Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's 435
theodp (442580) writes Comparing Yahoo's diversity numbers to Google's, writes Valleywag's Nitasha Tiku, is "like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges." Two weeks after Google disclosed it wasn't "where we want to be" with its 17% female and 1% Black U.S. tech workforce, Yahoo revealed its diversity numbers aren't that much better than Google's, with a U.S. tech workforce that's 35% female and 1% Black. The charts released by Yahoo indicate women fare worse in its global tech workforce, only 15% of which is female. So, with Google and Yahoo having checked in, isn't it about time for U.S. workforce expert Mark Zuckerberg and company to stop taking the Fifth and ante up numbers to show students what kind of opportunities Facebook offers?
Re:Sensationalist summary (Score:5, Informative)
According to this page: http://www.economicmodeling.co... [economicmodeling.com]
At the very best, females make up 30.4% of IT graduates.
The workforce is 35% female, so on average females are more likely to be hired for IT positions than men.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Informative)
Not data, but. I recently was involved in hiring in a STEM field. Saw dozens of resumes a small number of them were from women. I don't know how many may have been from minorities because we don't ask. Of all of the candidates only three were considered qualified enough to interview. One was woman. She got the job.
However if you start at the beginning of the process the pool of people we had to chose from contained few women. Just so happened that this time a woman was the best candidate. Other times that might not have been the case, but in every hiring action I've been involved with the number of women who apply is always vastly smaller than the number of men.
According to Economix the number of women graduates in computer science last year was 20%. Computerworld claims it's even less at 18%. With a workforce of 35% women they are actually significantly above the average of new graduates.
So if there is a problem it's not Google's or Yahoo's. It goes back to why are so few women going into computer science? Perhaps for the same reason that so few men are going into nursing or veterinarian medicine? It just doesn't interest them as a profession.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Informative)
My wife changed careers 10 years ago from teacher to network engineer. She tries VERY HARD to get other women insterested in going into tech fields. She has oodles of money from her job, while all her female friends make less than half what she makes. But none of her friends or relations are even remotely interested in changing their career, even though they all complain about not making enough money.
Hell, I try to get more women interested in the tech fields all the time to no avail. I've even gone to career days at local high-schools to try to get women interested in tech careers. Last time I interviewed a woman for a programmer-trainee job she decided she wanted to do something else after we offered her the job, she didn't even try it.
So the problem seems to be pretty cultural. Even with someone offering to mentor them, most women (based on my limited sample) have little or no interest in the tech fields. And these are all smart, educated women. I imagine we really need to change the way we bring up girls if we want to fix the situation.
So it will remain a sausage fest wherever I work until I retire, I guess.
Re:Sensationalist summary (Score:4, Informative)
According to this page: http://www.economicmodeling.co... [economicmodeling.com]
At the very best, females make up 30.4% of IT graduates.
The workforce is 35% female, so on average females are more likely to be hired for IT positions than men.
At lower paying positions with less potential growth. That kind of skewed those figures.
Re:Sexism (Score:4, Informative)
Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men.
Uh, there ARE significant initiatives to try to get men into nursing. The American Assembly for Men in Nursing [aamn.org] is an organization specifically dedicated to the cause. They even have a YouTube channel [youtube.com] dedicated to stories from male nurses trying to convince men to join up. They have a dedicated initative [collegexpress.com] to increase the number of male nurses by 20% by 2020 (the "20 X 20 Choose Nursing" campaign). And then there are other miscellaneous advertising campaigns, like the "Are you man enough to be a nurse?" posters [oregoncent...ursing.org].
Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."
Uh, no. The main difficulty in recruiting male nurses has to do with stereotypes of the type of caregiving differences [huffingtonpost.com] between doctors and nurses. (If you want even more info, here's a whole Powerpoint presentation [aamn.org] from the AAMN about the various issues involved in recruiting men.)
LOTS of organizations are actively trying to get more men into the nursing profession. Because of social stereotypes, though, most men aren't interested in trying. This has nothing to do with "sexism" or trying to keep men out of the profession.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Informative)
A tiny bit of research shows most women decided to study something other than tech after high school. So there's a cause closer to the root right there.
If Google/Yahoo is supposed to hire qualified workers and only 20% of tech grads are women, how do they get their number higher than 20%?
Further if the decision is between a man with a tech degree and a woman without a tech degree, all else held equal, why is it appropriate to select the woman?
But no, no, facts be damned, it's the toxic environment. Go with that.