Tech companies are quietly defunding diversity pledges
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I'd be perfectly happy to support their cause if they provided evidence of discrimination to back their claims, but these accusations come off as sensationalist, statistically innumerate and lazy.
Some U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for reference: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
An organization/team of 500 people should be expected to be diverse, especially in a desirable career path.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
What makes it so that Asians are underrepresented, and would the games be more interesting if these causes were addressed ?
Many inuits left their land and moved to cities. A second generation inuit living in Toronto has no reason to be better or worse than anyone else at basketball.
I always thought stereotypes arise because they're commonly observed behaviours within a social group?
Their physique.
Fact of the matter is, black peoples' bodies are far more suited for strenuous physical activities than asians'. For the NBA specifically, the average height of blacks compared to that of asians is a significant factor; the taller you are the more advantageous you will be.
For a more in-depth example, over in Japan (note: I'm Japanese-American) athletes who have some foreign blood in them tend to perform better in sports compared to 100% Japanese athletes. Not to mention 100% foreigners who moved to Japan who will, in general, perform better than anyone with Japanese blood.
The reality is asians aren't as physically capable as other races, generally speaking.
>and would the games be more interesting if these causes were addressed ?
No. I think I speak for the majority when I say we watch sports matches to spectate top-of-the-class athletes doing their best, regardless who or what they are.
If there are obvious diversity quota players in the mix, that would /reduce/ the overall fun and interest because the sport stops being about the best athletes performing their best.
> […]
> The reality is asians aren't as physically capable as other races, generally speaking.
Do you apply similar logic to explain why black people are underrepresented in technical fields while Asian people are over-represented? Would you say that Asian peoples’ minds are “far more suited” for strenuous intellectual activities than black peoples’?
This is also the reason why there are far few women software engineers than men. It is not about their capabilities, physical, intellectual or otherwise. It is about their environment where they grow up in - some people grow up with programming computers from very early age because their parents do something similar, most of these (by a wide margin) are white or asian boys.
For the record, I also don’t think it’s about “differences in capabilities”. I think that amongst other things, as personal computing came of age different types of men became attracted to computing, and changed the culture around computing to one which excluded women (in most cases probably unintentionally). If that’s true, there might be parallels with the software industry today and race.
Early computer "programmers" were doing something more akin to data entry than churning out CRUD apps using the latest js framework. Comparing the programming jobs of the 70s or whatever to the jobs today therefore makes little sense.
But that was the 60s and 70s, and the women at the time were in their 20s and 30s.
Many of those women remained "computers" and did not go into "engineers", and there is a big difference between the two. A computer is great at solving equations and doing the menial work of data calculation, similar to what we use spreadsheets for today.
Engineers on the other hand is a more creative approach to problem solving, when presented with various problems (not just of math) that need some solutions, an engineer would try and find that solution by being creative.
About 20-30 years ago, there was a large population of engineers around the world who are the parents of today's engineers who are 20-30yo right now. Those engineers were white men, and women, and asian men and women. Not many of them were black families, so today's 20-30yo black men (and women) are not only a small portion of the world population, they are also heavily underrepresented in engineering. That is not to say they are incapable, as I mentioned above, it is more influenced by the "environment" where these people grew up in.
Also, early women programmers does not mean that today's women had the same upbringing and attraction to the same professions as the women in the 60s and 70s. Back then being a "computer" was similar to being a secretary, it involved a lot of menial work and precision. Today's secretaries might be required to be good with spreadsheets and document writing software, quite a leap away from programming.
The above are generalizations, since there are absolutely definitely amazing women software engineers today, as well as black men software engineers. It is just that they are barely a minority in the software engineering industry, there are just very few of them - which makes sense why the software engineering jobs don't have any significant representation of these people working there.
The brutal reality is that various peoples and individuals have varying aptitudes to various things depending upon their genetic makeup, upbringing, social factors, and more.
You literally can not round up a random group of people and expect them all to behave the same. That's not how this works.
