5 ms·

Facebook’s Point System Fails to Close Diversity Gap

18 points by Garbage 10y ago

flukus 10y ago
Is this just a confirmation of what many of us here suspected all along, that the interview process is way to late in the game to correct for diversity?
- girvo 10y ago
  It's certainly an anecdote that could be interpreted that way. I think the main answer to things like these are always the same: a multi-pronged approach. Searching for a silver bullet for something as complex as human-human and human-society interactions is somewhat futile: usually we improve these by tackling it in as many ways as we can. I think diversity in hiring is similar, personally.
- meira 10y ago
  Yep, but this discussion creates a lot of projects targeting to improve these numbers in the future
  - reefoctopus 10y ago
    Improve. Yes. I for one am going to lobby the government to provide early training for young women who might be interested in coal mining. Hopefully we can reduce the number of men in coal mining in favor of more disadvantaged groups who are less interested in back breaking labor.
- achompas 10y ago
  No, I don't think so. We don't know what the recruiting funnel looks like at FB, but it is entirely possible that the hiring process has been designed by a group of engineers who, through their homogenous demographics, are either drawing on similarly-homogenous professional networks for references or selecting for characteristics they possess (which could be bad for anyone who's not like them).
  - happyslobro 10y ago
    Based on my own anecdotal experience with hiring developers, the m/f ratio is highly unbalanced before our own biases even come into play. A while ago, we had a recruiting agent helping us to find candidates, based solely on a list of technical criteria. She (yes, she) sent us almost only men, a dozen or two of them. The one exception was a woman who choked on the fizzbuzz test. That was actually really saddening.
    - achompas 10y ago
      Did these technical criteria skew towards mid-level or senior? I've observed this as well, but I've observed a more even balance of junior candidates. If so, this could be a manifestation of the high attrition rates for experienced female engineers.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  There have been plenty of folks who have proved this wrong. This is the classic "pipeline" argument, which is really just a case of the company restricting the "pipeline" through various practices. There are plenty of posts out there about why Facebook's recent declaration that their numbers are that way due to the pipeline problem is wrong. There was a particularly good one I recall, but I can't find it sadly. But the other articles out there should suffice too. There are also many self taught programmers out there, which are not affected by the "pipeline". Interview practices often subconsciously discriminate against them (for example, an overabundance of datastructure questions -- most self taught programmers I know are good enough with datastructures, but haven't become super awesome experts at them because that's not very useful when actually programming. Focusing your interviews on solely these questions excludes nearly half the "pipeline"). The college I was in has an extremely skewed gender ratio. There are many companies out there that nearly exclusively hire from a set of similar colleges as a matter of prestige. And of course have a large gender diversity issue, which they (well, employees there -- in this country there is less of a push for diversity and companies don't make public statements about it) blame on the pipeline. This is absurd. What Facebook does is similar, though not as stark.
chrischen 10y ago
These policies are always just band-aids for a deeper rooted problem. In the best case scenario, it masks the problem and diverts attention away from actual solutions that actually provide equality of opportunity at an earlier stage for underrepresented segments.
- reefoctopus 10y ago
  Why is it a problem? I personally think it's a problem that there are so few women coal miners. Clearly this is a sign of deeper societal problems. We need to get women interested in coal mining at a younger age to help solve the gender gap in coal mining. Once we solve that we can tackle diversity in professional basketball and hockey. Obviously more white and Asians should be in the NBA and more blacks in the NHL. That the ethnic breakdown of these particular sports doesn't match up with my personal beliefs can only mean one thing: everyone is racist.
  - meira 10y ago
    It's clear that tech is the Golden mine of XXI century, so democratize this industry in particular is important.
    - reefoctopus 10y ago
      There is nothing stopping anybody with an Internet connection and a little bit of curiosity from learning to code. The computer doesn't care about your race or gender. This issue strikes a chord with me because I spent years programming while others called me a nerd. Now that my skills are useful people claim I must be doing well because of my sex and skin color.
    - crazy1van 10y ago
      > It's clear that tech is the Golden mine of XXI century What's the evidence for this claim? I think tech is fun, pays for a good standard of living, and is a solid career choice for any person entering the job market. However, according to the bureau of labor and statistics, you're still better off going into a host of fields like medicine, dentistry, airline pilots, law, and finance. [0] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
toehead2000 10y ago
Facebook Recruiter: "I won't be able to afford to send my kid to college unless you wear this sombrero to your interviews."
seattle_spring 10y ago
I'm not sure how this is surprising for anyone. Of all of the female friends I had growing up, I don't know a single one that went into software. I had one study "Happiness" at Mt Holyoke, one study Gender Studies at UMass, a few Biology majors who now are lab techs, one law school graduate who works with the ACLU, and a bunch of women who didn't even go to college. If we want to fix this problem, we need to encourage women to stop studying such ridiculous nonsense feel-good bullshit. The problem lies with our culture and how we raise children, not "racist/sexist/whatever-ist" employers.
- achompas 10y ago
