Apple releases diversity numbers
apple.com
apple.com
If seven out of ten applicants are male then the 70% male ratio doesn't indicate a bias. It might mean that the company isn't as attractive to female applicants, but then again, neither is the discipline behind many of their products (at the moment.)
And of course (and as you know) the reverse is not true, either. The fraction of non-Caucasian members in the KKK probably reflects the fraction of non-Caucasian applicants they get, but that does not imply that hey do not have a bias.
1) There is a "filter" problem, eg bias in interviewing. This is what you are talking about.
2) There is the "pipeline" problem, eg universities and recruiting practices.
3) There is the self-selection problem, eg women / minorities going into other fields because they don't want to deal with the horseshit.
...plus many others, including how the few women are treated after they get the job.
The only cure is sunlight. You optimize what you measure. If we can get tech companies to publish these numbers every year, then maybe they'll start doing something about it.
And calling someone's good-faith comment a "tiresome excuse" is rather rude.
But hey it's only bigotry against "white" "males" and it hip to be ok with that nowadays, right HN?
Anyway, there is a reason that white males are not allowed to talk about bigotry against themselves, and it's not about some conspiratorial hipsterism to sabotage you. It's because if you are a white man born in America complaining about discrimination pretty much everyone else in the world will you see you like this:
Hell, why not go after Samsung for hiring too many Koreans.
Sure, but if the hiring process is unbiased, the problem exists elsewhere, so the hiring process cannot be "fixed".
The only thing that could be done at the hiring point is "overcompensate" by hiring many inferior/poorly qualified applicants simply because they are female.
Certainly companies hire "token" minorities purely for PR purposes, but generally speaking it seems unrealistic to expect a large company to routinely pick inferior candidates for the bulk of its workforce.
Regardless of where the failure is there is clearly something about the software engineering industry and the pipeline leading to it that is biased against minorities and women, which implies we are failing to optimally place the most talented (or potentially talented) people in the right positions assuming talent if evenly distributed among various ethnicities and sexes). Which means our economy is not as productive as it could be and we're missing out on the increased opportunity for possible break throughs in software development and other related fields with similar bias.
It's clearly a problem. It may not be directly the fault of say Apple or Google but it is naive to see numbers like that and not be concerned.
How can you say that when East and South Asians are so overrepresented?
1. You are confusing P(A|B) with P(B|A).
2. Even if it were true, a lack of bias against a few minority groups would not invalidate the statement that there is bias against other minority groups.
3. You are conflating a very wide and disparate set of ethnic groups in a way that is very misleading (and mathematically similar to Gerrymandering[0]). If we were to break those very broad categories further, we would see that many groups that qualify as "East and South Asian" are still themselves under-represented.
Please don’t pretend that companies can do nothing about who sends the applications. I don’t know what Apple does, but I do know that many companies are doing some kind of outreach already (going to conferences, publishing job adverts in many places, maybe even specifically calling people and asking them whether they would want to apply), so optimizing that with diversity goals in mind would not be something very weird.
Your portrayal of the situation is extremely simplistic and misleading.
That is, there are potential ideological underpinnings that lead to the rather by-the-book statistical analysis.
When Lombroso attempted his measurements of criminality, and leveraged what appeared to be an exhaustive bit of data against the subject, inevitable analysis of the data ensued.
What was missed however, were the vastly more complex subjects of “What is criminality” and “Who defines criminality” for example. In a way, the data became a cyclical reinforcement of the (false) hypothesis, while ignoring the entire sociological dimension.
Very few have stopped to question the metrics and models, and instead only see the data.
In this case, it may be prudent to not stop at the 70% data, and dig beneath it to evaluate the ideology and biases that _may_ have played a role in the symptom. It is seductive to lean on Western Rationalism / Scientism, but we conceivably could do well to question the systems that give rise to the models that yield the data.
That impresses me as the sort of information no company would want to release in total. There's just too much room for criticism.
In a way, it is similar to how the government operates - the diversity of people who call the shots is very different than the diversity of people in DMV or SSA offices, but overall it gives the impression that things are diverse.
Edit: Un-Edited the Edit.
