us find them."
"Google's workforce data demonstrates that if we want a better outcome, we need to evolve our approach," said Danielle Brown, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google, in the report. "That's why from now on ownership for diversity and inclusion will be shared between Google's leadership team, People Operations and Googlers. Our strategy doesn't provide all the answers, but we believe it will help us find them."
Considering the lengths to which they've recently gone to increase skin-level diversity, which includes literally suspending all application processes for lower level positions where the applicant is white or asian, I do have to say that I am somewhat surprised by how little they've been able to move the needle.
Kind of makes you wonder what could have nullified their efforts this heavily. I know they've had some well meaning changes that have made their minority hires feel genuinely uncomfortable, like how the traditional mentoring of new hires has been changed so that your mentor will always be of the same race, but I didn't imagine they'd be able to take as many steps backwards as forwards like this. Either that or then they've knocked some sense into their hiring practices, which should have come with such a big backlash it would be well known to people outside the organization, so I can't image anything could explain this except well meaning policies that have backfired strongly enough to make their diversity hires leave in the same numbers as they're able to shepherd them in.
I guess that's good for them as nobody deserves to work in a place that makes you feel uncomfortable enough to make you want to quit your job. However I am somewhat worried about their remaining staff because if I know these diversity types, a setback will only cause them to double their efforts rather than take a moment to think about what they're actually doing.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
That's a pretty big change in just one year since it's 4% greater. The article is misleading.
I did a series of interviews at Google in Kirkland, WA (between Seattle and Microsoft) because I had a free place to stay a couple of blocks away for a friend that's out of the country for two years working for Microsoft in Dublin that was looking for a house sitter. I also had two other friends that are also black that did the same. All three of us gave up before the end of the process. Despite being able to get rid of $1,500 a month and live somewhere nice and have a higher paying job, Google's interview process just made it not worth it. My two friends also gave up since both of them ran out of vacation time to take off from their current jobs to keep going back to Google.
The way I feel about the process is that if you screen resumes well, do a good phone screening, then in person interviews with three or four people, then another interview with someone more senior and you still can't make-up your mind then the problem is with your process, not the candidate. It shouldn't take six months of waffling to make a decision.
Well said. Wish i had mod points today.
Diversity shouldn't be a metric that matters in 95% of occupations. The ability to do the job you are hired to do is all that matters.
Google could still goose its numbers by opening product-development centers where the bulk of the employees are some shade of brown. Just give them meaningless work to do, discard it all, and highlight the numbers in their employment reports. But you don't want to mix the diversity hires with actual developers, since that would reduce productivity.
I've seen a number of good people leave Google over the past year. The completely toxic culture that Google created by doubling down on their abusive rhetoric can very-well drive people away.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I'll supply the standard responses for you. Women getting paid less is due to things like not valuing them, outright sexism or institutional issues. Since simply having a policy to pay them less is illegal, you don't see companies using that as a business model very often.
you missed a few reasons why women get paid less:
- Women value work life balance over additional salary
- Women value flexibility over additional salary
- Women value vacation days over additional salary
- Women value less job related travel over additional salary
- Women do not negotiate salary as often as men
What it comes down to? Women value predictability and stability over risk. Men will accept jobs that have inherently higher variability and risk in return for higher salary.
That's the overall wage gap. You need the equal pay gap, so you can compare like-for-like.
Ok, let's go. First, menial tasks: recent Uber data (an extremely SJW company) had women choosing to work shorter hours, choosing less lucrative times of day, choosing less lucrative parts of the city, performing worse when on the same route at the same time of day. That's an unskilled task that requires reflexes. Uber's pay is calculated by a provably fair algorithm.
Then, skilled coding: biggest tech companies have currently extremely biased hiring, with about 25% workforce female. Yet that very same talent pool goes differently when you're not paid for your gender: top 1000 Linux kernel committers: 0.8% female, "key" package (as defined by testing migration) maintainers in Debian Stretch: 0.9%.
Women do have many upsides: much longer life, better ability to distinguish colours (both regular and mutated -- only women can be tetrachromats!), better sense of smell, better sociability. But none of those make you a better engineer. For that, you need more curiosity, higher intelligence, better work ethic (instead of putting kids first), etc.
For the causes, you need to look at hominids 200k years ago. When men were hunting a mammoth, women collected tubers with a kid in tow. Men were expendable, thus today they are still more willing to take risks, which lets them drive that Uber car a bit faster (and modern cars make safety good enough), visualize a 3d solid better, and so on. Women took safer jobs, and the qualities they then needed (ability to tell an edible root from a bad or poisonous one) are still there, except that there's very few jobs that pay well for that skill with colors or smells.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
A more interesting question is how they managed to go from 59.6% white techies in 2014 to 50.7% white techies in 2018. That's an 8.9% drop in four years. Presumably they're not preferentially firing white techies, nor are they preferentially quitting. That leaves hiring, which for some reason has fallen off a cliff, versus non-whites. Is there any innocent explanation for this?
On top of that, female techies have gone from 16.6% to 21.4% over the same four years. Since many of these new hires are undoubtedly white, that means that white male techies have fallen even more than the above stats would indicate. We need more data, but I'm guessing 15 or 20% over four years.
This seems almost beyond belief, and yet no one else seems to be discussing it. Am I all wet here? Or maybe Google screwed up their numbers?
I'm kind of at a loss to know what you think you even mean by "SJW" any more.
By "SJW", I mean believers in a recent extremely vile religion that preaches racial and gender discrimination, is thoroughly anti-scientific, sanctimonious and self-righteous. It also doesn't self-identify as religion to be able to exploit avenues of disseminating and legislating their rules that would be otherwise banned (kind of like L. Ron Hubbard exploited identifying as a religion).
Ah yes we hunted the mammoth.
It was hunting by humans that offed the species (that survived millions of years worth of ice age cycles, so habitat shifts couldn't be the cause, at least not by itself). And humans and hominids before hunted a lot of other animals, mammoths are merely the most iconic example.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The US population is 62% white. Google's employee population is 53.1% white and new hires are 45.2% white. That seems like a pretty serious bias to me, but it's a private business and they can do what they want. What I don't understand is what "better outcome" they actually want to achieve. Dose Google want to become a "majority minority" company?
You jest, but this is exactly what happened last year.
Apple's Diversity Chief was forced out after committing heresy. She said that a room of twelve white men could be diverse, because they could all come from different backgrounds and experiences. She was forced to apologize for this heinously offensive statement, and step down, and she was replaced by a white woman.
This makes it stunningly clear that what currently passes for social justice advocacy is really more about rigidly enforcing dogma than it is about helping people.