Google reports soaring attrition among Black women
reuters.com
reuters.com
This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone to this problem.
Competing for talent and working hard to ensure that underrepresented group members have a fair shot? Should be standard practice and a baseline of ethical corporate and human behavior.
Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. That’s observable from the industry-wide figures. Moving an underrepresented group member from industry company A to industry company B doesn’t change that industry-wide measure at all, which should be obvious but seems to escape mention.
Supporting pipeline programs (middle and high school education, summer programs, internship programs, bootcamps and other career-change programs, etc.) seems to be the obvious paths for companies to exert lasting positive influence on the industry and world.
Sure, there's some fringe backlash when some company supports a program that is targeted at underrepresented groups, but I think that's the way to create lasting change.
Unfortunately, it doesn't move the needle on D&I OKRs this quarter or next. Poaching from someone else is the fastest way to move a key result metric.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
It's not "fringe backlash". It's a recognition that success in the job market isn't determined by skill despite what's claimed but by quota. The companies partaking in these diversity and inclusion ventures however don't want to admit the full depths of their assessment regarding the "underrepresented" but still try to keep the PR benefits that come with it.
>>Unfortunately, it doesn't move the needle on hiring OKRs this quarter or next. Poaching from someone else is the fastest way to move a key result metric. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
Yes. Because any sensible business would take the least risk needed to produce highest payoff. Showing proof of success at a major competitor is a great indicator of that and that also works wonders for employees in the form of massive pay raises.
I'm 100% supportive of these programs, while being opposed to quota-based hiring models.
But railing against any of the bootcamps you named above would be career suicide.
These are fringe concerns?
Fuck me then I guess.
Just wondering though: Are we assuming that the youth are too stupid to notice what we're doing? Or are we assuming they already know the score well enough to bite their tongues when we deliberately foist more of their parents culture war into their faces?
Were you not exposed to hamfisted intervention programs growing up?
They say that you never notice the propaganda that works, and I think there are lots of programs that are just outright good that even a cynic can't cut down, but I remember lots of insulting messaging baked into "lets fix X" initiatives too.
“Girls who code” and similar programs don’t strike me as the 2020s version of the war on drugs, though.
First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thinking "she only has this position because of gender". It also leads to these women sometimes doing poorer jobs, just because there aren't enough qualified women in the company to fill those positions.
Secondly, you drain the lower rungs of the company from women. This leads to under-representation in the lower rungs. Meaning fewer women getting the training time one needs to properly move up the ladder. It also means a dearth of female perspective on the lower rungs. Hurting both diversity of views, and the culture. That second point makes the company less attractive to women trying to enter the company, which perpetuates the problem.
However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.
Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.
I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).
As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else.
If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege".
From what I saw encouragement came in two forms:
- generally for everyone
- and in addition, specifically for girls
I.e. I've seen activities for "kids who code" or "girls who code" but never for "boys who code".
I also have some personal experience regarding encouragement: from I was a young boy and until I had almost finished my Bachelors degree I was more than once discouraged from IT and encouraged to get a "real job" so either I was very special or the idea that boys get "nothing but encouragement" is plain false
Did your BA in IT limit your access to good advice? Did it contradict the good advice you received?
I don’t see the conflict between a BA in IT and good advice.
Could you maybe ask the question again in a different way?
I wrote about being a boy and getting what I think is bad advice.
You comment "The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice."
I wonder if you think that what I got is good advice.
(BTW: BSc, not BA :-)
And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions.
The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men.
You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.
> Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom.
Women are 55% of the population. Why aren't they 55% of tech workers? Why are only the 20% who are really good at it working in tech?
Saying "the minority are always going to be better" doesn't explain why. And the why is really important.
Pro tip: talk to women who would like to work in tech but aren't for an answer.
I’m very skeptical about this. Firstly, the popular studies that purport to show bias against females are variously flawed (including using old data from other fields) but also because women have done very well in other fields at other times which were much more hostile to them (medicine and law, for example) than tech. Similarly, women do well in tech in countries that have much more gender inequality than we have in the West (indeed, there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s gender equality and its female representation in technology). All of this suggests that discrimination isn’t responsible for as much of the gender gap in tech as we suspect.
This is very much the case if promotions are done without considering gender diversity. This can be compensated for by considering gender diversity when looking at applicants. However, that compensation can overshoot. This is especially likely if, for internal promotions, a goal of diversity is set that is too high compared to the total number of women already in the company.
That specific overshoot, caused by having diversity goals that are too ambitious given the number of women in the company, is what my comment was about. I raised the issue because women have raised it to me. Specifically when discussing blanket boardroom diversity quotas that were being considered by politicians in the Netherlands. Such quotas are more likely to cause this specific scenario, because they are made without consideration for the fraction of women working in the company, or even industry.
I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.
Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.
But in the 80s/ 90s picking up a Pascal or Delphi book was about the dumbest thing you do in social circle.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women.
One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correlate with desirable representation outcomes. Yet, those appear to be the only approaches attempted here in the West.
We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.
there are initiatives of promoting IT among women in Poland, afaik.
Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.
There's a plot of % women STEM graduates vs. a measure of opportunities for women. Algeria has the highest percentage of women STEM graduates on the chart. The Nordic countries have some of the lowest.
It wasn’t until later that obsessed nerds could teach ourselves from scratch at home.
The drop in women's representation in computing corresponds to the elimination of overtly sexist policies in other fields. E.g. medical schools removed gender quotas (maximum not minimum quotas, sometimes as low as 10%). Mary Ann Wilkes initially wanted to be a lawyer, but changed to computing when she encountered explicit sexism in law firms. After the expansion of women's right, women in her position were able to pursue their original passions.
I doubt it boils down to any one cause, but I think it's crucial not to ignore women's agency in making career decisions.
Another thought: compared to other technical careers, programming careers are uncredentialed. No legal or even social prerequisites other than skill.
If you want to be a doctor, you must apply to college, be accepted to college, matriculate, graduate with a degree in sciences. Then you must take the MCAT, apply to medical schools, be accepted to a medical school, graduate, apply to a residency, complete the residency, and become board certified.
And then you are an entry level doctor, licensed to practice in a single state, with no job, no patients, no practice, and no insurance network contracts.
If any of those steps are sexist/racist, a woman or minority is less likely to make it past that step.
Programming doesn’t have as many gatekeepers. That’s good for people who have been kept out of things.
Anytime an organization treats one group of people differently it creates at least two problems: others in the organization resent the preferential treatment and more importantly the targeted group does not get proper credit for their accomplishments, since they and others feel like their accomplishments were due to the advantages conferred to them by the organization.
Odin?
We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a underrepresentation problem in tech, but a misrepresentation problem.
There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
Pointing out what groups _aren’t_ underrepresented is like saying “Yeah, we’ll, all lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter”.
Your parent was responding to this statement:
> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt.
And their response - that tech is, in fact, diverse and meritocratic - is a fair response to that statement.