Systemic discrimination and inhibitors can't be set aside in a discussion about representation. The results you're referring to have those two baked in.
You seem to be upset over his pointing out this fact. Why is it no problem to point out that these Kenyans are dominating long distance running - even NPR reports about this - but problematic [3] to point out that the Japanese, Swiss, Chinese, Americans and Dutch dominate when it comes to intellectual pursuits? I suspect this is because intellectual pursuits have a higher standing among the "educated" classes who tend to ruminate about these things than physical activities. In a way this itself is problematic just like the way many "educated" people look down upon physical labour is problematic - to use a term often bandied about by those same people. A healthy society needs both those who are more into physical activities as well as those who are more into intellectual pursuits to develop and thrive - this is true diversity.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/01/241895965/...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/duncanmadden/2019/01/11/ranked-...
My comment was more related to the fact that in my experience there are quite a number of people who have no qualms about suggesting that black people are over represented in sports like running and sprinting, professional basketball, and professional football because they are just naturally better athletes, but then will absolutely refuse to even entertain the possibility that some other races or ethnic groups might be naturally better in other fields like science and engineering. I find that sort of thinking rather inconsistent, so I was mostly just probing to see what the person I was replying to believed.
Of course this sort of discussion is going to be controversial since suggesting that a certain ethnic group is naturally better than other ethnic groups in some sense, even if only in certain areas, would seem to fit the traditional definition of racism.
We can't make meaningful decisions until we properly understand the reality in which we all live.
Regardless of the veracity of your claim, Japanese physiques don't represent all Asian physiques. And even Chinese historical records often mentioned who short the Japanese were.
I merely used Japan because I'm actually qualified to talk about them with some degree of specificity, and the rest of the comment is hopefully written in a more generalized manner.
Then wouldn’t be more interesting if a variety of players with different top-of-the-class physical profiles moved the game through strategies optimized to their strengths and weaknesses ?
To take a concrete example, the addition of the 3 point rule expanded the category of players that could have a critical impact on the game. I personally wouldn’t see that rule addition as a dilution of the game or a pandering to physical diversity, it genuinely makes the games more interesting.
We could imagine other rules that bring in even wider physical profiles and change the game in interesting ways.
As such, diversity quotas would not be appealing to my interests and demands in the first place. I /don't fucking care/ what they are, I care if they are good athletes.
If a sport presents me with diversity hires, I'm just going to go watch or do something else.
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/13175331/ho...
What about baseball then? MLB has only 3% asians[1]. However, asians have demonstrated excellence at a very similar sport (Cricket), so physique should not matter.
[1] https://routine.com/blogs/press-box/mlb-player-demographics
That comes down to MLB play being on an entirely different plane of existence from Japanese (and I would presume other asian locales') professional league baseball.
Japan has two of their own professional leagues, and a handful of players manage to move over to the MLB in their careers. But only a handful make it, because the minimum skill and performance levels demanded by the MLB are several orders of magnitudes higher than Japan's leagues.
This isn't about racism nor discrimination, the reality is the vast majority of Japanese baseball players simply don't make the cut for MLB.
Players like Nomo, Ichiro, and Ohtani were among the cream of the crop in Japan's baseball leagues when they moved to the MLB. They make it all look mundane, but they quite literally busted several asses to get in the MLB.
Conversely, MLB players who move over to Japan's baseball leagues tend to wipe the floor with Japanese players because the performance floor is so much lower.
This is all to say physique, and also attitude, very definitely matter. That shit ain't easy; mad respects from me as a baseball fan. Baseball is as meritocracy as it gets.
P.S. Kudos to Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers for making the MLB one of the pioneers and forerunners in true equality for mankind.
The problem is that black people are ~1% of local population, so a team without black people is much less surprising than in the US or London.
College educated San Franciscans are close to ~1% black as well.
