Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If the purpose is to gain greater perspective and awareness through less homogeneous employees, then it would be more effective to hire according to heterogeneous answers to questions about perspective and awareness, rather than by less reliable proxies like gender and ethnicity.
IMO if your organization has a "genuine diversity of intellectual approach" that is truly genuine, then you will soon no longer have an organization — you will have two different organizations, each ideologically homogenous but definitely "genuinely different in intellectual approach" from one another.
My question is this: what defines an organization other than a shared intellectual approach? Borders? Dare I say... Walls?
I'm just saying that a "shared intellectual approach" is literally the definition of an organization to me, unless you're gonna say that walls/borders/exclusion are what defines an organization. So it makes no sense to insist on NOT sharing an intellectual approach because in that instance you'd quickly have two separate organizations.
What I'm really asking for tho is a single example of "genuine intellectual diversity" being beneficial as opposed to merely being divisive and demoralizing. Can you provide an example?
As for an example: I'm currently developing a fairly large open-source software package for numerical analysis. I do the majority of the coding but every few weeks I discuss the latest developments with a co-worker and my supervisor. They often disagree with the way I have done certain things (intellectual diversity) but after (sometimes lengthy but productive) discussion we almost always end up with greatly improved software design that we are all happy with. Sometimes they compromise or come round to my way of thinking, sometimes its the other way around.
1.) a shared "purpose" to me is literally the same as a "Shared intellectual approach" -- purpose is a synonym of what I was trying to say.
2.) I strongly disagree that "disagreeing with the way you do certain things within the frames/boundaries of pre-agreed purposes and projects" is what anyone is trying to say when they talk about "intellectual diversity." If your definition of intellectual diversity (just inferring here so lmk if I'm wrong) is "disagreeing about how a job should be done," then literally every company on Earth is diverse by that metric, so its not a particularly useful metric IMO.
3.) IMO when people refer to "intellectual diversity" they are referring to having strongly held and opposing viewpoints about issues that are much larger than "how this job should be done." The viewpoints that qualify as "intellectually diverse" in all discussions of the concept I've read are referring to politics and/or religion.
I respect that you have an effective working process with diverse and strong viewpoints about software, but I think that strongly opposing viewpoints about software do not meet the commonly-held criteria for "intellectual diversity." Strongly-held opposing viewpoints about religion and politics do.
Compared to politics and religion, It's easy and fun for you and your coworkers to strongly disagree about software development. When you guys strongly disagree about that topic, the final outcome (as you just described) is positive: Everyone learns new things and your product gets better.
But it's extremely difficult and potentially way less fun for you and your co-workers to strongly disagree about politics and/or religion while still having a positive final outcome for all involved.
My question is this: do you know anyone who can? Because if anyone can provide me with a link to an article/blog post about "intellectual diversity" as it seems to be defined in common parlance -- I.e. "group members holding strongly opposing viewpoints about politics and/or religion" -- let me know because I'd be fascinated to read about it.
My curiousity is this: I wonder if intellectually diverse organizations share characteristics and if there was a way to map all organizations and find out which ones are "intellectually diverse" and what commonalities they share. Some part of me wonders if CrossFit and yoga would be the most intellectually diverse but the other part thinks maybe they're self-selecting for some tribal/religious/political qualities that I'm not even aware of. Would be cool to find out :)
------- > The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.
Why is that an upside? It seems utterly racist to me. Let’s try to substitute “white” with, say, Asian.
“The upside to this is that Asian people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”
Or how about the color black?
“The upside to this is that black people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”
I wonder how that would go down? -------
I echo this sentiment completely. Why is anti-white racism being encouraged?
I am all for diversity, but this sentence upsets me. Decreasing one population in the place should not be the goal.
This line if thing seems liable to give credence to the notion that "diversity" is a dog whistle for achieving an underrepresentation of undesirable groups (men, Whites, and increasingly Asians).
The sex based targeting of childrens toys would be a good place to start , but you won't see results for 20 years.
I don't know. The pink bicycles vs non-pink bicycles thing applies to adults too. See 'pink tax'.
Having problems hiring black tech workers? It's the college's fault.
Having problems graduating black students with BSs in STEM? It's the high school's fault.
Having problems graduating black students from high school? Really it's the fault of the community or family that raised them.
Having problems fixing the community's culture? Really it's the fault of poverty.
Having problems fixing poverty? Really it's the fact that no good jobs will hire us.
