9 ms·

It's {{current_year}} and people are still asking, "why does diversity matter?" Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic d

• Maascamp 12y ago
  Thank you for typing that all out. I agree completely. As a visible minority in tech, I'm simply more attracted to companies where I feel l won't stick out like a sore thumb. Of course I want to hired for my qualifications, but I'm only applying to companies that can meet _my_ requirements as well.
  • middleclick 12y ago
    I don't get this logic. How does it matter if you are a sore thumb if you are not being discriminated? As someone who is also from a visible minority group, it never bothers me unless of course people change their behavior towards me because of the colour of my skin, which I have luckily never experienced. Please don't feel that I am being condescending; I have come across this statement many times before and I can't understand it.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • michaelrkn 12y ago
      I think a lot of it has to do with the environment where you grew up and/or have spent a lot of time. I'm white and grew up in a heavily Asian community; when I'm the only white person in a mostly Asian group, I don't feel self-conscious, but when I'm in a mostly black or Latino group, I usually do.
• Torgo 12y ago
  "Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence." The founders of Twitter and Facebook are mostly rich white dudes and don't seem to be having this problem.
  • nostrademons 12y ago
    Twitter and Facebook also had significant uptake first in the rich white tech dude demographic (or in Facebook's case, the rich white college student demographic). It's just that they later grew to encompass...everyone. For that matter, look at the social networks that have flourished abroad: Orkut (developed by a Turkish engineer) and WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian). So there may be something to this...
    • yummyfajitas 12y ago
      Orkut (developed by a Turkish engineer)... ...and wildly popular in Brazil and Iran. WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian) ...and wildly popular in India, South Africa and Egypt. Looks like white dudes of assorted nationalities are actually pretty good at building apps used by men and women of totally different nationalities. Maybe the white/asian guys at google can actually do a good job - they certainly have so far...
  • hindsightbias 12y ago
    Perhaps it would be worth looking at who Naomi Gleit's peers would be at Google+ and Twitter.
• omonra 12y ago
  Successful tech companies have to be staffed by very smart nerds. So at the end of the day their pool of candidates is that group. So the numbers you see are reflective of the people who make up that pool. If you want to see more X in it - work on attracting X into the pool of smart nerds.
  • wetmore 12y ago
    That's what half this blog post was about.
• yaketysax 12y ago
  "If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population" It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product. So what's the point in having diversity at every level? "and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs," no. "or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies." nope
  • groby_b 12y ago
    > It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product. It is, if you work at a company that values your input. (As Google does). The point is not that everybody gives input all the time - the point is that if something goes wrong that affects subgroup ${X}, there's a member from that subgroup who can speak out and provide feedback. That doesn't work if you're in a company that believes in centralized control and top-down management. Google is not that company :) And yes, if you disagree with that approach because you want top-down, you do believe there's a certain group that's better suited to make all decisions - they're the managers.
  • dragonwriter 12y ago
    > It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product. Whether that's true or not really depends on the organizational structure and management philosophy of the company. From everything I've read, role differentiation of the specific type that would make that true is less true, at least within the broad umbrella of "technical staff", is not particularly prominent at Google.
• fiatmoney 12y ago
  "Diversity in points of view" is not an unalloyed good. There are significant coordination costs associated with it. It is also not something you get when you attempt to recruit people from the same sources and socio-cultural milieus with the same acceptance criteria, but of different genders and ethnicities. Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints. "If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population". Huh. So, if most of my sales of akvavit are to expat Finns, I should certainly not hire a German to do my security audits. And if most of my sales of peat-optimized spades are to the Irish market, I should certainly not contract out the manufacturing to the great industrial base of Shenzhen. This seems rather insensible and possibly bigoted to me.
  • rcthompson 12y ago
    > Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints. I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed through "purifying filters" such as elite college acceptance standards.
    • hueving 12y ago
      >At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. That's a pretty prejudiced statement. I have not observed this at all when it comes to work-related items, which is what is relevant in the workplace.
      • rcthompson 12y ago
        Well, maybe I didn't phrase it very well. What I mean is that in my experience, women consistently bring unexpected perspectives to my attention that are attributable to the differences in life experience between men and women in the same society, even in subjects and areas where I wouldn't expect these differences to be relevant. So I definitely see the benefit of having a more balanced ratio of men and women in the workplace, regardless of what the work consists of.
• throwaway54984 12y ago
  If diversity matters so much and it should reflect the customer population, then perhaps Google (or any other company for that matter) should hire less smart or even dumb people. After all 47.5% of the population has an IQ between 70 and 100.
  • notduncansmith 12y ago
    As early product testers, absolutely. It's one thing to put yourself "in the user's shoes" as far as unfamiliarity with a product, it's another entirely to pretend to have 30-50 fewer IQ points. This could produce some valuable insights :)
    • wutbrodo 12y ago
      I think you might be missing the point of his comparison. The claim he's discussing is that your workforce overall should reflect your customer base, not that your product testers (much more directly related to the customer base) should reflect it. What throwaway54984 is saying is that this claim doesn't seem to hold water, through the counterexample of diversity of IQ. Dismissing it with "it only works if you limit them to product testing" is really just strengthening his argument.
