Facebook’s Point System Fails to Close Diversity Gap
wsj.com
wsj.com
This issue strikes a chord with me because I spent years programming while others called me a nerd. Now that my skills are useful people claim I must be doing well because of my sex and skin color.
What's the evidence for this claim? I think tech is fun, pays for a good standard of living, and is a solid career choice for any person entering the job market. However, according to the bureau of labor and statistics, you're still better off going into a host of fields like medicine, dentistry, airline pilots, law, and finance.
At which point you're seen as only caring about equality when it disadvantages women, which isn't how equality works.
It's just as important that we have a gender balance in coal miners (and nurses and teachers and prison inmates) as it is for software developers.
Or maybe we should stop preoccupying ourselves with this equality of outcome nonsense because in a free market people are allowed to choose their own career paths.
As such, I don't believe your statement that women mining coal was a priority for women when mining coal was an up and coming industry. Coal mining has always been a low status and dangerous job, and as such its been exclusively a male profession.
A similar situation currently exist with under water welding. It is one of the highest paying jobs there is, but its below average in social status and has a very risky environment. As one of the most lucrative area, you would think there would be a push by gender equality advocates, but no. The focus is only to get more women in jobs which has high social status, rather than to create change in current gender culture.
Is software low- or high-status work?
I did find people who has done a similar study, like http://www.sverigesingenjorer.se/Global/Dokumentbibliotek/Ra... page 18.
As for software development, there has been quite a few movies so far about CEO's of large software companies. I don't think there is that many other professions that get hero worshiping like that, except for doctors.
Along with data on race and gender, does the company make public the percent of its workforce that is over 40 or 50?
If so, this could be a manifestation of the high attrition rates for experienced female engineers.
There are plenty of posts out there about why Facebook's recent declaration that their numbers are that way due to the pipeline problem is wrong. There was a particularly good one I recall, but I can't find it sadly. But the other articles out there should suffice too.
There are also many self taught programmers out there, which are not affected by the "pipeline". Interview practices often subconsciously discriminate against them (for example, an overabundance of datastructure questions -- most self taught programmers I know are good enough with datastructures, but haven't become super awesome experts at them because that's not very useful when actually programming. Focusing your interviews on solely these questions excludes nearly half the "pipeline").
The college I was in has an extremely skewed gender ratio. There are many companies out there that nearly exclusively hire from a set of similar colleges as a matter of prestige. And of course have a large gender diversity issue, which they (well, employees there -- in this country there is less of a push for diversity and companies don't make public statements about it) blame on the pipeline. This is absurd. What Facebook does is similar, though not as stark.
That's not to say there aren't extremely talented women and racial minorities, but I'd imagine they have their pick of the litter right now as everyone is clamoring to have that perfectly homogenous workforce so their director of HR can post their "diversity numbers" and get a big raise. That's the real reason driving this nonsense.
The problem is in the supply of the candidates, which starts long before they make it to the recruiter, so it's of no surprise the recruiter can't do anything. It's not like by giving these points we suddenly opened up a hidden cache of women engineers somewhere.
If big tech companies really cared about minorities, they would offer minority scholarships, complete with an offer of employment afterwards, sponsor after school programs and help find those kids that have been left behind in the institutional education system. Take that extra budget allocated for this banal and hopeless program and give it to the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization and mandate the recruiters attend and mentor someone there. Of course, those results will not be visible in the HR Director's next OKR meeting. Some problems cannot be fixed easily or quickly and that's just how it is. They could be doing these things....but they won't.
Instead, we get recruiter "point systems".
Bravo, Facebook!
first of all, does anyone know whether i'm right about this?
and then, does anyone else think we might have to address the gendering of all careers in order to get at addressing those careers which attract all of the concern?
It doesn't like the Hiring Managers (who decide offers?) got that same system.
It appears that Facebook does not hire enough whites and these sort of point systems appear more like an active discrimination against white people.
If we want to fix this problem, we need to encourage women to stop studying such ridiculous nonsense feel-good bullshit. The problem lies with our culture and how we raise children, not "racist/sexist/whatever-ist" employers.
It sounds like you're chalking this up to the famous "pipeline problem." [1] This is empirically incorrect. In particular, Figure 8.2 demonstrates that the quit rate for women in "high tech" is almost 2.5x higher than the quit rate for me.
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-technology-stanford-...
[1] http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-...
I personally know people from underrepresented groups in tech (African-American, women etc) who attest that, even in work environments that made them feel 100% welcome/comfortable, they felt a mental cost from the very fact of being underrepresented. That is to say, even if you were to remove all the consciously and unconsciously biased behavior from workplaces, some people still have a negative reaction to being the only present member of a group that they identify with. The pipeline problem is the only solution that could possibly address that[1], by addressing the imbalance per se.
[1] I suppose short of having people stop feeling this way about being underrepresented. I've been underrepresented ethnically in almost every group I've ever been in, but it has never bothered me. Far be it from me to tell other to stop feeling a certain way though.
