YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says
wsj.com
wsj.com
There are no easy solutions, but it would help I think if all effort was concentrated on removing hurdles rather than patching problems downstream with lazy fixes.
> under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes.
The former veteran Google recruiters behind this suit are claiming they were 'instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.'
To answer your question the issue of discrimination is solved by not discriminating. If women and others are being discriminated against then stop doing this, rather than just start discriminating against other people.
No one expects it will be easy to end discrimination, but it is hard to see how it will be solved by piling on more discrimination.
Taking your boot off someone's throat doesn't make them your equal when they're still on the ground.
To ignore gender this should be combined with gender-neutral voice processing for phone interviews, but it’s doable and not that hard.
What happens after the person is hired?
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
(yes, its inconclusive, but)
> for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
Not good for employees but I don’t see how it’s bad for Google.
Unhappy people are less likely to reflect on things, and more likely to do what the boss tells them to. Which is what you want your employees to do when you attract them with nice “don’t be evil” slogan, and make them optimize an ad server for the market capitalization metric.
I'm pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have.
Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists.
I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can some of the conversation be about that?
Also the absolute numbers of each groups also matter. On this basis we should expect far few Asian and Black employees just on the basis that there are fewer than whites within the USA [0].
0. This is assuming the employee pool is drawn from the USA population.
1) hiring based on IQ, cutoff at 2 standard deviations above the global mean (mu = 100, sigma = 15, by design), 2 sigma above that makes 130. You get hired if you're the candidate with the highest IQ, if you satisfy the minimum of an IQ of 130
2) 8/20 hispanic, 8/20 white, 1.16/20 black, 2.6/20 asians (and let's just pretned that sums to 100%). Or: 40% hispanic, 40% white, 5.8% black, 13% asian
3) let's assume 1000 candidates for each position.
So each round has 1000 candidates: 400 hispanics, IQ taken from N(90, 15) 400 whites, IQ taken from N(100, 15) 58 black, IQ taken from N(85, 15) 130 asians, IQ taken from N(105, 15)
The numbers: 33.42% Asians, 10.85% Hispanic, 0.54% Black, 55.20% White
Odds of getting hired under those criteria: 0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White
And that's why nobody's going to be happy with expected outcomes. Just imagine the (completely "fair") news headline "Asians 25 TIMES more likely to get hired than blacks in the bay area".
import random
counts = {'h': 0, 'w': 0, 'b': 0, 'a': 0, None: 0}
experiments = 10000
for x in range(experiments):
candidates = []
for h in range(400):
iq = random.normalvariate(90, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'h'))
for w in range(400):
iq = random.normalvariate(100, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'w'))
for b in range(58):
iq = random.normalvariate(85, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'b'))
for a in range(130):
iq = random.normalvariate(105, 15)
candidates.append((iq, 'a'))
# filter iq > 130
candidates = [(iq, typ) for (iq, typ) in candidates if iq > 130]
if candidates:
selected = sorted(candidates, key=lambda (x,y):x)[0][1]
else:
selected = None
counts[selected] += 1
total = sum(counts.values())
print total
for k, v in counts.items():
print "%s %2.2f" % (k, 100.0 * v/total)
print "odds of hire if hispanic : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['h']/experiments / 400)
print "odds of hire if white : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['w']/experiments / 400)
print "odds of hire if black : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['b']/experiments / 58)
print "odds of hire if asian : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['a']/experiments / 130)
print "odds of no hire at all: %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts[None]/experiments)> about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian.
These two comments say the same thing. Mine is standardized.
Your take away from all this is a little strange. The Google numbers say that Asians are 25 times more likely to be hired than blacks. That has happened in real life. No one complains about that. I have read that Google is too Asian though.
People harp about less-talented people not deserving to be there, but that is already the case. From a statistical point of view, Whites are over represented at the expense of Hispanics and Asians with a higher IQ. Real life is messy, but you get the idea.
This battle has been fought already and enough people at Google were convinced that there was a bias in their hiring practices. So, now they are in the process of correcting.
The level of the problem doesn't matter. Working at Google is an elite job. We could go a level lower to Stanford. Asians are under represented at Stanford. We could go down a level to an elite California High School. Asians are still under represented. Blacks and Hispanics are really under represented at this level. It only gets worse for them the lower you go at elite institutions.
I use the general population because that is where the workers are coming from. If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.
That's an interesting conclusion, statistically and as a societal commentary. Assuming for a second we take your conclusion as given, and we look at the legal liability question that someone in alphabet legal or HR has to be thinking about when the make hiring policy decisions: which population should their workforce be representative of: the base population, or the population of qualified applicants?
Edit: >I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.
I don't care I'm here for the legalities and statistics discussions, see my other comments here about judging people based on melanin or Genetics. It's silly where it isn't insulting to reduce a real person based on their inclusion/exclusion to poorly defined groups with little to no impact on actual ability to perform/qualify.
