Apple makes slight progress on diversity while rivals make practically none | Hacker News Reader

Apple makes slight progress on diversity while rivals make practically none

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsclifanatic43 comments

The nation is somewhere around 12℅ black, and a little over 50℅ female. Am I the only one that just doesn't see a problem with Apple being 9℅ black and 37℅ female? That is not close enough? Will people only be satisfied when companies exactly match the demographics of the countries they operate in? There are many more white, Asian, and Indian males that graduate with tech degrees, so Apple is to ignore this when hiring? It's not Apples fault that there are fewer minorities and women graduating with STEM degrees. America is so damn race obsessed.

Nitpick: 32 percent female; 37 percent was for new hires.

More importantly:

> Critics have pointed out that Apple is more diverse because a significant percentage of the company’s employee base are lower-paid workers in its retail stores, which Google and Facebook do not have. But Apple’s gains this year did not come exclusively from retail. There was a 1 percent increase for women and blacks in technical jobs.

According to the actual report:

http://www.apple.com/diversity/

They give a breakdown on gender globally and race within the US. For tech workers, the numbers are 23% female, 8% black, 8% Hispanic (national 17%) - and 27% Asian. The race stats are not terrible, but 23% female is pretty bad (though it might be better in the US).

  There was a 1 percent increase for women and blacks in technical jobs.

No, there was a 1 percentage point increase, not 1 percent. That's an over 14 percent increase (using their grossly round numbers).

No, it's not close enough. You're acting like the low representation in tech companies is strictly because there are a lot more male white/asian/indian candidates, but that's not correct. A big reason why there are a lot fewer candidates from other demographics is in a large part because of the low representation. Lack of representation both means lack of role models, and it also serves as a big signal that someone in an underrepresented demographic is going to have a hard time succeeding in that industry. It also means that people of underrepresented groups who go into the industry anyway are not going to find very many people like themselves, which will make them less comfortable (which leads to fewer people going into the industry in the first place).

On a different note, why did you use ℅ instead of %? ℅ is U+2105 CARE OF, but you used it like a percentage.

"A big reason why there are a lot fewer candidates from other demographics is in a large part because of the low representation."

Can you back this with a peer-reviewed study? Or this is one of things we are supposed to take for self-evident?

Have you ever actually tried talking to people in underrepresented groups? Asking for a peer-reviewed study for something that over 50% of the world experiences in their personal lives is just a tactic for shutting down the conversation.

Off-topic, this comment has the id 12222222. Neat!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222222

Looks like you found a bug in the Google Keyboard on the final beta of Android Nougat on the Nexus 6P! That symbol shows up on the Google Keyboard in place of percent.

I do understand the need for people to see others that look like themselves, but at what cost? Here is the cost: when you say you want "larger percent of X demographic", you could also say you want a "smaller percent of Y demographic". A company is not simply going to have a bigger workforce to fit more black women, they are going to pass on some Asian man to fit them in. That's a disservice to some hard working people. We are, after all, people. We all want different things in life.

> A big reason why there are a lot fewer candidates from other demographics is in a large part because of the low representation.

Citation needed? And how did we arrive at the large number of asian/indian professionals today, when they too lacked representation? I am very sceptic for claiming representation as the main ("in a large part") reason.

I don't consider it a problem because there is full employment nationwide even amongst the most marginalized engineers.

So why is the Washington Post obsessed with Silicon Valley, in particular Facebook, Google, and Apple.

Who even cares about what schools they recruit at? I didn't go to any of those and I get a recruiter from Google trying to poach me every 6 months, and I just assumed everyone else was too.

> So why is the Washington Post obsessed with Silicon Valley, in particular Facebook, Google, and Apple.

Because certain Silicon Valley companies (non-tech) are used by their owners to push their political ideals.

Some SV companies were backing the now defunct Gawker, presumably they've been using media as an anti-PR arm for a long time. It is like they are emulating the metapolitics of Washington.

> Will people only be satisfied when companies exactly match the demographics of the countries they operate in?

Well, why not? That would be a good way, in general, to eliminate discrimination, class and caste systems that hinder social mobility.

Moreover, those demographics should be consistent over each pay scale. I suspect Apple is making its figures look better by hiring low-paid minorities.

