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> Recent studies conclude this is not a “pipeline” problem — qualified candidates can be found. Really wish they'd provided a link to the stud(y|ies). There ce

> Recent studies conclude this is not a “pipeline” problem — qualified candidates can be found. Really wish they'd provided a link to the stud(y|ies). There certainly exist qualified people of all stripes, but are there enough to meet a population-level representative size?

throwawayjava 7y ago
There is a huge pipeline problem. The only articles I've read claiming there isn't one have all been click bait pieces written by journos, not scientists or educators, and contain no data. Just wild ass speculation about the underlying causes of the pipeline problem. Which, yeah. The pipeline problem has lots of causes. But saying "we don't have a pipeline problem because there are reasons women don't major in CS" makes no sebse. It's like saying the roof doesn't have a leaking problem because the real problem is that the gutters are clogged. I mean, sure, that's true, and we need to fix that to fix the roof. But the roof is still leaking... The only real argument I've heard that isn't prime facie flawed in this way is the argument that you don't really need college educated computer scientists to fill your SWE roles. That may be true for some roles and some companies, but lots of positions (e.g. all the ones I hire for) do require a strong education in CS and math. PhDs in STEM fields that go on to good boot camps or masters programs in CS can be good fits, but those are even more rare. And, again, even that argument has no data to back it in the articles I've read. It's just not prime facia illogical.
- povertyworld 7y ago
  Part of the pipeline problem is that you're not winning over the most high achieving minority students to stem. I remember there was a Mexican American woman in one of my calc classes that was easily the best student and smoked everyone else (granted, it was at a second rate state school), but when asked what she wanted to do, she said she was going to be a dentist. People coming from underrepresented backgrounds don't want to spend 8 years doing a Phd, then a ML bootcamp, all so they can make low 6 figures at a job that could be outsourced or H1Bed at any minute when they could instead go to medical, dental, or law school and have a respected and well paid career.
  - creato 7y ago
    > but when asked what she wanted to do, she said she was going to be a dentist. Just guessing here, but there's probably a message board and clique of web blogs about dentistry full of people discussing the underrepresentation of minorities in their field and how they can fix their "pipeline problem".
    - povertyworld 7y ago
      Out of curiosity I just googled it, and yes, there is, and it's actually more serious than lack of diversity in adtech. If there aren't enough underrepresented minority applicants at Google, they will just have to hire an overrepresented minority to spy on you instead. But if the dental schools aren't producing enough minority dentists, those communities may not have access to quality dental care.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        > But if the dental schools aren't producing enough minority dentists, those communities may not have access to quality dental care. Sorry, I must have missed the memo that citizens can only visit dentists of the same ethnicity.
        povertyworld 7y ago
        I'm just going by what the NYU College of Dentistry says. I assume they've thought a lot more about access to dental care than I have. >Dentists who are underrepresented minorities are more likely to serve communities in need and therefore address disparities in dental care. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/september/how-pipeline-programs-can-increase-diversity-in-dentistry.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/septem...
        goldcd 7y ago
        Indeed - although the point may still be valid. Once you're qualified, it's natural to go off and place yourself where you can make money. As an anecdotal example, in my local practice, there are a lot of Eastern-European and now Greek dentists. They're excellent and came here to make more than they would at home (and prop up the NHS whilst they're at it) - I do have a concern that there's likely to be an impact on dental care in their country of origin though. I know precisely that has happened with nursing.