If you assume that the Silicon Valley percent of immigrant workers holds for Google you conclude that 6% of the American Googlers are African Americans, since none of the foreigners can be. About 2.4% [2] of computer science degree recipients in the US are African American.
[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf
[2] https://cra.org/crn/2015/09/expanding-the-pipeline-the-state...
How about we judge people on their merits ?
That's fine if everyone starts from the same base and has the same opportunities which, currently, they most assuredly do not. Let's knock this privileged bullshit on the head until then.
We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity (not outcome) but it's important to realize what is actually reasonable and achievable vs impossible.
And that's why "we should just judge people on their merits" is a bullshit statement.
> We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity
I am 100% behind this if it actually results in equal opportunities (spoiler: it never will.)
Some of these Asian males may have come out of abject poverty in countries like India - worked all their lives for a chance at better living, were that given the "same" opportunity ?
Please stop this entitled thinking. We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.
I know. Which is why "just judge people by their merits" is a nonsense argument.
> We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.
But since there's little chance of the former happening within the next decade or two, we're stuck with the latter.
It is currently impossible for an immigrant to avoid being mis-classified because the EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.
The misclassified immigrants is by far Silicon Valley's largest source of diversity, and the misclassification also makes diversity statistics incorrect for Americans in tech.
[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf
[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...
2. Minorities have faced discrimination the most.
3. Let's discriminate against Whites/Asians to correct #2, even though we accept the truth of #1.
I don't get this thought process at all..."lets fight discrimination with more discrimination!"
I though we left that behind a 100 years or more ago?
Non-white people are discriminated against because society as a whole accuses their parents as a whole of being degenerates.
> If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes?
I'm a german. Ask me about the amount of paying back my entire life has consisted of.
--
You're also veering very off-topic from the fact that op made the claim "more discrimination is being proposed as the solution" to which i replied by disagreeing that it is more, and claim it is the same amount of discrimination, just moved around.
How is this an acceptable solution??
So its more like "discrimination is bad, but only against some groups, if we discriminate against this other group though, its okay"...I still don't how this is "fair" or "just" in any sense
It is however an improvement, unless you think it is fair to discriminate one group massively and one not at all.
> It is not acceptable in the sense of "ok, we can stop now."
That means: It is not supposed to work well in the long run.
The sins of the father should not condemn his children.
Can you fix the existing imbalance without doing something?
What if the affirmative action were only temporary, and was designed to stop once balance is reached -- is it still discrimination?
The solution can't be to do nothing, doing nothing is why we are where we are, doing nothing is why discrimination exists. We need to fix #1 and #2 on your list before we can fix #3.
I would love to hear of an alternative thought process, please please suggest something better than affirmative action that might fix discrimination.
The thing I hate about it is that it involves rejecting candidates on the basis of the colour of their skin.
Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking people are just hired to fill a "diversity quota checklist", which may or may not be true.
For example, say I'm an employer that wants the best performing employees. I know that, for whatever societal/biological/whatever reasons, the black population in the US tends to have worse schooling (maybe the schools have less money, maybe the parents tend to be less wealthy, it doesn't really matter so long as I believe that the black population has some biases against them).
I can deduce just from these biases that the black population will tend to have lower grades, just because of these biases. I may choose to "correct" this bias by preferring equivalent hires that are black, on the assumption that if they have equivalent grades, they had to work harder/be smarter to achieve them, because of the aforementioned biases. I do this entirely from a selfish perspective - I want the best, and if my beliefs about the world are right, this gets me the best!
The same reasoning can theoretically be reversed for e.g. asian populations (maybe their schooling tends to be better, because e.g. wealthier or stricter parents causing more focus on school? Which would imply higher grades without necessarily translating into better workers).
Note: This is a hypothetical case for why an employer might voluntarily and correctly choose to use some form of "affirmative action". It is not necessarily what I think is right or what I think is happening, and is based on a lot of possible assumptions which I have no idea if true. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a case, which doesn't rely on "social justice" or anything other than correct self-interest of the employer.
The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0].
But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man.
An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this.
(No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).
Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business.
You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.
I mean, let's take an extreme case and see if we can at least agree on that. One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity, since if for example everyone is refusing to hire black people because of racial discrimination (think 1930s), then an employer will come along and offer to hire black people for cheaper, and will therefore outcompete other companies, who will have to also hire black people at slightly higher wages, etc.
If we were in such a (1930s-like) world where every employer refuses to hire black people, and we were deciding who to hire, and our normal practice would be only to hire people with 2 years' worth of job experience. We would never hire a black person, because none of them would fit our requirements. In such a world, wouldn't it make sense, from a purely self-interested economic perspective, to change the requirements for black people to compensate for the screwed-up biased world we find ourselves in?
If not, then is the classic economic argument wrong?
I do not see what the logical situation is, because it is overruled completely by the individual's data which you already have right in front of you. It just sounds like applying biases by guessing with group membership instead of looking at the person. Anytime the group membership overrules the individuals' attributes, it's going the wrong way.