The way we should do this, is for every large company to cross-tabulate every pay scale by relevant demographic - ethnic group, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc - and do a chi-squared test against the official proportion of demographics in the United States. If the p-value falls below, oh let's say 0.001, we apply the corporate death penalty, and revoke the company's business license.

Now, some people would object to this. But it is a transparent test, and simple for companies to fix: just hire more minorities to redress the balance. It would result in the virtual elimination of all persistent inequalities. I think it would be worth it.

I honestly don't understand why any corporation would spend money on anything other than chasing the absolute best candidates, regardless of race, gender or anything other than their excellence with respect to their positions.

Every minute spent caring about diversity is a minute not spent caring about excellence; every dollar spent chasing diversity is a dollar not spent chasing excellence. Hire the best candidates, no matter who they are.

I don't care about someone's race or gender, so long as he is the best possible candidate for the position. And if he's not, why would I want him?

Diversity is an inherently good thing for a company, because a diversity of views and knowledge allow a company to better understand and work with an equally diverse market. And more than that, it seems like a morally desirable long-term goal; companies should generally reflect the racial makeup of wider society, for example, and if that isn't happening it means that something is broken. Promoting diversity internally can help to solve this issue of a society-wide scale.

> Diversity is an inherently good thing for a company, because a diversity of views and knowledge allow a company to better understand and work with an equally diverse market

Are there any studies that provide supporting evidence for this claim? I see it being thrown around all the time but I never see any data to back it up.

P.S: I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying, I'm genuinely curious to know if there's any truth to your claim

You won't find any, there isn't any. The basic idea is people from different backgrounds will have different views on things and this is a good thing. The concept itself does make sense, but I can't imagine any type of study actually being possible to back it up.

There's a nice Scientific American article that reviews the literature:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...

If that is true, shouldn't companies then not also reflect age of society and hire a bunch of +50 married-with-kids people instead of hipsters fresh out of college?

Yes in fact. Age discrimination is a big problem.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3051030/the-future-of-work/is-27-...

The same issue applies to companies that only hire middle age employees and have a bias against "fresh hipsters" based only on their age.

But what if some of the best candidates aren't getting hired because the system that created the applicant pool is skewed/biased and leads to under-representation of talented candidates?

Isn't it be perfectly reasonable for a company to try to correct that bias in order to ensure they're hiring the best people?

It would be great if gender/race/age bias didn't exist in hiring, but there's a lot of evidence that it does. The good diversity programs acknowledge the problem and aim to fix it in order to get the best talent.

Blind hiring tests can be done.

Oddly enough there is no drive for it.

Curious, that.

Because it's harder to do and people think they're better at judging candidates with more info than they actually are.

Not very curious, that.

I agree with the second proposition but don't see why it should be harder to accomplish. It appears to be largely a matter of requesting some information through a channel that does not permit nonessential observation, like a Turing Test or rather the original Victorian game, a reversed Imitation Game.

"But what if some of the best candidates aren't getting hired ..."

But what if they are and current racial composition just reflects that?

If there are talented minority coders who are overlooked by Google/Apple, it should be possible to exploit this market inefficiency, no need to enforce it.

But what if some of the best candidates aren't getting hired because companies overlooked them while trying to hire alongside racial quotas? Seems much more likely.

It's that for many jobs good enough is in fact good enough, and then the hiring question turns into a quality-of-life issue. Some people really don't like to sit across from blacks, queers or Trump voters.

I don't understand this either. It's not up to companies to "be the change they want to see in the world". To me, this behavior is nothing but a ploy. No successful company invests money to get the second, third, fourth, etc best return possible.

If anything, it's an insult to the minorities; they only hire them because they are a minority and they fill the minority quota, not necessarily because of their ability.

At some point companies become large enough that they effectively are society and government. For those in charge to put societal interest as a goal beside shareholder profit is to me a requirement for healthy capitalism.

The act of selecting one candidate for a job over another based on their ethnicity or gender instead of their qualifications and aptitude is literally the definition of racism/sexism. By doing so they are propagating the very thing they claim to want to destroy.

This obsession with balance of race and gender is toxic to what actually makes businesses great, talent.

