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So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the

by Torgo 12y ago

So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.

rcthompson 12y ago
Well, they say they're working with "upstream" to resolve the issue: "Among other things, since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at Howard University, where he revamped the school’s Intro to CS curriculum."
- Torgo 12y ago
  My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. This came right after I'd read a PBS article that claimed "Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it’s not good." Then I read a breakdown of CS grads in this submission, and Google seems to be pretty representative.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce, whether or not they are at fault for the lack of a sufficiently diverse qualified applicant pool, it is their responsibility to fix it.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - waveman2 12y ago
      > it is their responsibility to fix it. This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions. 1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do you think women are too dumb to make their own choices? 2. That it can reasonably be "fixed". Spending more money on education must be the most commonly employed and most universally failed intervention in social policy. I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. The evidence for this is very thin, and indeed more ethnically diverse communities tend to have lower levels of trust and social capital. There is some evidence that diversity in terms of viewpoint and skills is useful but just eg having more white women in the office may not be the great boon people assume.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        #1 was not an "embedded an unexamined assumption", it was the explicit condition of the stated conditional. ("If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce...") #2 is, insofar as it appears to be an "embedded and unexamined assumption", simply a result of brevity in omitting "...insofar as doing so is practical without costs that make it a net loss" at the end. Obvious qualification is obvious. > I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. "Desirable" is subjective. Google expressly claims to value that kind of diversity. Obviously, you might have different values, which, to the extent that the means you choose to pursue them are not themselves illegal, you are free to pursue in your own company. > The evidence for this is very thin The evidence is actually very strong that its a thing that some people value independently of whether it contributes to any other thing that they value.
        paulwolf 12y ago
        >Obvious qualification is obvious. Don't form arguments this way. Dumping tautologies into an argument sounds childish.
  - groby_b 12y ago
    No, it's not Google's job, but Google is in a good position to fix upstream. One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is that there are no role models. Sending female engineers to university events is a small step, but it can have huge impact. In a nutshell, it's playing the long game :)
    - cbhl 12y ago
      I'm not sure I would want to take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine if it was mandated that every female engineer had to participate in university events. Now the job responsibilities are different between the genders, and you've made the problem worse on a different axis (equality of job responsibilities). Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are insulted that they are perceived to be non-technical, or just a recruiter, and how such an initiative would make that worse.
      - eropple 12y ago
        Do you seriously think they don't have a surfeit of volunteers? C'mon.
        paulwolf 12y ago
        Probably not. It's usually difficult to get an engineer to waste an entire day or two visiting a university for recruiting.
        ithkuil 12y ago
        You'd be surprised.
        jtheory 12y ago
        Hey, next Friday is Google's "make the world a better place" day... would you be interested in coming with me and (name) to give mini-talks at a few schools? -- I guess you'd have a tougher time if you actually call it "wasting an entire day" when you pitch the idea.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population What is the benefit of this?
    - virtue3 12y ago
      because programming is the new reading. The sooner we get everyone on board with that the faster we can start automating things and changing the world. Also because I for one am very sick of dealing with all the brogrammers in SF :/
      - paulwolf 12y ago
        I don't understand this sentiment. Once something is automated by one person, that same work can apply to everyone. There is no reason everyone needs the skills to do that. It's the same with any other skill. "statistical analysis is the new reading. the sooner we get everyone on board with that the faster we can start new scientific experiments and change the world." Reading is special because it's required to take in new knowledge and communicate quickly.
        eurleif 12y ago
        Automated processes can be customized.
Fishkins 12y ago
To be fair, the (real or perceived) opportunities for women and minorities at major tech companies like Google could very well influence the majors college students choose to pursue. If I were an 18 y.o. woman who read news articles or talked to family/friends in the industry who told me women are treated poorly at Google and the like, I might opt for a different degree. I have no idea how much of a factor this actually is in the proportions of college graduates, but I think it's worth considering as a possibility.
heterogenic 12y ago
Not necessarily. You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability. I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50, but better than the holistic ratio at least.). Also, they can look at their specific source pools to get a less hypothetical target. Berkeley is ~50/50, for example. (http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/ http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/). But retroactively
- waveman2 12y ago
  > I would hypothesize that this is false Citation required. And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics. The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits. So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.
  - thirsteh 12y ago
    Citation required.
  - hft_throwaway 12y ago
    I see a lot of people make claims like this, or even stronger ones such as claiming it has little/nothing to do with environment. Charts like this bear that out somewhat with the poorest Asian and white students scoring higher on the SATs than well to do blacks: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1a52vkpjans/UmjAc5fGxtI/AAAAAAAAA6U/EmUPxCtOsXg/s1600/sat+race+income+1995.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1a52vkpjans/UmjAc5fGxtI/AAAAAAAAA6... Generally, people I see who bring this up are usually using it as a thin veneer over racist beliefs. When asked what end discussing minority IQ serves, they usually suggest defunding inner-city (read: black) schools or similar measures. I can't get on board with that. I think the US certainly fails at providing equality of opportunity to many groups, and there is still widespread discrimination against women and minorities. We can certainly do better and we should view people individually rather than treating them in a prejudiced way based on group membership. I also have a hard time getting on board with a "blank slate" view of humanity. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong so I could fire back at "race realist" reddit commenters, but it seems plausible to me that different groups, especially men and women, are biologically predisposed to certain traits, on average. I know in my career that requires both a certain amount of aggressiveness and quantitative aptitude that my colleagues have overwhelmingly been Asian or white men. I've worked with women and "under-represented minorities" who've made me feel like a chump trading, and I certainly don't harbor prejudices about them, but they're difficult to find.
rhizome 12y ago
Does GOOG have any self-taughts in tech positions? Might be missing some data in the staffing-to-CS-grads proportions.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  Not many, and they would mostly be acqui-hires or early hires. Google strongly prefers candidates from a list of preferred universities. If you didn't graduate from one, you'd need to be coming from another employer in order to get hired there (and even then, my understanding is that those with degrees from those universities have a better chance of being hired, all other things being equal). They also hire (or at least recruit) based on Open Source work (I've gotten recruitment letters from them based on a book I wrote and some Open Source software I've been involved in), but I doubt that I would have been hired just on the strength of that. I've never taken them up on the offer of an interview, as I liked working for myself too much, but I suspect I would not measure up during the process, given my self-taught background and unimpressive education history. I know several folks who have been hired by Google, including folks who got the recruitment letter based on Open Source software work, and they tend to also have the strong college background. In short, I believe that for those folks who end up at Google, they very likely got there by way of a good university. So, the upstream needs to be fixed for the diversity at Google to be fixed.