This isn't a pipe that just spits kids out when they're about to be hired, every single person in that pipeline is desperate to pretend that it's someone further down the line's problem, except once you go far enough down the pipe you end up back where you started. It's not a linear pipe spitting individual kids out that we just can't do anything about. It's a cycle and wherever it is that we exist in that cycle, be it elementary education or hiring Senior Devs at a FAANG, we have a responsibility to step in and do something about it. Enough passing the buck.
I think sure, do what you can at an individual level if you want but that’s so much less important. You’re not gonna change the household conversations happening in millions of houses, and telegraphing what YOU are doing for your daughters in Silicon Valley is more narcissistic than political.
Even the hard path (someone going into it starting at college) takes 4+ years.
All FAANG is doing right now is concentrating a limited supply, making diversity worse in the rest of the industry. They aren’t magically creating new supply via aggressive hiring practices.
It seems like they always end up with egg on their face. And they have no obligation to be transparent as private (or public) entities.
But now they all have to have chief diversity officers and diversity councils and PR/recruiting teams for diversity - all of which cost money and hasn't seemed to move the needle very much.
And which as another poster pointed out, doesn't fundamentally change the underlying issue about who applies to these jobs, who goes to school for computer science, etc.
PR.
Because if you don't, it looks even worse. So my guess is publicity and PR.
I know it's a shocking concept, but people actually care. "Big corporations" aren't some amorphous number crunching machine. They're staffed by people, and those people have concerns, and priorities, and principles. When you specifically hire for people who share those principles, and announce them loudly as part of your culture, people actually can, and do, get upset, and demand change when you don't act accordingly — and change can and does happen.
If only 10% (made up number) of women are interested in software development, and 95% of that 10% are working in software, that's good! Looking at all women and saying only 9.5% of women are working in software misrepresents all the progress has been made.
[1] Why these numbers would be different for each class of people is a whole different conversation involving nature/nurture/culture/etc.
"In 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 18 percent"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
"The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61.3% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 76.9%"
Maybe they can solve it the same way, by hiring based on "full personality assessments".
I recently saw a new "the more you know ad" on YouTubeTV and was really impressed with the message. Instead of playing identity politics and blaming "patriarchal white men" it encouraged women to join the engineering and science movement and become more active in technology. That's the message we should be sending.
I grew up in what is today Trump Country. My high school prepared me to work in a factory. Then the factory moved to China, and now the only jobs left in the area are retail and healthcare. I managed to move out, but the vast majority of people I went to high school with are stuck.
Why is economic background not a class we care about too? Shouldn't economic mobility be a part of social justice as well?
It is, but those people are called socialists and/or communists. If you look, you'd find groups that try to synthesize a unified picture of our common struggles.
I feel like there's little conversation about it because it's an even harder problem to tackle and a less obvious one to see. I will say though, to a large extent economic class and race still remain tied in the US.
I think this is an overgeneralization. I don't doubt this is mostly the case but I don't think it's conclusive that it is always the case, especially when you look into the activism within and by wealthier classes and corporations.
> to premise the question with the idea that they don't care means at best, OP doesn't know what they're talking about
The way I understood the comment is in reference to Facebook/tech, in which case it's very true: Facebook seems to survey gender and race but there's no mention in their diversity efforts about social/economic background. For all we know, all those great paying jobs could be going to well-off people. 4.9% hispanics of 25000 employees is 1,225 people: Are they first-generation college students born in the US to immigrant parents, middle-class graduates from Mexico's engineering schools or well-off kids from Latin America whose parents could afford them a Harvard education? For the record I know people who would fall under each of these three buckets and I think the idea of classifying them under the same category in diversity efforts is very short-sighted.
> at worst, OP is using class issues in bad faith to bludgeon away any attempts at talking about the former.
I don't know in what faith OP posted, but from his last sentence I gather he is vouching to include economic status as part of "social justice as well", not instead-of.
So, race and sex are directly tied to economic mobility, which is why they are the important factors that are being measured.
I also think that people who champion social justice are also very much in favor of investment in education and public resources like public libraries to help with economic mobility. So I don't think that isn't a focus on economic mobility, it's more that we expect the federal and local governments to flex their muscle to ease problems with social mobility while companies themselves are supposed to make themselves more welcome to diverse candidates.
The problem we want to eliminate is sexism and racism. Counting the number of times people are actually affected by a negative -ism is difficult. We don't know what people are thinking unless they tell us. Bigots have an incentive to lie about their reasons and non-bigots can be subject to unconscious biases.
