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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

But if there are hurdles to black women getting hired at places like Google, isn’t your explanation just passing the buck?

People aren’t happy with the status quo, where one of our most important and creative industries is nearly devoid of people who make up more than 1 in 10 Americans. In view of that, I don’t think it passes muster to say that “we don’t discriminate against black women, we just look for Founders in places that are nearly exclusively white/Asian.” Pipelines need to be reformed.

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I worked at Google, and if racism is present in the hiring process, it's to the benefit of minorities. Google would (at least during my time there) jump through a lot of hoops give POCs and women on-site interviews, and the review process was scrubbed of racial information. Many employees took it upon themselves to avoid using gendered language in their reviews as well, to avoid that possibly playing a role.

That being said, over the course of ~50 on-site interviews I conducted there, only 2 were Black, and they were both from Africa, not the United States. The reality is, African Americans are woefully under represented in computer science well upstream of companies that would love to hire them. Even if you assume all corporations are evil, hiring more POCs would be in their best interest at this point just to avoid lawsuits and to have better optics.

So VCs pass the buck to Google, and Google passes the buck to universities. And universities presumably pass the buck to K-12 education, and the whole thing circles back to an abstract debate about “fixing the educational system” (which we have been trying to do for decades with zero results). Do you see why people are mad?

> Do you see why people are mad?

Because it's an extremely hard problem, and it's easier to be abstractly mad and hope someone else solves it, than to come up with concrete practical effective solutions?

“Fix the educational system and hope disparities resolve themselves” is not a “concrete practical effective solution.” It’s a cop out.

Other industries faced similar problems and materially improved representation. Ours steadfastly refuses, and instead comes up with increasingly silly special pleadings. The last CS gender debate I saw devolved to an argument about the behavior of monkeys in laboratories. People saying there isn't a problem in the industry are making an extraordinary claim, and pretending otherwise.

At least some other industries with problems (law, medicine) have an oversupply of practitioners that is limited by cartel behavior. This does make this problem a bit more tractable.

I think that's a fair point! There needs to be a sustained effort across the board, I think; the solution will be iterated, and involve continued lifts both from the labor supply and the demand side of industry.

What worries me is that we have a coordination problem, and if you snipe at efforts to make employers retain more URMs, you're damaging the case for the pipeline to supply more URMs.

Ours in an industry with extremely low barriers to entry (you don't even need a degree!), no formal credentialism and therefore much more meritocratic, but on the other hand without the enhanced social status of say law or medicine. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this point, or if it has any relevance on the representation, but suffice to say, you can't really compare it with "other" (probably law & medicine, not trucking & nursing) industries that are invariably completely different.

Most practitioners in our industry are fed to it through the university pipeline. It's not interesting to this particular discussion to note that the pipeline can be bypassed by especially motivated people, because it's the task of the industry to make sure that URMs don't need to clear a higher bar for motivation and resourcefulness than the median practitioner does.

Harvey Mudd College has achieved gender parity in CS graduates.

I feel like this problem was easier to solve in other industries. For instance for doctors or lawyers there was a long line of women who wanted to be doctors and lawyers but couldn't because of institutional barriers.

All we had to do was remove the barriers.

Software is harder. I see three places we are losing women. First is women who never even consider the field, the second is women who drop out of car in college, and the third is women who switch fields from cs.

We're losing the most women in the first step in the pipeline and I've tried to convince so many of my girl friends to join software because I work half as much and make twice as much as them. But despite this they all had absolutely no interest in joining. They mostly had two fears. One was they wouldn't be good at it, but overwhelmingly the fear was they wouldn't like it.

The second was women who switch in college. I only know 2 women who started off cs and switched. One switched because she didn't like it. The other switched because she felt intimidated because she was put in a class with people like myself who had years of coding experience in a classroom, summer camps, and as a hobby before our first class in CS.

For the third leak in the pipeline all the women I know who left, left because they didn't enjoy the work. Some because they wanted to feel more connected to their work and people, moving from software to roles like therapist and teacher.

I think it's incredibly important we try to get women into tech. Women those women who would enjoy it lives would be better, consumers would enjoy better software, and our industry would be healthier.

But I think to do that it's important we use identify the right root causes.

I one of which is treating devs like rockstars aka children with specialized skills that need to be managed instead of professionals similar to engineers.