Also while I understand the context, some things just don't matter because life is fundamentally unfair and full of chaos. Yes everyone works differently at the same task even with similar results. Maybe they're smarter, or maybe they had a bad year, or got sick, or something else... how can you possibly account for any or all of that in a reasonable sense?
> but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience?
Judge their school experience. Give them responsibility commensurate with their skills and measure continuously to establish the history, then promote or fire.
> One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity
Yes, it does. However capitalism isn't perfect and is still up to legal, political, and generally irrational whims of the people. If you're talking about 1930's then there were actual laws segregating people. If you move forward to WWII, then it was the political climate where it was accepted to not work with others regardless of the money. If anything, I think a common love for profit actually does a lot to remove these barriers once people realize they're all better off generating and spending wealth instead of hating each other over looks and other useless attributes.
Facebook has explicit policies against hiring (non-latino) white and asian men. Management would occasionally decide that they hired too many people of certain races/ethnicities and tell employees that they are only hiring from other groups until the end of the year.
I'm not sure how they determined race/ethnicity. I'm assuming recruiters had to make guesses based on candidates names and facebook photos. It's weird to imagine recruiters trying to estimate candidates' skin color to determine whether to toss their resume in the trash.
Facebook tried to hide their affirmative action programs and chastised any employee who questioned them. But occasionally, someone from recruiting or management would reveal the existence of their racial profiling. So I'm assuming the discrimination went much further than what was occasionally revealed.
Mark Zuckerburg spent last year touring the country to make photo-ops with "real americans". I'm curious what his new friends would have thought of him if they knew about his support for discriminating against them.
In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.
Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.
If similar companies in the same industry and geography have numbers that show a more diverse demographic profile, the EEOC is much more likely to consider a discrimination complaint non-frivolous, which is required to file a lawsuit alleging employer discrimination (as I understand it; not a lawyer).
Companies play this game a) to protect themselves against lawsuits; and b) to potentiate damage to competitors who are not yet explicitly playing this game, and therefore have correspondingly less demographic diversity.
Many companies have failed due in part to internal politics. Also, weren't many of the companies involved in the financial crisis going along with the prevailing political winds, just before everything changed?
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077541/ns/technology_and_science-...
Many companies have been trounced by outsiders unconstrained by their political liabilities.
Let's face it: Ford, Chevy and Chrysler all had sufficient applicants, even as Toyota and Honda were building the processes and company cultures that would dethrone them.
And scare quotes around "inefficiency" because I'm not convinced putting pressure on their productive white/asian male majority employees is actually inefficient for Google.
I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.
No wonder many Asians sigh relief when Clinton failed her presidency, or she surely would have pushed for more.
Making it difficult for families to immigrate together via family visa and reducing work visas does not play well.
The polling methodology is present in the report I posted.
Trump has proposed eliminating many of the major existing categories of legal immigration in the core, family-owned action based system. He's proposed replacing the eliminated categories with a small number of renewable non-immigrant (no path to citizenship or work permission) visas for parents of US citizens.
He's proposed no concrete increase in total permanent allocation in the remaining categories, though he's talked about cancelling the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the quota used there to help clear backlogs elsewhere.
If I had to choose one, I'd prefer more employment visas over family visas and definitely diversity visas.
It appeases his nationalist base because it would not give visas to immigrants in low-paid jobs. Most of those voters were never in contention for the high-paying tech jobs anyway. They have no reason to care too much about them.
Overall immigration will decrease.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/12/t...
Exit polls are different from opinion polls. The surveying techniques are entirely different, and in general exit polls are considered far more accurate than opinion polls -- because you're polling on a concrete question ("who did you vote for a few minutes ago") rather than a less concrete one ("who are you more likely to vote for").
You could just as easily reason that companies who aren't implementing these policies and actually hiring based on individual qualifications and not group identity will out compete their competitors in the free market. They'll surely get bad press for a while but eventually their haters will get tired and move on to the next news cycle. In the mean time the company has hired all of the "undesirable" straight white and Asian males (not intentionally but only because their value in the market has been artificially depressed) and they are easily outpacing the productivity of their rival firms.
As the postmodernists reject possible logical conclusions from their actions and claim organization power they will eventually come face to face with the free capitalist market and the firms they overtake will fail. That is of course if they can't act quickly enough in manifesting their utopian vision of the destruction of capitalism itself.
historically underrepresented = minorities - Asian-Americans + white women
Imagine if a policy were instituted that benefited minorities, then someone proposed that it should be tweaked so that it didn't help Asian-Americans so much and helped white women instead. They'd be laughed out of the room.
Engineering is one of the few fields Asians in the US have been able to do well in. Consider law, where Asian-Americans make 10% of graduates at top-30 schools but only 6% of federal law clerks and 4% of state law clerks; by comparison, the numbers for white Americans are 58% graduating and then 82% and 80% becoming law clerks. [1]
And now policies like this are in vogue--removing one of the last reliable paths to the middle class for immigrants and the children of immigrants.
The phrase "historically underrepresented" should be a red flag. It neglects context and is virtually a euphemism for discrimination against Asian Americans and for (and it feels so bizarre to be typing this) white women.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/07/31/538299755...
