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> The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. No, the
by xienze 9y ago
> The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job.
No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_.
They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google?
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...
> Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
- jonnathanson 9y agoHow does a study about affirmative action policies in college admissions offer any specific evidence about Google's policies?
- xienze 9y agoIf universities can't increase minority enrollment without lowering the bar, what makes you think Google can? I would argue that university affirmative action is the inspiration for how Google and other tech companies are juicing their numbers.
- jonnathanson 9y agoAgain, I'm not taking any issue with your assumptions, but assumptions are not direct or even circumstantial evidence. That's all I'm trying to say.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoYour argument is legitimate. We don't know the exact mechanisms by which Google enacts their affirmative action hiring policy. We don't know if it's through quotas or scores or anything else. An affirmative action hiring policy, though, is built to hire more of a minority in some way or another. When the pool of workers of that minority is quite low(like in tech), I don't see how an organization can have such a diverse workforce without at some point choosing a weaker candidate that happens to be diverse. If this isn't the case and Google does actually hire people based on their skill and not skin color or gender, then Google needs to emphasize that, or else the majority of people will look upon women and such as "diversity hires" and build a disdain for them, thus hurting the cause.