I mean, the data does seem to support a tech environment that applies disproportionate pressure on women to perform certain activities. From the linked HBS study, for example (Figure 6.1), 71% of women in tech feel pressure to put in face time (vs. 19% in all sectors) and 36% feel pressure to be available 24/7 (vs. 26% in all sectors).
Both of these are time-consuming activities. Myriad studies show child care responsibilities, even today, still fall disproportionately onto women. Child care is time-consuming, and that comes into conflict with time-consuming professional work.
Of course, not all women want children. And this is one study. But it wouldn't surprise me if women were underrepresented in tech due to a combination of cultural issues and the pipeline problem. It's just extremely reductionist when people assign blame to the pipeline problem, since that shifts the focus from work environments to higher education. That's a convenient result for companies.
The reference you cite says that
> about 214 women are majoring in computer science, accounting for about 30 percent of majors in that department
and
> only about 18 percent of all U.S. undergraduate computer science degrees go to women.
While the WSJ article states that
> Women made up 33% of its global workforce, up from 31% in 2014.
So, exactly a pipeline problem.
One would assume there's a natural attrition across all industries due to women taking time off to have/raise kids as well as some common base level of quitting in general due to reasons common across all industries (better pay elsewhere, bad managers). Is 2.5x coefficient very high, very low or just about same as other industries?
What is the quit rate of women in other sectors ? What is the quit rate in high-tech in general ?
All those questions are very important. My wife left her job after marriage because she had to relocate and later she took a break for childbirth while I was at the same job.
"Pipeline problem" is not really a problem. It is not the case that women will suddenly come to CS if we paint classrooms pink. If the reason women are not attracted to CS is probably those young girls have done their research an decided that they will be better off being something else other than CS major. Hostility at workplace might be one of the reasons but I highly doubt if that is the only one. At least we need data to indicate that quit rate is not a useful metric.
careers such as nursing, teaching, and (ironically given the op) human resources seem to be highly gendered towards women.
This whole thing is way overblown, imo. If, for some reason, far more women want to be doctors than engineers, then good for them. The last thing we need are grumpy doctors who treat their patients like machines, or bored engineers who make a special snowflake out of each server.
Imagine how ridiculous it would be, if when I was enrolling in uni, an advisor had said something along the lines of "Are you sure you wouldn't rather be a doctor? Because we need more male doctors, and the engineering fields are way over their quota for males. In 4 years, you might not be able to get a job in that field, unless you discover that you are actually a woman in a man's body."
Punishing merely makes people afraid to tell you their ideas, which means they just go on believing them. How does that help?
I think people who insist that 50% of developers should be women are nothing but sexist of high order who objectify as some number that needs to be bumped up. Women have different priorities than men. They prefer jobs that provide more security and more immune to gaps than jobs that require more attention. I don't understand why it is so hard for people to accept the simple fact that women have their own mind and preferences and it can be different than men ?
P.S. This is not to say there aren't gender issues in any industry. But I dont think it is as black and white as people make it out to be.
Conclusion: it's complicated. Women make up about half of science and business degrees, and relatively small percentage of engineering and computer science.
'"Happiness" at Mt Holyoke' - here's the list of majors at Mt Holyoke: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/majors. 'Happiness' appears nowhere on the list.
"bunch of women who didn't even go to college" - females outnumber men in college 55/45.
Beyond the blatant disregard for facts, the comment is dangerously reductionist, attributing the diversity gap to a single cause- a lack of encouragement for females to pursue technical fields at a young age.
Yes, this is part of the problem, but no matter how much the talent pool increases, women are going to continue to leave tech at alarming rates until tech culture issues are improved as well.
Congratulations, you can Google! Maybe if you exercise that talent a little bit more, you'll realize that My Holyoke, not unlike the infamous Evergreen College, allows students to design their own major.
> the comment is dangerously reductionist, attributing the diversity gap to a single cause- a lack of encouragement for females to pursue technical fields at a young age.
How is that any different than the OP suggesting that hostile work environments are the single cause of poor diversity?
I'm baffled by how this could possibly be your impression of the article. The WSJ is reporting on a recruiting push that failed to hire minorities and women. It's the only thing they talk about for the first five paragraphs, then they immediately reference the pipeline problem (emphasis mine):
> The move shows how Facebook is applying its trademark data-driven approach to one of the tech industry’s most stubborn problems: the homogeneity of its nearly 15,000-person workforce. But its lackluster results reflect the limits of that method when tackling deep-rooted issues such as inequality.
The article raises the pipeline problem again in multiple places:
> Facebook says it wants its workforce to better reflect the diversity of its 1.7 billion monthly users—85% of which are outside the U.S. and Canada. But last month, it said it couldn’t substantially increase the diversity of its workforce because there weren’t enough qualified women or minority candidates. That drew fire from tech diversity and inclusion leaders on social media.
> The extra incentive points—awarded in job categories that are too homogenous—are an unusual effort to expand Facebook’s “pipeline,” which is the pool of candidates recruiters identify to interview for a position.