Immigrants are misclassified into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs, and they risk discrimination for this.
[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf
[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...
That exactly describes the policies many have adopted, either explicitly or implicitly, and they're often deadly serious about it. It's no secret that both Jews and Asians are generally treated as white/majority/whatever for diversity purposes, despite their respective histories or current demographics.
It turns out that the reason is that screening for basic math competency could be discrimination, because it reduces the chance of hiring for minorities who do less well at math testing. If the quiz were carried out in US, the company would need to prepare some report stating that math is essential to the job, which would be very cumbersome and costly to do scientifically.
I found it ridiculous as the position clearly needed math and I believe basic arithmatic is a valuable skill to ask for majority of the jobs, even for low-skill positions like cashier at Walmart. While eliminating discrimination is a great cause, all the band-aids to make the issue look less bad is shameful. Instead of improving basic education for minority communities (which costs some money now with high return from enhanced labor productivity and less welfare), our governments/society artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.
artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
Eroding meritocracy is ultimately bad for everyone. It's through climbing meritocratic ladders that minority groups throughout history have raised their prospects.
It's as if they think people can't do math based on ethnicity. Those people are the true racists.
But you can still be challenged to prove in court that it's not only not directly racist, but also actually useful and related to the job requirements. Which can get expensive.
Lets say that Google added a test for its engineers, that screened for writing and communication skills. Think, SAT verbal questions or something. And lets say that it just so happens that women are a lot better at SAT verbal questions than men.
Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?
My verbal scores happened to be better than my math scores on both the SAT and the GRE, so I'd be all for this! Someone did a study in the 80's that suggested that programmers had to do more interaction involving details than other jobs. Good verbal abilities are going to help out, in my view.
Racist, discriminatory, or whatever you might think this would be, I cannot imagine being any type of manager in any type of corporation and wanting to hire someone above retail clerk-level who could not pass such a test. I just wouldn't want any company business passing through the judgement and perception of someone that never learned mathematical reasoning beyond single-variable algebra, even if it seems like math abilities are irrelevant to the position. Innumeracy might be less of a big deal than illiteracy, but it is still a fundamental gap.
If it was being pushed on international hires, it could have just been a trivial check against unreliable international standards and qualification reporting or something.
Anyone from Google or YouTube--or people who applied to work at either org in this time frame--have perspectives to add regarding this claim?
I believe my on-site went excellent technically overall, but I had a hard time meshing with a couple of my interviewers and wasn't surprised about my rejection. Nothing strange about that personally.
However, another Google recruiter reached out to me for two other potential positions, said I would be an excellent fit, and said they would set up the interviews for me.
A couple weeks passed and I pinged, no response. A month passed and I pinged, no response. Still haven't had a response from two separate recruiters to this day.
I don't wish to stir the pot -- Anything could have happened, there are some stories about Google recruiters forgetting their candidates, maybe they think I'm just annoying and not a good candidate, but in light of these specific circumstances this is certainly intriguing news.
It never happened to me until I moved to the Bay Area.
Seems like a way to filter for people with low market value.
The end result of all this sort of game playing is not going to be pretty.
That strategy has been shown to work. And people are more angry about the beneficiary being called out about it, than they are that they stole a reserved spot in the first place.
There's a lot of Indian people with Portuguese surnames from around Goa, but I'd think that Spanish would be very uncommon, unless it's their first name.
Racial identity for Hispanics seems to be a complex personal decision.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...
There are probably a lot of boring reasons this could've happened as well. It's probably boring.
I'm a white male and received a Google offer 8 month ago (turned it down to go work at twitch, because I love gaming). So this is not an across the board discrimination against EVERYONE, if that is what you were implying.
I am just 1 person among thousands, though, so I guess you'd have to get info from someone who applied exactly in the spring, to youtube, and had their interview cancelled.
I mean, I've interviewed with google and my application got "lost", when the interview process restarted I identified that I had already been phone screened and the suggestion from the recruiter was: "Oh, ok, I guess we'll follow up in six months".
Step #1 Discriminate against the lower classes through a biased hiring process that favors upper class people over more qualified members of the 99%. A system of "culture" tests, nepotism, and simple favoritism. The "elite" investors fund the "elite" founders which hire "elite" friends.
Step #2 Realize your policy is classist and racist.
Step #3 Disregard the idea of creating a merit-based system.
Step #4 Commit explicit racism in an attempt to balance out your on-going racism.
Step #5 Ignore classism entirely, despite it being the root cause.
EDIT: Also, double down on the ideological fervor until th problem is solved.
Making the hiring decision would be harder because there's not as much information to go on, and it's not too hard to fake a superficial understanding of some technology. Presumably one would rely more heavily on rigorous aptitude testing (i.e. more of those whiteboard exercises everyone seems to hate and probably have bias problems of their own).
Excuse me. Hold on. Aaaaararrrrrarrrrgh!!!11!!! Sorry. Had to get that out of my system.