by Torgo 12y ago

So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.

rcthompson 12y ago

Well, they say they're working with "upstream" to resolve the issue: "Among other things, since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at Howard University, where he revamped the school’s Intro to CS curriculum."

Torgo 12y ago
My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. This came right after I'd read a PBS article that claimed "Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it’s not good." Then I read a breakdown of CS grads in this submission, and Google seems to be pretty representative.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce, whether or not they are at fault for the lack of a sufficiently diverse qualified applicant pool, it is their responsibility to fix it.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - waveman2 12y ago
    > it is their responsibility to fix it. This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions. 1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do you think women are too dumb to make their own choices? 2. That it can reasonably be "fixed". Spending more money on education must be the most commonly employed and most universally failed intervention in social policy. I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. The evidence for this is very thin, and indeed more ethnically diverse communities tend to have lower levels of trust and social capital. There is some evidence that diversity in terms of viewpoint and skills is useful but just eg having more white women in the office may not be the great boon people assume.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      #1 was not an "embedded an unexamined assumption", it was the explicit condition of the stated conditional. ("If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce...") #2 is, insofar as it appears to be an "embedded and unexamined assumption", simply a result of brevity in omitting "...insofar as doing so is practical without costs that make it a net loss" at the end. Obvious qualification is obvious. > I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. "Desirable" is subjective. Google expressly claims to value that kind of diversity. Obviously, you might have different values, which, to the extent that the means you choose to pursue them are not themselves illegal, you are free to pursue in your own company. > The evidence for this is very thin The evidence is actually very strong that its a thing that some people value independently of whether it contributes to any other thing that they value.
      - paulwolf 12y ago
        >Obvious qualification is obvious. Don't form arguments this way. Dumping tautologies into an argument sounds childish.
- groby_b 12y ago
  No, it's not Google's job, but Google is in a good position to fix upstream. One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is that there are no role models. Sending female engineers to university events is a small step, but it can have huge impact. In a nutshell, it's playing the long game :)
  - cbhl 12y ago
    I'm not sure I would want to take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine if it was mandated that every female engineer had to participate in university events. Now the job responsibilities are different between the genders, and you've made the problem worse on a different axis (equality of job responsibilities). Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are insulted that they are perceived to be non-technical, or just a recruiter, and how such an initiative would make that worse.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Do you seriously think they don't have a surfeit of volunteers? C'mon.
      - paulwolf 12y ago
        Probably not. It's usually difficult to get an engineer to waste an entire day or two visiting a university for recruiting.
        ithkuil 12y ago
        You'd be surprised.
        jtheory 12y ago
        Hey, next Friday is Google's "make the world a better place" day... would you be interested in coming with me and (name) to give mini-talks at a few schools? -- I guess you'd have a tougher time if you actually call it "wasting an entire day" when you pitch the idea.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population What is the benefit of this?
  - virtue3 12y ago
    because programming is the new reading. The sooner we get everyone on board with that the faster we can start automating things and changing the world. Also because I for one am very sick of dealing with all the brogrammers in SF :/
    - paulwolf 12y ago
      I don't understand this sentiment. Once something is automated by one person, that same work can apply to everyone. There is no reason everyone needs the skills to do that. It's the same with any other skill. "statistical analysis is the new reading. the sooner we get everyone on board with that the faster we can start new scientific experiments and change the world." Reading is special because it's required to take in new knowledge and communicate quickly.
      - eurleif 12y ago
        Automated processes can be customized.

