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Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
- vixen99 8y agoSo, are companies less profitable and successful than they might be by not hiring on a totally meritocratic basis? In other words, do tech companies really reject potential employees for reasons other than pure merit?
- philwelch 8y agoMathematically, not all companies can have a higher proportion of $GROUP than the industry as a whole. So if companies advertise and compete on having a higher-than-industry-average proportion of $GROUP, they paint a target on their back.
- grenoire 8y agoI find it a little absurd to compare the SV demographics to the US demographics, and then claiming that the problem is with SV's hiring. It's a US problem that its society has failed to push the minorities up with better welfare and education; it just manifests itself as lower representation in SV.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI don't really see how diversity is tech's problem any more than it's hospitals' problem. If you want more engineers from more underrepresented groups you need to educate them. If there aren't enough doctors of group X it's not the fault of hospitals. It's the fault of society for not facilitating more of them going into medicine. It seems to me that the case for tech workers is analogous.
- hmate9 8y ago100% agree. Look at the diversity of CS courses at top universities. If minorities and females are not represented there then how can you expect companies who hire top talent to have them?
- crististm 8y agoMale and female representation is also a function of domain interest. Last time I checked there were not that many women applications in brick layering.
- jonathankoren 8y agoSo what changed in 1984? https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
- username90 8y agoMale interest in the field exploded when people realized that you could build things with computers and not just crunch numbers while female interest progressed in the same rate as before. After that the gender ratio in computer science aligns very well with what they have in other engineering fields, data which that article very conveniently left out.
- joelfolksy 8y agoThe attitudes of men changed? Women's attitudes wouldn't have to change at all to produce that graph.
- jonathankoren 8y agoThat doesn’t explain the NSF data. If women’s behavior was constant, then we’d see the same relative growth of women compared to women, but we don’t. Just looking at bachelor’s degrees, we see women exit the field at 2x the rate of men, and enter at lower rates as well. (% YoY men to men, women to women). https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4266&id=2 https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4...
- alottafunchata 8y agoThis is such fake news. I've been surrounded by H1B employees my entire career.
- commandlinefan 8y agoI did a master's degree in CS at a US university a little over 10 years ago. I was one of only two U.S. citizens in the entire CS _program_. 75% of my instructors were from foreign countries as well.
- darawk 8y agoMore like journalism is using race to hide its jealousy problem. Tech now has the power, influence, and compensation that journalist used to have, and they're mad about it. Most of these companies go way out of their way to recruit minorities and women. If you believe that not having enough of them in tech companies is a problem, you're going to have to look further down the funnel, to college major choices and honestly probably much earlier. These groups are simply not graduating with CS degrees or programming skills in the numbers necessary to be equally represented as employees at these companies. Whether that's because of discrimination at earlier stages or simple preference, fixing it at the level of hiring for tech companies is way way too late to improve anything. By then it's a completely zero-sum problem. There are only so many viable candidates from these groups with the requisite skills, if Google hires one, that's one less that Palantir can take. It's just a silly game of musical chairs until we fix the pipeline problem, which is that there are not enough viable candidates from these groups. Once that is fixed, then if companies are still not hiring them, let's talk about that, but I very much doubt that will be the case.
- dpflan 8y agoWould you be willing to share your ideas on what can be done at the beginning of the pipeline?
- adamnemecek 8y agoGood primary and secondary education systems and affordable colleges.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoCountering American anti-intellectualism is needed as well.
- joelfolksy 8y agoYep. America hasn't even started to reckon with the attitudes encapsulated in the n word (no, not that one, the other one).
- ralusek 8y agoFor the millionth time. The distribution of populations not lining up with the general population distributions is not indicative of discrimination. Not to mention that the "anti-brown people" narrative absolutely dissolves in the face of the massive overrepresentation of Indians and other Asians. To say that Silicon Valley has a "race problem" and only include the employment statistics as they relate to the population at large is just pure insanity. What about the racial distribution of the hiring pool? It's less diverse by their own standards than the distributions in companies. What about the racial distribution of college graduates in engineering? Then what about mapping the racial distribution of the college graduates onto interview success rates, where the biased distribution of the graduates as produced by the universities' affirmative action policies must necessarily align with a similar policy at the company if their own filtering criteria is to produce the same results? The thing that I find the most interesting about all of this is that there isn't an overt attempt to actually remove purported discrimination from the hiring process. Suggestions to anonymize the interview process typically produce results that are even less representative of their desired distribution, because almost every company is actively discriminating in favor of women and "marginalized communities." If their accusations were actually on the basis of correcting bias/discrimination, this is the sort of strategy you'd see advocated, but it's not. They want arbitrary quotas that are, given the available pool of candidates to even consider, mathematically impossible to attain.