Certainly, these experiences are anecdotal, but I've seen enough anecdotes personally (in addition to reading articles about discrimination at Uber and Blizzard) to suggest that discrimination is a non-negligible problem. I'd definitely be in favor of accurately measuring discrimination since, at the moment, all I know is that it happens to _some_ people, but I have no clue how big that group is.
I doubt that tech companies have any motivation to actually try to measure this accurately. A lot of the "pro-diversity" actions that tech companies have taken seem to be aimed to placate (sometimes misguided) employees worried about diversity issues, rather than trying to actually solve any actual problems.
Could we apply this to entire fields? Does the fact that nursing is 84% female roughly indicate discrimination against men in the profession?
"Recent research shows Black and Brown employees were disproportionately impacted in those layoffs." Links to
https://www.zippia.com/advice/diversity-in-high-tech-statist...
Which doesn't even include the word layoff, is from 2022, and doesn't seem to address the issue at all.
As I go through, this is consistent in the article. Make an argument, link to evidence, which doesn't include anything about your argument.
I'd really like to read a better put together article on the topic. I think it's a very reasonable discussion, but I'm dissuaded to try and sort out it when they cite details that have no evidence i can see.
The more time you spend talking to your employer about your skin color, the less work is getting done, and in the long run that equates 1:1 to money. Do the work, take the money, and keep it simple.
I think people need better mentors. They don't need diversity pledges and social justice initiatives in the workplace, I think they just need people to guide them along their path to becoming the best X that they can be, without judgment. That way the relationship is collaborative and nurturing, rather than threatening and adversarial like with these diversity movements. Keeping it skill-based is better for everyone.
Some of us are born into privilege, and those who aren't do need some help to level the playing field. And that's likely at every stage of life, from forced integration of schools to extra grace for oppressed groups in the workplace.
These large corporations often turn diversity goals into pseudo-business number games. To put it bluntly, they’ll hire a certain number of brown folks and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
I’m all for extra grace. I really, truly am. I don’t talk about this much, but my grandfather was murdered by a burglar many years ago. My dad visited that man over a dozen times that I can remember when I was growing up, and there’s a lot of other details and lessons surrounding this, but my point is that I understand what I believe to be the true nature of grace.
Giving someone a job they don’t deserve because of their skin color is not grace, it’s tokenizing and patronizing, whilst simultaneously reinforcing the power structures that create the situation in the first place. No, a person should be given a job they don’t deserve because of the belief that they will be grateful to learn to do it well, and led to do so by a competent and compassionate mentor.
It’s this weird quantification that holds back people’s understanding when it comes to race and status in the workplace. It’s about people, and it can’t be captured or comprehended by any form of spreadsheet or business initiative.
If we want the situation for our neighbors to improve, we need to be good neighbors and help them, rather than saying “oh, well we should find sixteen more black neighbors to make our diversity quota.” If you’re one of those future neighbors, you suddenly realize that all you are is just some black person to fill a space, for numerical purposes.
"Despite loud commitments of solidarity and support for Black communities after the murder of George Floyd, the tech industry, by and large, seems content to quietly overlook the business case for retaining employees of color and prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging."
What is the business case for retaining employees of color other than having them as employees that benefit the company? This reads like companies should keep employees of color no matter what, essentially discriminating against everyone else and just virtue signalling.
>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."
These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.
You are listing two business cases for retention: do you think tech companies are not aware of the same data? If there was a strong case for keeping employees of a specific demographic, do you think companies would ignore that and prefer to lose more money?
I don't know the answers to your questions. Though I agree the article doesn't back up the claim that layoffs are reducing diversity, except possibly indirectly by references to Twitter, where there are claims layoffs disproportionately affected women.
Paradoxically, more profitable companies can afford hiring practices which hurt their bottom line. The causality could easily be the other way around.
Of course it could, though I've come to find this critique pretty weak when two people discuss a study that neither of them has read. You can say it about any topline conclusion about things that are correlated.