It is frustrating to read the same misapprehension over and over and over.
Once again: James Damore's memo suggested no such thing.
He said that men and women tend to have different interests; and that engineering jobs at Google, as they are implemented, tend to favor engineers whose personality attributes are those that are typically held by men. He then went on to explain how Google might change the jobs so that it would be more appealing to those whose personality traits typically align with women. There is nothing about how men are more suited.
Something is seriously wrong with society when journalists at WSJ (et. al., et. al., et. al.) do not have enough reading comprehension skills to read, and understand, Damore's memo.
When very many people who read his document come to the same conclusion maybe, just maybe, that's what he actually said.
Because the alternative is that emotions, driven by political identity, overwhelms the thinking circuits of vast numbers of otherwise intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful people.
So that when a thought-leader such as Gawker calls Damore's memo a 'screed', this exact same characterization is broadcast and repeated over and over and over by anyone who, in some sense, identifies with Gawker.
That's terrifying. I would much rather believe that Damore is a misogynist. It's like everyone keeps repeating "Electrolytes: it's what plants crave." only it's "Damore's anti-diversity screed."
Maybe part of the issue has to do with the early education system? I'll admit this idea is not originally mine, but I like it. For some reason is sounds right?
The problem really might be that no one has a good solution. Discrimination exists, no one has a clue what to do about it. These "affirmative-action" type solutions seem more like attempts to do something rather than nothing.
It also brings up an interesting question. Without a genetic profile can you truthfully answer what your race is on a job application? Are there legal implications to answering without concrete knowledge? Without such a test I suppose you can only really call yourself "indeterminate race".
That shows the real motive is not the one stated. This diversity stuff is a power game used by some minorities go get some advantages for themselves. They do not care about the minorities that can achieve things by themselves, with education and hard work.
It's not just in hiring either. Another thing I've noticed is if you fail as a male engineer, you get fired. If you fail as a female engineer, you get reassigned to product management. These positions seem to be reserved for non-males. Women get reassigned, men get shown the door.
It's getting to the point where all of this is so overt and so undeniable. It's all to avoid lawsuits, but what if they're just exposing themselves to more lawsuits on the other end of that pendulum?
I have to think at some point the race- and gender-based meddling these companies do in people's careers will have to stop.
Likewise, I've made friends in the US who are of Mexican descent and look very much like it but don't speak a lick of Spanish.
This has led me to feel not at home in either my country of origin or Canada. Since I'm too white to be from here and don't know enough about Canadian lifestyle to relate to anyone there.
A screenshot from an email says (p28): "Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only continue with L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups"
Is this correct? And isn't it kind of inconsistent?
Whatever sort of decision-making process a recruiter goes through, one could imagine a mathematical formulation of it that matches up to some tolerance. Would such a formulation be illegal, since it must assign a weight to race at some point, even if the recruiter's vague sense of "I kind of want more diverse hires" is legal?
In fact, doesn't disallowing any sort of numbers-based approach increase the likelihood of human bias creeping in, which is a lot of what diversity hiring is trying to correct for in the first place?
Why should a practice only be illegal if you put explicit numbers around it?
So documenting attempts to hire and attract underrepresented people (POC), is a way to avoid discrimination lawsuits and satisfy court judgments for prior bad hiring practices.
Recruiters need to get POC into the pipeline. Then, merit based "scoring" is introduced. There's no guarantee they'll be hired.
Employers are allowed to undertake initiatives to promote diversity hiring, employment lawyers say. But under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes. That means they can’t employ practices like hiring quotas based on race or only hiring one type of minority candidate, attorneys say. Such practices would also run afoul of California laws.
Either state officially, like "we do racial profiling of candidates", if you in fact do, or, well, don't if you don't.
That really only applies to junior personnel, though. I'm not sure what you would do for hiring more experienced people.
This is an opposite to narrowing your audience, because certain people need not apply.
I mean, I think employers should be able to introduce whatever filters they need for the job requirements ("our dance group only accepts ladies with prior dancing experience, older than 18, and no shorter than 6ft".) But I'd like them to be open about these requirements.
These programs are fantastic, and I think a great (albeit no silver bullet) strategy to grant greater OPPORTUNITY to underrepresented groups who may never be exposed to CompSci & Tech industries.
Things that are discussed in this article (if true) are clearly about reaching equal REPRESENTATION more than opportunity – and yeah, that's very disappointing since at the end of the day the only way to do that with immediate gratification is discrimination. (pipeline & societal problems don't get fixed overnight)
Maybe all this effort agains an hypotetical STEM/Tech "shortage" is just to drive down tech employees salaries in the long term.
The goal posts of equal _outcome_ continue to move, from university enrollment, to employment enrollment. And there are some people who want to see it go further. (What societal engineering scheme does this resemble?) With no apparent regard for what it costs.
Do you want to live in a world where you are judged by the color of your skin, your gender, your "ethnicity"?
Or do you think that, maybe, we should judge people by who they are? The substantive characteristics that define an individual. Not a fantasy, not a PR story, but _who an individual is_.