On the other hand categorizing people by race/gender is easy. There is always some wiggle room, but there is a lot less ambiguity when answering "is this employee a black woman" compared to "was this employee hired because she is black".
Once you have a set of (mostly) reliable statistics then you can start looking at trends over time, patterns by industry, etc. These numbers can't tell you anything about racism/sexism on their own, but they can help show the general direction the population studied is going and if there are any outliers who might deserve more attention.
No mention is made of the fraction of Asians, because their over-representation would undermine the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities. This intellectual dishonesty irks me.
There are industries such as education where the vast majority of workers are female. If men and women are in the workforce at about even levels, there must be some industries where men predominate.
Yes, and they've tended to be the lower-paid professions. Nurses instead of doctors, teachers instead of principals, etc.
This argument is a little like citing "black people have water fountains, too" to defend the segregated South. It misses the point.
If women choose their profession based on factors other than salary, it is a little strange to analogize them to black people under segregation. Just because someone has different values doesn't mean that they have false consciousness or are acting under duress.
You made up that narrative. The narrative presented in the article is
> Williams noted that, "diversity is critical to our success as a company"
Achieving "diversity" is not the same as mirroring the demographics of a company's home country and "over-representation" is not directly related to lack of diversity.
So they're actually MORE diverse than the country racially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
"The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61.3% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 76.9%"
Example: Women are GENERALLY more petite, they struggle carrying firefighter gear (45-75lbs depending on your load out) and aren't interested or can't pass the necessary requirements to ensure their safety, they get fewer female applicants and thus more men are firefighters type of thing.
I imagine there are still fewer qualified female applicants than male. I imagine there are far fewer female applicants for entry-level construction jobs than male applicants too, doesn't mean a construction company is dropping the ball or being discriminatory by default.
This reasoning is part of the problem. It's not rigorously inspected or accepted, because it's circular logic that can be self proving given one dominant party enforcing such a reasoning structure as 'the rules'.
Please don't treat me like an idiot because ambiguity is convenient.
There's the expectation that people will just fill in the gaps because that's how we think when we code large projects. But here, I must say no. I will not fill in these gaps for you. I work hard to be good at what I do and if it continues to be insisted that sex differences serve as a concrete foundation for technical, mathematical skill, that simply isn't true. My life is proof enough to me. It may not be proof to you, but that's what I get to live with, because of lazy thought patterns like this. The near constant need to prove myself to people who are privileged enough to not have to go to such extremes.
Expectations and roles, yes, I've heard all these arguments before. How does stuff like that change? Surely, you must be aware that repeating the same points will only serve to reinforce such a perspective?
Let me fill in the gaps for you. I never once said or implied that women are inferior in any way and unable to do what men do in software. Read my comment again. I'm saying that women THEMSELVES do not prefer to do the work, regardless of ability, due to societal conditioning. I'm not talking about all women either, just on average. And I'm talking about gender here, not sex. You seem to have some old ideas about gender. I would suspect that a trans individual might have some of the same biases and cis-women, as many trans-women pick up a lot of the social and cultural behaviors and preferences of cis-women, so hopefully that makes it clear to you that I'm not talking about fundamental physical differences.
Also, let me make clear that I agree with the goal of a blended, equal workplace. I'm only discussing the effectiveness about how and where we go about doing it, not whether we should do it at all. Don't misplace your anger toward me.
---
In 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 18 percent.
As of July 2016, White Americans are the racial majority with the White population being 76.9% of the country.
Statistically, an applicant with a computer science degree is likely to be a white male so logically a company that employees mostly CS types would be heavy on white males and white on women and other races.
---
I am tired of playing nice and assuming everyone has good intentions when this sexist passive BS crops up. This is not a good argument. 'Who applies' is a perspective offered very clearly from only one side of the application pool - and it's severely limited because the only people that get listened to about the problem are the ones that retain authority over the business dynamic.
It is incomplete information. I don't know how to make this more clear or obvious, but if people who value reason and logic and hard facts so intimately want to shoot themselves in the foot, well, cest la vie
Everything. If people aren't applying to the jobs, they can't be hired.
Then of course even if the minority/gender a company is lacking on applies for a job, if they aren't the most qualified candidate a company shouldn't be expected to hire them.
>Are you actually suggesting women have some physical attribute that makes them less applicable for programming, mathematics, or computer science jobs?
No, clean your display off, I said "Example: Women are GENERALLY more petite, they struggle carrying firefighter gear".
