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> Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company? Here's one example. Google has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity ef
by imron 9y ago
> Is there evidence that Google's diversity efforts hurt the company?
Here's one example. Google has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity efforts in the last 3 years, and has barely moved the needle in terms of diversity in their workforce [0].
Some of that can be explained by long-term efforts that will take more than 3 years to show dividends, but not all of it, and given the lack of results, you'd think that it's worth considering if current efforts are addressing the actual problem or if they're just throwing money in the wrong direction.
You can't do that without questioning the current methods and examining other ideas, but when the reaction to questioning current methods and examining other ideas is to stifle discussion and say 'no, this is right, you are wrong, and btw you're fired', then you may well find you keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars, for little to no result.
You could argue that a quarter of a billion dollars is pocket change to Google (and it is) and therefore doesn't represent any real harm, but it's still a lot of money to throw around on something that might not actually solve the problem.
0: https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-little-progress-2470784457.html https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...
- nostrebored 9y agoYou're analyzing this problem independent of context: women graduating in software engineering is decreasing over time, and they are more likely to exit the profession.
- imron 9y ago> women graduating in software engineering is decreasing over time That's right, but what's the cause of that? Is it solely down to sexism and discrimination, or are there other causes? For example, studies have shown that the more egalitarian a society becomes, the greater the difference in personality between genders is, which affects things like job and career selection. This makes sense because in an egalitarian society, men and women are more free to choose careers based on interest rather than on preordained acceptable roles based on gender [0]. I'm not saying this is what's happening in tech, but there's enough research around it that it's a plausible explanation for some of it. And if you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars but are not in any way interested in investigating (or even contemplating) whether this might be one of several factors leading to a decline in women entering software engineering, then that's probably a problem. 0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
- majidazimi 9y agoThat's not because women are incompetent. It's because the workplace is putting so much pressure on engineers that even some men prefer to be promoted to management level after a decade of technical work.
- irishsultan 9y agoSo then the solution would be to search for ways to make more women graduate, instead of hiring more from a pool that becomes smaller every year (not sure if the decrease is in absolute or relative terms, it doesn't really matter if the end goal is a 50/50 gender balance).