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The pool of candidates are men and women who want to work in tech. I have no metrics of this pool but I think that most probably is something like 75/25 (if som

The pool of candidates are men and women who want to work in tech. I have no metrics of this pool but I think that most probably is something like 75/25 (if someone can provide better metrics I appreciate it). So the bigger the company the most probably it get closer to this ratio. What companies want to achieve with gender diversity is 50/50 because in the world the proportion is 50/50. But this is not the case for the pool of candidates. So moving far from 75/25 it only make you not hiring the best candidates (because the best candidates pool should be something similar to 75/25 if we assume a normal distribution for both genders). I don't think it is bad you have a company with a ratio 75/25 but I would think why are less women than men interested in tech. Is it based on biology? is it a cultural issue? We can discuss that, but for me it is clear that a positive discrimination to have a 50/50 ratio it only harms the company in the long term and it an impossible goal to achieve now a days. > Even if their hiring pool of candidates didn't have a fully diverse distribution, that doesn't automatically make it okay to have a company that ranks poorly on diversity So, how do you achieve this diversity?

kevingadd 9y ago
First of all, nobody said the target was 50/50 or even 75/25. If you want to know the actual percentage makeup of the population (or even of computer science grads, or college grads) it's very trivial to find those numbers using Google. Google's race and gender makeup (in general, but especially in engineering) is far off the mark. I already mentioned some of the ways you can expand your candidate pool. There are tech firms in other states/cities with more reasonable race balances than Google, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-black-women-workers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... With the vast financial resources at its disposal and the (generally) positive brand recognition it has, Google absolutely is in a position where they could recruit more people of color and more women. They have to identify the right steps to take, and then take them - both significant challenges, especially if your employees actively resist every step involved. Honestly though at this point, this is a well understood issue. It's not a completely solved problem but many companies have no difficulty recruiting a diverse workforce.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  Thanks for the reference. You are right, if the ratio they want to achieve is close to the pool of candidates them I should apologize for my comment. But after reading the manifesto I think the ex-googler had the feeling the company was going out of limits and try to achieve an impossible. Do you have any reference for the goal Google had for any of his programs?
  - kevingadd 9y ago
    Sorry, I had nothing to do with hiring while I worked there, so I can't comment on details of their hiring policies. I definitely didn't observe anything out of the ordinary or discriminatory against white men - I worked with plenty of them.

kevingadd 9y ago

First of all, nobody said the target was 50/50 or even 75/25. If you want to know the actual percentage makeup of the population (or even of computer science grads, or college grads) it's very trivial to find those numbers using Google. Google's race and gender makeup (in general, but especially in engineering) is far off the mark. I already mentioned some of the ways you can expand your candidate pool. There are tech firms in other states/cities with more reasonable race balances than Google, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-black-women-workers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... With the vast financial resources at its disposal and the (generally) positive brand recognition it has, Google absolutely is in a position where they could recruit more people of color and more women. They have to identify the right steps to take, and then take them - both significant challenges, especially if your employees actively resist every step involved. Honestly though at this point, this is a well understood issue. It's not a completely solved problem but many companies have no difficulty recruiting a diverse workforce.

jorgemf 9y ago
Thanks for the reference. You are right, if the ratio they want to achieve is close to the pool of candidates them I should apologize for my comment. But after reading the manifesto I think the ex-googler had the feeling the company was going out of limits and try to achieve an impossible. Do you have any reference for the goal Google had for any of his programs?
- kevingadd 9y ago
  Sorry, I had nothing to do with hiring while I worked there, so I can't comment on details of their hiring policies. I definitely didn't observe anything out of the ordinary or discriminatory against white men - I worked with plenty of them.