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Comment by bojl | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: why is this sort of diversity important? As an Asian American man, I can't help but feel slighted when reading articles like this. Why is my status as an Asian any different from other minorities? Why even take race and gender into account in the hiring process for ENGINEERING roles?

As a minority I fully understand how race can affect one's perception on oneself, and how societal pressures can make one feel like they don't belong in a certain field. But in this light, shouldn't companies focus more on encouraging women and URM to enter in the field of engineering, and not at the point of hiring? CMV.

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For the last bit this is a very commonly talked about idea, often referred to as "the pipeline problem". There is evidence that the level of which minorities graduate with CS degrees outpaces hiring though, suggesting that the pipeline can't be blamed alone.

The first part about why diversity is important has been covered ad nauseum so you can find those arguments and agree with them or not.

McKinsey claims that on average diverse companies outperform homogenous companies http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...

With that said, their survey includes companies across all industries, including those with a lot of customer face-to-face interactions (retail, banking, airlines, hospitality, healthcare). I am not aware of anyone narrowing down the research to tech/engineering field, so in absence of that the public just assumes that similar findings would apply to every industry, and diverse high-tech companies will outperform non-diverse ones.

Maybe you're misunderstanding these policies. Not only do these companies often discuss the pipeline problem publicly (and sometimes offer corporate support to address it), but as rhcom2 pointed out, it's not the only factor.

If it's not the only factor, then there's a chance diverse candidates simply aren't being reached by the typical recruiter strategy. So companies take that hypothesis and incentivize recruiters to diversify their search. Only time will tell if that hypothesis is correct, and this is the only point in the system where race/gender are under consideration. It has no impact on those that apply to FB through a college career fair, or through facebook.com/careers.

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