  Sorry, so you're suggesting the problem is that women don't study computer science? Hmm. [0] It sounds like you're chalking this up to the famous "pipeline problem." [1] This is empirically incorrect. In particular, Figure 8.2 demonstrates that the quit rate for women in "high tech" is almost 2.5x higher than the quit rate for me. [0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-technology-stanford-idUSKCN0S32F020151009 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-technology-stanford-... [1] http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-Athena-factor-Reversing-the-brain-drain-in-science,-engineering,-and-technology.pdf http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-...
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    The fact that the quit rate is higher doesn't disqualify the pipeline problem as an explanation. It sounds like your assumption is that a hostile work environment must be the reason for the higher quit rate, and thus that fixing the pipeline wouldn't fix the issue. I'm not sure this is as ironclad as you're pretending it is. I personally know people from underrepresented groups in tech (African-American, women etc) who attest that, even in work environments that made them feel 100% welcome/comfortable, they felt a mental cost from the very fact of being underrepresented. That is to say, even if you were to remove all the consciously and unconsciously biased behavior from workplaces, some people still have a negative reaction to being the only present member of a group that they identify with. The pipeline problem is the only solution that could possibly address that[1], by addressing the imbalance per se. [1] I suppose short of having people stop feeling this way about being underrepresented. I've been underrepresented ethnically in almost every group I've ever been in, but it has never bothered me. Far be it from me to tell other to stop feeling a certain way though.
jdminhbg 10y ago
It's weird that the article describes Facebook as "largely white" when it's significantly less white than the US as a whole: (54.4% vs 61.6%[1]) [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00
- andrewchambers 10y ago
  Yes, feel good quotas mean nothing. You are probably diverse enough if your staff match the ratio of people enrolled at university 5 years ago, and even then i think its wrong to favor employing people based on race or gender at all.
  - asdfologist 10y ago
    It's not racist as long as you favor the right race. /s
- perfmode 10y ago
  > Facebook says it wants its workforce to better reflect the diversity of its 1.7 billion monthly users—85% of which are outside the U.S. and Canada.
  - jdminhbg 10y ago
    Yeah, I held up for a second because of that, but the data presented is from the US EEOC, so presumably applies to their US workforce. Their workforce might be "largely white" when compared to the worldwide FB userbase, but not to who they're allowed to hire domestically.
  - asdfologist 10y ago
    Then shouldn't Facebook hire more Chinese and Indians? They comprise ~35% of the world population.
    - tn13 10y ago
      Since Chinese people are not the users of Facebook he should not hire any Chinese :D.
helloworld 10y ago
The article doesn't mention any focus by Facebook on diversity of age. Along with data on race and gender, does the company make public the percent of its workforce that is over 40 or 50?
daok 10y ago
Isn't that racist and sexist to give bonus to hire specific sex or race. Hiring by competency is still a concept that we cannot handle in 2016?
- asdfologist 10y ago
  The really sad thing is that viewpoints such as yours are considered racist and sexist in today's society. These issues are so politically charged that it's impossible to have any honest debate. If you even remotely disagree with feminism, Black Lives Matter, or Israeli occupation of Palestine, you're immediately labeled sexist/racist/anti-semitic and no one else will dare agree with you.
- HaloZero 10y ago
  It sounds like it's an incentive system for recruiters to find non-traditional candidates. It's easy to only recruit from top colleges and universities but I think the system tried to get a better pipeline of candidates from other sources. It doesn't like the Hiring Managers (who decide offers?) got that same system.
- tn13 10y ago
  Facebook is significantly less white than US in general. Given that white people are over represented in occupations like programmers I would expect them be actually more white than USA. It appears that Facebook does not hire enough whites and these sort of point systems appear more like an active discrimination against white people.
jtchang 10y ago
I don't see this surprising. It's like trying to find the target market for your product. It's possible that the market size is too small or you are being too restrictive. It also could be that facebook's recruiting itself is biased.
exit 10y ago
it always struck me as funny watching this issue unfold in my industry, that the people on the "frontlines" belong to another highly gendered career path - human resource workers seem to be overwhelmingly female. first of all, does anyone know whether i'm right about this? and then, does anyone else think we might have to address the gendering of all careers in order to get at addressing those careers which attract all of the concern?
iamleppert 10y ago
Otherwise known as affirmative action? My guess is that the recruiters realized that selecting for people who could actually pass the interview process and stand a chance at getting hired is a better strategy to getting good performance reviews. It's gravy if its a minority, but you can't count on it. That's not to say there aren't extremely talented women and racial minorities, but I'd imagine they have their pick of the litter right now as everyone is clamoring to have that perfectly homogenous workforce so their director of HR can post their "diversity numbers" and get a big raise. That's the real reason driving this nonsense. The problem is in the supply of the candidates, which starts long before they make it to the recruiter, so it's of no surprise the recruiter can't do anything. It's not like by giving these points we suddenly opened up a hidden cache of women engineers somewhere. If big tech companies really cared about minorities, they would offer minority scholarships, complete with an offer of employment afterwards, sponsor after school programs and help find those kids that have been left behind in the institutional education system. Take that extra budget allocated for this banal and hopeless program and give it to the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization and mandate the recruiters attend and mentor someone there. Of course, those results will not be visible in the HR Director's next OKR meeting. Some problems cannot be fixed easily or quickly and that's just how it is. They could be doing these things....but they won't. Instead, we get recruiter "point systems". Bravo, Facebook!