lopmotr 7y ago
The pipeline problem for blacks begins before the age of 4 when their IQs are measurably lower than whites and stay that way for life. This is well known and has been studied to death. Any talk about education or whatever at school age or above is ultimately futile because you can't improve IQ in a lasting way. Some researchers attribute it to cultural parenting techniques or the environment or other things. But, fundamentally, to get black engineers, you need to solve that pre-school disadvantage. Maybe the best you could do is identify the gifted children and move them to a suitable environment. But not all of them - only those who actually have potential, otherwise the problems caused by their lower ability peers will continue to drag them down.
- perfect_wave 7y ago
  After some cursory research I've found the following two quotes. The first, from Wikiepdia, likely has other sources in the footnotes, but I didn't look. Honestly, I found it really hard to read your post and not view it as incredibly racist. The study found that "(a) putative genetic racial differences do not account for a major portion of the IQ performance difference between racial groups, and (b) black and interracial children reared in the culture of the tests and the schools perform as well as other adopted children in similar families." [0] "This paper proposes a parsimonious alternative explanation: the apparent IQ advantage of East Asian adoptees is an artifact caused by ignoring the Flynn effect and adoption’s beneficial effect on IQ, and most of the IQ disadvantage of Black adoptees disappears when one allows for attrition in the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, and acknowledges the results of other studies. Diagnosing these artifacts suggests a nil hypothesis: East Asian, White, and Black adoptees raised in the same environment would have similar IQs, hinting at a minimal role for genes in racial IQ differences." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption... [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/1/1/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/1/1/htm
  - waterhouse 7y ago
    Looking at the first study you point to, I'm not sure why that is the stated conclusion. If you look at the data charts... well, as the article says later: "Both Levin[8] and Lynn [9] argued that the data clearly support a hereditarian alternative: that the mean IQ scores and school achievement of each group reflected their degree of African ancestry. For all measures, the children with two black parents scored lower than the children with one black and white parent, who in turn scored lower than the adopted children with two white parents. Both omitted discussion of Asian adoptees." On the Flynn-corrected chart, the age-17 IQ respective numbers are 83.7, 93.2, and 101.5. But then there are further arguments and counterarguments; the "Interpretations" section is a full page. One coauthor says, "The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry)." That's not true because "The adopting parents of 12 of the interracial children wrongly believed that their adopted children had two black parents", which at least gives you a comparison point for fully back vs. mixed, but that point is also disputable because "The study showed significant differences in adoption patterns of mixed-race black/white and black adopted children as was noted by Scarr and Weinberg" ("Children with two black parents were significantly older at adoption, had been in the adoptive home a shorter time, and had experienced a greater number of preadoption placements. The natural parents of the black/black group also averaged a year less of education than those of the black/white group..."). It would be nice if people identified the genes responsible for the main visible differences between races, verified that they only affected skin color and maybe a few other cosmetic traits, and were able to manipulate that directly to do controlled experiments. (And to confound actual racists by hiding someone's true race; having a lot of people with randomized racial appearance seems to be the most thorough way to train everyone to not make judgments based on apparent race.) Who knows when that'll happen, though.