We should all have the decency to look beyond the superficial traits of a person, to not make assumptions about their character, positive or negative, and to truly try to understand one another.
Blatant discrimination of such superficial features has no place in a healthy society, or one that wishes to become one. This arrogance, assumptions, and short-sighted thinking cost more than we can afford.
There is a place for consciously paying attention to race, ethnicity, and gender in that case. (Admittedly, the alleged situation in the headline is too far.)
Speak for yourself. Also, like similarity goes beyond skin color. I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race.
That being said furries are weird.
https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-the-science-actually-says-about...
Is that unusual freedom from unconscious bias reflected in the history of what engineers you have chosen to interview, made offers to, or subsequently promoted? Everyone thinks they're free from bias, until the empirical results show that the majority of them mathematically must be wrong.
I'm a scientist. I believe in the power of observation, action, and assessment (further observation). If I perceive that a problem exists, then I: do my due diligence to determine the extent to which it exists (if at all), determine if and how I should solve it, and carry out that determination. I believe there are plenty of people that could use an adjustment, at least for the matter you describe.
But I'm an even bigger believer in priorities. Of investing energy and time--of our one, limited life--towards the goals that I think matter the most. The health of our planet and power inequality, for two. There are just some people for whom any such "adjustment" would only serve to (at best) distract them from other endeavours, where they may be sorely needed. Good people, who do truly good things. At what point do you stop this (re)education? Can we hope for a complete disassociation from our biological tendency to observe and encode patterns? Do we even want that? At some point, the energy expended on a perceived problem may greatly outweigh the returns you get from the investment. Energy that could have been better spent.
Right now, I see much energy--mostly talk--being devoted, in a "shotgun" approach, to this problem and other social problems. I see it talked about in mass-consumed venues, and I see others parroting talking points. But for me, my colleagues, and my friends, it just isn't a problem. I interact with individuals all over the world and we are able to work together toward common goals. And I think that's what matters most.
> YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.
I'd like to remind people of what Denise Young Smith, who ran HR at Apple, said, before suddenly stepping down after the outrageous repsonse.
> “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.
> “Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
She's gone now, instantly, after working there for 20 years and rising to senior executive VP. What is going on in our industry?
Her crime was not having ideological purity...
What I can say we do need more of, however, is well-engaged, open and honest discussion. Having leading voices speak your mind can be very good, but central figures can be fallible. A better solution would be to have input from humans in the "silent majority", whatever that might be.
If you 'whiten up' your resume, you're more likely to get callbacks. Even if the company indicates that they're pro-diversity or equal-opportunity [1]. Employees with black-sounding names are in general less likely to receive callbacks even when accounting for economic status and skill level [2]. Depending on your name, you will be perceived as being more violent or lesser in status [3]. For minorities, this sort of thing is what they already and commonly experience.
So while we can claim that diversity hiring and so forth has swung too far in the opposite direction, studies and research in general has shown this to not be the case. I'm skeptical of any lawsuits like this brought against Google and while I don't doubt there are instances of terrible hiring managers going too far I imagine people will use this lawsuit as vindication for why they weren't hired.
[1] http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
[3] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/5494/black-sound...
That entire process amplifies both unconscious biases and discrepancies of economic status. People without economic means to network, made worse by prejudices and expectations.
Foot in the door is a huge step, and it's totally okay for companies to push initiatives that allow more minorities to get their foot in the door / exposure to the company and industry. It's not okay for them to push that agenda in assessment to reach better distribution numbers in representation.
Not really. It can still be true that this white/asian discrimination is happening in tech, whereas the listed papers appear to test non-technical job fields. Ideally, racial profiling shouldn't happen anywhere! But be careful in applying those specific findings to the entire field of hiring/jobs.
> try to understand one another
> ...
> arrogance, assumptions, and short-sighted thinking
The point is at the time it seemed completely normal. Sometimes when you get away long enough to clear your mind, you get to see the reality of the social hysteria that you had been consumed by. I experienced this a second time after not watching the news for a few years. Silicon valley, Hollywood, MSM, the 'left' in general, has gone so far bonkers their behavior is virtually comedic at this point. If you get a chance, turn off the news, the movies, twitter, facebook etc, and leave your bubble for a year or two. You'll be amazed at the clarity and freedom of thought that you will discover.
And it's a welcome reminder.
Reminds me of this controversy from not too long ago:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/30393117/ns/us_news-life/t/asian-a...
As Martin Luther King said: > History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors.
It’s just a fact that some groups end up with advantages in any society and some end up disadvantaged, and those that have advantages will use their power and wealth to retain them.
You don’t have to lay blame on people to see that it happens, and how it can be damaging to society if allowed to continue to its natural end— massive political and economic inequality.
So how do you fix it? If you go on a purely quote-unquote merit based system, the people who grew up with educated, wealthy parents, in safe neighborhoods, etc, will naturally fill the educational and recruitment pipelines that train people for high status jobs.