The driving factor could be something else - profitable companies could be more attractive to a diverse workforce.
Probably we oughta read the study. I was just pointing out that parent was looking for a business case for diversity in and of itself and seemed to have missed the one the article attempted to provide.
Did the report imply causation from correlation?
Which is pretty terrible for talented people of color who are making material contributions because it erodes their peers confidence that they're actually qualified.
MLK would be rolling in his grave.
https://edwest.substack.com/p/would-martin-luther-king-be-an...
> But would King have opposed Kendism? Although conservatives like to quote his brilliant speech on the content of a man’s character, he was also quite explicitly in favour of quotas and discrimination measures if they favoured his group. As King said: ‘if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in a particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.’
> King may have believed in all sorts of preferential treatment, not just on account of race but also income and class, but then he was quite explicitly a socialist. Racial equality was part of a more general belief in social equality between rich and poor (that these two goals inevitably and always clash is one of many problems making this dream not entirely realisable).
> As Matthew Yglesias has written: ‘Today’s conservatives often like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as an apostle of “colorblind” policy as an aspirational goal. But King was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources.’
Not to mention that the longer DEI lasts, it will discredit any future attempts to address any actual issues with the distribution of opportunity in our society.
To that I would add, significantly simplify all laws, processes, and forms so that the average person (or preferably even a person 1 standard deviation below average) can start a business without consulting a lawyer.
Worked at a place with ERGs. I had never heard of them before. In our company wiki, they were listed as places where people of the protected group could "share career opportunities" and help each other out. Seemed mega illegal to me. I asked HR how is this not discriminatory, and they said anyone could join the group, not just people of the protected group. But nowhere was that written down or communicated. Pretty sure I was put on a "list" for that line of questioning.
Coinbase isn't in the business of being a platform for progressive politics. It's a platform for exchanging crypto, and it's explicit about it. Other companies aer quietly following suit.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori...
This is going to be kind of tangential and I apologize for that, but allow me to say that as a person of Japanese heritage I fucking hate the term "BIPOC" and any related terms thereof.
I'm a man, not a political object of convenience. If you must refer to my race for actually practical reasons, you can just refer to that than use a stupid term stemming from identity politics. If you need some generic way to refer, just refer to us as the minority because that's an objective fact.
"BIPOC" is insulting, both to the individuals and their heritage.
These terms get used the way "savage" might have been used a few 100 years ago by missionaries
I've once had a talk with a CEO (a very technical one) of an ML/CV company, who told me a story of how some American company wanted to hire her as a female manager.
She was super offended by this and declined. When asked why, she said that she wanted to be hired for her skills, rather than for her set of genitalia.
So my question is: don't diversity hires feel devaluated? Or maybe I just underestimate the level of day-to-day discrimination in the US and the alternative is worse?
P.S. I don't live in a western country so excuse me if any of this sounds insensitive.
There are also of course (as a majority) legit people from whatever trendy background that just want to do their job, and see all the fawning over "diversity" either as something to ignore (like most of us do). And then there are a few that choose to engage with it and see it as actively offensive, which it is when you think about it.
So bottom line, my feeling is that the way "diverse" - trendily ethnic or genedered etc people feel about it is about the same as everyone feels about it
The label of “professional diversity hire” is harmful to those in the majority group you identified who aren’t playing that game. So just call it for what it is rather than enabling discrimination with a dog whistle.
Even if you are not low performing, you’re still under constant pressure to prove you’re not a diversity hire.
People usually don’t have the designation of “diversity hire” officially bestowed on them by a company. They are just given to people who are in the out-group by people in the in-group. In your story, it sounds like a company explicitly was searching for a woman as a manager or the CEO got that impression. I don’t know American laws but where I am the exemptions for explicitly hiring a job based on a protected category are very limited and need to be intrinsically link - think things like requiring a woman for a female role in a movie or requiring a member of X cultural group for an outreach role focusing on that group.
