Alphabet shareholders reject diversity proposal backed by employees
reuters.com
reuters.com
In particular, though, the only over-represented group is asians: 35% vs 5%.
Also keep in mind that in official US usage that term basically means "someone from a Spanish cultural background OR a Latin American country". Although some agencies specifically exclude countries from Latin America without a Spanish or Portuguese culture.
So a white guy whose grandparents immigrated from Spain counts (the grandparents spoke Spanish), and a Quechua from Bolivia who recently immigrated and only speaks Runasimi counts (Bolivia has a Spanish culture), and a black guy from Guyana might count. The OMB says no (Guyana was colonised by the British), but the Census says yes (it's in South America, so close enough).
The system makes very little sense.
These groups are generally forgotten about or elided when talking about how Google or US tech has a diversity problem - there is just a diversity problem with blacks, latinos, and women, and my hunch is that it has nothing to do with tech being racist or sexist and has everything to do with either larger structural issues in the US, or people choosing through free will to not enter the field.
As a hunch, yes I used to be of that opinion as well. I thought it was nonsense. Sorry that I don't have the data handy to back it up, but seriously (not being snide) if you care enough to matter you can research it.
You either have to go one step further and break that down by available tech talent to be recruited, with the premise being that you can't magically manifest a certain % of white/hispanic/black/asian tech employees if they're not available locally (eg if the population is 12% hispanic, but only 5% of the tech employees available locally are hispanic; that presents a very difficult recruiting scenario).
Or the argument is that a company like Google can afford to recruit nationally and relocate whatever demographics they see fit to the bay area, such that local restrictions do not apply as much to them. If the local bay area pool of tech talent is 3% black, and the national pool is 6% black, Google can afford to relocate black employees from around the US to bolster their diversity efforts locally if that's their aim.
Though Asians are only 5% of US, they are maybe 1/3 of Tech degrees, which is consistent with Google hiring.
Similarly for women.
Very roughly, Google seems to be selecting in a fairly unbiased fashion from the candidate pool.
Where the issue gets more sticky is at upper levels of management, which are fairly male dominated.
There are six officially recognised racial categories: White, African American, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander.
There are two official ethnicities: Hispanic and Latino Americans, and Not Hispanic and Latino. (Note: Hispanic is actually a cultural group, not an ethnicity, and in the real world the terms hispanic and latino are orthogonal. Try not to think about it too hard)
Most hispanics and latinos are officially categorised as white. That means that whenever you see the term "white" you'll need to do some further digging to see if that means the official "white term (including most hispanics), or if it's a short hand for "white, non-hispanic and latino". The 77% you cite as "white" includes latinos; the number you probably are looking for is 61%. The 56% in google's numbers seems to exclude latino's, so the comparison is probably 56% to 61%. (Probably!)
Also note that if your goal is equity for all groups, it doesn't make much sense to average minorities together. The Hispanic and latino group (including both whites and non-whites) makes up 18% of the US population, but the apparent matching group at Google makes up 4% of their employee base. Conversely, Asians make up about 5% of the US population, but apparently around 35% of Google's employee base using the closest equivalent measure. Clearly Google shouldn't get a pass for discriminating against hispanics (if that is indeed what they're doing) purely because they discriminate in favour of Asians (if that is indeed what they're doing).
> Doesn't that mean that racial minorities are actually overrepresented at Google?
Some (well, one) are. Others are not. Non-hispanic white's are broadly in line with the major population share.
With regard to Asian overrepresentation and Latino/Hispanic underrepresentation, I think there's a really good chance that how those respective immigrant groups came to be in the United States probably has a large role to play in this disparity. East and South Asian immigrants have to cross an ocean to get here, whereas most Latino/Hispanic immigrants could cross a land border (on foot in many cases!). The disparity in wealth required to pursue these alternate immigration paths probably significantly skews the class mixture of these groups and, thus, their representation in white collar professions.
It’s really time other geographical places, in other countries, become good competitors.
Yes they are primarily a search engine, but they are heavily diversified, not to mention one company being responsible for basically the entire consumer internet is insane.
Arguably Apple not focusing on women's health for the longest time could have also been mitigated by more female product people as well.
Taking the example to the logical extreme I doubt the bug would have hit production if the entire development team was dark-skinned.
"Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter" - HBR [1]
"Diversity and Work Group Performance" - Stanford [2]
"New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work" - Forbes [3]
There's a drumbeat of this stuff, both old and new, that comes out constantly.
[1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-resea...
I’m certain that there is a legitimate reason for the effect, but people are right to be skepical without any exploration of the cause. Are diverse teams more likely to disagree? Do they exhibit complementary recall of facts? Different modes of creativity?
I think a more complete explanation of causality would result in a much more concerted effort to increase diversity and a lot less resistance. As it is, it feels like the diversity ‘lobby’ is actually trying to create controversy instead of proving value.
When these people push for diversity they often mean "have every skin tone represented in your team photos". While this feels nice and would certainly repel any accusations of not being "diverse enough" it is the wrong kind of diversity. Now here is my "common sense" argument:
What people actually want is a diversity of opinions. This you can imagine having a positive effect on performance as each member of a team would have a slightly different take on things that may allow the group to discover a better solution. This would explain why the diversity of skin tone type approach somewhat works, as different races usually have different experiences, which usually means more diversity of thought when compared to a completely homogeneous group.