throwawayjava 7y ago

There is a huge pipeline problem. The only articles I've read claiming there isn't one have all been click bait pieces written by journos, not scientists or educators, and contain no data. Just wild ass speculation about the underlying causes of the pipeline problem. Which, yeah. The pipeline problem has lots of causes. But saying "we don't have a pipeline problem because there are reasons women don't major in CS" makes no sebse. It's like saying the roof doesn't have a leaking problem because the real problem is that the gutters are clogged. I mean, sure, that's true, and we need to fix that to fix the roof. But the roof is still leaking... The only real argument I've heard that isn't prime facie flawed in this way is the argument that you don't really need college educated computer scientists to fill your SWE roles. That may be true for some roles and some companies, but lots of positions (e.g. all the ones I hire for) do require a strong education in CS and math. PhDs in STEM fields that go on to good boot camps or masters programs in CS can be good fits, but those are even more rare. And, again, even that argument has no data to back it in the articles I've read. It's just not prime facia illogical.

povertyworld 7y ago
Part of the pipeline problem is that you're not winning over the most high achieving minority students to stem. I remember there was a Mexican American woman in one of my calc classes that was easily the best student and smoked everyone else (granted, it was at a second rate state school), but when asked what she wanted to do, she said she was going to be a dentist. People coming from underrepresented backgrounds don't want to spend 8 years doing a Phd, then a ML bootcamp, all so they can make low 6 figures at a job that could be outsourced or H1Bed at any minute when they could instead go to medical, dental, or law school and have a respected and well paid career.
- creato 7y ago
  > but when asked what she wanted to do, she said she was going to be a dentist. Just guessing here, but there's probably a message board and clique of web blogs about dentistry full of people discussing the underrepresentation of minorities in their field and how they can fix their "pipeline problem".
  - povertyworld 7y ago
    Out of curiosity I just googled it, and yes, there is, and it's actually more serious than lack of diversity in adtech. If there aren't enough underrepresented minority applicants at Google, they will just have to hire an overrepresented minority to spy on you instead. But if the dental schools aren't producing enough minority dentists, those communities may not have access to quality dental care.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      > But if the dental schools aren't producing enough minority dentists, those communities may not have access to quality dental care. Sorry, I must have missed the memo that citizens can only visit dentists of the same ethnicity.
      - povertyworld 7y ago
        I'm just going by what the NYU College of Dentistry says. I assume they've thought a lot more about access to dental care than I have. >Dentists who are underrepresented minorities are more likely to serve communities in need and therefore address disparities in dental care. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/september/how-pipeline-programs-can-increase-diversity-in-dentistry.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/septem...
      - goldcd 7y ago
        Indeed - although the point may still be valid. Once you're qualified, it's natural to go off and place yourself where you can make money. As an anecdotal example, in my local practice, there are a lot of Eastern-European and now Greek dentists. They're excellent and came here to make more than they would at home (and prop up the NHS whilst they're at it) - I do have a concern that there's likely to be an impact on dental care in their country of origin though. I know precisely that has happened with nursing.

lopmotr 7y ago

The pipeline problem for blacks begins before the age of 4 when their IQs are measurably lower than whites and stay that way for life. This is well known and has been studied to death. Any talk about education or whatever at school age or above is ultimately futile because you can't improve IQ in a lasting way. Some researchers attribute it to cultural parenting techniques or the environment or other things. But, fundamentally, to get black engineers, you need to solve that pre-school disadvantage. Maybe the best you could do is identify the gifted children and move them to a suitable environment. But not all of them - only those who actually have potential, otherwise the problems caused by their lower ability peers will continue to drag them down.

perfect_wave 7y ago
After some cursory research I've found the following two quotes. The first, from Wikiepdia, likely has other sources in the footnotes, but I didn't look. Honestly, I found it really hard to read your post and not view it as incredibly racist. The study found that "(a) putative genetic racial differences do not account for a major portion of the IQ performance difference between racial groups, and (b) black and interracial children reared in the culture of the tests and the schools perform as well as other adopted children in similar families." [0] "This paper proposes a parsimonious alternative explanation: the apparent IQ advantage of East Asian adoptees is an artifact caused by ignoring the Flynn effect and adoption’s beneficial effect on IQ, and most of the IQ disadvantage of Black adoptees disappears when one allows for attrition in the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, and acknowledges the results of other studies. Diagnosing these artifacts suggests a nil hypothesis: East Asian, White, and Black adoptees raised in the same environment would have similar IQs, hinting at a minimal role for genes in racial IQ differences." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption... [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/1/1/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/1/1/htm
- waterhouse 7y ago
  Looking at the first study you point to, I'm not sure why that is the stated conclusion. If you look at the data charts... well, as the article says later: "Both Levin[8] and Lynn [9] argued that the data clearly support a hereditarian alternative: that the mean IQ scores and school achievement of each group reflected their degree of African ancestry. For all measures, the children with two black parents scored lower than the children with one black and white parent, who in turn scored lower than the adopted children with two white parents. Both omitted discussion of Asian adoptees." On the Flynn-corrected chart, the age-17 IQ respective numbers are 83.7, 93.2, and 101.5. But then there are further arguments and counterarguments; the "Interpretations" section is a full page. One coauthor says, "The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry)." That's not true because "The adopting parents of 12 of the interracial children wrongly believed that their adopted children had two black parents", which at least gives you a comparison point for fully back vs. mixed, but that point is also disputable because "The study showed significant differences in adoption patterns of mixed-race black/white and black adopted children as was noted by Scarr and Weinberg" ("Children with two black parents were significantly older at adoption, had been in the adoptive home a shorter time, and had experienced a greater number of preadoption placements. The natural parents of the black/black group also averaged a year less of education than those of the black/white group..."). It would be nice if people identified the genes responsible for the main visible differences between races, verified that they only affected skin color and maybe a few other cosmetic traits, and were able to manipulate that directly to do controlled experiments. (And to confound actual racists by hiding someone's true race; having a lot of people with randomized racial appearance seems to be the most thorough way to train everyone to not make judgments based on apparent race.) Who knows when that'll happen, though.