But I don't think sexism plays a big part. It exists,and it should be eliminated, every female dev I've talked to has experienced it. But none of them mentioned it as a reason they were thinking of leaving software.(at the professional level, I think it's more impactful at the college level where you have a bunch of kids who have no idea how to talk to women, and peer groups are more influential). But all my friends who are doctors and lawyers also experienced sexism, and in most cases far worse than the devs.

Repeating myself here: I believe the solution to this will be iterated, and will require work both on the supply and on the demand side; it's in part a coordination problem. Industry will need to put in a big lift without immediate significant returns, because otherwise there's little incentive for the pipeline to correct itself. Correcting generations of obstacles to participation isn't easy.

Here's a concrete, practical solution:

Radical affirmative action. Not radical in the rioting / revolution understanding of the word, but in its application.

So, if the issue with systematic racism is such that it endangers the foundational core of American society, it's time to take a big risk: literally pull random people to sit on VC and companies boards, in skilled jobs, etc. (a bit like the Diversity Visa Lottery the US already does for immigration). And train them on the job.

Sure, there will be issues here and there, but it would definitely solve the issue once and for all. It wouldn't even have to be explicitly racial. If it's truly random, you would end up with an accurate representation of the population.

It would also desegregate schools and neighborhoods, too, because with such a disruption people would have to move to match their new jobs.

Now, an exception should be made of course for professions where an error would mean life or death (or injury): doctors, airline pilots, etc. But I suspect 95% of careers at least could be desegregated in this way.

And perhaps an exception for jobs that truly require special abilities: professor of physics, professional athlete, etc.

That's sortition, baby!

Indeed. We also use this logic for juries.

If you want to label 'not having much power or responsibility' as 'passing the buck' that's your prerogative, but poo colored glasses hide reality just as well as the rose colored kind. If they're striving to create equal opportunity for their employees, then Google is doing everything they have a responsibility to do in my book.

> But if there are hurdles to black women getting hired at places like Google, isn’t your explanation just passing the buck?

What is the evidence that there are hurdles for black women getting hired at Google?

For example, does their representation differ significantly from, say, the rate at which they graduate with CS degrees?

How much evidence would ever convince you? How much evidence of racism do you need? How about red lining that continued until the 90s which locked black families out of home ownership? There is so much evidence available that demanding evidence at this point is more a sign of willful blindness than intellectual rigor.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "red lining" in the 1990s and how this constitutes evidence of bias by Google against hiring black women in 2020?

You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.

I grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood in the 1990s. My neighbor was a Caltech/Stanford grad that needed help building some RF measurement equipment, which I did as a summer job during high school. That evolved into a job programming a driver for spectrum analyzers, which evolved into a job developing software for embedded systems. By the time I graduated college, I had a guaranteed engineering job and a bunch of connections in the field.

There were no black people in my neighborhood. I don’t recall any in my elementary school classes. Thanks to housing segregation—the legacy of redlining—they were elsewhere, in neighborhoods where there were few if any people with Caltech and Stanford degrees. You don’t think that makes a difference?

There are unquestionably advantages to growing up wealthy, but that's a question of class, not race.

In this case, it appears as though you can draw a straight line from racial redlining policies to the current status quo elite profession pipeline.

While you're correct that it's a question of class — class is unfortunately downstream of racial policies the long term effects of which we've never quite fixed.

Questions of class are questions of race because in America, the median wealth of black households is 1/8 that of white households. Apart from that, even upper middle class black people tend to be excluded from these opportunities because tech entrepreneurs live in upper middle class white neighborhoods instead of upper middle class black neighborhoods. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

No, the disadvantage is racialized. White households at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile of income live in neighborhoods where the median income is a double digits percentile higher than black households at the same income level, and the effect amplifies the lower your household income is.

I suspect it's being pointed out that racial discrimination doesn't just start at age 30 when applying for a job at Google, it impacts many key points of development and opportunity along the way. Perhaps true support of black founders takes this truth into consideration, especially if a business idea is solid.

I am not irate. I am pointing out a lack of seriousness in demanding evidence for a proposition that is obvious on its face. If you don’t see that black people, in America, have deliberately, systematically, and consistently faced discrimination and destruction of their wealth and ability to accumulate wealth it is willful ignorance not thoughtful insistence on fact based reasoning.