      • notduncansmith 12y ago
        I wasn't disagreeing with the assertion he was making; my comment was intended to complement the point, not refute it. Apologies for not making that more clear.
        • wutbrodo 12y ago
          oh my b. Totally agree with your comment without the underlying point I (wrongly) assumed it was making.
• QuantumChaos 12y ago
  >Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. Other people have already said it, but what about Facebook or Twitter? >If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies. That is a false dichotomy. If diversity is in itself good, then that implies that there are significant differences between ethnicities [1]. And in that case, it is certainly possible that different ethnicity might be better or worse at particular tasks, in this case coding. And claiming that the view that such differences is inherent, is bigoted, is just name-calling. [1] Feel free to substitute ethnicity with X, where X satisfies "diversity means having people of different X".
• paulnechifor 12y ago
  > Diversity [...] is good for public relations. That's pretty much the only reason tech companies are interested in diversity.
  • unclesaamm 12y ago
    What a douchey thing to say. There's more to it than that, c.f. every other comment in this thread.
• Dewie 12y ago
  First I though that people should give X more of a chance in hiring, because they shouldn't assume anything about X's background just because they are X. Now, at the same time, people say that we should hire X because they have a different background. That sounds like a fun backroom conversation in cases where the diversity-part doesn't work out - "We hired that black guy because we wanted more diversity on the team. It turns out, though, that he has a very, um, non-black background, by which I mean that he isn't really like a stereotypical black person at all. In fact, he grew up mostly with group Y, which we already have a majority of, anyway. So I had to let him go and find some other black people, in the name of diversity."
  • kaitai 12y ago
    Don't worry so much: your black guy (or woman) can never escape his (her) fate in America! I don't think you have to worry about the being pulled over while driving, followed by shopping, and arrested when trying to get into one's own house stopping soon.
    • Dewie 12y ago
      Yes. And what's your point?
• gaius 12y ago
  Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Nope. It didn't have significant uptake with ANY demographic.
• Dwolb 12y ago
  The reason it's important to ask 'why does diversity matter' has to do with overall program metrics. If you don't know why you're doing something, you can't state where you are going, you can't plan how to get there and you can't tell when you've reached the destination. It's a matter of accountability and making sure we're doing things the right way.
• tragic 12y ago
  > If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies. From the point of view of a business, it is by no means clear to me that having a diverse workforce, at least along the traditional lines of demarcation - even assuming that this leads to a 'diversity of viewpoints' - makes the business more successful. Hollywood, for example, spends the big money on films targeted at the notional 15-30 year old male, and medium budgets on patronising 'chick flicks' for women. It turns a very nice profit doing so, and has done for a long old time. A fortiori triple-A games, most of which I find frankly disturbing nowadays in their contempt for their audience. Before the 1970s-80s, when equal ops and stuff really became a thing at all, I didn't notice anyone failing to make boatloads of money either, despite reproducing the much stronger racist/sexist biases of society at that time. Until somebody shows me evidence that increasing diversity on staff and at senior levels/C-level has a causative relationship with increased profits, I conclude that capitalist enterprises are an ineffective vehicle for this sort of social change, and that people would be better served forming political parties, standing in elections, protesting, doing political stunts, strikes, whatever tickles your political fancy, than grumbling about what percentage of whom Google should have managed to hire thus far. It wasn't diversity on the board of Ma Bell that got rid of Jim Crow.
  • kaitai 12y ago
    While I agree with your last paragraph, there have been a number of studies on diversity on corporate boards, for instance: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/is_there_a_payoff_from_top-team_diversity http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/is_there_a_pay... http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/workingpapers/Board_Diversity_and_Performance_07_01_10.pdf http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/workingpapers/Board_Di... That's a start. Seems like evidence is mixed, of course, with some part of the evidence "against" diversity confounded by people's unconscious -isms. It's really terrible, these -isms: I start to worry when a woman is named CEO of a major US company because it seems like they only allow a woman in if the company's doing poorly. And it seems that's borne out by some evidence: http://hbr.org/2011/01/how-women-end-up-on-the-glass-cliff/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2011/01/how-women-end-up-on-the-glass-cliff/a... Frustrating.
• curun1r 12y ago
  If you want diverse points of view, race is only one dimension of what you're looking for and using it as the sole measure of diversity isn't really that productive. For instance, I have coworkers that were born in Ukraine, France and Germany who are all lumped into the Caucasian group with me that offer perspectives much more different from mine than my African-American and Asian-American coworkers. My belief is that Country/Region of origin plays a much larger role in your point of view than skin color. This is particularly true when you get to technical skills since different countries educate children in different ways. I have one coworker who attended University in Dubai who's an excellent engineer, but has an approach that's very different from mine. Also, Asian is way too corse a classification, especially for our industry. It should, at a minimum, be broken down into Middle-Eastern, those from the Indian subcontinent and East Asian. These numbers would be a lot more interesting if they subdivided Asian and then subdivided each category into US and non-US. Knowing what percent of Google's workforce is Caucasian-American rather than simply Caucasian would provide a lot more insight into Google's diversity.