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Comment by jeffy90 | Hacker News Reader

To what extent do black computer science grads have worse job placement than white/asian ones? At my employer for every position we're required to interview at least one underrepresented demographic (basically female, black or latino), but recruiters are struggling to find candidates. It gives me the impression that there simply aren't many computer science grads in those demographics

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As a white woman in the tech industry, the entire pipeline is leaky. You're discouraged from studying engineering before you go into college. You're discouraged once you're in college. You get less money and fewer advancements once you're in industry. Dudes creep on you and condescend to you, assuming you're a diversity hire. Even encouraging people will push you into non-technical roles because you have "soft skills". Eventually you get sick of all the bullshit and you take one of those non-technical roles, or you just leave the industry altogether.

Even if you feed more people into one end of the woodchipper, very few will make it out the other end intact.

Contrast that experience with that of female MDs, where even though there's surely still plenty of bullshit you get to treat a lot of grateful female patients — pretty rewarding in comparison! (And grateful male patients too, but the point is that it's not just male patients.) And now women outnumber men for both applying to med school and graduating.

The same nonsense about aptitudes, interests, whatever was thrown at women about careers in medicine. Eventually, the tech industry will even out too, because today's tech demographics are not the result of some unchangeable destiny. I just wish it would happen in my lifetime.

I would expect a general correction to women being over represented in universities and correction for privilege programs like women-in-STEM before I expect it to “even out” with women dominating every field.

For sure. U.S. Comp Sci grads are around 1/5 female right now. And you need look no further than the hostility of the tech industry for why they might want to go elsewhere. (Cue the usual "women aren't interested in computer science", which is exactly what I'm talking about.)

Do you see it being equally problematic that U.S. Nursing grads are about 1/5 male right now? If not, why is it that this should matter in one industry and not the other?

It is a problem that men in nursing are often discriminated against, both by hiring boards, their coworkers, and their patients. We’d probably have better health outcomes with a more varied population of nurses.

Here on HN we talk about CS more… because we’re on a CS discussing site, and CS generally pays better than nursing, and women have historically faced more discrimination across society.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also care about male underrepresentation in nursing, it’s just less relevant here.

What hostility? We receive 1 woman candidate application per 20 male on average.

> What hostility?

Look no further than a sibling comment from sjsbdkj: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31090862

> We receive 1 woman candidate application per 20 male on average.

Unsurprising, given the first part of your answer. If a company gaslights women when they say that they face hostility, why would women want to work there?

Will you be answering my question above? I can only assume you've seen it by now.

What's the point? It's a superficial premise and presumes that I'm a rank hypocrite; it looks to me as though you have nothing but contempt for what I might say in response. It's not we're going to have a good faith discussion, this is just gotcha games and ideological battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

This isn't a formal debate. Nobody owes anybody else a response, and choosing not to reply to baiting posts, opting out of poisonous back-and-forth, is not only not ceding the argument, it's upholding the spirit of the HN guidelines.

If you actually want to engage, try to show that you're actually listening to the person you're engaging with and not throwing rocks at some straw man caricature of them. A good exercise would be to couch your post in terms that your interlocutor might agree with.

> It gives me the impression that there simply aren't many computer science grads in those demographics

Others have addressed other aspects of the disparity, but I'll chime in here and respond to this common misdirection with the reminder that everyone that everyone who works at a tech company does not have or need a computer science degree.

The thing about a tech company is that it's still a company with many of the same corporate functions as a railroad or oil company: finance/accounting, sales, marketing, human resources, facilities management, legal, etc. While it's fine for your head of HR to have a CS degree, it's definitely not the main criteria for the job. I don't have current numbers for FAANG, but would be somewhat surprised if more than ~40% of the headcount of any big tech company comprises roles that require or use a CS degree.

Incidentally: there was a robust discussion on this site today about the merits of whether a degree was even necessary, and HN commenters posted to indicate that not having a degree has not been an impediment to them working in the industry. I think having a CS degree is perhaps not the gating factor here. (Yes, I have a CS degree.)

Google has sushi chefs on staff, and yet it's still a misconception (misdirection?) that aggregate corporate numbers are skewed because of a dearth of Hispanic/Black/women CS grads. Whether that is actually the case or not, we can say for certain that tech does a terrible job at hitting their diversity in non-engineering roles, areas where Coke/AT&T/Accenture are not having a similar problem.

This is a new trend in requirements…

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