Getting to work on diversity at Google
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
"Among other things, since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at Howard University, where he revamped the school’s Intro to CS curriculum."
If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce, whether or not they are at fault for the lack of a sufficiently diverse qualified applicant pool, it is their responsibility to fix it.
This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions.
1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do you think women are too dumb to make their own choices?
2. That it can reasonably be "fixed". Spending more money on education must be the most commonly employed and most universally failed intervention in social policy.
I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. The evidence for this is very thin, and indeed more ethnically diverse communities tend to have lower levels of trust and social capital.
There is some evidence that diversity in terms of viewpoint and skills is useful but just eg having more white women in the office may not be the great boon people assume.
#2 is, insofar as it appears to be an "embedded and unexamined assumption", simply a result of brevity in omitting "...insofar as doing so is practical without costs that make it a net loss" at the end. Obvious qualification is obvious.
> I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing.
"Desirable" is subjective. Google expressly claims to value that kind of diversity. Obviously, you might have different values, which, to the extent that the means you choose to pursue them are not themselves illegal, you are free to pursue in your own company.
> The evidence for this is very thin
The evidence is actually very strong that its a thing that some people value independently of whether it contributes to any other thing that they value.
Don't form arguments this way. Dumping tautologies into an argument sounds childish.
Example: I grew up on a farm and love farming. The moment I had some free cash I bought a couple of acres to engage in hobby farming. I would never, ever consider becoming a farmer professionally, because farming is a terrible job. In bad years you rely on crop insurance and loans to get by, and in good years you make enough money to cover your costs and keep going. You're squeezed in all directions by megafarms who sometimes have legitimately lower costs and sometimes just want to drop prices to drive everyone else out, real estate developers who can pay more than you for new land, and middle men who use their mass to pay producers less and charge consumers more. You'll work eighty, ninety hours a week for the pay of a McDonald's employee, without the chance of a "big score" like a startup founder.
None of these are intrinsic to the actual act of farming.
So what is the reason why the composition of the hiring pool for software engineers does not match the composition of the population as a whole? If it for reasons intrinsic to the nature of the job, that's one thing, but if it's for stupid reasons, like an unappealing culture (eg, white dude-bro culture) or lack of early access to computers and programming, well, we can fix that.
If we can fix that, and bring in all the people who are currently excluded from software engineering for stupid reasons, we could potentially double the number of software engineers.
Doubling the number of software engineers should be an obvious good.
One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is that there are no role models. Sending female engineers to university events is a small step, but it can have huge impact. In a nutshell, it's playing the long game :)
Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are insulted that they are perceived to be non-technical, or just a recruiter, and how such an initiative would make that worse.
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I guess you'd have a tougher time if you actually call it "wasting an entire day" when you pitch the idea.
I'm curious why there is always such a huge focus on role models (is it a grandfathered idea from the past?) and not on the herd of other problems, such as access to tools, ease of self-learning and targeted tutorials at under-represented demographics. I'd imagine tutorials that are targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics would be more useful than a few famous minority or women C.S. majors, but I could be wrong.
It seems dated to me, but maybe there is some strong research that correlates to the role model idea. I'm just not seeing it.
Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. You can imagine that person overcame many of the same obstacles that you face.
People point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg to show that you don't need a comp sci degree to be a coder and an innovator. These examples are used to encourage people to continue in the field, not as models to pattern your behaviour after.
On the other hand, if you look at a sample of people in an industry and you don't identify with any of them, you might imagine that people like you (a) don't enjoy the work experience or (b) face some serious obstacle to success.
This is the part that's kind of weird to me. Wouldn't this only be true of people with too much emphasis on superficial characteristics? I grant that there are many people like this, but we usually get a lot more info about people than just gender, race, etc. If a potential CS student reads about Zuckerberg and Page and Gates and just thinks "White Male" instead of "person who loves tinkering and breaking things down and creating, just like me" etc etc, isn't that an issue with their predilection for stereotyping? It's like someone staying out of jazz (or the NBA) because they look at its history and think "it's all black people, there's no place for me there" instead of "it's all creative and brilliant musicians (or talented athletes), I would love to be a part of that".
