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> Critics have long argued that Google and its tech industry peers favor white, Asian and male workers Google was 51.7% white in 2020, down from 54.4% in 2019
by MikeUt 5y ago
> Critics have long argued that Google and its tech industry peers favor white, Asian and male workers
Google was 51.7% white in 2020, down from 54.4% in 2019 *. The US is 61.5% white, meaning whites are under-represented at Google, and increasingly so. How can one then argue they are favored? Why do reporters not apply even the smallest degree of scrutiny to such claims?
* https://diversity.google/annual-report/ https://diversity.google/annual-report/
- Imnimo 5y agoGoogle hires many people who are not from the US to come work in the US, so I don't think the 61.5% is reflective of their hiring pool.
- MikeUt 5y agoOh, okay. So we can keep claiming Google, a US company, favors white workers until when? Until less than 10%* of their US workers are white? Is that what being favored means? That companies in your own country look elsewhere to import workers? *Ballpark white global population.
- Imnimo 5y agoAll I'm saying is that your statistic does not disprove the allegation that Google's hiring processes might favor white workers. You're making an apples-to-oranges comparison, and drawing a conclusion that isn't demonstrated by the data. I'm also not saying that these numbers prove that Google does favor white workers. Only that they are not sufficient to disprove the idea.
- MikeUt 5y agoThe choice of hiring pool is part of the hiring process. Expanding that pool to other countries is itself an act of disfavor to US workers.
- sokoloff 5y agoGoogle serves the world as their customers. It seems to me that having a preponderance of US-based employees that's wildly out of proportion to their customer (or revenue) base is still heavily in favor of US workers.
- MikeUt 5y agoMany large companies serve the world (Xiaomi, Hikvision, Hitachi, Samsung, Mitsubishi..) while their employees in their home countries are overwhelmingly native. So if international customer bases are the norm, but only Google (or US companies) have significant international hiring, that effectively disfavors US workers.
- sokoloff 5y agoShould the null hypothesis be that Google discriminates in favor of white, Asian, and male applicants? Or should it be that Google is not discriminating improperly? It seems strange to put people in a position where showing a datapoint that would otherwise tend to refute a hypothesis (which IMO should not be assumed to be true in the first place) is not enough to be considered as evidence against the hypothesis being true.
- Imnimo 5y agoI'm not making any claim about what the null hypothesis should be here. I'm simply disagreeing that the datapoint says what the poster claims it says.
- esyir 5y agoI'll say that you'd probably want to set your null hypothesis at "presumption of innocence" here. The general trend I see in the community is that there's a strong belief that google, and by extension, the tech industry, is biased in favor of white workers.
- akomtu 5y agoWhat's "white" even mean? Descendants of north Europeans? Surface albedo of skin greater than 0.85 in the visible spectrum?
- artichokes 5y agoDescendants of Europeans. It's not ambiguous.
- akomtu 5y agoWhat degree of purity is required to count as a European? Europeans can and do mix with non-europeans.
- artichokes 5y agoThe 99% of white Americans for whom all ancestors were from Europe, are European.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> The 99% of white Americans for whom all ancestors were from Europe, are European. “White Americans” average a little under 99% Eurooean ancestry, but far fewer than 99% have exclusively European ancestry.
- akomtu 5y agoJust checked that there are 7 millions Jews in the US. That's a lot more than 1%. About 3 millions are Slavic people. Many millions are european-type Arabic people. They all look like white Americans and if they grew up in the US, they won't even have an accent. The number of "true north-european descendats" must be a lot lower, maybe 60% of white Americans. And this number is going downhill rapidly because Americans don't hesitate to mix with other races and nationalities. My point is that albedo of skin is a really poor predictor of ancestry, about as good as a coin toss.
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- temporalparts 5y agoI think it's worth considering the following points: * The critics are talking about Software Engineering (~1/3rd of the company?), whereas the source you cited is about all of Google. I wouldn't be surprised if the White/Asian/Male splits are far worse when you only look at software engineers. * Google has many international offices (e.g. there's > 1000 employees in Google Japan).
- throwaways885 5y ago> The critics are talking about Software Engineering (~1/3rd of the company?) It's closer to 2/3.