I think what OP meant by their statement is that there is a diversity problem _pertaining specifically to people of color_ in tech. Which is true.
I think we would all benefit by being a little generous with each other when trying to discuss these sensitive issues.
In fact, it is exactly these kinds of attitudes that directly contribute to perpetuating the diversity problem in tech.
And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.
> Saying "We do have plenty of representation of some minorities" is not a refutation of "we have a diversity problem in tech".
Nobody is trying to refute anything. Your knee jerk reaction is to attack anyone who doesn't 100% agree with you. _You_ are turning a nuanced discussion into an argument.
> And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.
Again, there is no reason for you to go full offence here. You are deliberately choosing the least charitable interpretation in order to make me the enemy.
I was referring to OP's own statement:
> This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps
I was giving a reason why OP's comment was a little generalized.
It's actually a great habit that helps facilitate polite discussions. It's called the principle of charity and unless I'm mistaken it's actually one of the rules of this site.
And the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. It means that if a statement could be read in an irrational way or in a rational way, you choose the latter. So if for example I said "sheep are white" you could interpret that to be the obviously false claim that 100% of sheep are white with no exceptions, or as the much more reasonable statement that sheep are typically white, where the principle of charity would be assuming the second interpretation. It has nothing to do with bending over backwards to make a statement palatable.
The hacker news guideline you are thinking of is "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech.
People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certain subgroups getting passed up during interviews, underpaid, getting passed up for promotions, etc. As an example an ex-colleague had a really hard time landing his first job in the industry. No one would call him back. He wondered whether his Hispanic sounding name was hurting his chances, so he anglicized it and tried again. He said it was like night and day. He found a job soon after. Perhaps you haven’t witnessed something like this first or second hand.
I think many companies are butchering their diversity recruiting efforts. They try to “fix” the issue with superficial and inefficient policies. But the problem they’re attempting to address is very real.
it's curious, right?
I'm not saying that it's impossible, and I don't know what kind of difference something like braille would make. Idk, are there any blind programmers that you know of ? Surely there must be some programmers who have gone blind, I wonder if they just decide to switch careers idk.
It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs?
Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?
Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.
It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.
What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.
Something like X-Keys L-Trac (Formerly CST2545-5w)
I've developed carpal tunnel, and to mitigate my problems I now use a mouse at work and trackball at home (strain different muscles). The clicking of the mouse bothered me for awhile, so for that I tried two mice. Right hand would control position and left hand would do the clicking. A foot pedal for the clicks would have been so much less awkward.
People with disabilities are the most neglected of any demographic because they are not easily exploited for political gain.
My Talon project is capable of voice controlling Visual Studio, both at the interface level and at the code insertion/editing level. It can use Dragon as a speech engine, or my own engine. It has an existing Visual Studio integration, and Talon makes it easy to write your own context specific app commands or integrations.
Here's some Visual Studio support for it:
- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vi...
As well as vscode:
- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vs...
Here are a couple of public GitHub issues about dictation support in vscode:
- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/40976
- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/117980#issuecomme...
I interpreted their argument as "people who want to can get on in tech". Being non-discriminatory doesn't lead to representative demographics (unless everyone likes/wants the same things equally, which is clearly not true).
How do you get to your conclusion from your statement? Simply having some minority groups overrepresented doesn't mean that the industry is welcoming. It may mean its welcoming to those groups.
And people w/o formal education isn't really a minority group. Any more than PhDs in computer science is a minority group that is overrepresented in the tech industry.
> But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
This isn't about political expedience, but its about understanding the context of the discussion. Either you're new to the US or simply are ignorant to the issues of the post.
They’re a minority / highly underrepresented in other highly paid professions (law, medicine, finance). That’s something that IMO makes tech a truly exceptional industry!
(Technically, women aren’t a “minority” either.)
We are all minority and majority at the same time for different groups. And that's ok.
That's an odd way to write, "modern educations for gifted people so fancy that their brand comes from their status at the world's biggest corporations instead of universities, but have nothing in common with the experiences of a typical person who did not receive a formal education.
I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc.
The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?
There are, they’re called “Nigerians”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans
> In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households.
https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3...
> Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions.
Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.
Or, zooming out, "me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger".
Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.
It's a dangerous time when it's considered dangerous to express an opinion.
It may be less dangerous here and now than most places in history.
When people say how its dangerous to voice opinions nowadays, they aren't using medieval Europe as a reference point (where it was also very dangerous to voice unpopular opinions). The reference point people use is their own experiences online from ~10 years ago.
People used to be able to say whatever they wanted online, and now doing so is dangerous. You may think that is a good thing, but it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be.
Making some snide remark about history is completely missing the point.
"Sex and gender are the same; they are immutable; and there are only two of them."
"Every child has a right to a mother and a father."
"An individual can't change his race."
"China is the world's worst human rights transgressor and currency manipulator."
The immutability of gender was controversial in 1991, but okay.
I'm not sure how bringing up anti LGBT crowds typing things like "it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" 20 years ago shows there was no controversy on the internet 10 or 20 years ago.
If you are correct that typing things like that was not controversial, it sounds like identifying as gay or LGBT was indeed controversial, putting false the claim that the internet was a free speech utopia where you could type anything and nobody would care.
Normal people joined the internet and they want normal people things.
The internet is almost like real life now. Communication has consequences in real life, as kindergartners find out.
This is because the online audience is much larger than it used to be. I could say something on usenet in 1994 and the reach was pretty limited.
To be clear, stating unpopular opinions has always been dangerous if the wrong people hear them. Now its just that they're much more likely to hear it online.
As far as I can tell, that is all gone now. People with unpopular opinions just get banned immediately. Sometimes it is the same exact people in the exact same communities who 20 years ago would have wanted to hear that unpopular opinion. I don't know if the cause is that they have been trolled one too many times, they just got older and changed, something in the culture, who knows. The big sort keeps getting bigger though.
By saying it, you both get to piss on the 'woke' (which I assume this person is not), plus, if you happen to say any of the quiet parts out loud, you are somewhat protected.
I've been trying to call this out for years, to no avail.
Trying to boost the diversity metric scores without actually working to remedy the underlying structural problems boils down to a very simple goal: "We need to poach the diverse talent from out competitors, while making sure they fail to poach ours."
I think a sizable chunk of the industry feels this way. But the incentives of PR are driven more by the baying of influential parts of the public than by rational consideration of and conversation about what's just.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "metrics diversity" folks are definitely wrong. Just that the environment has long been one that responds to good-faith questions about the effectiveness of its approach with screeching instead of thoughtfulness.
I still remember, early in my career, when Google held a diversity-focused TGIF (internal all-hands). There were obvious, gaping holes between the approach and its stated goals, and I care about representation and especially about identity-driven discrimination, so I was chatting with teammates about it afterwards.
I pretty quickly picked up on the fact that everybody thoughtful that I knew considered diversity efforts to be little more than theatre, designed to appease the loud and dumb and corrupt, and that breaking the kayfabe in the name of actual social justice was professionally costly.