It's an example, an analogy. Firefighters often have the exact same diversity issues, fact is more Caucasian men apply than other races and genders. In the case of a firefighter a man selected at random is more likely to be more physically cable to do the job than a woman, with firefighting strength comes first then firefighting theory.
With computer sciences, you have a far larger pool of men to draw on than women. n 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 18 percent (https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/st...).
That means out of a pool of applicants, roughly 1 out of every 5 (with a degree in the field) will be female. Add to that the fact that white Americans make up the racial majority of the country and what happens? Your pool of applicants is far more likely to be male and white than female and any other race.
Someone with a computer science degree in the U.S. is statistically likely to be a white male. That's not racism, that's not sexism, that's reality.
The world changes, I'm assuming you know that. That's reality too.
I am not in CS, I do not know what companies look for in CS. I however do not have a college degree and this week alone have been rejected for 3 jobs I applied to, despite having 12 years of experience doing 1, because "there is a minimum requirement of a Bachelor's".
In my experience, outside of early-stage startups, companies want a degree not hobbyist experience. In the case of the job in my field where I have more years of experience than the company has in existence, they wanted a degree over experience.
"Ryan! I wanted to extend a virtual wave and thank you for your interest in joining our team. You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the Customs Brokerage role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience". I literally have over 12 years of experience doing the exact job, at a company that is 105 years old vs the company that is 5 years old, and I was rejected before even getting an interview because I lacked a 4-year degree (in any field).
I personally don't think I'd do well walking into an interview for a startup, even though that's something I might have wanted to do when I was younger. We all have regrets and struggles we live with and have to work with, no matter how many pieces of paper are attached to us.
There's literally less qualified women than there are men. Fact. Period. End of story.
That means fewer applicants.
That means fewer hires.
Should Facebook go hire unqualified people then spend considerable amounts of times training them like some military occupational training where you're i class all day every day getting paid for 3-18 months while you learn what is necessary to do the job?
They could do that, you'd have to sign a contract though guaranteeing so many years of service or repay the money if you self-terminate.
When 20% of the people pursing the degrees are women, you can't expect 50% of the new-hires to be female.
The article's figures come in the form of a metric of change, a delta value indicating the passage of time. That is the foundation to reason and measure with. That is where there is complaint and room for improvement because that measurement is a useful measurement to the whole system as a dynamic system.
Erm. I linked where the figures came from. There are considerably more white people in the U.S. than any other race, fact. Numbers of women majoring in CS degrees has fallen considerably, fact.
Less than 20% of CS degrees are being pursued by women per the source I cited. Women would be a minority at anything less than 50%.
You can't expect 20% of the degree holders to fill 50% of the jobs.
From the linked article:
'Unless companies fire everyone and start over, we’re not going to see drastic improvements anytime soon.'
People who are saying 'there is a problem' are well aware this isn't something you can just measure today and fix with just the information that exists as it exists presently.
Why do I care? Because, I was once a little girl reading hacker stuff on the internet. It is part of the problem. If you can't admit to the subtext implied by your original post, or even get a sense that maybe it's not the right kind of analogy to use, I don't have anything left to say.
I'd be lying if I have to say I'm happy to infer that your point here is to discredit and silence the perspective of the article, but that's how all of this is coming across. Also a point from the article:
'That’s because homogenous cultures lead to limited perspectives and potential lack of awareness of things that may be more obvious to diverse groups of people.'
But perhaps all of this is pointless.
If it boils down to who applies, then we need to make sure that we're reaching out to communities that are not well represented in our field. It's not about waiting for them to come to us.
I don’t believe that people in tech aren’t represented because of some biological difference. That might not be what the commenter was implying, but that’s how I read it.
If there are issues earlier in the pipeline then we can't just focus on the end of it at the "who's applying" stage.
If we want more representation, are women more represented in comp sci programs? Are they going into related engineering fields? Do they go to meet up groups or construct new ones if they don't want to go to existing ones?
18% of CS majors are women. 76.9% of the U.S. is white. Statistically someone in the work force with a CS degree is a white male.
That absolutely applies in the context of a tech company, unless you want them to hire unqualified applicants and spend months or years training them before they return profit.
The problem isn't with who a company is hiring, the problem is women aren't seeking out the training and non-Whites are a literal minority of the population.
Until more women pursue degrees/training in the field, and everyone starts partnering off with someone of a different race to make melting-pot babies, then it's just going to be this way purely due to statistics.
This article isn't written professionally.