I get that this might be a problem that's not easily solvable so we should explore other avenues as well, but it's bizarre to me that we seem to be embracing that sort of reduction of human beings into a single physical characteristic, instead of identifying it as a big part of the problem.
This is not an issue of "reducing to single characteristics", but of power imbalance. I can't speak for other minorities, but a lot of women are experiencing discrimination from men in some way in some place in their lives. Try looking at #YesAllWomen on twitter if you want more details.
And so it's meaningful to set an example that says "While this profession currently predominantly male, we do accept minorities, and there are many non-white/non-male people in our industry who succeeded". That is what the role model part is about - clearly communicating that it's not a clique. That privilege is at least somewhat addressed.
If there were black privilege in the NBA, yes, it'd be a lot scarier for white athletes to get in there. Looking at the odd fact that by far most quarterbacks are white (75% of them right now, and the fact that it's so low is celebrated), I think we're far from that point.
But even if we leave out the debate around privilege and pretend for the moment that it doesn't exist: Being in a minority leads to a lot of shared experiences. A creative woman interested in CS, but not in the field has more in common with other women than she has with a guy interested in exploring CS.
There are more shared experiences the longer you share that interest, and the differences vanish. But at the point where it's about getting into CS, these differences matter. And seeing somebody who is "just like you" matters, on a psychological level.
> most quarterbacks are white
The NBA is the National Basketball Association. The football one is the NFL. Not that this directly addresses your point or anything but that was bugging me haha sorry...
> But even if we leave out the debate around privilege
Oh thank god you said this. I haven't yet been able to figure out how the common usage of privilege [1] in such discussions is nothing more than people trying to justify the use of classical racism and sexism in the rhetorical service of those who aren't typically the beneficiaries of such disgusting tactics. And far more often than not, any attempt to think critically about these tactics is met with "you just don't get it, probably a white male" [wrong].
> Being in a minority leads to a lot of shared experiences. A creative woman interested in CS, but not in the field has more in common with other women than she has with a guy interested in exploring CS.
This is a really good point, consider me pretty much convinced. As much as we might not _want_ one's gender or race to define one's experiences, the fact remains that it still does, upstream. My assumption was that "shared love of CS" was enough of an experience to relate to someone on a non-stereotype basis, but I can totally see how that could not be true in many cases.
[1] Note that I'm not talking about the concept of privilege per se; it's been YEARS that I've been baffled by the fact that so many people are just completely unaware of the fact that success (and many other things) is (partially) a function of many many external factors that are easy to dismiss for those who aren't handicapped by them (poverty, certain sexualities, being in certain racial minorities, being female (in some contexts), being male (in others)).
Most people aren't driven to just one career path in life. They start out with a few different options that narrow as they get older. Given that, if you are investigating two careers, and they both have lots of creative tinkerers, but one of them has many more people that match up with your race and gender, is it unreasonable to factor that in to your decision?
White people don't have much historical evidence that they will receive poor treatment in the NBA or the jazz community because they're white. But black people and women do have reasons to pay special attention to signals that they might not be well received in a certain community/industry/workplace. It's not their fault for being aware of that.
I'm less certain that native americans, say, who have historically been treated poorly by just about everyone, wouldn't be watching for a different set of warning signs. I don't want to make assumptions about their experience in a given community.
I agree these discussions tend to boil down to man/woman and black/white but I think that's just what most of us in North America are most confident discussing. Anyway I'm glad it's been productive.
It's not about having somebody you look up to all the time, but just knowing you're not alone. It might not sound like a big deal, but believe me, when you're the only woman on a 20-person team, it gets lonely.
But I'd argue that you're correct in your judgment of famous role models, specifically. What's needed is not the few famous ones, but knowledge that an average person of your minority can succeed. That others like you have travelled the path before. And famous people really don't evoke "just like me" images for most people :)
Sidenote: please let's not have tutorials that are "targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics". The intent is good, but it inevitably leads to pinkwashing. As it turns out, women are, like men, pretty diverse in their interests. I would assume that's true for other minorities, too.
