AWS director sues Amazon, alleging systemic racism in corporate office
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Their interview process is crazy.
This article gives some perspective:
https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diver...
Amazon is actually the most diverse company that Oo Nwoye surveyed.
Oh, so she was treated like literally everyone applying there? This is not uncommon.
>During the 2017-2019 time frame, no Black employees were hired at or promoted to the director level ("L8") within Amazon's public policy division, the suit alleges
This statement is meaningless without knowing how many black employees were eligible or applied.
>While working for Amazon, Newman alleges that she faced multiple instances of colleagues overtly engaging in racial stereotypes to discuss her or her work, describing her as "just scary," "too direct," or looking "like a gorilla."
Only one of those is a racial stereotype, and a single incident does not imply systemic racism.
This looks exaggerated at best to me. Everyone experiences downleveling regardless of race.
I would like to know the denominator as well. It’s hard to really mean anything without the number of L8s in total, how many L8s were hired, etc
It’s actually odd that the press release doesn’t include this info. I expect that it’s hard to get and they have to sue to get it, or the numbers aren’t in their favor so weren’t reported.
Race is really hard to “eyeball” since it’s not necessarily clear. For example, I was working on a team studying this and we surveyed a group of a few hundred people and asked what a fair distribution by race should be. It was interesting that many people overestimated how much their race should be represented, overestimated how much of the population their race makes up, and underestimated their race within coworkers.
It kind of makes sense as not many people know even basic demographic data. It made communicating with data hard because when sharing that 25% of positions were held by African Americans and 20% of leadership, the most common feedback was that these percentages needed to go up to match population distribution. Which is odd because AA is like 12-15% of population.
So even with these numerator and denominator numbers it’s hard to understand what’s ok. Hopefully the lawsuit will result in an investigation and if there is discrimination, to have it corrected.
I wish there was more research in this area. I’ve found a hard time with HR type data as it’s all either too general or so specific it’s never published or shared.
I’ve wondered about programmer efficiency for decades now and wish there was some objective way to measure. I’ve never been part of a programmer labor lawsuit but I wonder how that would go as it’s really common for people with similar titles to make very different pay and it’s usually based on completely subjective measures of impact. But my basic understanding of this stuff from business school is that the onus is on the employee to prove a pattern and just “my boss subjectively pays me less” is perfectly legal.
The cases I know of are ones like WalMart’s sex discrimination case [0] that was eventually won (or lost if you’re Walmart) based on the ease of measuring gender (compared to race) and the size of the organization.
I think part of the issue is measuring race and ethnicity is hard. Many people’s race and ethnicity aren’t necessarily widely known so informal methods of looking at the company prof pics isn’t definitive. It’s also hard because race is self-selecting so if someone responds to a survey there’s not really anything that can be done to qualify responses unless they are specifically claiming tribal nation status.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes
A pure statistic doesn't tell the whole story. But for pointing it out you usually get labelled a racist.
If there are less people of color applying or objectively eligible for a job the statistics will "paint a damning picture". But maybe the picture isn't damning at all and if the same people had been white they also wouldn't have been chosen. The smaller the numbers involved the less we can just assume that because of the sample size something like this has 'worked itself out'. It's like looking at my coding statistics for the last week. That says nothing as there's so much variability week to week depending on circumstances. But looking at a full year any outliers should have been reduced enough to be able to make decisions based on the numbers.
That said looking at the sibling post as well, there seem to be quite a few positions open in that department. So now one could probably start deducing.
EDIT: and there comes the down voting for 'being a racist' for pointing out that statistics are statistics and that it looks like statistics might actual favor the article protagonists odds. Awesome!
Which one?
> During the 2017-2019 time frame, no Black employees were hired at or promoted to the director level ("L8") within Amazon's public policy division, the suit alleges. Neither were any Black employees hired at the next level down, L7, until December 2018.
That's pretty specific. I wonder how big the public policy division is? If I look at amazon.jobs there are like 8 pages of open recs in public policy...so it's a pretty huge organization. And global, too.
> she did the work of an L7 job for several years before receiving a promotion to that level in fall 2019.
This one is a little tougher for me. It's pretty common to "do the work" of the next level for a promotion. In isolation, this doesn't seem so bad. But if she was deleveled before even taking the role that's...not a good look.
Hope the lawsuit goes into that.
Would be good to see numbers for all ethnicities as a comparison. For eg: how many asian people at amazon vs directors? Offhand, I think you will see that there are fewer asian directors when considering the total asian pop at amazon vs white. Is that a problem?
From my anecdotal experience, I just don't see too many black or latino people in tech companies so I would assume this is partly a pipeline issue which we can address at the correct spot in the funnel rather than bringing in token black l8s.
Otherwise the next spate of articles will say "Black L8s fired at higher rates than other ethnicites".
Also, re-levelling during interviews is common at Amazon: just because you applied for a position doesnt mean there are enough data-points in the interview that support you getting that position (esp at L6+ level), but we may think you are "amazonian" enough to be extended an offer with re-level.
What probably happened is the candidate was re-leveled, then was setup for success by being provided multiple opportunities to prove themselves, which took a few years. This also makes sense because a promo-doc requires consistent evidence of performing at the next level.
Now, a senior manager should know all this so A) this is a bad faith lawsuit driven by entitlement or, B) she decided that this was a big enough problem to burn a few bridges.
I'm interested to see what data the lawsuit dredges up.
The thing is, this wasn’t a tech role. It was in “public policy” which I take to mean lobbying, and her previous experience was as a staffer to a US Senator. So her career is in politics rather than tech.
The other thing is that suing a broadly unpopular company for discrimination isn’t really going to be a career limiting move. Most companies settle most lawsuits, so you get to put on your resume that you successfully and publicly sued a big unpopular company for discrimination. But maybe I’m just being cynical about people who go into professional politics.
Great insight, too, on the subsequent headline if Amazon just starts recruiting black candidates willy-nilly.
Failing that, after accepting the offer and doing some interviews + performance management as an L7, the situation would have been clear.
Unpopular opinion. Underpaying, de-leveling, and under compensated is pretty much the norm in all organisations and across all industries. I would actually argue that is the problem because of ALL HR and Recruiters. ( Sorry I have never met any good one ) So without lots of evidence it may not be specific to gender or race.
But sexual harassment and assaulting are very serious.
Senior mgr is 1 level down from director and generally has a lot less scope.