I don't hold quite as cynical a view as this (see a couple paras up), but the degree to which the process is widely considered to be a jobs program for useless HR people was really striking, and a formative moment in my professional life.
This depends on other factors. For example, are there high numbers of qualified underrepresented candidates that often get no job offers and are left to leave the industry? If so, this can help absorb those qualified candidates.
But if it is just simply shuffling the deck then I agree with your take.
I do have some doubts that there are high numbers of these cases, given how much overall excess demand there is for qualified candidates. It is surely possible and worthy of examination, though.
> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
How about competing for underrepresented groups, then targeting resources to ensure their success? The industry has created an environment that either is or appears to be hostile to these underrepresented groups. Perhaps they should take responsibility to change that in meaningful ways. Meaningful ways means more than filling quotas.
What is the correct racial / gender / sex breakdown for a tech industry with no diversity problems?
I’m not sure how we can say we have a problem if we don’t know what the correct breakdowns are. We’re implementing all these solutions with no metric to measure success. That seems like a perfect system to create more discrimination.
Within the tech industry, the correct proportion of minorities should be representative of your hiring pool (which is why I think they ask you to self report), or maybe even proportionally to "all qualified potential candidates", not sure how you'd measure that out.
The problem is even within qualified potential candidates, many minorities are still under-represented. This is a societal problem outside of the tech industry, but one that leaks into it.
More opportunities for these minorities to get a leg up to enter the field would bring the proportions closer to normal, stuff like affirmative action for schools.
It's a tough answer and nobody wants anyone in the chain to take responsibility for lifting up those that have been put down, it's definitely a flawed approach but I'm glad to see businesses attempt it.
I think the solution is to realize that it's wrong to pick outcomes a priori, that we shouldn't trying to find the "correct proportion". Instead, focus on eliminating discrimination and biases in the hiring pipeline. Anonymize the gender and ethnicity of applicants. Use voice altering software to prevent the ability to discern between genders when interviewing. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics, create a hiring process that isn't able to distinguish between these characteristics in the first place. Then, whatever proportion that results is the "correct proportion".
How do you know all your hiring pools should produce evenly like that? There’s a lot of factors (cultural, genetic) that need to be understood. It would be very strange for interest in any industry to be even across racial groups.
- 0.95% of CS degrees were awarded to black women
- 0.86% of degrees were awarded to women who identify as two or more races
- 1.63% were awarded to latina women
Looks like they're hiring a larger share of individuals in these demographics (1.8% hire rate in each group) than receive degrees. It's not by a lot, but it's definitely not stagnant or moving backwards.
(Note this obviously doesn't include other professions, but these other professions, at Google, aren't nearly as large a part of their labor pool. It is significant, though, considering 20% of blacks have BS degrees, and 19% of hispanics do.)
I've really soured on these efforts. It seemed to me the diversity group formed at the company I work for has a narrow focus on the specific identities that (surprise, surprise) the "leaders" on the team fit in. This is what identity politics in America is these days. It's not about inclusion, it's about using the politics of identity in a self-serving way--kinda like any other corporate maneuvering.
The issue is rarely that people of a specific race are leaving faster than other races. The issue is almost always that turnover is high in lower level roles and that's where the bulk of your black / latinx population sits. You CANNOT look at overall attrition rates for a company. You must segment it by level unless your levels have equal mixes of races, and they never do. I'd bet heavily that low level attrition is just higher than usual. You can see it in their charts that attrition has increased across the board. It just fails to notice that attrition is going to be among low level employees and low level employees are more likely to be black.
In order to not have black employees leaving at higher rates than white employees overall, while black employees occupy lower level roles, you would need black employees to leave at significantly lower rates than their white colleagues, normalized to level.
edit: and I'll also note, for a growing company the more important number is hiring. They're at 8.8% black/latinx each up from ~6% each last year. That's very good. The overall representation has improved by ~0.6% since 2020. That's also very good. Headline is misleading. Google's making strong progress on its diversity goals.
The important question is whether it seems causally reasonable to group or not group. In this case, grouping makes sense.
What’s funny is: in five years researchers looking at the data will say “oh! There’s a higher attrition rate / poor performance even though prior reviews marked them as good! THAT must be where all this systemic racism we are trying to find is!”
This seems to be quite illegal according to the EEOC website, yet as another poster notes there is no chance that it would be pursued if reported.
Could it be that women (in general) want something more in life than working in a big company for a nice wage?
Study after study after study show that women want families and other things other than the standard mega corporation employment that society has trained us to expect.
I’d bet if one looked at the numbers one would see that women as a whole are leaving google and other companies just as much as black women.
And it’s not about google. It’s just about people wanting something different that working in a mega corporation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
But even though he was an ass, studies have proved him absolutely right.
is that useful?
which is indistinguishable from people open to other perspectives that simply haven't been articulated well, or could be discussed amicably, or perspectives that really shouldnt be accepted uncritically yet
No, Google is huge, they could have put that guy in another team or whatever. He was fired because someone leaked his memo and the press managed to make it bad PR for google. He was fired for PR reasons nothing more, in an era that was all about "girls in tech" in a patronizing fashion.
This is mostly a cultural issue. Being professional is being able to work with people you fundamentally disagree with from a political perspective. But maybe Google shouldn't be a space where people discuss wedge issues to begin with, or write memos about anything on the matter.
Google is one of the most racially inclusive tech companies in the world. It really tries hard to fix historical disparities between races in ways that you don't see in most companies, ranging from very active promotion of minorities to programs dedicated to hiring them. The interview process, while not perfect, also tries to erase bias by forcing gender and racially-neutral terms in interview writeups.
I have my own explanation for the problems the article describes, but I think it would be hard to accurately represent it in a HN comment. This is part of a VERY complex situation rivaling the historical Middle East conflicts in resistance to analysis.
For all of its faults - and it has many - Google is trying much harder the most companies to right past wrongs in our industry regarding racism.
My female friend interviewed at a number of large tech companies, not Google due to it's COVID hiring slowdown, and generally there was at least one interviewer that made comments I never, as a white man, have heard from an interviewer. Not outright sexist but things like (paraphrasing) "clearly you must have only worked on part of this project and not do the whole thing." It wasn't a question "which parts did you work on?" but a direct statement questioning her claim to have done the whole project.
I will say - as a man - that I rarely heard this question when interviewing.
Would be interesting to hear your insight.
What I'm trying to say is that this is a hard problem and perhaps this attrition, paradoxically, is an unexpected consequence of trying to to tackle the problem head on - rather than lack of effort and investment in trying to solve it.
Spending so many resources creates an image or a sense of urgency. This sense of urgency creates pressure within the organization, which also would pressure even more so the employees that Google is trying to help. No quantity of metrics and calculations are going to reach this type of observation. Google is probably one of the least qualified companies to tackle this being that it is driven by a scientific mathematical calculus and is one of the most corrupting organizations in the world mainly due to their major privacy violations and manipulation as it relates to their search products. Other companies particularly those that deal with artistic areas are more likely to come up with useful solutions to this problem.