White 64%
Asian 21%
Hispanic 6%
Black 3%
Undeclared 6%
Apple does have a substantially higher percentage of asians than would be expected from the entire U.S. population (15% vs 5%), probably due to the relatively large number of asian tech workers, but I would think the same effect would lead to a larger-than-expected percentage of white employees.
What is "hispanic"? Is a white person of Spanish descent "hispanic" or "white"? Wikipedia says that this is "is an ethnonym that denotes a relationship to Spain".
So a Greek or Turk would count as "white", but a Spaniard as "hispanic"? Pop quiz: Ricardo Montalbán: white or hispanic?
The pie chart seems to be mixing "ethnonyms" with skin colors.
Then there is "Asian"; what exactly is that, and does it lump together the people of Indians and of Korea?
About "white": suppose that 70% of applicants are white, but they are largely Slavic, from central and eastern Europe; and suppose that the 70% of the employed whites are Germanic whites. Nope, no discrimination there!
Maybe the "white" category is so large because it includes many ethnic groups: someone from Iceland could qualify, as well as someone from Israel.
Since the Arabic and East Indian people are "caucasoid", any pale-skinned people from those regions can represent themselves as white. A person with albinism of Indian descent is very difficult to distinguish from a European, if at all. (Do a Google image search for "indian albino").
This is exactly part of the seductive nature of “data” in EuroWestern culture.
Knowledge as power, but not in the rather trivial sense of education being empowering, but in the crafting of knowledge. As cited below, well explored by Mr. Foucault.
News at 11.
Its really uncomfortable since we're not supposed to use any of that.
Because CV without all what you listed is no longer a CV and is closer to a catalog listing. Should you also replace your name with some alphanumeric code? Because name can tell you a lot to discriminate on.
I've actual lobbied to anonymize all applications as much as possible. Thankfully for some positions I have to review resumes for I'm unfamiliar with the cultural norms of what names are female and what are male. So in that way they are anonymized!
As with age, people are not expected to state their race in an interview, nor are employers allowed to discriminate based on race, yet this diversity report includes anonymized racial data. They could have easily included anonymized age data.
Rather, people have more dynamic nationalities and ethnicities which are harder to classify.
My conspiratorial feeling is because they are even more male dominated in the US than globally.
It is likely even woven into scientific systems. This is precisely what Foucalt referenced in his “The Order of Things.”
(Repeat for race/nationality - I don't think a single African person works for Whatsapp. I've also never met an African woman in the past year who doesn't use it daily.)
Diverse viewpoints can help meeting the needs of diverse populations, but it's obviously possible to make a product that appeals to other demographics than your own.
Congratulations on murdering that strawman.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813953
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434585
You can find lots more with a quick search. It's more or less the standard response when some naughty person asks "why do we care about diversity?"
Let me carefully emphasize that I said "suggest", not "prove beyond a shadow of a doubt".
The hypothesis is "diverse viewpoints can help better understand and meet the needs of diverse audiences".
In contrast, the relative scarcity of such companies is (weak) evidence against the hypothesis. That's just how probability works.
Another thing I don't get about absolute numbers is that it seems desirable to have an outcome proportional to society (eg. 0.2% "Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander"). Given the fact that we're all equal; I don't see why that would be any better/worse/whatever.
Not even considering issues of equality and access, diversity as a thing in and of itself is at least good business. Especially in positions of power and decision-making. And that is at least one reason to peer at the discrepancies with open-minded curiosity - not to start a witch hunt, but to make smart shifts towards better business.
That's true. Roughly proportional anyway. But there's still gonna be minorities inside that group. I guess what I tried to say earlier is that making sure minoritie's voices are heard is (IMHO) more important than making sure they're represented proportionally to society. Simply because there's always gonna be a minority.
"[...] diversity as a thing in and of itself is at least good business. Especially in positions of power and decision-making."
Don't forget that huge groups like races, genders, etc. are incredibly diverse already. I guess a stereotypical example would be hiring a white man might diversify your staff more than hiring a black women if that man happens to be a vegan (or whatever). Or take the Fox News staff as an example if you like (they sure look diverse on mute). No argument on the second part though. Any representational entity (management, senate, etc.) should represent society accurately.
The rest of your post is a no-brainer. Talking to seemingly different people is always a good idea :)
Tall black men are wildly overrepresented in the NBA. Should the NBA be "proportional to society?"