Red lining was a government sanctioned practice of refusing to underwrite and subsidize mortgages in neighborhoods that had large minority populations.

Why do I need to google and Wikipedia link for you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

I think he's asking for evidence of Google's racism, not racism in general. Google can't 'fix racism' to hire more African Americans, they can only prevent it in their hiring process.

That’s the thing about systematic racism, each individual actor or firm can claim their actions aren’t racist and yet in the aggregate the effects exist and emerge.

Then we get VCs pledging to take deliberate steps to address the problem and they turn out to be vaporware.

If each individual actor or firm is not being racist than no racism, systemic or not, exists in the aggregate.

However you didn't claim that no actor was being racist regardless, you claimed that the redliners were being racist, which is true. So go after them and their children, not Google.

Such evidence needs to actually be quantifiable in such a way that you have a sense of how big an effect it has. You might compare economic performance against immigrants whose parents were red-lined out of America until the 90's. It's easier to migrate to NYC from West Philly than from Nigeria.

Immigrants who come to the US do so with a substantial advantage in social capital, if not economic capital. Someone whose parents are professionals in Nigeria has a huge leg up from someone whose parents were excluded from professional jobs due to segregation in the US, even if the immigrant comes to the US initially with limited financial resources.

Most of what you need to get into engineering and CS is good performance at quantitative and logical reasoning. Scoring >=700 on the math SAT will put you in the top 33% of Asian test-takers and top 1% of black test-takers. How much of that ratio do you think is caused by Asian kids having parents with better financial resources?

Last I checked, age 18-24 college enrollment rates are 45% of white women, 41% of black women, 39% of white men, and 33% of black men. How much parental financial resources do these students need in order to sign up for Computer Science 101 -- which has basic high school algebra as a prerequisite -- and find out they like it?

If black people are graduating with CS degrees at a lower rate than other groups related to the population at large, and having a CS degree is a criterion of getting the job, then we should expect jobs that require CS degrees to have fewer black people for reasons that have nothing to do with racism in the hiring process. (The same is true for any other dimension you care to slice on)

Why do fewer black people graduate with CS degrees relative to the population than Indian or Asian people? That's a topic to understand better if you consider this a problem that you'd like to fix. Have you heard of the stereotype of "Asian parents", that drive their kids very hard to succeed academically? From many personal acquaintances, that effect is real, especially for immigrant parents. Meanwhile in some areas, in black culture, trying to succeed academically is "acting white" and is frowned upon.

It's a hard problem to solve and it may require changing the culture of populations gradually over time. You could start by looking what percent of families are single-parent grouped by race:

https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

According to that data set, 65% of black families were single-parent in 2018, by far the grouping with the highest percentage in that data set, compared to 15% for Asian and Pacific Islanders, or 24% for non-hispanic whites. If you want to fix education and the success that comes after it, then you probably need to start by fixing the families in which children are raised.

It's difficult to succeed academically, and pay for and succeed in college, without two parents to support you.

Now why is that, the difference in single-parent families? I don't know the answer. We can keep popping the stack, looking for solutions in each layer like that, and finding problems at the next layer. Solutions won't be easy.

You don’t think the tends you cite were deliberately cultivated by Jim Crow and the war on drugs?

Concrete evidence of discriminatory activities, concrete evidence of policies which systemically exclude people who happen to be black for no bona-fide reason (Think "We're looking for a culture fit" more than "We want an employee from a prestigious school"). Combined with a sufficient quantity or data, and especially with some sort of trend that implies black underrepresentation.

I've certainly seen intellectually rigorous studies of discrimination against Black people, mostly involving sending out resumes where there is no notable difference other than the implied ethnicity of the applicant. This post on the other hand claiming that discrimination in the mortgage industry in the 90s means that google must be practising racial discrimination today IS willful blindness in the place of intellectual rigor.

Did you mean "status quota"?

For some, equality may appear to be a fat baby banging on a highchair at times (when displeased usually).

If we had an unadulterated version of equality, do you think we would have found our natural stride by 2020 on the issue?

Racial neutral is a tough line to walk, but the talk on the other hand....

Oh not like that (gas-lighting)....

Just saying the training-wheels should come off instead of the gloves.

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