Google discloses its diversity record, and it’s not good
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Only 17% of Google's tech jobs go to women. Given that roughly 20% of comp sci degrees go to women that seems roughly reasonable [1]. For non-tech jobs the split is 52/48 which again seems roughly reasonable.
The numbers for non-Asian minorities are pretty grim. They appear to be much further off from national averages for relevant degrees. Would need much more detailed information before making an assessment.
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp [2] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s3.htm
It is unjust for the people discriminated against and bad for our society: Our workforce loses valuable talent, and, from what I've read, diversity in the workplace is widely believed to improve performance (due to a wider number of perspectives and experiences).
Until that time arrives, it's neither "good" nor "bad", it's "best under the circumstances".
I mean, maybe my management and hr is filled with racists and sexists, but my gut reaction is they seem like pretty progressive folks. I think the pipeline is messed up much, much earlier.
If they dig deep and analyze the race diversity of women in tech, I bet the data would be more striking.
This is a tricky question for senior/principle software people, but perhaps as a proxy, we could look at the number of new grads at the Bachelor's, Master's and PhD levels that are employed {six months prior, one month prior, one month after, six months after} graduation, as broken down by gender and ethnicity.
For example, if 95% of women are hired by one month before graduation day, that would suggest that we need to be looking at an earlier point in the pipeline (educating parents, additional funding at the elementary or high school level, teaching boys how to not sexually harass girls in middle school, etc.). On the other hand, if 20% of women are hired by six months after graduation day, then maybe that means there's something funny going on during the hiring process.
Google's description of what they are doing about diversity seems to indicate that they see exactly that as the problem -- most of their actions discussed are about growing the pool of qualified candidates in underrepresented groups.
ps. Interesting side note, is that while looking this up, I wanted to see if H1B visas skewed the stats. I found a page that lists "10 of the largest and hottest US Companies that hire skilled immigrants for H1B visas" [2]. What's interesting is that these numbers are far lower than I thought they would be, as in, I thought H1B visas were the life blood of these companies. But these numbers are probably not even a fraction of their total employee base.
Amazon 333 visas
Apple 520 visas
Facebook 173 visas
Google 685 visas
Microsoft 2,125 visas
...
[2] http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/H1Bvisa10topH1BsponsorsRevie...
H1B is a type of visa, it cannot be hired.
> They're getting hired by old, slow, cheap, mostly non-tech corporations who won't compete on either quality of work or wages.
Foreigner = Evil. On the other hand, you get an H1B if you are shown to be more qualified than u.s. citizens who applied to the job. If anything, it's a great way to bring in skilled laborers and keep them in check (since, if you get fired, you get deported too).
So they import someone on an H1B visa, work them for a few years, and send them home. They've solved the kind of labor shortage that causes immigration, without actually giving them the chance to become Americans.
As one datapoint, the program I'm on has a 8:1 male-female ratio, and of the 80 or so students on it, I believe that there is one black student.
It's a problem with all of CS - and Google have decent initiatives to help turn it around, but it's going to take time - more CS education in schools, more access programs to help those from deprived backgrounds get programming - and that'll sadly happen slowly.
Perhaps it's different in America (where one need not choose CS before university starts).
Not really related to the original article, but this stood out to me as not quite accurate.
Even within the US, this actually varies from school to school. My university required you to declare a major before you started, but the average student changed majors at least once in their college career (I changed twice, landing in CS). Other schools require you to start undeclared and declare at some point, as your comment implies.
I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.
And also, Asians are a minority group, at least in California as of today.
Absolutely. I get upset every time someone presents me number about how workplace is not diverse. That's like someone is trying to pick a fight.
I think people have to let go of the term minority and realize true equality has no concept of gender and race.
> And also, Asians are a minority group, at least in California as of today.
Depending on where you live. In most Bay Area and major part of SoCal, Asians, especially Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipino aren't minority in their community. They may be minority in politics overall, but the number of Asian residents in some community can overwhelm other ethic groups.
Update: He would skip over them without reading them.
You are right about the unconsciousness (yeah, I remember this from my psychology 101 class :) those famous prejudice experiments in the 40s, 50s).