- sjg007 8y agoThe article cites data from the government on percentages of black, hispanic, and women in tech in Silicon Valley vs those same populations in tech nationwide. You would expect the percentages to be statistically equal.
- felinista 8y agoIf lack of diversity isn't a problem, why aren't these companies open with their figures? Why go to such extents? There's also research to suggest women and minorities are underpaid relative to their male, white counterparts, shouldn't companies fix that?
- crististm 8y agoIs it a crazy idea the reason is that the figures themselves are irrelevant?
- felinista 8y agoWhy are they irrelevant? Why can't the data be used to address this disparity? If certain groups shy away from STEM careers, why not try to do something about it?
- SpicyLemonZest 8y agoAll of the companies named in the article are indeed trying to do something about it, and almost certainly use the data internally to address it.
- xamuel 8y agoWomen and blacks should have the right to choose their own destiny, who are we to tell them they're supposed to go into tech?
- felinista 8y agoIs this what I said? Some straw man. What I said was we should we work towards removing any obstacles underrepresented groups may face when trying to enter STEM careers. Plenty of research that supports the existence of such obstacles and the higher drop out rates of these groups even after having a go at pursuing a career in a STEM field (particularly in tech - https://hbr.org/2016/09/what-it-will-take-to-keep-women-from-leaving-stem https://hbr.org/2016/09/what-it-will-take-to-keep-women-from...).
- fipple 8y agoThe whole “diversity industry” (and it is a huge industry) is based on a lie... that “diversity” improves a company’s performance. The research on this is so shaky with so much empirical evidence to the contrary, and everyone knows it, which is why companies are trying to do nothing more than “lip service.”
- commandlinefan 8y ago> that “diversity” improves a company’s performance. Hm - well, I agree that there's a lie floating around, but I don't think that's quite the lie in play. More often what they say is that you're hurting yourself by turning away qualified candidates based on their race/geneder/sexual orientation/whatever they're not seeing as many of as they think they ought to be. The problem is that, while this is strictly true, there's no evidence that qualified people of _x_ race/gender/sexual orientation are actually being turned away. For all the digital ink that's been virtually spilled on tech and diversity, I have yet to see _anybody_ claim, even anecdotally, that they, themselves are qualified members of diversity group _x_ but are unable to find employment. Instead, they express bewilderment that although they have no trouble finding employment, they don't see enough other members of group _x_... which they presume must be because all of the other ones are being turned away by prejudiced hiring managers.
- CM30 8y agoThis is something I've wondered about a lot as well. Look at any large company in the world, then look at how diverse they are. Probably isn't much of a correlation between one and the other. Looking at companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook and what not, you'd suspect any effects from having a diverse workforce are massively outweighed by other factors like selling a product/service more people want, good product design, price, marketing efforts, etc.
- fredgrott 8y agomaybe I am clueless but how can anonymous data turned into the government be trade secret protectable?
- sjg007 8y agoIt's likely not. Even the premise that employment demographics are trade secret at all is malarkey.
- williesleg 8y agoI wonder why so many teachers are women? How about nurses? Where's the equality?
- porpoisely 8y ago"And as criticism grows over Silicon Valley’s bro culture and its lack of minority representation" Isn't 40% of the tech industry made up of east and south asians? Do they not count as minorities? If anything, you'd think SV would be praised for being one of the most diverse industries. "A growing body of research shows diverse perspectives bring tangible benefits to firms that support them" You see this so much in these types of articles. "Diverse perspectives" doesn't necessarily mean "diverse ethnicity". A group of 3 white men ( CEO, factory work and homeless man ) will have greater diverse perspectives than 3 female CEOs ( black, white and asian ) who went to the same schools, hung out with the same crowd and live in the same area. Also if her assertions were correct, wouldn't more diverse firms naturally have beaten out less diverse firms and we wouldn't need to legislative or force diversity in these companies? If what is being stated in this article is true, why doesn't YC or any VC firm gather the most diverse set of founders to start a new Google, Facebook, Apple, etc? "Research" has shown that the new diverse google, facebook, etc have tangible benefits which must translate into success. Right? Instead of complaining about it, why not start a diverse company and take hundreds of billions from the less diverse companies like Apple, Google, Facebook? Also, does this apply just to tech companies only? What about another highly successful firm in the silicon valley area - the Golden State Warriors. Instead of having 5 african american starters, why not diversify the team since "research" has shown that has tangible benefits. I'm against racism of all kinds whether it benefits whites,blacks,asians,etc. I'm against sexism as well - whether it benefits males or females. If there are systematic obstacles, lets remove those rather than creating more racism and racial obstacles.
