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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Key point of the abstract:

   Women:                       +9 to +10% chance of callback relative to men
   Black, Hispanic, and Asian:  -8 to -13% chance of callback relative to White people.

Anyway, kudos (I guess?) to the researchers for choosing the absolutely most fashionable subject they could possibly study in this day and age.

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Would be interesting to separate Asian applicants into their own group.

They do in their model. Being Asian carries with it the worst relative odds of being hired, though it is not responsible for the overall negative non-white male coefficient (Black and Hispanic applicants also have negative coefficients in the logit)

Seems to make sense relative to each other. D&I initiatives often times target Black and Hispanic candidates, but not Asian since they are not underrepresented.

And also separating out Indian, Chinese, and Other Asian. The majority of many tech workforces are broadly Asian, along with over half of the global population. It doesn't make sense to lump them all in together. It may be acceptable in other industries in the US where Asian representation is in line with the US standard of ~6%, but certainly not in tech. If a single bucket accounts for more than half of your entire sample, and that bucket can trivially be broken down further into sub-buckets, then you should absolutely do so.

This is something that tech in particular just keeps getting wrong over and over. E.g. look at the 2019 Google diversity report [1] -- on page 52 it shows that 55.5% of new tech hires in the most recent year were Asian, vs 0.7% for the smallest category (Native American). Break out that 55.5%, please!

[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/25badfc6b6d1b33f...

That's surprising - every software team I've worked on for the past 20 years at least has been predominantly Asian.

These callback rates are relative to the number of applicants, so if the pool of applicants is predominantly Asian, the hires could still be predominately Asian, just slightly less so.

"Fashionable"? Being so dismissive of the push for racial equality is deeply arrogant and small minded.

If the medicine has more side effects than the indication, it might be time for an honest review.

In my experience there is little discrimination in tech. I am located in Europe and maybe other factors apply. But here you could be a raccoon and if you have an affinity for tech, you can almost get the job you like.

edit: On the contrary, I think these talk about discrimination drives people away, but I hold back my criticism because I think people mean well.

Yes, fashionable in that suggesting we live in a deeply unequal society(not true) shows that you're one of the "good guys". Its just a social signal and at this point people have been hearing/saying it for so long that most probably believe people should be judged by the color of their skin, rather than your personality.

What made you think I am dismissive of "the push for racial equality"?

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