My argument is once you are conscious of doing "I must hire more said gender, said race", you are sort of discriminating people who are believed to be minority. First, do they like to be called minority? Should they be given extra bonus point because they are minority?
Of course we can argue all day and make different situations when and when not to hire a minority over a majority, but let's not.
Granted, what makes one "more qualified" than another candidate. See [1]. This is an old post by Stripe's CTO. One of that is Sunday Test and the whole point is to see whether people like to work with the candidate.
X is super funny and X is as skillful as Y. But what makes people think Y can't have humor in his/her own way and isn't more productive than X? Data we gather from interview can only show some data. But that's where we stop because if we go full investigation we would spend a year to interview every candidate.
Unless we can completely hide our identity from interviewers... we will always be committing the unconscious bias.
[1]: http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-is-the-engineering-...
1. We have unconscious bias. 2. We won't commit conscious bias, because it wouldn't be "fair". 3. The result - a hiring process biased against everyone who isn't an attractive white male American. 4. Bonus result - a horde of guys who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
So I'm saying yes, there should be some conscious bias in our hiring process. "Qualified" isn't the hard black-and-white line we would like to imagine it is. I'm not saying hire people grossly underqualified or unprepared for a role, but if you have a candidate you would find good enough if there wasn't someone else you like better, and the differences are reflected at least in part by gender/race/appearance, stop and think really hard about why you like the more privileged candidate better.
Google will hire ALL the qualified candidates, not just the "most qualified" one. We are always looking to hire more people (headcount is easily the most precious and scarce resource at Google).
Nobody is missing out here. We're just trying to decrease the gender and race imbalance at the company.
Somebody must be turned away based on race/gender to accomplish this.
If you read the Google blog post on this issue, Google's actions in regard to the problem they perceive with diversity are mostly about supporting/sponsoring efforts to grow the pool of qualified candidates in currently-underrepresented groups.
Just because external social factors are the source of the problem, not your company, doesn't mean that your company can't (a) recognize that the problem exists and manifests in the makeup of your workforce, and (b) take action to reduce the severity of the problem by addressing the external social factors.
Time for me to add a profile pic on LinkedIn?
Seriously now...
I'm not sure what, if anything, to make of this. I expected the numbers to be low, but not that low. I've personally felt discriminated against throughout life and at times witnessed direct evidence of it.
Thing is, the objective requirements for candidates to build and run bleeding edge infrastructure in a highly competitive market is quite a bit different from say renting an apartment.
This leads me to imagine that the applicable pool will be much smaller and Google will not be inclined to pass on qualified candidates.
That said, ‘Google’ doesn't hire people, people do and unless the process has changed - any single person can exclude any candidate. It would be interesting to know what proportion of minority candidates who come on-site are hired versus the field - not conclusive, but certainly interesting.
If I had guess I’d think that discrimination is producing this, but it’s not happening at Google - it’s happening all over. A million small slights and denied opportunities (in this generation or those prior) that see people who might otherwise have the capacity never gain the necessary experience, exposure, relationships or plain confidence that could surface them to the top.
Personally, I had never entertained the possibility that I could work for them until they called me - it was eye-opening that someone could see a possibility in me that I’d refused to see myself. Interestingly, both times I've been contacted by SV companies (Google included) the recruiters were minorities themselves.
We’ll see.
Unfortunately I don't feel this is due to Google's hiring policies, the disadvantages and lack of privilege kick in a lot earlier and apply to every action in a lifetime... by the time that has compounded the person isn't even a candidate for Google.
I'm a white male and Google wouldn't hire me. Because I don't have all the qualities I would need to work there. Probably neither do most of the people they aren't hiring. Probably not a conspiracy. Why do we look at people as groups instead of individuals so much? What if someone is half Asian and 1/4 African American? Or what if they are "Hispanic" but half their ancestors came from Lebanon three generations ago? Where do these go on the numbers chart? There are only going to be more of these types of individuals around as time goes on. Maybe the group view is sometimes misleading and becoming more bogus every generation?
If you are smart enough, and hard working enough, to get a good job at Google then you can do well in accounting, medicine, law, banking, sales, engineering etc.