18 points by Garbage 10y ago

Is this just a confirmation of what many of us here suspected all along, that the interview process is way to late in the game to correct for diversity?

girvo 10y ago
It's certainly an anecdote that could be interpreted that way. I think the main answer to things like these are always the same: a multi-pronged approach. Searching for a silver bullet for something as complex as human-human and human-society interactions is somewhat futile: usually we improve these by tackling it in as many ways as we can. I think diversity in hiring is similar, personally.
meira 10y ago
Yep, but this discussion creates a lot of projects targeting to improve these numbers in the future
- reefoctopus 10y ago
  Improve. Yes. I for one am going to lobby the government to provide early training for young women who might be interested in coal mining. Hopefully we can reduce the number of men in coal mining in favor of more disadvantaged groups who are less interested in back breaking labor.
achompas 10y ago
No, I don't think so. We don't know what the recruiting funnel looks like at FB, but it is entirely possible that the hiring process has been designed by a group of engineers who, through their homogenous demographics, are either drawing on similarly-homogenous professional networks for references or selecting for characteristics they possess (which could be bad for anyone who's not like them).
- happyslobro 10y ago
  Based on my own anecdotal experience with hiring developers, the m/f ratio is highly unbalanced before our own biases even come into play. A while ago, we had a recruiting agent helping us to find candidates, based solely on a list of technical criteria. She (yes, she) sent us almost only men, a dozen or two of them. The one exception was a woman who choked on the fizzbuzz test. That was actually really saddening.
  - achompas 10y ago
    Did these technical criteria skew towards mid-level or senior? I've observed this as well, but I've observed a more even balance of junior candidates. If so, this could be a manifestation of the high attrition rates for experienced female engineers.
Manishearth 10y ago
There have been plenty of folks who have proved this wrong. This is the classic "pipeline" argument, which is really just a case of the company restricting the "pipeline" through various practices. There are plenty of posts out there about why Facebook's recent declaration that their numbers are that way due to the pipeline problem is wrong. There was a particularly good one I recall, but I can't find it sadly. But the other articles out there should suffice too. There are also many self taught programmers out there, which are not affected by the "pipeline". Interview practices often subconsciously discriminate against them (for example, an overabundance of datastructure questions -- most self taught programmers I know are good enough with datastructures, but haven't become super awesome experts at them because that's not very useful when actually programming. Focusing your interviews on solely these questions excludes nearly half the "pipeline"). The college I was in has an extremely skewed gender ratio. There are many companies out there that nearly exclusively hire from a set of similar colleges as a matter of prestige. And of course have a large gender diversity issue, which they (well, employees there -- in this country there is less of a push for diversity and companies don't make public statements about it) blame on the pipeline. This is absurd. What Facebook does is similar, though not as stark.