Obviously this is very hard to police, and people do consider protected categories in hiring practices, sometimes in favour of an in-group and sometimes in favour of an out-group.
You might argue that the existence of diversity quotas, targets, policies or programs is the cause of the the different treatment, but it is not. Even if the company had a very explicit “best candidate wins - no special treatment” policy - you can’t escape in-group vs out-group politics. It is just that the dog whistle used will change. Even if a company has no diversity policy, the laws exist and so the whistle will change from “X is diversity hire” to “they can’t fire X because they’re afraid of lawsuits”.
Most people in out-groups will just end up adopting a persona that is acceptable enough to the in-group in order to survive. But this also does bad damage to a person’s identity. Ironically, one of the best ways to prove yourself as a member of the in-group is to blow the same dog whistles - as the female CEO did in your example.
It reminds me of how Cal graduation rates went up when they couldn't use racial quotas.
We’d all benefit from your inside view of positive support for people with potential at some of the largest, sometimes hated for their perceived indifference/profit-above-all, tech companies.
begging the question
All of this is rooted in racism.
Pardon the tangent, but I've always thought "brown" was a derogatory term. Is it not?
I’m not sure that brown people are underrepresented in tech or that these layoffs hit them harder.
In fact, the article doesn’t share any data that the layoffs hit black people more than any other so if they are underrepresented in tech companies at only 7%, doesn’t that mean they would also be underrepresented in layoffs? So there are actually fewer impacted by these layoffs than non-black.
In the US, black is a race so I think I understand the usage. But not sure what brown means unless it’s some offensive term for Latino. I don’t really think that people who have brown skin share many socioeconomic characteristics as they are many different races and ethnicities and cultures.
Just about anyone living close to the equator is going to be at least brown in skin tone.
I've only seen this term used to lump all these people together and deem them insignificant.
Used to discriminate or say something bad, ex: “<this color skin people> are annoying“, of course it’d be derogatory.
For this headline, it’s trying to capture the right small group(s) of people affected by layoffs - ok!
Any any term can be perceived as derogatory depending on the mindset of the hearer.
Surprisingly they don't seem to mind that in my UK team of 15 people we only have two British citizens (I am not one of them myself) and 11 people of color, while White British represent 75% of the population of the UK.
DEI is an absolute cancer for society.
The only black dev I know personally is my ex, and he was the only black person on his old team (of devs I mean, there were other black people at his company; it was a big media company) and is the only black dev at the new company he's at.
So, these programmes seem to artificially increase the number of PoC in the industry by having a few large companies have diversity programmes, without actually affecting their market share (for a lack of better word) in the industry itself? Is this just the wrong way of thinking about it?
Also, it probably creates contempt among the discriminated groups, as the system is unjust towards them. Ie, there's no longer an equal equal opportunity at landing the job, since one side has an unfair advantage.
So, instead of bringing people together, these forced quotas just push people more apart.
I do understand that until 20 years ago black people probably had less chances to land these jobs due being disadvantaged by educational systems, but I think that's kinda behind us since universities also prioritised PoC admissions for a while now.
I'm lucky to not have been affected by this personally, and don't know many who have. So, maybe it's irrational to think they discriminate against other groups (because it's difficult to find people to fill diversity roles in the first place). I don't know. It's a very complicated world we created for ourselves.
You're forgetting that most of that demographic shift are children. The white population over 25 is closer to 75% still.
Most of these companies don’t actually care at all about any sort of DEIB initiatives… even the supposedly “woke” ones. It’s all a sham.
Edit: This was a few months back. I lead an entire engineering organization now for a company who despite having no DEIB program is truely the most inclusive work culture I’ve ever seen.
When I reviewed the rules, which I tend to take seriously I noticed that it said "We promote neurodiversity" and in the next line it says "don't be an asshole".
I understand that some people can see a distinction here. The problem I have with those two rules is that if you are a person who is autistic, your behaviour is seen by neurotypicals as "being an asshole", especially on text based mediums where communication is much more limited in context and less rich meta-communication like body language or tone.