That's starting to bother me too. Shy people, short men, disabled people, people who stutter, fat people, ugly people are also being discriminated against. It's certainly a well-intended effort but the "diversity" trend creates a few groups of favored people while doing nothing for others that are also being discriminated against.

I'm not at all surprised that they are completely mute on age diversity.

Neither am I, because in a growing industry with your HQ being in a location receiving a migration influx, it's not a useful stat.

I'd emphasize the "slight." Apple fares no better when it comes to diversity in management, and in fact, unlike their peers, doesn't even have a sizable number of Asian people in management.

Are there any diversity advocates that fault the NFL/NBA for their severe under-representation of Latinos and Asians?

If the low number of Blacks/Latinos at Facebook is proof that FB is unfairly discriminating against them, then why can't the exact same argument be made regarding the lack of Latinos/Asians in the NFL and NBA?

Stereotypes and prejudice is real, and I'm all for efforts made to combat them. I'm very optimistic about the potential for "blind interviews," similar to orchestra's blind auditions, in order to combat the influence of stereotypes during the interview process. But the idea that someone can just put together a pie chart of Facebook employee demographics, and use that as proof that FB is any worse than your average American company, is just nonsense and lazy thinking.

This is such an absurd fucking argument for people to have.

BTW, Apple is based in Cupertino, which has 0.6% Black population, 63.1% Asian, and 29.3% White -- even if you take a huge surrounding area, it is about the same.

Shouldn't they hire to match the demographics?

How about the state demographics? They would need a lot more hispanics!

How about the world demographics? They would need a lot more Asians!

Why stop at matching gender and race?

Why not match the population of red-headed people that are qualified? Are they not normally discriminated against enough?

How about fat or old people? Plenty of them and those motherfuckers wake up discriminated against!

How about ugly people? I have been to Apple headquarters and can vouch they are low on ugly people compared to the general population. Are ugly people not discriminated against enough?

How about hire who is best qualified? That is a fucking idea! Almost like if you had a fiduciary duty to do what is best for your company, and hiring the best qualified employees is exactly that!

You don't need a role model that has the same skin colour as you to be motivated to do stem or specifically get into programming. Stop caring about what people look like. stop trying to control how the industry hires because that's not the problem. People don't do programming or science because it's hard. Most people that go to university don't even improve or add to the field they studied. Let people choose for themself what they want to do and stop worrying about things that don't matter. Nobody is crying about the lack of diversity in nursing or finance or social work or whatever it is kids choose to study these days.

> You don't need a role model that has the same skin colour as you to be motivated to do stem or specifically get into programming. Stop caring about what people look like.

You seriously underestimate how important it is to see other people like yourself succeeding at the things you're considering. I also find it pretty interesting that you created a new account for the express purpose of making this comment. I don't know if that's because you don't want me figuring out what race/gender you are, or because you know you're making a boneheaded comment and don't want it to be visible on your main account.

He is doing it because witchhunts are a thing.

You could say that about almost any comment, and yet you don't see people constantly creating brand new HN accounts to make comments (in fact, brand new accounts are often viewed with suspicion). Besides, their comment wasn't anything overly inflammatory, it was actually a point of view that a surprising number of people tend to express, it just happens to be completely wrong.

Their view contains the moral high ground, whereas yours might seem pragmatic but actually reinforces identity politics.

Moral high ground? That's bullshit. Their view is "I'm privileged as fuck and have no idea what other people are going through, therefore I want to completely discount their issues and pretend they don't exist while at the same time blaming them for it". There's nothing even remotely moral about that.

We should not be praising someone for being afraid to stand behind their words. That is the behavior of a coward.

> Stop caring about what people look like

People, even people who actively seek not to, generally do care about this to some degree; what you care about is not something infinitely amenable to voluntary changes.

The existence of a society in which gender, race, ethnicity, and other demographic factors are pervasively given weight, particularly, means that such things do matter. We might wish to have a society in which they were not given the weight they are now, and where gender-, race-, etc., specific role models were not important. But we don't live in that society, and human nature does not let people magically transform into the people they would be if they had been raised in such a society simply by wishing it so.

> Nobody is crying about the lack of diversity in nursing or

That canard has been brought up and refuted so many times here that it's time to just retire it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221763 and marked it off-topic.

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