The obvious drawback to diversity of thought is that it's harder to quantify and optimize for. Anyone can look at a team photo and tell if a race is over/underrepresented because we have evolved incredibly advanced pattern recognition abilities. You can't easily tell what someone's opinions are without talking to them for a little while. Management already has trouble hiring qualified candidates since they don't know what qualified candidates look like, so adding diverse thinking to the list of criteria just exacerbates the hiring problem. Plus if you actually could select thought diverse candidates you run the risk of not including all races, opening yourself up to accusations of bias that can be devastating in today's politically charged climate.
Social science can't accurately model single humans well, let alone groups of humans as they attempt to solve problems. Even my analysis that we really ought to be concerned with diversity of thought is based on intuition rather than experimentation. It's a hard problem domain, and the solutions may not be intuitive.
The reason that social science can't model (aka overfit) many phenomena, is that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are involved.
Do some reading. Educate yourself. You may change your vantage.
Right, they currently can't accurately model the phenomena and thus their models have little to no predictive power. We are in agreement then. Also, it seems to me that social sciences tend to produce models that are underfit rather than overfit.
So why then do we accept conclusions from scientists who have weak models with little predictive power? This is what my comment above was talking about.
>This is pure, uneducated rubbish.
It's definitely not uneducated and I don't think it's entirely rubbish either.
More importantly, they don't get into causality. Most diversity studies show correlation.
The problem is - as companies get very big and stable, they can start to worry about diversity, and have such hiring programs.
Early on, nobody has time to worry about anything but just getting the best people they can at the time, possibly in a panic.
So, looking for diversity is often a case of sampling the winners.
I'm not so cynical about diversity, but I am about the voices promoting it, who are often heavily biased.
Diversity is polarizing topic, and like with all such things ... it's hard to get good data points.
This one is funny/sad: https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
More history: https://priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-w...
Not a product, but musicians and gender: https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
We build to our biases, and groups of people integrate their own collective bias into all their decisions. It would be difficult to argue otherwise, I think.
[1] http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-in...
I'm not criticizing the goal of increasing diversity. I think it's important to provide the same opportunities to people regardless of background, but we should judge policies by their effectiveness rather than their intentions.
Whichever side is right is largely irrelevant to the point I was making, which is that even if you care about diversity, there aren't really effective ways to increase it besides affirmative action style policies. I might be wrong about this, but I have not seen evidence of other diversity policies that are actually effective.
I think it depends on how broadly you define "affirmative action style policies", i.e. if you say that encompasses anything that helps one group more than others, then sure, but if your comment is more about quotas/preferential selection I think there are plenty of policies that exist.
Assuming you do mean the latter, some examples I have seen implemented include: more flexible work environments, interview coaching for diverse candidates, outreach to diverse groups to ensure that they actually apply at the rates that they exist in the pipeline.
I have seen those examples too, but I don't believe they are very effective in practice.
The solution to a constrained maximization is never greater than the unconstrained solution. So how does adding a diversity constraint make it easier to hire?
I often wonder about the supposed rigor of the hiring process.
Google is being eaten from the inside. Will not last.
It's that way for the exact same reason Microsoft being a mess to varying degrees for 10-15 years didn't wreck the company because the Windows + Office duopoly perpetually printed vast profit. Even when they screwed up the products at times.
The tolerance level of insanity, chaos, idiocy, whatever, that can occur within Google before it's threatening to their existence, is far beyond where they're at now. The search engine has no meaningful competitive threats currently, they can coast for at least a decade on the search product as it is now.
Financially, they have net tangible assets that make them look more like Berkshire Hathaway than a tech company. Their net tangible assets are greater than Apple's, because they're basically debt free ($140b in net tangibles, $102b in cash). Microsoft's net tangibles are $28b by comparison. With Google's balance sheet and the search monopoly, they can spin in circles juggling mistake after mistake, with a rotting culture, for many years and have nothing to seriously worry about.
For the former you just need to be big, heavy and slow so the chaotic movements decay and extinguish each other. And Google is, as you noticed, very well suited for that.
The latter, however, requires active counter-actions IMHO. Being big and slow is not going to protect you from the "fifth column". It's not like Google has 0 competition - Baidu, Yandex, even Bing, all can easily take its place in search when/if an opportunity opens.
The headline should read "Alphabet management votes down employee backed diversity proposal".
Imagine if the proposal were put to company-wide referendum and quashed?
I suggest that a policy representing the 'balance of views' would look something rather different than something proposed by a group of highly motivated 'slightly activist' employees.
Alphabet insiders (read: Brin, Page and Schmidt, along with other executives) control the vote.
How you set those two variable sets is arbitrary and subjective depending on your own prejudices and diversity preferences.
E.g. Distribution of genders is probably the easiest one as it’s binary (almost) and even throughout all cohorts. But choosing the ratio to target is subjective.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's moral or immoral, just that seeking "increased diversity" is factually seeking to affect an outcome, not an input/opportunity.
will watch this one with interest.
Years ago, when Google was young, their recruiters contacted me. Their pitch: We only hire the best of the best. We’re focused on top students, from the top schools. The interviews are hard, and most people fail.
Today, it seems Google’s pitch is: Okay, we need to top-off this demographic bucket, and you’re in that bucket. Will you help us even-out this demographic pie chart?