Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yet somehow this lack of diversity hasn't prevented Google, Facebook and Apple from being very profitable and very creative.
Let's take a stab and see what are these "studies" that show how diversity helps. Here is one (from the article NYT links to):
"In a study conducted in 2003, Orlando Richard, a professor of management at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues surveyed executives at 177 national banks in the U.S., then put together a database comparing financial performance, racial diversity and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation. For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance."
So we have exhibit A - the three most successful companies in the US that seem to do a-OK without diversity and exhibit B - a survey of bank executives about how they feel about diversity and innovation.
Let's be honest - diversity has nothing to do with creativity or profitability. It's a political construct that the NYT feels needs to be hoisted upon successful American companies. Because diversity.
[Edited typos]
They care as much about diversity as NBA owners - which is they don't give a toss.
That said - I do think they do want to have the best people working for them. So if the best candidate for a position happens to be a disabled black lesbian - they'll gladly take her. But she has to be qualified in the first place - simply having the right 'diversity' points won't help.
Even when a company tries to do a good job (and there's lots of room for improvement at most places), hiring is still fairly random. You can lose good people because they happened to have a bad day or be matched up with an unfortunate interviewer, through cultural misunderstandings, and so on.
We can't know what top management really thinks in their heart of hearts, but it doesn't necessarily matter for most hires since they're not doing the interviews or making the hiring decisions. They built a system for that. It's the people who actually are making the decisions that you might have to worry about. The point of diversity training is to reach them and avoid losing good people through bias, screwups, and bad judgement.
The number of CS graduates who are women differs in how it's gauged, but it's roughly 18% [4].
Though obviously there are non-technical positions, even accounting only for tech jobs the numbers are still 17%, 15% and 20%, respectively. They all fit around the same range.
There's certainly room for improvement, but I'm not sure why the onus should be on tech companies. They seem to be doing well enough with the available resource pool. Having profit-motivated entities be the initiators of social change seems like a clunky band-aid solution to me that won't be of any particular efficacy.
[1] http://google.com/diversity/at-google.html
[2] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-...
[3] https://www.apple.com/diversity/
[4] http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/btn_02282...
This is where, say, Google's Made With Code initiative came from.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
SF companies do well on one measure of diversity (they employ Asian males) but pretty poorly on other scales (women; older people; people with disabilities, etc)
We're told to hire people who we know, or people that are known and trusted by those we've already hired. One of the first things that will happen if you're hired at Facebook or Google is that HR will sit down with you and ask you to make a list of every smart person you've ever worked with, so they can try to recruit them.
No one sets out to create a monoculture (we hope), or to build a workforce without diversity. Silicon Valley is filled with intelligent, well-meaning, ambitious people who I believe are truly interested in a meritocracy.
But look around. Who's founding the companies that get funded? There's a reason you get dozens of Snapchat wannabes, "sharing economy" startups, and social apps. VCs are emotional creatures just like anyone else, and they follow the herd, where it's safe. That also means they're funding founders who live nearby, and come with a warm intro and a recommendation.
Companies in the Valley are founded by a relatively homogenous slice of the American demographic, whether you're looking at race, age, background, socioeconomic status, or what have you. When you then tell those founders to minimize risk by hiring through personal networks, you create a foundation for a culture that will continue to look homogenous as the company scales and grows.
If you've ever been involved in hiring in the Valley, or interviewed with any tech companies here, you've probably heard the words "culture fit." It's an insidious phrase, one that may start with good intentions, but ends up excluding good people, valuable hires who might have brought a much-needed diversity of thought, insight, and perspective to a company.
Silicon Valley wants to be a meritocracy, and it's not against diversity. But it's got a culture that's currently designed, albeit unintentionally, to create copies of itself and the people who are already here.
One thing that has worked for me over the years is choosing to be an "ally" of "outsiders" -- ensure that people get invited to meetings or other functions who otherwise might be left out, make sure that they are consulted for their opinions consistently, make it apparent that you, personally, value diversity through your actions. The effect is to rebalance the ratio of outsiders to insiders so that people don't feel surrounded and outnumbered.
Other suggestions?
Eventually, we'll all be "outsiders" thanks to age, so it's in everyone's interest to mitigate this problem.
Note that, at least for the UK, asian includes people from India. I don't where you are, but the tech scene I see in the bay area has plenty of white, asian & indian people in it. In contrast, I've only run into one other african-american engineer in my 13 years in tech... and he was first generation Nigerian(like myself).
Don't forget income. Asian family incomes are typically much higher than black and latino households. The parents are more often found in high-tech jobs which gives their offspring a big jumpstart. A black or latino parent might work in agriculture, food services, or low-skill manufacturing jobs and they aren't bringing a PC home to do work on, or have enough money to purchase one for their kids.
Personally, I've given up trying to argue with people on this matter. Some view this sort of reverse-discrimination as some sort of noble social-correction mechanism, I just view as what it is. Because, to me, at the end of the day, we are dealing with individuals. And sure, we may be uplifting certain individuals, but at a cost of other individuals purely because their gender/race was previously benefited in some way.
The interesting thing about those studies is that what they seem to show is that what is important is that there be someone in the group who you perceive as being different in some significant way. It appears that what is going on is that when you see everyone in a group as being the same as you, you expect everyone to think the same, and aren't as open to new ideas, and don't put as much effort into promoting your ideas.
Most of the studies used race as the difference, putting one or two blacks in a group of whites. One used politics, comparing two democrats or two republicans against mixed pairs, and one used groups where the diversity was geographic.
That raises some interesting questions. In the following let's take as a baseline a small group of white males.
Does the degree of difference make a difference? Is adding a black female better than adding a black male to the group, because she differs on both race and gender?
What differences besides race, politics, and geography matter? We are all white males in the engineering jobs at my office, but we are split evenly between married with children people and single people. We've also got a nice split between liberals and conservatives. Are these enough differences to max out our creativity?
There's a lot a more research needed here.
We've probably all heard the story about how Paypal rejected a candidate that aced his engineering tests because he said he "likes to play hoops" in his free time. They decided that a guy who likes to play basketball would not be a good culture fit.
So, if that was the thought process that the Paypal Mafia left the nest with, it's not hard to see how we ended up in the situation we're in regarding diversity.
Side note: Like others, I also wonder how age gets left out of this diversity debate. That's pretty interesting...
Sorry to say, my view is that it will just lead to a lot more paper-pushing or other make-work jobs.
EDIT to add: if it is about money, most would rather take up law.
Are you actually suggesting that minorities can only do paper-pushing jobs? Not only is that abject racism, it's obviously untrue.
The article is pointing out that because it's mostly whites and asians in tech, and people generally hire the people they know, the problem just perpetuates, leaving highly qualified, and sometimes better candidates, overlooked from positions simply because they don't enter the field of view for the candidate selection process.
We have to instead suppose there's built-in bias in the actual hiring process. E.g. only the dominant cultural filter is allowed weight in the hiring process, regardless of who is acting in that role.
Asian is the _real_ minority(or tinority) in USA, somehow it is not treated as such when we talk about college, IT jobs etc. Maybe it's not just about the percentage of population? IT is also a highly skilled profession, similar to NBA players to some extent.
I'm all for diversity everywhere, but it seems the status quo is more likely from nature force/choice instead of simple intentional discrimination. To fully better it, we need check the diversity in those who are taking the hard courses in STEM majors, it's difficult to hire a non-STEM students for IT jobs.
Then we're back to round 1, I think it's the diversity on STEM major choices from highschool/college deciding the end result in SV. For that, there is only so much the government can help.