As for tools & self-learning: That's orthogonal to having representation/role models. We should neglect neither. Nor traditional learning, and many other tools to ensure success.
Having a much younger little sister sort of led me to that comment. I'd enjoy if there was some way to teach her programming that she would also enjoy and undeniably, for her, it would be something stereo-typically associated with what young girls like (cute creatures, bright colors, etc.). Obviously girls, just like boys, have much more diverse interests than what society sees as the "standard", but it just seems that something targeted at stereotypical young "girl-y" interests (forgive me for using girly and not a more descriptive term) is missing, while there is lots of tutorials for stuff that is more stereo-typically associated with other demographics.
Hope that explained it without coming off as sexist or discriminatory. If not, I tried.
FWIW, I don't object to activities considered stereotypical per se. By all means, create a "how to animate My Little Pony" workshop. Or remote controlled sewing machines.
Just don't attach "for girls". The issue is not the activity, but associating it with a demographic instead of letting it stand on its own. (And lest we forget, guys suffer from the same stereotyping - it's considered uncool by many for a guy to do anything remotely "soft and cuddly". Let's not reinforce)
I'm curious - have you asked your sister what kinds of things she would enjoy? What programming means to her, or why she would/would not consider getting into it?
I have two daughters. Both love computers, but will never go that way. Both are fearless about traditionally male pursuits; hunting (bow and speargun), fishing, mechanic-ing, surfing, dog training, ranching stuff.... one brought home A SHARK she'd speared. It was delicious.
One's a master of one of the big stats packages (SPSS? I forget) and the like ( was in a bio PhD program; got out with a Masters before she crippled her career prospects ).
Yawn.
It just does nothing for them. My extremely biased sample says "girls just aren't as likely to want to code." Trust me, I tried. Nope. Perhaps reverse psychology would have worked....
What is the benefit of this?
Also because I for one am very sick of dealing with all the brogrammers in SF :/
"statistical analysis is the new reading. the sooner we get everyone on board with that the faster we can start new scientific experiments and change the world."
Reading is special because it's required to take in new knowledge and communicate quickly.
You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability.
I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50, but better than the holistic ratio at least.).
Also, they can look at their specific source pools to get a less hypothetical target. Berkeley is ~50/50, for example. (http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/). But retroactively
Citation required.
And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics.
The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits.
So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.
Generally, people I see who bring this up are usually using it as a thin veneer over racist beliefs. When asked what end discussing minority IQ serves, they usually suggest defunding inner-city (read: black) schools or similar measures.
I can't get on board with that. I think the US certainly fails at providing equality of opportunity to many groups, and there is still widespread discrimination against women and minorities. We can certainly do better and we should view people individually rather than treating them in a prejudiced way based on group membership.
I also have a hard time getting on board with a "blank slate" view of humanity. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong so I could fire back at "race realist" reddit commenters, but it seems plausible to me that different groups, especially men and women, are biologically predisposed to certain traits, on average.
I know in my career that requires both a certain amount of aggressiveness and quantitative aptitude that my colleagues have overwhelmingly been Asian or white men. I've worked with women and "under-represented minorities" who've made me feel like a chump trading, and I certainly don't harbor prejudices about them, but they're difficult to find.
There's little evidence that IQ and programming ability are correlated.
There is some evidence[1] that Mathematical ability and success at programming are correlated (30%). [1] shows that gender and programming success are correlated, but others show no correlation at all.
[1] shows an 8% correlation between spatial ability and success at programming are correlated, while [2] showed "only a small correlation".
[2] shows that people who are successful at program articulate tasks differently to those who are not.
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.110...
Yes, but while programming ability is no doubt a priority for Google in programming positions, its not unlikely that general intelligence is something they desire in a broad array of positions (including programming positions.)
So, its not entirely implausible that, to the extent that there are group differences in IQ distribution, those play some role in explaining Google's diversity results (of course, IQ is not purely innate and does appear to be influenced by a number of environmental factors, though those are even farther upstream from hiring than the kind of things that Google is focussing on with regard to educational opportunities in computing for women and minorities. But there is no reason Google couldn't work to improve those, too.
> Citation required.