Google may be better served sending money to another organization to study and research how to achieve the goals of counteracting the under representation.
I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question, and have far less bias (well, employee distributions that more closely map to underlying population distributions) in hiring. Most of what Google is doing is to reduce its legal exposure to class action hiring lawsuits, not righting wrongs, as much as their leaders like to say they are.
I know for a fact that people in my area discriminate based upon where people are from. If they know you’re from a certain area, they have a particular disdain for you from the get go. So, don’t rule it out as being a real thing.
You're not going to somehow convert these folks to not be discriminatory overnight or even in a few years (as evident from HN). It will be something that will require a lifetime of work and more than just HR doing something.
HR is there to just prevent the assholes from being able to outright do it in the public eye and then the company being held liable for jackass clearly discriminating based upon where the person is from. If you never ask the question and the employee decides to not hire because, "seems like she's from Missouri, never did like those Kansas City Chiefs. Fuck 'em!" Well, employee and company can't be held liable for that decision because only the employee knows they discriminated for that reason and no one else does. But you ask the question - opens the box.
I'm pretty certain that if I asked HR about this, they would say what Google said: Don't ask this question as it could be viewed as discriminatory. I don't think Google is an outlier here.
You can tout all the sophisticated programs about conquering bias or what not, but the truth is many of these initiatives have shown little actual evidence for improving outcomes. Our company is probably doing 1/10 of what Google is doing with 2-3x the outcomes. One major difference I see between Google and us; we actually have offices in cities with high concentration of black and hispanic talent. While I was at Google, leadership pushed people towards the HQ and in fact they were shutting down offices that were in more diverse areas of America. You can tout all the sophisticated programs Google runs, but I believe that Google misses the most basic steps for how to increase diversity in their workforce.
Our metrics aren't great, but they are a significantly better than Google. We aren't a unicorn, I know of a handful of tech companies that are at the same level, and the common pattern I see is very basic steps towards hiring that Google refuses to consider. As an outsider (and an insider several years ago), my experience is that Google invests in lots of programs that give a credence of caring about diversity, while actively avoiding doing impactful things.
Its easy to boost your outcomes if that's what you want. You just specifically hire people of some race.
This is the first time I'm hearing this term and can't find anything about it in the report or online.
My guess is Black or Latino of every gender/sexuality.
Their hires and workforce representation are ~40% Asian+ but I don't think that qualifies as diversity.
https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/93d9a4094693cb78...
This could be a modern incarnation of the 'one drop' rule, thinking that if you're part minority, that is still the most important part of your makeup. Or, more likely, it's to inflate numbers as much as possible for PR.
Latino is for males, Latina is for females so Latinx is for both and other genders and I guess the + indicates belonging to another minority group.
As a non-American this all seems silly but I see the point of it.
But the + doesn't stand for orientation. I don't see how being gay makes you any more or less of a racial identity
https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/93d9a4094693cb78...
Mixed race people. My kids would be Asian+ and White+ for example.
For example: the rainbow flag has always been for the LGBTQIA+ community. Now the flag has the added triangles with white, brown, aqua, and magenta for... black and trans folks? If that visibility makes folks feel included then by all means, but the rainbow colors on that flag weren't meant to specifically represent each aspect of that community to begin with. Maybe I've missed issues of representation in that community but I also don't think of LGBTQIA+ as an organization, just a sort of flag to represent non-cis folks.
And then there's Latinx, which is interesting because >98% of folks actually from Latino countries loathe that and don't recognize it. It's purely an American appropriation of another culture's terminology by the same folks who generally raise issues of appropriation.
I'm trying my best to be an ally but I have trouble keeping up with a lot of these things, even those which are a bit paradoxical. The best course of action I've found is to just treat everyone with kindness, respect, empathy, and an open mind.
This seems to be a oddity of the english-speaking cultures and not very relevant to other parts of the world.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Classifications...
Especially on the Internet, with pseudonymity, we're all nothing more than the ideas we present.
An egalitarian dream was twisted into a woke nightmare for bad actors to earn free PR by pitting people against each other.
Letting people pick whatever color seems more empowering to me.
The point is, once you move past the skin, all our blood looks alike. We all share that.
(I agree, though, that some are likely to insist on taking offense. Also, I note that albinos might have a case to complain about non-albinos who are called "white"...)
It's forced cultural desecration, and it's totally unwanted by the targets of the term.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
I'm a white dude but work in a foreign country (also predominantly white). For the most part I'm just "one of the guys". I only really feel like an outsider when corporate policy dictates we have to talk about cultural sensitivity towards foreigners and I happen to be the only foreigner in the room.
For people of different races, I assume this feeling is switched on practically all the time because now the differences aren't only felt during HR mandated meetings. And moreover, they're not differences that have any bearing on the person's contribution to the company (any more than my status as a foreigner does).
Not sure anyone can speak for all Slavic people. However, just because someone complains about something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to others.
Can you name a city in the world that doesn’t have some sort of racial, religious, economic or other form of segregation?
Regardless of who you think was wrong, it had a big effect on black employees' perceptions of their employer.
This is hard for people new to working and living alongside minorities in America, but these are individuals and not a monolithic group. Identity politics is dangerous because the loudest mouths on the issue are definitely not representative of any whole group. And yet culturally we're demanded to see things their way to an increasing and alarming degree.
Seems very pervasive to have a heavily distorted view of black people
What I most commonly see, on Blind, is people assuming that black people - mostly US citizens their entire lives - have a completely different culture that has to be tolerated, as opposed to a mostly shared American culture
Its kind of weird
It’s discretionary
So as far my experience goes it is pretty difficult to hire non-male engineers if you're on a budget, then you end up with a full male team and then you might end up being accused with bias and discrimination against women. (I've seen this happening.)
If that isn't outright blatant sexism, I don't know what is.
The vast majority of their clients seem to word it like "we'd love to have great talent" followed by "do you have any non-white, preferably women engineers?"
Since this is all off the books conversation it would be difficult to bring up a sexism or racism case. But there is currently a distinct, non-meritocratic, sub-industry cropping up in recruiting and it's getting more aggressive. Companies are being subverted in the name of "Diversity and Inclusion".
I have personal experience with this. When I was working out of a bay area consulting shop the "diverse" candidates were most often hired onto client projects despite experience levels not being the same. Again, the internal sales people had no choice. The companies would ask for "diverse" engineers off the books. I've also been passed up for promotion vs less tenured (but similarly experienced) engineers because the next rank up wasn't diverse enough. This one was not confirmed through any source but was deduced by the racial make up of promotion and personally knowing the promoted engineers. You'd expect it to be more random.
Racism is acceptable to big tech. It's both obvious and appalling.
"Anti-discrimination", if you behave rationally, must lead to further discrimination. I guess behaving rationally is not at the forefront of most of these peoples' minds.