chrischen 10y ago

These policies are always just band-aids for a deeper rooted problem. In the best case scenario, it masks the problem and diverts attention away from actual solutions that actually provide equality of opportunity at an earlier stage for underrepresented segments.

reefoctopus 10y ago
Why is it a problem? I personally think it's a problem that there are so few women coal miners. Clearly this is a sign of deeper societal problems. We need to get women interested in coal mining at a younger age to help solve the gender gap in coal mining. Once we solve that we can tackle diversity in professional basketball and hockey. Obviously more white and Asians should be in the NBA and more blacks in the NHL. That the ethnic breakdown of these particular sports doesn't match up with my personal beliefs can only mean one thing: everyone is racist.
- meira 10y ago
  It's clear that tech is the Golden mine of XXI century, so democratize this industry in particular is important.
  - reefoctopus 10y ago
    There is nothing stopping anybody with an Internet connection and a little bit of curiosity from learning to code. The computer doesn't care about your race or gender. This issue strikes a chord with me because I spent years programming while others called me a nerd. Now that my skills are useful people claim I must be doing well because of my sex and skin color.
  - crazy1van 10y ago
    > It's clear that tech is the Golden mine of XXI century What's the evidence for this claim? I think tech is fun, pays for a good standard of living, and is a solid career choice for any person entering the job market. However, according to the bureau of labor and statistics, you're still better off going into a host of fields like medicine, dentistry, airline pilots, law, and finance. [0] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

toehead2000 10y ago

Facebook Recruiter: "I won't be able to afford to send my kid to college unless you wear this sombrero to your interviews."

seattle_spring 10y ago

I'm not sure how this is surprising for anyone. Of all of the female friends I had growing up, I don't know a single one that went into software. I had one study "Happiness" at Mt Holyoke, one study Gender Studies at UMass, a few Biology majors who now are lab techs, one law school graduate who works with the ACLU, and a bunch of women who didn't even go to college. If we want to fix this problem, we need to encourage women to stop studying such ridiculous nonsense feel-good bullshit. The problem lies with our culture and how we raise children, not "racist/sexist/whatever-ist" employers.

achompas 10y ago
Sorry, so you're suggesting the problem is that women don't study computer science? Hmm. [0] It sounds like you're chalking this up to the famous "pipeline problem." [1] This is empirically incorrect. In particular, Figure 8.2 demonstrates that the quit rate for women in "high tech" is almost 2.5x higher than the quit rate for me. [0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-technology-stanford-idUSKCN0S32F020151009 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-technology-stanford-... [1] http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-Athena-factor-Reversing-the-brain-drain-in-science,-engineering,-and-technology.pdf http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-...
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  The fact that the quit rate is higher doesn't disqualify the pipeline problem as an explanation. It sounds like your assumption is that a hostile work environment must be the reason for the higher quit rate, and thus that fixing the pipeline wouldn't fix the issue. I'm not sure this is as ironclad as you're pretending it is. I personally know people from underrepresented groups in tech (African-American, women etc) who attest that, even in work environments that made them feel 100% welcome/comfortable, they felt a mental cost from the very fact of being underrepresented. That is to say, even if you were to remove all the consciously and unconsciously biased behavior from workplaces, some people still have a negative reaction to being the only present member of a group that they identify with. The pipeline problem is the only solution that could possibly address that[1], by addressing the imbalance per se. [1] I suppose short of having people stop feeling this way about being underrepresented. I've been underrepresented ethnically in almost every group I've ever been in, but it has never bothered me. Far be it from me to tell other to stop feeling a certain way though.