You may want to Google the meaning of "hypothesis"...
They also hire (or at least recruit) based on Open Source work (I've gotten recruitment letters from them based on a book I wrote and some Open Source software I've been involved in), but I doubt that I would have been hired just on the strength of that. I've never taken them up on the offer of an interview, as I liked working for myself too much, but I suspect I would not measure up during the process, given my self-taught background and unimpressive education history. I know several folks who have been hired by Google, including folks who got the recruitment letter based on Open Source software work, and they tend to also have the strong college background.
In short, I believe that for those folks who end up at Google, they very likely got there by way of a good university. So, the upstream needs to be fixed for the diversity at Google to be fixed.
Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic diversity is strongly correlated with diversity in points of view. You want the people building your products to come from many walks of life. Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies. If the latter is your belief, that's all the more reason to work to increase diversity as a corrective to those external social biases. Diversity also impacts the way that people see your company, which makes attracting a diverse pool of qualified candidates easier (few people want to be the only member of a certain demographic group) and is good for public relations.
Please don't feel that I am being condescending; I have come across this statement many times before and I can't understand it.
The founders of Twitter and Facebook are mostly rich white dudes and don't seem to be having this problem.
For that matter, look at the social networks that have flourished abroad: Orkut (developed by a Turkish engineer) and WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian). So there may be something to this...
...and wildly popular in Brazil and Iran.
WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian)
...and wildly popular in India, South Africa and Egypt.
Looks like white dudes of assorted nationalities are actually pretty good at building apps used by men and women of totally different nationalities. Maybe the white/asian guys at google can actually do a good job - they certainly have so far...
If you want to see more X in it - work on attracting X into the pool of smart nerds.
It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product. So what's the point in having diversity at every level?
"and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs,"
no.
"or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies."
nope
It is, if you work at a company that values your input. (As Google does). The point is not that everybody gives input all the time - the point is that if something goes wrong that affects subgroup ${X}, there's a member from that subgroup who can speak out and provide feedback.
That doesn't work if you're in a company that believes in centralized control and top-down management. Google is not that company :)
And yes, if you disagree with that approach because you want top-down, you do believe there's a certain group that's better suited to make all decisions - they're the managers.
Whether that's true or not really depends on the organizational structure and management philosophy of the company. From everything I've read, role differentiation of the specific type that would make that true is less true, at least within the broad umbrella of "technical staff", is not particularly prominent at Google.
It is also not something you get when you attempt to recruit people from the same sources and socio-cultural milieus with the same acceptance criteria, but of different genders and ethnicities. Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.
"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population". Huh. So, if most of my sales of akvavit are to expat Finns, I should certainly not hire a German to do my security audits. And if most of my sales of peat-optimized spades are to the Irish market, I should certainly not contract out the manufacturing to the great industrial base of Shenzhen. This seems rather insensible and possibly bigoted to me.
I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed through "purifying filters" such as elite college acceptance standards.
That's a pretty prejudiced statement. I have not observed this at all when it comes to work-related items, which is what is relevant in the workplace.
Other people have already said it, but what about Facebook or Twitter?
>If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies.
That is a false dichotomy. If diversity is in itself good, then that implies that there are significant differences between ethnicities [1]. And in that case, it is certainly possible that different ethnicity might be better or worse at particular tasks, in this case coding. And claiming that the view that such differences is inherent, is bigoted, is just name-calling.
[1] Feel free to substitute ethnicity with X, where X satisfies "diversity means having people of different X".
That's pretty much the only reason tech companies are interested in diversity.
Now, at the same time, people say that we should hire X because they have a different background. That sounds like a fun backroom conversation in cases where the diversity-part doesn't work out - "We hired that black guy because we wanted more diversity on the team. It turns out, though, that he has a very, um, non-black background, by which I mean that he isn't really like a stereotypical black person at all. In fact, he grew up mostly with group Y, which we already have a majority of, anyway. So I had to let him go and find some other black people, in the name of diversity."
Nope. It didn't have significant uptake with ANY demographic.
From the point of view of a business, it is by no means clear to me that having a diverse workforce, at least along the traditional lines of demarcation - even assuming that this leads to a 'diversity of viewpoints' - makes the business more successful.