And thus you perpetuate injustice and unfairness from generation to generation, which even if you don’t object to morally, you should at least object to out of self interest, because it will leas to instability and civic unrest.
Racial quotas in hiring are a blunt instrument to be sure, and can be grossly unfair to individuals, particularly the less well off members of advantaged groups who get passed over.
I don’t know if I think they’re a good way to solve the problem over a purely class based approach, but if you look at it and all you see is ‘racism’, then I would suggest that you look a little bit deeper, because it’s a much more complex issue than that.
That being said, it is YouTube. Sure most programmers are white or Asian males but many YouTube viewers are not. It could be in this case that a broader demographic more representative of end users was desirable for actual practical reasons and it was more than about slinging code fast and a PR quota stunt.
outline link seems broken
Swim tournament is severely underrepresented by deep skin colors. Meanwhile track and field is the opposite.
Let's mix all colors everywhere based on population percentile, to achieve diversity, equal rights and fairness.
Or do something like Dr.King hoped, that is, don't judge a person by color.
Nurse Practitioners: 92% women, median $107k
Veterinarians: 83% women, median $88k
All data from BLS.
[1] Computer and mathematical occupations (engineers, programmers, etc):
> 4,804k jobs, $78k median, 25.5% women, 7% projected growth
[2] Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (doctors, nurses, technicians):
> 9,141k jobs, $63k median, 75.0% women, 18% projected growth
If we imagine the ideal scenario of employment across all jobs being 50/50 men/women then we need to add 2.3 million women to tech and 4.5 million men to healthcare. Arguably, the lack of men entering the healthcare field (good-paying jobs, growing need) is at least as important as the lack of women entering technology, but why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home.htm
[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/home.ht...
[3] Percent women info: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
Who is we? HN? If so, the answer to that is obvious.
Your comparison needs more nuance, in my view. If health care had 100 people, 80 nurses (70% of which are women) and 20 doctors (10% of which are women) then you'd have a breakdown like the following:
Women: 56 nurses, 2 doctors
Men: 24 nurses, 18 doctors
If you said the median doctor has a salary of 200K and a nurse 65k, men are paid 5160K and women are paid 4040K. In other words men are paid 56% of the total healthcare salary despite only representing 42% of the workforce. So despite the majority of health care professionals being women, men are still overrepresented in terms of salary, and in a way, influence. This example obviously uses fake numbers, but is the crux of the problem.
Money allocation is more accurate than job allocation imo. Moreover, if you were to total men's salaries/wealth and compare it to women's wealth it would be overwhelming in favor of men. Discussions surrounding specific job types and their gender allocation are irrelevant and a distraction. If men and women represented the same amount of total wealth in the US I think these discussions would be more meaningful, but the disparity in wealth is reflected influence and consequently opportunity. So, yeah, more men will be reflected with higher percentages of the higher income opportunities. This is reflected in the BLS data:
Employees vs. Managers
Nurses vs. Doctors
Teachers vs. School Administrators
Business owners
etc. etc.
The issue has never been that men have more of the jobs. The issue is that men have all of the money. That's why people are talking about tech, and say, not education. The job discussion (particularly within tech) is just a way to attempt to solve a tiny aspect of the problem.
And we still wonder why boys ragequit school at unprecedented levels: There’s only 1 man left for 2 women at university now. And it keeps deflating. Could it be too much effort placed on getting women to succeed, and too much misandry from teachers? and men defending their side of equality systematically being accused of masculinism? No, men can’t be discriminated against, because discrimination only touches women, by definition.
That’s not true.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/22/male-teacher-...
You seem to be assuming that Black people simply have more skill and performance than others. You do this in Basketball but not in other areas.
Currently, hiring males for programming jobs is due to skill and performance, because far more men chose to go through this type of education than women. Huge numbers of men and women don't enjoy straining to grapple with abstract concepts for long stretches of time, sitting hunched over a keyboard, and so on. But, more men do than women, at the moment. So does that mean things are just fine the way they are, as your comment suggests about being Black and skill and performance?
Why not encourage, for instance, more Chinese basketball players to get scholarships, and increase their skill and performance? Why settle for how things are, which currently is not very diverse as anyone can plainly see?
China's basketball team has a lot of great Chinese players.
The NBA is actively recruiting/training for elite talent in China: http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/12/news/companies/china-nba-bas...
Which was: how come drwl accepts the status quo with NBA and not with programmers? Why do they simply assume that some qualities are more prevalent with Blacks but not with males?
I am not taking a position in my comment one way or the other, just pointing out a potential double standard so the reader can make their own conclusions by reconciling them :)
I assume you are clearly on the side of "things are the way they are because that's how biology works". So here is another one, far more politically charged. Are you prepared to endorse this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United...
"There is general agreement in the literature that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes than are whites in the United States. Whether this is the case for less serious crimes is less clear."
This statement is considered racist. However the equivalent statement for men and women is not considered sexist: men commit far more violent crime than women.
Therefore, should these things be used in profiling people suspected of violent crime?
You can go on and on about these things.