jdminhbg 10y ago

It's weird that the article describes Facebook as "largely white" when it's significantly less white than the US as a whole: (54.4% vs 61.6%[1]) [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

andrewchambers 10y ago
Yes, feel good quotas mean nothing. You are probably diverse enough if your staff match the ratio of people enrolled at university 5 years ago, and even then i think its wrong to favor employing people based on race or gender at all.
- asdfologist 10y ago
  It's not racist as long as you favor the right race. /s
perfmode 10y ago
> Facebook says it wants its workforce to better reflect the diversity of its 1.7 billion monthly users—85% of which are outside the U.S. and Canada.
- jdminhbg 10y ago
  Yeah, I held up for a second because of that, but the data presented is from the US EEOC, so presumably applies to their US workforce. Their workforce might be "largely white" when compared to the worldwide FB userbase, but not to who they're allowed to hire domestically.
- asdfologist 10y ago
  Then shouldn't Facebook hire more Chinese and Indians? They comprise ~35% of the world population.
  - tn13 10y ago
    Since Chinese people are not the users of Facebook he should not hire any Chinese :D.

helloworld 10y ago

The article doesn't mention any focus by Facebook on diversity of age. Along with data on race and gender, does the company make public the percent of its workforce that is over 40 or 50?

daok 10y ago

Isn't that racist and sexist to give bonus to hire specific sex or race. Hiring by competency is still a concept that we cannot handle in 2016?

asdfologist 10y ago
The really sad thing is that viewpoints such as yours are considered racist and sexist in today's society. These issues are so politically charged that it's impossible to have any honest debate. If you even remotely disagree with feminism, Black Lives Matter, or Israeli occupation of Palestine, you're immediately labeled sexist/racist/anti-semitic and no one else will dare agree with you.
HaloZero 10y ago
It sounds like it's an incentive system for recruiters to find non-traditional candidates. It's easy to only recruit from top colleges and universities but I think the system tried to get a better pipeline of candidates from other sources. It doesn't like the Hiring Managers (who decide offers?) got that same system.
tn13 10y ago
Facebook is significantly less white than US in general. Given that white people are over represented in occupations like programmers I would expect them be actually more white than USA. It appears that Facebook does not hire enough whites and these sort of point systems appear more like an active discrimination against white people.

jtchang 10y ago

I don't see this surprising. It's like trying to find the target market for your product. It's possible that the market size is too small or you are being too restrictive. It also could be that facebook's recruiting itself is biased.

exit 10y ago

it always struck me as funny watching this issue unfold in my industry, that the people on the "frontlines" belong to another highly gendered career path - human resource workers seem to be overwhelmingly female. first of all, does anyone know whether i'm right about this? and then, does anyone else think we might have to address the gendering of all careers in order to get at addressing those careers which attract all of the concern?

iamleppert 10y ago

Otherwise known as affirmative action? My guess is that the recruiters realized that selecting for people who could actually pass the interview process and stand a chance at getting hired is a better strategy to getting good performance reviews. It's gravy if its a minority, but you can't count on it. That's not to say there aren't extremely talented women and racial minorities, but I'd imagine they have their pick of the litter right now as everyone is clamoring to have that perfectly homogenous workforce so their director of HR can post their "diversity numbers" and get a big raise. That's the real reason driving this nonsense. The problem is in the supply of the candidates, which starts long before they make it to the recruiter, so it's of no surprise the recruiter can't do anything. It's not like by giving these points we suddenly opened up a hidden cache of women engineers somewhere. If big tech companies really cared about minorities, they would offer minority scholarships, complete with an offer of employment afterwards, sponsor after school programs and help find those kids that have been left behind in the institutional education system. Take that extra budget allocated for this banal and hopeless program and give it to the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization and mandate the recruiters attend and mentor someone there. Of course, those results will not be visible in the HR Director's next OKR meeting. Some problems cannot be fixed easily or quickly and that's just how it is. They could be doing these things....but they won't. Instead, we get recruiter "point systems". Bravo, Facebook!