Asian woman who quit Google: 'The culture there is really discouraging' | Hacker News Reader

Asian woman who quit Google: 'The culture there is really discouraging'

businessinsider.com

23 pointselsewhen15 comments

> Men hold 75% of Google's leadership roles

Well, I'm of 'leadership age' and when I was young, the only people I saw who were interested in computers were nerdy boys. We were mocked by jock guys and ignored by virtually all girls. So, to me it's a matter of focus. They had fun with romance and sex, we practiced computers. An imbalance seems expected given what I saw. Maybe that will change in time.

> Men hold 75% of Google's leadership roles

Since men are 69% of the company it looks like they are only slightly overrepresented in leadership roles.

> just 2% of its employees are black, 4% Hispanic, and 35% Asian.

Doesn't this mean that Asians are way overrepresented?

> She told Levin of a white male coworker who suggested she got her job more easily because people would think she was good at math.

The horror! Looking at PISA scores from Asian countries or SAT results, it seems to be absolutely the case that Asians, on average, are "good at math". Honestly, people who work at freaking Google and don't have worse problems than this should count themselves lucky to be part of the 0.1% most privileged individuals in the world and have the decency to keep their spoiled mouths shut.

How do you deal with over-representation if you don't want to increase headcount? Fire the over-quota demographic so that their numbers match the general population? That seems to be the way most diversity initiatives want to solve the problem.

> The horror!

He didn't say "you are good at math", he said "people just assume you're good at math, and it's those assumptions that got you the job".

He's saying she didn't get the job on merit, she got the job because of her race.

and what about nerdy girls who had neither athletics, romance or sex, and would have loved a computer? as npr[1] notes, when the home computer came out it was marketed heavily to boys; a generation of girls largely missed out on that step up.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I hate this stupid argument. Nobody ever marketed me to be into computers - my parents just had one, and I liked it, and wanted to use it. Whenever I saw a computer I wanted to play with it.

Nobody needed to "market" it to me.

Also, it's a shitty argument, because there are a million and one different things that could convince you to not be a part of something. Part of being an adult is learning to sometimes ignore what society expects of you, and also adjust your understanding of what society actually expects of you.

If the thing that stopped you from working in tech is because "there were too many boys" then you probably weren't all that interested in the first place.

I find that npr article on marketing being the reason for the drop in girls doing College CS overstates it and is a bit unconvincing. I took up computing during the 80s as a kid in a small country that had no real computer marketing (or even market) at all - that didn't stop it being a practically male only thing. Even amongst the wider population of boys, it was only a tiny percentage who got into computers.

And while the Apple example in the article they used did have a boy as the focus, prominently sitting next to him in the class was a girl doing the same stuff and a 50/50 mix of other kids in the background. There wasn't a "computers are for boys" message in that ad.

And image searches for 80s home computer ads don't really show it was all exclusively male targeted ads anyway* - there were a lot of those cliched ones marketed at the whole stereotypical family though. If anything they were overly optimistic in their depictions of gender ratios compared to actual interest in the market.

* Except for the Italian ones - yikes

Yes where were they? :-) I honestly can't remember much computer marketing at all - any computer I could get a hold of was exciting. The Apple II in our class was mostly ignored except for about 2-3 boys, and even by the girls who were better students than the other kids.

There are a lot of Asians at Google, I don't think its a fair complaint about whiteness at all.

Are these numbers atypical for the industry? I know google is facing a lawsuit, and am curious because I thought it was fairly common in engineering, law, finance, etc for a pretty drastic imbalance.

The quotes about Googles positive diversity examples reminds me of quotas in education. I wonder if we are moving towards a time when someone will not get hired because a particular quota is filled, or the whole company is subdivided into neat little diversity blocs. I.e. "Every Google team must be 50% female, and 20% Black, 20% Asian, 20% white..." Etc.

>> Several women who worked at the company and quit say their time at Google was often frustrating

That's the overarching problem with being a member of the designated victim class: you can blame your misfortune on being a member of the class, rather than realize that 90% of people at Google aren't really having the time of their lives either. News flash: people do leave Google. If things were awesome for them, they wouldn't leave.

Non-members of the "designated victim class" can instead blame their misfortune on "reverse sexism" and "reverse racism" of diversity programs.

They sure can, but usually they attribute their misfortune to inadequate skill, which is mostly wrong as well. Mostly, irrepective of the skin color or gender, the cause of one's misfortune is not being pals with the right people. Ironically, people who count themselves as a part of the designated victim class are much less likely to recognize this universal pattern.

But as we have seen - if they speak those thoughts out loud, they can face consequences.

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