Outside of a few tech hubs like Silicon Valley software development doesn't pay as well, or have as good of a career progression, as other top professions. It is also significantly riskier.
On risk: In a startup your job is much less secure and to adjust for this your compensation should be roughly 1.5-2.5x higher than at a more stable firm. Startups don't usually pay this much higher which is why, outside of a few select areas, startups struggle to find talent. In SV though most of the risk disappears because the market is so hot. In SV it is easier to change companies than it is to change teams.
So already you are saying: If you want to do well you have to give up your existing friendships/family/lifestyle etc and move. Other sectors/fields that require the same sacrifices typically compensate you much better e.g. Go to NYC for finance and realistically if you are good your total comp can be > $1million/year.
And that is not even getting into lack of time for l&d, the small half-life of knowledge, working in a heavily male environment, etc.
On the other hand, if 100 hispanics applied, and only 1 was hired. Or if only 2 hispanics actually get to the application process, then that is an actual story.
Yes.
Of course, racial and ethnic data of the entire industry would help understand what they mean in more detail (particularly it would help understand how much is related to industry-wide factors and how much is Google-specific factors -- and note, the latter doesn't mean "Google's fault", if Google is especially selective and effective at taking the top end in merit, and external social factors tend to do worse at attracting or preparing women and some ethnic groups to be top-end candidates by merit, that's not Google's fault, but it would be a Google-specific factor.)
These studies imply the black female should be hired because of her gender and/or race to boost diversity numbers. Is this not sexist / racist?
No, they don't. The idea that the workforce diversity is a desirable thing to pursue plus studies showing that it is currently not acheived do not imply that the best way to correct the gap between desired outcome and present reality is to hire based on race or gender, even when candidates are otherwise equal.
I see no difference between this and caste based reservation in countries like India (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India). In states like Tamil nadu (India) only 30% of seats are available to brahmins. Note that 30% is open quota - everyone competes for those 30%. Even the people for whom things seats were reserved for already.
Diversifying the work force should never be a goal by itself.
They hire the people they think will make them the most money because these are the best people they can find for the job.
Seriously, if you don't like this, go to Cuba or North Korea or back in time to the USSR. There is no other agenda.
My forebears (and most likely yours) came to this country because of this; (honest) capitalism means the most talented and qualified people/entities/products succeed.
Why do people care about this?
If you read the Google blog post about this, Google doesn't like the state of their workforce diversity, and is actively taking steps to change it (by working to correct the external social factors that they see as the cause.)
> Why do people care about this?
Because some people aren't just narrowly self-interested capitalists. For which, I suppose, you would like to send the entirety of Google's management to Pyongyang.
I don't want to anyone to Pyongyang or anywhere else.
Those who think that that hiring is the business of an irrelevant third party or that job candidacy based on any factor other than pure merit is a good thing, should examine how this practice is paralleled by practices of those regimes.
But the stink is entirely a result of Google voluntarily releasing the numbers and saying that they were disappointed with them and working to fix them, and pointing to things they were doing to fix them long before the released the numbers. If Google were really only concerned about the stink, they could have just not released the numbers, and would have no reason to have been working on corrective actions when they weren't releasing the numebrs.
It really seems like you started from the conclusion that Google doesn't really care about diversity, and are desperately trying to twist the facts into that preconceived mental model.
"But public campaigns have stepped up the pressure — just this spring, Jesse Jackson visited Google’s shareholder meetings in Silicon Valley. Google officials told the NewsHour that the company had been “working toward disclosing this for the better part of the year” and said Google invited Jackson to its meeting last month where the company promised for the first time to release the numbers."
Without that information, it's pretty hard to tell how much of an effect it has on those numbers.
Similarly to Jobs's "A-people hire A-people" - top college kids doing well in CS algorithms (which would usually be white or Asian guys) would hire the same, ie. top college kids doing well in CS algorithms.
I fully accept that women aren't represented in CS degree courses, and this may be a good argument for the under-representation of women in Google's workforce. For foreigners and people of a different race, it's more difficult. Tuition fees for foreigners is higher, so I'd be willing to believe the are fewer foreign students studying CS than domestic students. For domestic students of a particular race? It's still not entirely clear to me.