When I pointed this out, I was blocked.
I can only gather that people want to be seen as inclusive, so they use things that are easily seen. That which is _not_ easily seen is ignored, like autism- though people will say they support people with it, I think they're not actually interested in understanding that autism isn't just being a bit anti-social, it's a mental illness and it can be difficult to live with! Another minor example of people not caring what cannot be seen: I don't see many people making a stink about economic background, but that is a massive differentiator in mental diversity.
The only commonly tolerated, perhaps even celebrated, form of neurodiversity is asymptomatic depression.
Especially if they start getting a dopamine reward for engaging.
There is always a limit to what can or can't be allowed in spite of someone's neurodivergent status. The classic real-world case is Terry Davis, who would go on HN to insult just about everone and rant about the "CIA niggers" or whatnot. Many people were willing to give Terry some leeway, but ... to a limit.
Or to put it in another way: if you – due to your neurodivergent behaviour – are excluding other people from a community then there's clearly a bit of a conflict.
None of this is easy or simple.
It's really sad that neither side actually gets this. Both (for the sake of simplifying, let's call it the left and the right) are filled with loud bigoted reprobates who don't realise they are the very things they hate, just with different labels attached.
An added layer of bewilderment is that the woke movement is becoming increasingly more bigoted, and seems to be using the fascist playbook more and more. Like, where's the self awareness?
DEI is cancer for firms and they can ill afford it during increased AI disruption and high interest rates age
This is a classic generic-ideological comment (i.e. reflexive repetition of common talking point on divisive topic, with zero new information).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
In practice though it’s all theater. When I asked if we could at least interview some people from under-represented groups for a new position I got a “we’ll look into it.” And they didn’t.
I've heard that claim, but I don't know of many concrete examples. Can you share some?
First of all your question is terse and I think you need to expand a bit more so we can understand exactly what you want to know. For example are there any of the very few examples in this thread that you do not agree with? As always when this is discussed people get into the "holier than thou" argument some thing like: "they are not for diversity because they do not think my aspects are important enough". Feel free to use them as good examples of why diversity is needed.
I think you can find at least four arguments for diversity by reading the negative comments in this thread.
How would you have liked the question to have been phrased? This isn't rhetorical, btw. I'm genuinely curious now.
I found one about facial recognition not working for black people, and another that comes to mind in a similar vein is that the new Goole Pixels phones seem to do some camera razzle dazzle to make skin tones more accurate.
Another example that comes to mind is Overwatch's dev team is fairly diverse, which leads to really authentic hero designs in the game.
I think the last one is probably the best one out of the three I listed. The first two required more diverse models not developers IMO. But I'll keep them until people contribute more examples.
I care about understanding other people, if you ask a question with no context, I have no clue of what aspect interest you, and we will never be able to have a conversation. If you read the comments in this thread, the examples I see are mostly about inter personal relations that is something that has always been a big cost at all my workplaces. That is completely different from your examples.
My friendship group is largely diversified by having "graduated" the friendships from knowing them online to meeting them in person, or meeting people at festivals. So, maybe I appreciate workplace diversity less in that aspect.
If it's a common vector for one to diversify their environment, then it might be boon.
I do think the way it's currently done is a bit... Shallow, lazy? For lack of a better analogy, it reminds me of a fad diet. But that's not really a constructive criticism on the topic, since I don't know what we should do better either
Many in this thread have valid whataboutism points of the diversity argument, even if they are valid the danger is that they derail the argument. You should not undermine a movement if you support their goals in someway, you have to learn how to compromise or just learn from them and take up the fight for yourself.
I've been part of building up many organizations, the online ones are always easier. That said I do not spend time with any of those people except online. I do not have the capacity for that.
Are they specifically excluded, or did you really want to only interview people from these groups?
In an economic slow-down, investment in big long term bets invariably gets decreased. This is one of them.