Hollywood, for example, spends the big money on films targeted at the notional 15-30 year old male, and medium budgets on patronising 'chick flicks' for women. It turns a very nice profit doing so, and has done for a long old time. A fortiori triple-A games, most of which I find frankly disturbing nowadays in their contempt for their audience.
Before the 1970s-80s, when equal ops and stuff really became a thing at all, I didn't notice anyone failing to make boatloads of money either, despite reproducing the much stronger racist/sexist biases of society at that time.
Until somebody shows me evidence that increasing diversity on staff and at senior levels/C-level has a causative relationship with increased profits, I conclude that capitalist enterprises are an ineffective vehicle for this sort of social change, and that people would be better served forming political parties, standing in elections, protesting, doing political stunts, strikes, whatever tickles your political fancy, than grumbling about what percentage of whom Google should have managed to hire thus far. It wasn't diversity on the board of Ma Bell that got rid of Jim Crow.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/is_there_a_pay... http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/workingpapers/Board_Di...
That's a start. Seems like evidence is mixed, of course, with some part of the evidence "against" diversity confounded by people's unconscious -isms.
It's really terrible, these -isms: I start to worry when a woman is named CEO of a major US company because it seems like they only allow a woman in if the company's doing poorly. And it seems that's borne out by some evidence: http://hbr.org/2011/01/how-women-end-up-on-the-glass-cliff/a... Frustrating.
Also, Asian is way too corse a classification, especially for our industry. It should, at a minimum, be broken down into Middle-Eastern, those from the Indian subcontinent and East Asian. These numbers would be a lot more interesting if they subdivided Asian and then subdivided each category into US and non-US. Knowing what percent of Google's workforce is Caucasian-American rather than simply Caucasian would provide a lot more insight into Google's diversity.
If they are world-wide, I find it quite interesting how closely the location of the Google offices where software development occurs[1] matches the ethnicity numbers.
Notably, there is only one development office in Latin America (and none in Spain/Portugal), and the only development office in the Middle East or Africa is Tel Aviv (not clear what ethnicity the workers there would class themselves as).
I'm not aware of any world-class Computer Science programs in Africa. There are some decent ones in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, but increasing the number would be a problem worth tackling.
[1] https://www.google.com.au/about/careers/teams/engineering/sw...
In the USA it is compulsory so you can provide these stats and protect yourself against lawsuits.
Upstream is important, but we should still make an effort.
And yes: I agree that change takes both upstream push and downstream pull.
Why would there be Palestinians in Tel Aviv? That's like asking how many Canadians are in Tuscon. Unless they are citizens or residents they couldn't work there anyway.
Maybe you meant to say how many Muslims? Or how many Arabs? That at least makes sense.
But in any case, the actual "race" distinction in Israel is Ashkenazim vs Sefardim.
Google's only development office in South or Central America is in Brazil (who presumably don't self classify as Hispanic either?)
Interesting that you should bring that up: in South Africa under Apartheid, the racial classification of "Black" (previously called "Bantu" and "Native") was a person of "pure" African descent.
In post apartheid South Africa, for the purposes of redress [^] "black" means Indian, Coloured (mixed race) and black Africans. Of course, it was found that disproportionately Coloureds and (especially) Indians were being appointed (they were better educated and more affluent), so there seems to be a renewed emphasis on black Africanness... our Indian finance minister was just replaced by a black African, which was viewed as some kind of milestone - incidentally Julius Malema brought this up a few years ago, but it was quickly sent down the memory hole.
There has been, in recent times the emergence of racial bomb-throwers who claim that whites cannot be "African".
In any case, my point is that even the term "black" is not as clear-cut as we would assume.
[^] I actually do support affirmative action in South Africa as a corrective measure. The potential for abuse does exist, in the future - currently whites, despite a huge amount of whining are not particularly disadvantaged. Sadly there isn't a sunset clause, although the constitution limits reverse discrimination to reversing the effects of past discrmination, a sunset clause of, say 2035, after which all racial discrimination would be banned, would have been better, in my opinion.