Fun fact: professional basketball was once dominated by inner-city Jews
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/11/25/when-jews-d...
This is very similar to how we do admissions for most college education, except now imagine the basketball scout saying "You crushed it out there, but sorry, we have enough %race players this year".
But don't forget to represent people of different body types by weight and height as well.
As a very short, fat, and white dude who can't jump...but has a decent jumper, I still want my shot at Lebron James in the NBA.
False equivalency.
How do we encourage short people to grow taller? Or kids to grow up into a tall adult?
Coming to tech, it's possible to encourage people to work in STEM who otherwise may feel unwelcome due to various issues, including gender, age, race, workplace attitudes, glass ceilings etc. That includes trying to have role models that kids may want to emulate.
Asians and South Asians are vastly underrepresented in the Music, Entertainment, and Acting industries and Asian and South Asian women are vastly underrepresented in Fashion, Modeling, etc, industries. Sometimes freedom of choice results in outcomes that we shouldn't try to force but it's not white and black. In STEM, gender disparity results in many problems for females, in the other industries I mentioned it's significantly due to connections, glass ceiling, a certain type of "boys club" but also due to choice. I agree with role models, and removing barriers, but I highly highly disagree with excluding individuals based on their race. That is racist and I will oppose that to the core of my being
Yes, its very much a natural advantage to all things being equal, be tall to play basketball. Source: Am tall guy.
I personally try not to hold it against my fellow white male entrepreneurs from prestigious schools and affluent backgrounds that I know we had an easier time raising capital and hiring people because of our race, gender, and social connections.
In both cases I imagine there are capable young non-black men who don't pursue basketball because its a "black sport" and there are technically minded young black women who don't pursue software because its a "nerdy white man industry". Regardless of if the NBA is actually biased, or if tech companies are actually sexist, what matters is the average normative cultural perception of that industry or discipline. If you are told your whole life by opinionated outsiders that only white men can program of course you are going to have a hard time finding the willpower to fight that presumption as a young uninformed anything.
rather than any of these organizations being overtly discriminatory, can we acknowledge certain groups might just be self-selecting into professions as a part of culture identity and work-life balance or risk/reward preferences. and that's okay!
The idea that male programmers are like professional athletes who are so far superior to women that they deserve a similar level of elevated status and disproportional representation is repugnant and indicative of the problem that needs to be solved.
This is a serious problem, leading to unnecessary deaths of black children. Here's an article by the founder of an organization trying to address this called "Black Kids Swim" [2].
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11172054
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-stereotype-is-k...
The doublespeak is inescapable. They claim to stand against racism and sexism, but will not hesitate to discriminate based on race or sex to meet some kind of nonsensical demographic parity targets which are absolutely not reflective of the actual qualifications of applicant pools.
Meanwhile, with the other hand, they claim that the existing industry leaders are in the wrong for supposedly doing just that, when merely conflating equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. How the hell do you seriously expect to achieve something like gender parity, for example, through hiring, in a competitive industry when incoming male graduates outnumber female graduates 10 to 1?
How can people be so disconnected from reality and blame biased hiring practices?
But it is not abhorrent to treat black people like shit and disclude them from many roles for many years?
And it isn't fair to presume that we benefited from some kind of historic opression based on the color of our skin either - some of us are immigrants, or first or second generation descendants, having faced persecution of our own, pre and post immigration.
I hope Google gets raked over the coals for this though. Not only are they hurting these men (and their families -- if they have them) but they're also hurting women. What man wants to be an "ally" to the women in tech movement when that movement's goal is to put them out of work? This is just going to create more hostility between people who should be working together, not at war with each other.
The US is 76.9% of the US "white alone" according to its Census data. The corresponding figure for California is 72.7%.
It's interesting that YouTube (allegedly) made the decision to freeze hires of a racial group already underrepresented and that the text of the article never touched upon the point. The ethnic group truly overrepresented in US tech companies is Asians.
It's an unfortunate trend of treating people as members of groups rather than individuals to begin with, but it's doubly unfortunate that so many Americans are struggling even to speak openly about the what the current numbers are.
Anyway, going by https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanmateocountyc...
San Mateo County is:
40% white alone
29% Asian alone
From that data alone, whites could actually be more over-represented than Asians. (I stress could because you need per-site info to conclude anything)
Regardless, I don't see evidence that whites are underrepresented.
Which group of people does the "76.9% of US population - White alone" statistic refer to?
The San Mateo numbers in the link you shared say:
24.8% Hispanic or Latino
39.8% White alone, not Hispanic
61.4% White alone
This would be clearer if race were one category and "household language" were a completely separate one. :/
This is defined in the footing - hispanic is not a race
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217#qf...
> Does this mean that the vast majority of Hispanics in the county are also in the "white alone" category?
Yes
> San Mateo County is small enough to be distorted by the effects of the very kind of discriminatory hiring the article is about.
Possible, but you'd need more evidence to make this claim. SF and Santa Clara have similar demographics; that's nearly 4M people across these 3 counties.