Fishkins 12y ago

To be fair, the (real or perceived) opportunities for women and minorities at major tech companies like Google could very well influence the majors college students choose to pursue. If I were an 18 y.o. woman who read news articles or talked to family/friends in the industry who told me women are treated poorly at Google and the like, I might opt for a different degree. I have no idea how much of a factor this actually is in the proportions of college graduates, but I think it's worth considering as a possibility.

heterogenic 12y ago

Not necessarily. You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability. I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50, but better than the holistic ratio at least.). Also, they can look at their specific source pools to get a less hypothetical target. Berkeley is ~50/50, for example. (http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/ http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/). But retroactively

waveman2 12y ago
> I would hypothesize that this is false Citation required. And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics. The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits. So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.
- thirsteh 12y ago
  Citation required.
- hft_throwaway 12y ago
  I see a lot of people make claims like this, or even stronger ones such as claiming it has little/nothing to do with environment. Charts like this bear that out somewhat with the poorest Asian and white students scoring higher on the SATs than well to do blacks: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1a52vkpjans/UmjAc5fGxtI/AAAAAAAAA6U/EmUPxCtOsXg/s1600/sat+race+income+1995.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1a52vkpjans/UmjAc5fGxtI/AAAAAAAAA6... Generally, people I see who bring this up are usually using it as a thin veneer over racist beliefs. When asked what end discussing minority IQ serves, they usually suggest defunding inner-city (read: black) schools or similar measures. I can't get on board with that. I think the US certainly fails at providing equality of opportunity to many groups, and there is still widespread discrimination against women and minorities. We can certainly do better and we should view people individually rather than treating them in a prejudiced way based on group membership. I also have a hard time getting on board with a "blank slate" view of humanity. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong so I could fire back at "race realist" reddit commenters, but it seems plausible to me that different groups, especially men and women, are biologically predisposed to certain traits, on average. I know in my career that requires both a certain amount of aggressiveness and quantitative aptitude that my colleagues have overwhelmingly been Asian or white men. I've worked with women and "under-represented minorities" who've made me feel like a chump trading, and I certainly don't harbor prejudices about them, but they're difficult to find.

rhizome 12y ago

Does GOOG have any self-taughts in tech positions? Might be missing some data in the staffing-to-CS-grads proportions.

SwellJoe 12y ago
Not many, and they would mostly be acqui-hires or early hires. Google strongly prefers candidates from a list of preferred universities. If you didn't graduate from one, you'd need to be coming from another employer in order to get hired there (and even then, my understanding is that those with degrees from those universities have a better chance of being hired, all other things being equal). They also hire (or at least recruit) based on Open Source work (I've gotten recruitment letters from them based on a book I wrote and some Open Source software I've been involved in), but I doubt that I would have been hired just on the strength of that. I've never taken them up on the offer of an interview, as I liked working for myself too much, but I suspect I would not measure up during the process, given my self-taught background and unimpressive education history. I know several folks who have been hired by Google, including folks who got the recruitment letter based on Open Source software work, and they tend to also have the strong college background. In short, I believe that for those folks who end up at Google, they very likely got there by way of a good university. So, the upstream needs to be fixed for the diversity at Google to be fixed.