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Comment by s4n1ty | 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?

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?

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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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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