I'm mixed mixed ethnicity and it's definitely easier to just pretend everyone is treating me fairly and we're all the same. I was pretty much raised to do that.
Unfortunately, that has badly impacted me over my lifetime. It lets people single me out and pretend it's not a racist prerogative. It often is, but people don't even want to admit that to themselves. They hold other ethnicity to higher standards to "fit in" or "be a cultural fit". Meanwhile, some rude, abrasiveness, ignorant guy who looks like them gets a pass.
Given large jumps in both directions for various groups, it’s hard to figure out if this is just noise or a meaningful number (eg last year: attrition for whiteX-males was higher, this year it’s higher for blackX-females).
It’s cool they’ve been able to find qualified people, taking a long time to fill those roles but very nice they are doing it!
They will more adequately address additional markets with this talent gravitational pull.
What is the percentage of Black+ in the population? The US census doesn’t have a + section, so we can deduce that it is at least 12% for standard tier Black, but when including the premium tier what percentage is that?
It’s nice that it is getting much closer to proportionate representation, it’s not clear how close
The article got that very incorrect
I was surprised by the 7% metric and found it improbable too
There have always been cultures that adapt to certain states of the world. For example, German efficiency was there and irrelevant before the industrial era, and when the world valued efficiency their culture was the beneficiary. In reference to some cultures from Asia operating in the West, they are also benefactors of the family support systems that they are able to maintain, even if there are psychological issues with that model, it is accurate that many are able to achieve social standing in Western society. You are hoping for that to prove the wrong thing, or disprove the validity of other group's experiences as if they are not worth further analysis and support. This doesn't help y/our society.
Tech companies have not been inspired enough to do so, not suggesting it is their role
But many organizations interested in the tech industry are
but why? end exams are standarized and in my opinion fair
there is actually a lot of ongoing discussion about that and there is no resolved consensus on your opinion
current approach challenges pure intellectual output, any other way implies bias which current system strongly avoids
Obviously the biases in actual standardized tests are more subtle, but a lot of the question have an inherent cultural bias and assume some basic cultural knowledge in their test takers.
basic (mandatory):
math, country_lang, other_lang
advanced level (your choice): cs, math, physics, biology, chemistry, country_lang, other_lang, history, other...
I don't think there's wide room for questions like that.
You'd be surprised. There is ample research showing that even the most simple math and reading comprehension questions have cultural biases.
but on the other hand they appear on previous years questions as often as other (I think), thus you can easily prepare and learn how to count cards or stuff
So yes, you could learn it, but the kids who grew up playing cards with their family have a distinct advantage on that question.
on math exams in my country (basic+advanced) I noticed only 1 question like that - those cards
System is not perfect, but do you have any better alternative?
(You need to be wealthy and coastal to know what a Regatta is)
If you have a number system where each place is a power of two greater than the one next to it, and only the digits 1 and 0, how do you represent the number 1033?
(This was an actual question I remember from a test, which I aced because I already knew binary but most of classmates were dumbfounded by the question)
Any question in English to a kid who grew up in a home that didn't speak English.
There are lots of studies you can Google with more examples.
On english exams (here) the question is written in native language
e.g Polish students in Poland take english exams and the "what you have to do" part is written in Polish, but the task itself challenges english skills
Usually standardized tests are in one language regardless of if you're a native speaker or not, putting immigrants at a disadvantage.
It seems reasonable, taking math without proficency in exam's math nomenclature is harder if you were learning math in other language, as far as I know you can probably ask comission to clarify stuff.
But, the original discussion started from
>Black people are currently less educated as a result of systemic racism than their Asain and white counterparts.
comparing Black people who have been in US for looooooooong time to imigrants is not greatest.
Here's basic level school leaving math exam:
https://cke.gov.pl/images/_EGZAMIN_MATURALNY_OD_2015/Arkusze...
I just went thru those questions and they seems to be almost purely mathematical (there's one question about balls in the box and counting probability (no. 25))
and also very often their description is relatively short like "solve the inequality" (27), but there's some longer questions, mostly about geometry
I'm not aware whether there's English version of this, but let's think about it for a while:
I don't think that immigrants in Poland come from English speaking countries, thus even using English on those exams would be relative disadvantage, the perfect solution would be to allow them to take it in their native language, but then we'd have to support(*) basically all languages because somebody may appear and declare that he want to take the exam
* - have people who are able capable of providing high quality translation
The census does track people identifying with multiple races. Pew, citing the census, says there are ~46.8M (40.7M + 3.7M + 2.4M) Americans who identify as Black (and possibly as something else as well) so about 14%.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/the-gro....
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
14%, thanks
Knowing nothing, I can't put this in context. Three curiosity followups I'd ask:
#1 How does Google compare with other huge organizations? vs Fed Govt, military, education, FAANG, interationally ...?
#2 I'm most interested in retention efforts. Daylighting the reasons people say they're leaving. Revealing this info is fraught with danger, I know. Maybe with large enough sample size, across organizations (eg all FAANGs), it could be done safely.
#3 For people to advance, there need to be opportunities. If I had a cushy job, why would I leave to make room for another? What's Google doing there? One radical solution is the "up or out" system used for high powered consultancies (lawyers, accounting). I'm sure there's downsides to any proposal. But ya gotta break some eggs to make omelets. The kind of cash Google has, they could just buy people out.
As science advances and the vagaries of thought are linked to organic and atomic, physical processes I expect the Grand Unified Theory of Quantum Mechanics to explain Discourse Mechanics too.
* Absolute numbers of people leaving over time * Absolute numbers of employee * Average tenure
(And you could break those down by group.)
My thinking is: maybe there's a background effect? Google used to have the reputation of being the most exciting and desirable place to work in tech, and maybe it deserved that reputation? Now?
These terms are useful for demographic measurement, not for personal description. Another commenter gives a good explanation – that the + is there to include those who identify as mixed race. Latinx is used to aggregate Latino/Latina identities.
These terms are useful with even the smallest amount of interest given to why they might be. I'd encourage you to be more curious rather than jumping to the conclusion that this stems from some cultural over-sensitivity.
Using the term "Latinx" in my opinion is a form of cultural appropriation, because it imposes a way of using grammatical gender that is typical of the English language (think e.g. about the "singular they") upon neo-latin languages where the perception of grammatical gender is very different. In neo-latin languages such as Italian or Spanish, grammatical gender doesn't have the same weight that it has in English, e.g. when I think about "scrivania" or "armadio" (those are the Italian words for "desk" and "closet", the former is feminine and the latter is masculine) I don't imagine in my mind that the desk has feminine features, or that the closet is somehow manly. This is just not how those languages work.
Edit: when I speak English I'm absolutely in favour of things like singular they. I'm just saying that this doesn't work as well in other languages.
Anyway, we know that most of the time it's not about actually respecting the other person.
What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the idea of masculinity or femininity might be de-emphasised in the mind of the native speaker, rather than reinforced.
And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?
> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?
