So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.
"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.