The article cites data from the government on percentages of black, hispanic, and women in tech in Silicon Valley vs those same populations in tech nationwide. You would expect the percentages to be statistically equal.
Serious question: why? Why would you expect that? I’m seriously interested by a response to that, that would give way more weight to this affirmation.
In reality, the tech-tech participation comparison between SV and the US is closer than the article makes it seem. Look at the chart "INDUSTRY PARTICIPATION BY GENDER SEX AND RACE GROUP - HIGH TECH VS. ALL PRIVATE INDUSTRIES" in the EEOC report [1], and then compare to the numbers listed on the graphs for SV.
The proper corresponding stats for representation in tech between SV and US would be:
Black: 2.6% SV vs. 7.4% US
Hispanic: 6.4% SV vs. 8.0% US
Women: 32.3% SV vs. 35.7% US
So one could still point to the differences above for looking at the group disparities, but the article's statistics are comparing apples to oranges.
Not to mention location demographics and other factors attribute to differences between SV as a data point vs. the aggregate data for the US.
The pick-and-choose implementation of statistics is looking through a narrow lens.
PS: E.g. google tells me that the Santa Clara population is 2.5% black, while it's 12.6% nationwide (2010 census). The article now says nationwide the tech industry is 14.5% black; 14.5 / 12.6 = 1.15, 2.5 * 1.15 = 2.9; So adjusted for demographics I'd expect the SV number to be 2.9% black employees in tech after adjusting for demographics of the area, compared to the 2.6% the article states.
However, it might be that the low black population in that area is highly correlated to the hiring practices of the tech companies in that area, or it may not be.
Is this the result of institutional racism? I’d say so, but it also can be a cause or underrepresentation in higher skilled employment, even if the employers are not biased in their selection processes.
What he said was "the top x% of the tech population". The tech distribution as a whole is already skewed. If talent was independent of race, you'd expect an equally skewed distribution at whatever talent threshold you set. That's how conditional independence works. His statement is implying that is not true, and that if you set the talent threshold high, you get a different racial distribution. That's a very important distinction, if that is indeed what he's saying.
I really think this is what he's saying, because he's explicitly stating that large companies that recruit nationwide should be have a population equal to the skewed nationwide tech population, because they higher only "the top x% of the tech population". Not confounding geographic reasons (i.e. someone doesn't want to move away from their family), but specifically talent reasons.
For example DC has a huge college educated black population because the government was one of the few places you could get a well paying as a black person with less discrimination. So lots of people decided to settle there. Atlanta has a lot of historically black colleges - creating a pool of educated workers.
In CA, most of the black population came over as blue collar workers in the military, shipyards, and manufacturing. Whereas most of the Asian population is made up of professional worker or affluent educated immigrants.
Yes I am generalizing here. We don't do a good job of carving out the differences for Asian groups. East Asians tend to be super educated, southeast asians tend to not be, and the outcomes are also widely different.
If you want to discuss race, let's look at perhaps the best coding college in the United State, MIT. We can probably all agree MIT produces some top talent programmers, right? I know HN is typically anti-college, but I think we can agree on that. 30% Asian, 9% black, and 15% Hispanic. That's 5x higher Asian percentage than the general US population and slightly lower for both black and Hispanic. If that's the pool that companies in SV are pulling from, then of course their diversity numbers won't match the US population as a whole. Look at the colleges near SV too - Caltech (43% Asian), Stanford (22% Asian), Berkley (42%).
No you probably wouldn't, as Silicon Valley attracts the top X% of the tech population
Could literally be summarized/rephrased as -
Silicon valley doesn't have a lot of black people, because it attracts top talent only.
I do presume you didn't mean it that way, which is why I didn't expand on it. But I want to point out that is the impression given.
One could argue that for a myriad of reasons, probably mostly money(again, for its own reasons), some minorities are underrepresented in the best tech schools and/or do not have the funds to up and move to the coast. That's an absolutely fair assessment. But I wouldn't assume that they are automatically not 'top talent' for those reasons. In my experience, the bay has a pretty low signal to noise ratio. Cheers.