My hypothesis is that having it might de-emphasise the link between grammatical gender and gender identity of a person, this link is very strong in the English language because in English the only time you use gendered language you are talking about a person, in those other languages you use gendered words to refer to a pot or a chair :-)
And German is a whole different class than Latin and Slavic languages - AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German. In contrast, in Spanish, Italian (not sure about French) and Slovenian words actually “sound” either feminine or masculine (or neutral, but those are rarer and mostly for inanimate objects), because gender is based on word endings.
Yeah, I gather that Germans intuit the gender of a new word - it just "feels" masculine or feminine (or neutral). Fascinating.
That's incorrect, there are rules. (These rules have a few exceptions.)
m: -en, -er, -ig, -ismus, -ist, -ling, -m, -or
f: -ät, -e, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -ion, -keit, -schaft, -ung, -ur
n: -chen, -lein, -ment, -nis, -tum, -um
That makes the proposed contrast weaker than you initially thought.
Slovenian: -a feminine, -o, -e neutrum, rest masculine. (Again, some exceptions.)
Italian and Spain is probably even simpler, since there’s no neutrum.
That's mathematically impossible.
Or secret option c): it has absolutely no effect on how they treat their women because they aren't actually that dumb.
To my original point, one of the most interesting examples that I can think of is how you gender groups of humans in Spanish or Portuguese. If I understand correctly, no matter the distribution of the group, the group becomes masculine once there is one man in it. It could be 999 females and 1 male and the proper way to label it is masculine.
Add on nouns shifting meaning over time and you've got a relationship between grammar and sex that is extremely loose. I'd take any notion that it « influences attitude » with extreme carefulness.
For sure. Similar to sociobiology, my original line of thinking can quickly lead to some offensive ideas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
> Surveys of Hispanic and Latino Americans have found that most prefer other terms such as Hispanic and Latina/Latino to describe themselves, and that only 2 to 3 percent use Latinx.[1][2] A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly three-quarters of U.S. Latinos were not aware of the term Latinx; of those who were, 33% said it should be used to describe their racial or ethnic group, while 65% said it should not.[3][2]
Honestly, with support that poor I’m not sure why you’d bother.
(Aside, but iOS doesn’t even recognize latinx as a word)
Honestly it's disgusting it's still in use. When does it be come a slur given it's used against a population against their wishes?
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
They're not describing the same population.
For reference, 75% of polled people in the US disapproved of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the year he was assassinated.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin...
If we go by your logic of purely going off of polling, MLK, Jr. was an all around terrible man going against the wishes of the population. I don't think any reasonable person these days would agree with that.
What sets this apart from a racial slur apart from a marginal difference in support?
LatinX is not just appropriation, it's cultural imperialism at its finest.
It's the "woke" American cultural hegemony trying to dictate what the Latino community can call itself. It's almost disrespectful to our autonomy, our culture and heritage.
And I say this as someone who's completely pro the gender-neutral language revolution in his native tongue, Spanish.
Latinos can call themselves whatever they want, we don't need the US to start telling us how we need to gender-neutralize our community.
However, I (an armchair linguist, I should note) am also a big adherent to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: your language affects your world view. And in terms of gender, there's at least research[1] that shows linguistic gender affects our perception of things. Of course, as with all research, it's open to critique, but I don't have the training for evaluating research in this field. Maybe someone else better equipped could chime in.
Interesting quotes:
> In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” ... This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.
> Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language.
The second quote struck me in particular because when I first came across this, I just had a vacation in Paris where I visited the Pantheon. In one of the Pantheon's pillars is a depiction of Death (French: La Mort, feminine) and it struck me as very curious that in this depiction, Death is female. The only other work I knew of to do that was Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
(This is already long enough, but going back to the topic of "Latinx" terms...I don't intend my point above as an endorsement of this practice. In fact I find them quite virtue signalling. I have more thoughts on this but I think the majority of gender (and racial) activism is distracted on bike shedding issues such as using this "x-form". But enough said for now.)
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-o...
Exactly
> Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: your language affects your world view
I also agree on this. The study you mentioned about German and Spanish speakers is fascinating.
However I see this under a slightly different light: I suspect that speaking a language where all nouns are gendered, your gender-related biases might end up being de-emphasised over time[1]. I would love to read research papers about this topic.
[1] see my other comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710620 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710812 where I attempt to explain what I mean by that
It absolutely does. That's why learning new languages can heavily widen one's perspective.
That's also why people who can influence word definitions, especially legal ones, are the most influent and powerful people on earth.
Talking about French, the English word "mortgage" always sounded extremely sinister from a French perspective, given its linguistic implications.
As a linguist, my personal opinion is that it tinges your world view, but does not have a large influence on it. I only adhere to a very light interpretation of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. tldr: culture is a much stronger influence on world view, it also strongly influences language.
A simple, but clear example is rhyme. By having words that rhyme in your language, you are more likely to pair them together in a song or a poem, like love and dove, but these words don't rhyme in Chinese so you a Chinese speaker is less likely to pair them when rhyme is needed. It also affects word play. A counter argument would be imperfect rhyme, the culture or desired effect forces a rhyme on words. The speaker finds a why to manipulate the language for their needs.
A stronger argument argument against Sapir-Whorf is that there are native speakers of a language that have very different cultures like native speaker of American English and native speakers of Indian English. They both speak English, but have very different world views, and change the language to suit their communication needs. The opposite can be true as well, speakers of different languages, but related cultures can shape their languages in similar ways. For example, many Singaporeans are native or high level English speakers and the language has evolved patterns and communication styles found in Chinese languages.
Personally, I don't use "Latinx" in normal, everyday conversation. "Latino" or (in English) "Latin American" works fine. But if I know I am speaking about a group of people where there are non-binary members who care about this, or if the topic is diversity/inclusion in particular, then I try to use Latinx. Why not? There's nothing appropriative about trying to use language that marginalized people have asked we use to better include them.
Were they predominantly people of Latin American heritage who lived in Latin America and spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or people of Latin American heritage whose primary language might have been English because they lived in a predominantly English speaking country?
Let's say a person of Latin American heritage, but whose everyday language is English, modifies their Latin American language in ways that conform to the English language. How do we evaluate that?
Yes, I agree that we could not call it appropriation, because that person is indeed of Latin American heritage, but is this not still a form of "cultural imperialism", where a language that is dominant for political or economical reasons imposes itself over other languages?
And does it not become cultural appropriation later on, the moment that word spreads and becomes mainstream mostly among people of non Latin American heritage, while Latin Americans seldom use it to refer to themselves?
> There have been other attempts too, like "Latine", "Latin@" and so on.
Yes, it is true that there have been some attempts at making the language more gender neutral in other languages too, as I said above I'm Italian and I saw some attempts in Italian as well, things like "Cara/o cliente..." ("Dear customer..." where "dear" has both the feminine and masculine termination, separated with a slash). And I don't have issue with those attempts.