- jameane 8y agoYou realize the "diversity" problem is also impacted by the funding problems. It is really hard for people of color and women to get funding - from any source. Banks, VCs, Angel investors and so on. Combine that with the wealth gap and it makes it a lot harder to get started.
- daenz 8y agoThis push towards intellectual and cultural uniformity is so incredibly anti-diversity. "All cultures must have the same interests as white people" is essentially what is being said after you account for all the various "systemic privileges." EDIT>> to put it another way, white people consider something "wrong" if different demographics aren't interested in the same subjects as they are, at the same rate. It's the ultimate self-centered worldview.
- darkpuma 8y agoThat's a very interesting take, I've never considered it that way before. I guess that goes to show I need to work on my empathy.
- YayamiOmate 8y agoI am very interested what the other half of black engineers do and why. Do they stay unemployed, or choose a different career? I have a hard time imagining that so much educated engineers who can be effetively underpaid are not being capitalized on. That sounds like a wasted business opportunity. Businesses outsource work to india or east europe, why not exploit locally? I've read they also import workers on hb1 because they can pay less for same talent, so this doesn't add up for me. I can't belive racism vs black people specifically wins vs cash on such large scale, since it doesn't vs other races. Interesting.
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- YayamiOmate 8y agoI am very interested what the other half of black engineers do and why. Do they stay unemployed, or choose a different career? I have a hard time imagining that so much educated engineers who can be effetively underpaid are not being capitalized on. That sounds like a wasted business opportunity. Businesses outsource work to india or east europe, why not exploit locally? I've read they also import workers on hb1 because they can pay less for same talent, so this doesn't add up for me. I can't belive racism vs black people specifically wins vs money on such large scale, since it doesn't vs other races. Interesting.
- justtopost 8y agoMore like hiding its h2b fetish.
- president 8y agoWho is funding these diversity studies? That should give a clue to what the true reason is. I am doubtful companies really care about correcting discrimination in hiring.
- samstokes 8y agoSince this has become yet another discussion about "the pipeline problem" instead of a discussion about a tactic major tech companies are using to duck accountability, this Twitter thread might be informative: https://twitter.com/Code2040/status/1092853501766467585?s=19 https://twitter.com/Code2040/status/1092853501766467585?s=19 It's from an organisation (Code2040) that spent 10 years working to build a pipeline of qualified Black and Latinx candidates, only to find many companies had hiring processes that wouldn't hire their candidates anyway.
- purple_ducks 8y agoIt's a series of opinions in tweets. no facts. no scientific anything. From a person who (after looking at their LinkedIn bio) is in no way qualified to tell companies what they need _at all_ From what I see of the company & CEO, it's a self serving & self preserving job role & company.
- jameane 8y agoTheir facts are based the experiences of trying to place their program graduates and the experiences of those people. Code2040 had a very extensive program pairing young people with tech worker mentors, getting them the right education and helping to place them in tech jobs. And after doing that for 10 years they found without companies that were very very committed to retention, even with all of that preparation, it still didn't work. Hence the pivot by that organization. They started trying to solve the "pipeline problem" and it turned out that wasn't really the problem.
- cannotdoitbro 8y agoI feel like articles like this are major trend of racism towards Indians and Chinese. Lately, as American-born Indian-background person, I have been feeling discriminated during job interviews. My friends and I are not really looking to changes jobs but are always interviewing passively. My black friends have recruiters hounding them on LinkedIn. They get more job offers, have easier interview questions, and even higher salarier. While my experience is usually average. But when we compare type of questions we answered at the same company for same role, it is pretty obvious that I was asked harder questions. On other hand, I can tell when my interviewers are mostly Indian, they discriminate in my favor.
- itsdrewmiller 8y agoThis seems like it's using Palintir and Oracle to tar all of Silicon Valley. Aren't Google, Apple, MS, Facebook, etc. leaders on diversity transparency across the entire business community, tech and non-tech? >The vast majority of companies on the list that report their full diversity numbers are in the tech sector. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have released reports on the demographics of their workforce in recent years, so it may be unsurprising that 75% of Fortune 500 firms publishing their numbers are in the tech space. http://fortune.com/2017/06/07/fortune-500-diversity/ http://fortune.com/2017/06/07/fortune-500-diversity/