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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

> The company nearly doubled the number of Black+ people in U.S. leadership to 7.1% last year

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

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They're using "Black+" as "all Googlers who identify as Black, plus those who identify as Black and any other race".

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)

Yes, the census does track multiple, it just wasn’t clear what the + in this context was referring to

14%, thanks

Is that a mistake? In the charts on this year's report, the Black Leadership % went from 2.6% to 3.0%. https://diversity.google/annual-report/representation/

Best I can see is maybe a 7% increase!

The article got that very incorrect

Black people are currently less educated as a result of systemic racism than their Asain and white counterparts. That would make achieving 12% leadership particularly difficult, since black people are on average less qualified(on paper, at least) relative to applicants from other races.

Asians are proof the power of systemic racism to hold minorities down in this day and age is not very strong.

Some specific cultures with Asian heritage in the West. Not intentionally trying to be obtuse, but to support that talking point it is important to recognize that there are other Asian people in the West that are underserved by this overly broad racially prejudiced assumption.

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.

Maybe if some culture is not adapted to the state of the world, we should try to fix that culture, and not modify the world around it. Or, at least, just let that culture be maladapted and leave it be. No one was hiring inefficient people during the industrial revolution for diversity, regardless of how inefficient the person's culture seemed to be.

You seem to not be aware that a lot of people are working to fix underperforming cultures for the reasons they are underperforming

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

I'm curious - how did you come to this conclusion?

But Asians are being systemically held down by affirmative action and racial quotas. Proof that the power of systemic racism is very real no matter your income or class, or no matter if you're a minority or not. You are not safe as long as the cultural zeitgeist has decided so.

>Black people are currently less educated as a result of systemic racism than their Asain and white counterparts.

but why? end exams are standarized and in my opinion fair

> 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

and what arguments are that this process is not fair?

current approach challenges pure intellectual output, any other way implies bias which current system strongly avoids

The arguments are rationalized after the fact. Black people do worse on the exams, thus the exams must be unfair. The rest of the exercise is trying desperately to twist the data to support this, or when that fails, just say "systemic racism" and wave your hands vaguely.

If a standardized test said "what is the Yiddish word for rag?", is that test fair? It asks everyone the same question after all. But I'd bet you find that Jewish people were passing that test at a higher rate than anyone else.

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.

In my country exams are:

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.

> 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.

Ok, I agree that it is possible that question like that exists (e.g counting cards)

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

That's actually a perfect example. Any problem that involves cards assumes you know what cards are, what the suits are, how many of each there are, etc. That's cultural knowledge not everyone has, and often breaks down by race.

So yes, you could learn it, but the kids who grew up playing cards with their family have a distinct advantage on that question.

but still, how many questions are like that?

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?

The biases must be subtle indeed if you are unable to describe one and have to resort instead to an absurd thought experiment.

Runner is to Marathon as Regatta is to_________________

(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.

>Any question in English to a kid who grew up in a home that didn't speak English.

On english exams (here) the question is written in native language

Ok, so I would do poorly then since I don’t speak the native language.

What do you meaan?

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

For the math part, are the instructions in Polish or English? As a native English speaker, I would have trouble doing math if the instructions and word problems were in Polish, even if Polish were my second language.

Usually standardized tests are in one language regardless of if you're a native speaker or not, putting immigrants at a disadvantage.

>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

it seems the article is wrong and it is much lower %

I was surprised by the 7% metric and found it improbable too

Sorry, people are downvoting this because it is out of the Overton window of acceptable discourse, and the fact that it happens to be true is irrelevant.

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