Take a 'White' person, for instance: is a White American the same as a White Englishman, or a White Australian? What about a White Frenchman? These are all classified as 'White' but could potentially be vastly different in terms of diversity.
The same argument could be made with the other ethnicities. The 'Asian' category -- are they Chinese, Japanese, Filipino..? Or an American Asian immigrant -- Chinese-American, etc.
If you're aiming for diversity that's representative of your customer base, then surely your measure of ethnicity has to be more granular.
No, however much you try to whitewash it, 70-30-3-4-5 is as shitty as it gets outside of legalized segregation.
Either way, to boost non-Asian minority percentages you've got to take away from the white or Asian percentages. Hmm... who do you think's gonna be on the receiving end of that rebalancing?
And people do complain about lack of diversity in the NFL/NBA, on both sides.
These are such small percentages that you wouldn't even need to reduce head count to increase representation, just hire a few more workers. But even if they did have to replace, why are you so focused on saving every last White or Asian soul to the detriment of addressing the problem?
Because I take offense to people saying that having a majority of white workers at a company located in a white majority country is a "problem".
Before decrying lack of diversity in field X, demonstrate presence of one in the pool of qualified candidates.
No, after identifying the lack of diversity in field X (or, in the case, Company G), finding the lack of diversity in the pool of qualified candidates tells you where you need to work if you care about diversity. But it doesn't mean "there's no problem to do anything about" -- as Google recognizes, hence whey they point to the steps they are taking to address the problems of lack of diversity in the pool of qualified candidates.
I personally only care about it as far as principle of fairness. Ie if one can show that company X discriminates against persons Y (by demonstrating that sufficient number of qualified candidates Y are turned away) - then it would register on my radar. Otherwise I consider 'diversity' as a tool to push through quotas that I personally detest.
And, while your statement of your personal biases about quotas are, I suppose, revealing of just that - your personal biases - I am not sure what you think they add to the discussion. Certainly, you can't think that a statement of what you consider diversity to be an a secret code word for unaccompanied by either evidence or logic justifying that consideration says anything about anything other than your own bias.
The data is interesting in it's own right but I don't better understand where Google is going with diversity; I only understand where Google currently stands.
There could be business goals though: it improves people's public opinion of you and in this case may help protect them from lawsuits.
This link at the bottom of the page has some more info... http://www.google.com/diversity/
Likewise, if the number of comp sci graduates in the country is 5%, the same question can be asked. Who is the one being unfair?
The data Google just posted contradicts you. 61% of Google employees are white, while 80% of the total US workforce is, see e.g. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp...
That means white people are under-represented at Google.
The group whose representation is most diverging from the population as a whole are Asians, who are hugely over-represented.
Overall, the numbers show that Asians are over-represented, which may explain much of the under-representation by all other groups. So the story here is certainly not one of "white male preference in the job market". You might be right about male, but not about white.
Writer research failure.
Also, just to emphasis what others have already replied to you; Whites are actually underrepresented at Google relative to the ratios seen in the rest of the workforce.
Like you, I enjoy engaging with a lot of different sorts of people. I was mostly just commenting that I've found a lot more success doing so outside the workplace in my own personal life. Maybe it's the places I've worked? Hard to say.
According to Google's numbers, whites are underrepresented at Google compared to the US at large.
What? What did I say?
Yes, european whites make up roughly 72% of the US, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat..., and 61% of Googlers.
If anything, you should be wanting to see less Asian faces overall (insanely, dramatically overrepresented, 30% of Googlers compared to 4.7% of Americans), and want to see more black faces and more white female faces.
It's especially praiseworthy due the fact it's not a case of "look how 'diverse' we are" but more of a "let's openly discuss these numbers".
Edit: I am mexican, and I personally wouldn't like to be hired for diversity reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.
Companies, rightly, don't want to stagnate by being limited to perspectives and views that don't fully reflect the world they operate in.
The article specifically discusses Google's attempts to lure people of diverse backgrounds into computer science earlier, so that there is more diversity among the qualified candidates applying at Google.
Nobody at Google got hired to fill a diversity quota.