But I take issue specifically with this: why attempting to make the language more gender neutral, using a device (grammatically neutral words) that is typical of the English language and doesn't really exist in Spanish? I am of the opinion that you can use an inclusive language while still speaking Spanish, e.g. you could say "Latinos y Latinas", or for brevity you could write both terminations with a slash like in the Italian example above, there is no need to force an English language device onto Spanish.
Given Spanish is spoken as a first language by hundreds of millions of people in tens of countries around the world, I don't think it should be seen as a problem that some of those Spanish-speaking people are finding new ways to express an experience that perhaps other Spanish-speaking people don't find relevant to them. There are 40 million native Spanish speakers in the United States, and millions more who speak it as a second language. At least some proportion of those consider themselves non-binary, and would like to have a term that explicitly recognizes that identity. (Note that your suggestion of "Latinos y Latinas" does not explicitly include non-binary identities.)
I don't think it really matters if "Latinx" is a word that was developed in the United States by people who live there. It might be a bit crass to refer to people across the entirety of Latin America using that term, but I don't see anybody doing that.
As far as appropriation goes: just like Spanish, the English language is evolving too. Sometimes we adopt foreign terms into English, and often we bastardize them, and that's not considered especially remarkable. We took "diva" from Italian and use it for both female and male "divi". I don't think that's cultural appropriation.
To be clear, I am not an American, so I am sympathetic to your view that American politics and culture tends to push itself into other countries. Here on HN that happens a lot. But I don't think this particular term is something worth worrying about. The way I see it there are many worse things Americans could be doing than creating a new word that people there have a use for.
I see it as a problem when it's used to identify a minority that overwhelmingly rejects this term as it's been noted elsewhere in this thread. That's something that is usually true of racial slurs. Of course, I'm not saying that Latinx is a racial slur, but that it shares this characteristic with racial slurs.
> Languages change all the time based on how people use them in the real world.
Of course, but that doesn't justify forcing terms onto minorities.
> Note that your suggestion of "Latinos y Latinas" does not explicitly include non-binary identities.
I think it does, because in Spanish, Italian and similar languages the masculine grammatical gender is also used for plurals where the grammatical gender is indeterminate (it's used as a substitute of the neutral gender, due to the fact that we don't have the neutral gender in our grammar)[1]. That is why I fail to see how someone who is a native speaker of those languages, and is familiar with the grammar, would find that definition non-inclusive. Unless they were projecting a way of thinking that is typical of the English language (where grammatical gender = gender identity) onto that other language.
> As far as appropriation goes: just like Spanish, the English language is evolving too. Sometimes we adopt foreign terms into English, and often we bastardize them, and that's not considered especially remarkable. We took "diva" from Italian and use it for both female and male "divi". I don't think that's cultural appropriation.
Yes of course you are right. But people don't use "diva" exclusively to refer to people of Italian descent - so it's not the same as "Latinx", which is being used to define a minority - which overwhelmingly rejects that term apparently. Speaking of Italian words assimilated into the English language - my personal pet peeve is English speaking people saying "Bravo!" at the end of an exhibition, even if the performer is not a woman ("bravo" is masculine).
> I am sympathetic to your view that American politics and culture tends to push itself into other countries. Here on HN that happens a lot.
Yes, sometimes in HN discussions it's considered as a given that they are talking about the USA and I often interject and ask "in what country?" I'm like the "internationalist police" of this forum ahah :-D
[1] An example would be: "Tutti gli italiani, uomini e donne, dovrebbero vaccinarsi" - "All Italians, men and women, should get the vaccine" - "Italiani" is grammatically masculine but it's being used as a neutral here. To an external observer this might seem masculinist, or you might see it the other way around (the masculine grammatical gender ends up being de-emphasised because it's often used for non-masculine nouns).
The Pew study that is commonly cited[0] makes it clear that 76% of Latino or Hispanic identifying people have not even heard of the term. Only 3% use it, increasing to 7% amongst younger people (18-29) and 14% among young women. The study also notes that most people of that background prefer to be called Hispanic, which makes sense because Hispanic is an older term in the first place, and it is also the term used in US government documents like the census. Of the 23% who have heard of the term, only 12% "disagree or dislike" it, with a far greater number understanding that it is useful as a gender-neutral or LGBTQ-inclusive term. This really is not the kind of big deal that some people are making it out to be.
This has all happened before, of course. For example, in the 70s some American women started to refer to themselves as "womyn". The term grew popular amongst some groups, and it's listed in the dictionary, but it never really caught on. Around the same time some American activists decided to take an actual slur - queer - and reclaim that as a term to describe everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Plenty of Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts were not happy about that, but eventually the term stuck, and now most people in that group would probably accept the fact that "queer" is a valid umbrella term, even if amongst themselves they still use a more specific or more old-fashioned terminology.
I see "Latinx" as just another one of these linguistic trends. Maybe it will catch on, maybe it won't. For now, it's pretty well-established in HR departments of big American tech companies, so if you work in tech and you're talking about HR... Then it makes sense to use the term. In other contexts, well that's up to you.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
"Black+", "Latinx+", "LGBTTQQIAAP". Putting people in smaller and smaller box in the name of equality and diversity.
I am the only one to feel this is coming to an absurd point ? I'm not an alt-right fan, nor would I vote Republican if I could, I'm a leftist in what's considered a traditional sense in my country, but this is beyond my understanding.
* Oh boy was that ableist ?
In my country it happens on both side of the spectrum, they're just instrumentalised differently, I don't think it's a left vs right thing
divide et impera, working perfectly
It was hate speech against your neurodiverse colleagues. Doubleplus ungood.
I am white as milk from a Latin America country I dont know what I am suppose to complete. I consider myself latin but companies may think I am not brown enough to fit the category.
(I don't know if that leaves them considered "Hispanic" or not. I think it does leave them considered Latin, though.)
But GP didn't say Hispanic. He was referring to Latin America, whose people are called Latino.
Neither of the terms carry racial connotations. If you're Argentinian of pure Italian descent, you're still Latino. If you're one of the 2 million Spanish speakers of the Philippines, you're Hispanic. If you're one of the Guarani indigenous languages speakers of Paraguay who doesn't speak Spanish at all you're still Latino but not Hispanic.
G. CRISTINA MORA , Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats and Media Constructed a New American (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2014)
Then the internet happened and society fractured along personal interest, whatever one is into now there are dozens of people with the same interest online. It became impossible to distinguish people on the basis of fashion either.
But to interact with strangers, we need some way to stereotype them, and so intersectionalism has tried to fill that gap. It won't work in its current form because nobody who presumes to declare on behalf of an identity group as to what is a proper way to treat members of that identity group is actually representative of any group. But the need to stereotype strangers somehow remains, so social offerings like this will continue to be brought forward.
"we only hire stanford grads, but some of them are black!" isn't really diversity.
"Inclusion" = Restricted speech and justification for purges
"Equity" = Equality of outcomes
I had to look up if this acronym was some kind of joke.
The word is queer. I'm still unsure as to why this word isn't used for most contexts where the LGBT[...] are currently used. We use the word "gay" and that used to be an insult like "queer" was too.
> Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer
Now, some people personally identify as queer instead of lesbian, bi, or gay for all sorts of reasons; but it is the umbrella term.
Robin DeAngelo, is a frontrunner of 'white guilt', CRT, and other strange sides of the woke movement.
This quote pretty much sums it up, they want to put group identity first, above individualism.
> I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
The issue with CRT is that every other theory and research of this subject (eg. IQ differences) has been shut down or obscured due to allegations of racism or fear of how society would react to such knowledge. And that poses a problem. You can't even propose any alternative theory in the current climate.
Second, the same criticism applies to CRT. There is a double standard. For the sake of simplicity, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about it under the "Academic Criticism" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory#Academic
> Farber and Sherry additionally posit that the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications.
I don't think I have to explain to anyone why this theory would have any antisemitic or anti-Asian implications, everyone has to know it on some level. You might not necessarily agree with it, but you should know why. But the most interesting and telling thing about everything surrounding the CRT is what this criticism doesn't say. Nowhere does it even mention anti-White implications. Imagine reading something explicitly focused on the overrepresantation of Jewish people in positions of power and saying "wow, this could hurt some innocent Europeans".
I agree that the divisions are already here (and pretty much always have been for that matter), and that individualists are wrong in just pretending like the problem doesn't exist. But forcing this down everyone's throats without any possibility of defending yourself will only end up in a disaster.
No, it hasn't.
Not even your specific example (racial IQ dofferences), on which there continues to be new work published (both on the differences and on influences, both genetic and environmental.)
So if “the issue” with CRT is just this thing that is neither true nor about CRT, then that’s pretty much the same as there being, in fact, no issue with CRT.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I had to scroll through dozens of your comments to find even one that didn't fit this description. That's clearly over the line, so I've banned this account.
In this framework the difference you notice makes absolute sense.
America is a country founded on enlightenment ideas, which were part of the leftist school of thought in the old borderline ecclesiocratic aristocracy that would have formed the 'right wing' of Europe.
Thus the american right wingers look back to what you'd consider leftist thought as their model of keeping society as it should be, whereas a European right winger may look back to the older days of European monarchs, national identity and religion.
In america, the right wing, looking back towards our american enlightenment ideals, wouldn't really believe in any of those things in the same way.
There are some bits of overlap, especially in the social issues since those are recent changes. But overall an american right winger is going to be a European classical liberal which is typically considered leftist.
If you think the average republican voter would support enacting "fascism [to] tear down the tenants of democracy in the US, while siphoning as much money and power to big business and the upper classes as possible", then I suggest you talk to some more. You may be quite surprised.
Regardless, I think this is a major pitfall of the two party system. What you say certainly has truth. What I say has truth as well. However discourse usually devolves to attacking the extremists in each group and no real discussion can be had. I am optimistic about the future. Have a nice day.
If you have an issue with "Putting people in smaller and smaller box"es then you should start your rants by addressing religion or American voter policy.
Your take reads like in America's history black people were always able to vote and Civil Rights was really a rebranding of their rights because Black Americans collectively just wanted to now call it the 'Black Vote'.
Religions are predicated on in-group out-group dynamics, and the shared schizophrenic delusion of a, specifically old white male in the case of the dominant American religion Christianity, in the clouds telling them to hate homosexuals.
Your take ignores the fact that the oppressor is often the one compartmentalizing.
For example, the church refusing to marry same sex couples. So homosexual specific civil rights movements organize to force the hand of the chuch to begrudgingly allow them to marry.
But some people still want to tell trans people they are forbidden from using a bathroom. So now a T specific civil rights movement is needed from the previous compartment they were just lumped into of 'homosexual' because the L and Gs can use bathrooms without issue.
I agree the end goal should be one category: Entropic Debris. It encompasses all that is and will ever be.
I think compartmentalizing humanity as separate from the rocks we see in the night sky is unscientific, but I can recognise that such a take fails to address any of the frought and nuanced elements of contemporary human social interactions that need to be addressed with specificity.
I hear you and I mostly share your view tbh. As we speak, Republican lawmakers are pushing for legislations that aim to exclude voters from democratic expression ; Flint residents still don't have drinkable water. All of this exist, racism exist, poor people are suffering and even dying from it, minorities in larger proportions.
Still, is the X of Latinx the solution ? Or is it smoke and mirrors in the Big Tech goal of being perceived as noble ?
Respectfully.
Hardly, though this seems a strawman since anyone who advocates for the X in Latinx would be unlikely to claim it solves the Flint water crisis.
> Or is it smoke and mirrors in the Big Tech goal of being perceived as noble ?
This feels like conflating. The X in Latinx is independant of the Tech industry, and was most definitely used long before any Tech HR department caught on.
Latinx came out of the intersectionality of minority rights and issues of gender. Latin languages are gendered but we want to address Latin-American issues without profiling a single gender, a la Latino or Latina.
As another tool in the toolbox to fix oppressive systems the X in Latinx is a fine thing and people have been empowered by it, but it in isolation is certainly going to fall short of addressing the myriad of issues within this domain and I doubt any advocates for change would claim otherwise.
I think business leaders will do anything to avoid dilluting their ownership, which will be an important effort toward real positive change, and if their tactic is to distract organizers with superficial changes then organizers will need to remain diligent.
Take what is offered and keep working until what is offered is what you need.
> This was not a rant.
Maybe, but your replies seem to point to a specific interpretation of your comment of villifying, or at least mocking, of people who see themselves represented in LGBTTQQIAAP and its advocacy ilk, and a plea that the only reasonable response is to reject the activism wholesale.
People will mock this sentiment perhaps, but it's true. Take the polarizing issue of abortion for example. If the USA had the same abortion restrictions as Germany, you'd likely see the GOp drop most of its prolife stuff. Right now, the democrats are very extreme on abortion and other social issues compared to international norms.
It's why places like France are now also explicitly condemning american leftism despite nominally and fiscally being far to the left of the democratic party too.
Given people stay respectful, I think that's fair to criticize languages choices and the barrier they create.
"Freedom is Slavery"
It is just my browser stuffing a plus sign at the end?
Some sort of gender or kink letter? Code for a cyborg? Programming language?
I'm not sure what the reason for this recent surge of neo-racism where every "tribe" has to be treated differently.
By “affirmative action” Google perpetuates racism
You are only disagreeing on the methods for fixing that. I think one of you is saying 'we need to fix the root cause and stop being racist', and another is saying 'we need fix the symptoms right now because they're suffering.'
What's frustrating is pretty much everybody thinks racism is wrong, and I legitimately think over 99% of the posters here are appalled by racism. But for various reasons, they disagree about methods to correct the issue, and end up despising each other.
The other side thinks the other are moderate enablers too dumb to think at system scale or understand why it's thought that the game theoretic ends justify the means
Why don't "straight white American men" tell HR they identify as "homosexual black Latina women"? Not like the HR is in a position to dispute that, right? Is there a mechanism to avoid this?