Basically (as suspected), doesn't really matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Demograp...
I don't see anything out of the ordinary or wrong, as far as men versus women, I think it's not a surprise to me that more men are in technology.
I don’t think any reasonable people at this point would disagree that affirmative action/hiring for the sake of racial quotas is the equivalent of passing up qualified candidates based on race. That is to say it’s a destructive practice that creates resentment and unnecessary racial tension.
The main problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores the tremendous societal forces in place that lead to a predominantly white executive work force instead focusing only on the outcome and attempting to change that with affirmative action and minority hires for the sake of diversity. This is so narrow minded and results-oriented that I have a hard time believing intelligent people signed off on it and it was actually legally mandated at one point.
What we should be doing is examining the processes and infrastructure that leads to a predominantly white male executive workforce to determine where discrimination occurs and attempt to curb it there. This discussion is not the one we’re having, instead focusing on sensationalist headlines and click-bait articles that do more harm than good to racial relations in America. Top that off with clowns like Jesse Jackson who just the other day showed up at the facebook shareholders meeting "advocating for hiring more minorities at technology companies, especially into board seats." and you get the sad state of affairs we find ourselves in today.
Louis CK tells a joke in which the general idea is “You know you really trust someone when you reveal to them your inner most racist thoughts”. It’s funny because it’s true, but the prevailing air of secrecy and shame about ones prejudices is a big part of what's preventing us from having honest dialogue about race in this country.
Just the other week Mark Cuban was lambasted by a desperate journalist/blogger who took quotes out of context and misrepresented his remarks to paint him as racist. With an atmosphere like that it’s no wonder white people are afraid to discuss race relations. It's the same reason this thread is full of people getting defensive about "Google isn't racist!"
Now I'm going to lose a lot of you on this next part, but based ONLY on my subjective experiences in the corporate workforce whenever we had new hires, the white males always seemed to be treated as "potential leadership material" not based on merit but simply because they looked the part. Being tall and easy on the eyes helps too. Meanwhile minority hires, even in the same position as their white male counterparts were seen as foot soldiers and worker bees. This perception was prevalent in the last 2 companies I've worked for. Take from that what you will, that's been my experience.
Going out a bit on a whim here, but if we accept that a) beauty has a substantial subjective element b) standards of beauty are modifiable/learned c) that people can derive an advantage through their status of being beautiful (ie, that all things being equal, in a choice between two identical candidates except that one is judged more beautiful than the other, that the more beautiful one will tend to be favored) and d) that North American and European norms of beauty are still rooted deeply in being white (which is fairly reasonable, and not their fault), then you can see where problems kick in.
It's honestly really shitty. I could rant on about your example re: looking the part of leadership material. But I won't cause... it'll be rambling and awkward. Suffice to say that we're in this really awkward in between phase, trapped between a history of clear white majority, and a future of clear heterogenerality - and worse, it's a transition taking place unevenly in nearly every respect.
That was incredibly frustrating to me as I thought Cuban's message there was spot-on. Basically, that we all have prejudices and predilections, but actions in response to and awareness of them are key.
Most of that probably would have been lost anyway, but making the horrible choice to say 'hoodie' ensured it would become a nonsensical circus.
Anyway, you're absolutely right that the conversation has to change. Unfortunately, we're locked in a sort of cold war of escalation without compromise in multiple directions that leaves reasonable people at a zero-point in the center which often feels like it's standing still.
my wife's IQ is 30+ points higher than my :) I do pretty well - a senior engineer (and among "the best programmers", etc... according to many people i worked with). My wife just can't stand the tech environment, nor the people, nor the work. Primitive, plain, boring, single-sided, ... - some adjectives used by her.
Literature may be considered boring because it takes patience to appreciate, but I think it is neither primitive nor plain. If some programming reaches the level of art, as in a clever hack, maybe we can tell others about the beauty of the solution. (G. H. Hardy says that "Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not". At least history has not borne this out - people do find literature easily more beautiful than they do theorems and programs.)