Which is all a non-sequitur, since nothing in Google's blog post or the linked diversity website suggest that Google's approaches to improving diversity include hiring people for diversity reasons rather than for their abilities.
Seriously, how many other countries divide people in "black" and "white"? Or is it even legal to do so?
From 2000 to 2009, 10% (48,897 / 471,318) of Computer Science undergraduate degrees were awarded to Blacks, according to NSF ([1][2]).
[1]: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm [2]: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c2/at02-19.xls
I wonder the extent to which Googlers' lives at work are affected by Google's new-found focus on diversity.
When a company's culture shifts, so will its output. It's inevitable.
If you know experienced engineers looking for a job, please send them our way.
When you consciously want to improve something, you set goals for yourself, and then figure out ways to meet those goals. Then people can hold you accountable.
Google doesn't seem to have done any of that. They made a start in choosing what they're going to measure, but I don't understand it. For example, I don't think "Black" is an ethnicity. The differences between a black South African and someone from Egypt is huge, let alone a third generation American.
Also, I notice Google didn't include anything about gender in their diversity graphs, and I think everyone believes gender and sexual orientation contribute a valuable difference in perspective. I'm curious as to why they chose to exclude gay, transgendered, straight, and everyone in between and outside those labels from this push.
And then, even if they define all the categories of diversity they want, how the hell do they determine what their targets are for all the different demographics?
I don't necessarily agree with affirmative action, but if you believe that many of the factors which contribute towards easily measured ability (attending a good school, work experience) may be skewed, then you presumably also accept that there is untapped potential out there - people with the ability to be as great but who have been in some way - fairly or otherwise - disadvantaged.
In IT in particular, where everything changes rapidly, you want to be hiring for potential as much as skill the candidate has today.
I don't think it's about picking someone because they're part of a minority, it's about thinking about how you look for and judge candidates to take into account that potential which so far hasn't been tapped.
I am not sure if an individual company can really do anything about the factors contributing to those inequal oportunities. I feel for many skills they come to late, the education system is really the place that should work to reduce the amount of wasted potential.
Nothing to see here, all stereotypes confirmed :)
No one is implying that it should. From the blog they seem to be working on improving the latter number too.
I want there to be more women whom I can date.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workfor...
Everyone talks Black (27 mentions) and White (82 mentions).... meanwhile Hispanic and Asian ethic groups race higher and higher in total number. [1] In raw numbers, Hispanics are growing far faster than any ethnic group in the US. Companies in this game for the long haul had better recognize that Hispanics will be the dominant ethnic group in relatively short order.[2]
But who are the Hispanics? Better figure it out. It matters now and will increasingly matter much more going forward.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population... [2]http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fast-growth-latino-...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workfor...
Who is "we"? And why do they want to be somewhere else?
Google.
> And why do they want to be somewhere else?
Among other reasons, because Google is employee-constrained (they have plenty of money and plenty of things they'd like to do, but have trouble hiring enough workers that meet their qualification standards to be able to effectively apply the money they have to the opportunities they would like to pursue), and the lack of the diversity in their workforce, mirroring the lack of diversity in their qualified candidate pool -- given the absence of evidence that there are inherent reasons for that lack of diversity -- indicates that improving social barriers that constrain their qualified candidate pool is likely to be an effective way of making more of the people who are innately capable of being Googlers actually able to become qualified to be Googlers, allowing Google to hire more qualified people, allowing Google to more effectively pursue the wide range of opportunities they would like to pursue.
If there is something gained by having gender X, then you are saying that genders are not equal. If there is no difference, then why are we doing this? Why are we basing employment on gender anyway?
I'd like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful and those that are not. If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not okay too?
> then you are saying that genders are not equal No, you're saying that their life experience is not equal. There's no inequality in terms of ability, but in terms of what you know.
> I'd like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful
Closest proxy I can find is a study of success rate for MBAs by gender.[1] No surprise whatsoever, women experience lower salaries and career satisfaction. Also, women have less upward mobility into management positions.
> If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? The issue is not wanting to stay at home.
> If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not okay too?
Of course it is. To make that possible, we need to close the salary gap and address glass ceiling issues.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/29182...