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?
Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that competitive business was supposed to hire the most qualified and motivated candidates? Seriously, get out there, carve out your own space, and get hired! "Diversity" is just a politically correct buzzword and is not guaranteed to lead to an agile workforce..
Sensationalist summary (Score:5, Insightful)
The charts released by Yahoo indicate women fare worse in its global tech workforce...
They indicate nothing of the sort. They indicate that Yahoo has fewer female workers than male workers. That is it.
Insinuating that female workers "fare worse" at Yahoo is akin to insinuating that there is rampant sexism and a glass ceiling going on there, which is most likely simply untrue. The truth is that there are simply fewer females applying for positions because there are fewer female CS graduates, which is the ACTUAL fact.
If you want more women in the tech workforce, you need to start at the source and graduate more first.
The same thing can be said of blacks. Like it or not the amount of black CS engineers in Silicon Valley is very, very small. You can't artificially create diversity when none exists in the talent pool.
Availablility (Score:2, Insightful)
Just Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just maybe this has nothing to do with race or sexism and they just hired the best people they could find.
Like a lot of people at Slashdot, I work in the IT industry too. Most of our people are male, and either Caucasian or Indian. Does that mean that the company I work for is part of some evil conspiracy to keep aphroditic purple martians out of the IT work force? Nope. We'd hire my dog if she was good at what needed to be done. Nobody cares what your body looks like as long as you're Nice and Competent. We simply don't get a lot of female, Chinese, Norwegian, Mexican, Brazilian, etc., people applying.
Is that a problem? I don't think so. Maybe certain demographics - gasp - have a majority of their interests in other areas. There's far more female nurses in hospitals than male nurses and although I see it mentioned from time to time, I never see hospitals being excoriated and dragged over the coals because they don't have a 50% male nursing force. Basketball is dominated by people with dark skin and I don't see people complaining that the white guys are under-represented.
This isn't any different. The opportunities are there. The education is available. Maybe certain demographics just aren't as interested in IT.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Insightful)
I never said either group was anything. I said the most qualified and motivated people get jobs in a perfect world. Affirmative action for its own sake, conversely, is discrimination against people who worked their butts off for a position and were passed over because they were the wrong gender or color.
Equally Divided! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a shocker maybe not enough women want to work in the Tech field? My wife thinks my job sounds horrible and she has no desire to bang away on a computer and thinks I'm crazy for doing it. Everyone seems to think everyone in the world is just like them and since they want to work in a field where you have very little interpersonal interaction that everyone would flock to that job. The same way I don't see a whole lot of men lining up to be elementary school teachers workers women as a whole don't seem as interested in working in the computer field as men. Can't men and women be different or does society now say all jobs must have break downs of people equal to the same population break down. Why can't we just say 100% of the people in working in tech companies are people and not say Women, Men, Asian, Black, White, Hispanic. Why can't we stop dividing people and treat them based on the individual qualities? If you want to work in tech great! if you don't great!
High tech jobs aren't the best job ever for everyone so lets stop the false outrage that this particular line of work does not have equal population distribution unless we are going to do that for all jobs. Where is the outrage of HR professionals, teachers, carpenters or any other job category.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to interpret the statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Graduation rates do not indicate talent, skill or grades.
Merely passing a course with a D average does not entitle you to a job at the biggest and most sought after IT companies in the world.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, perhaps, there are simply fewer women seeking positions in tech firms for whatever reason?
Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things. Neither is Yahoo/Google's problem. There are plenty of scenarios where they're simply hiring qualified people who apply for positions, and less than half of those happen to be women.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:0, Insightful)
If wimmin and minorities were motivated and qualified, they would have no problem getting jobs. These companies are tripping over themselves in their rush for diversity. Are they really going to pass on good candidates that help meet those goals?
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that most of the factors in achieving and maintaining qualification and motivation, after lots of research, appear to be societal and economical. Therefore we are not getting the most qualified and motivated but a small sub-set of that group (white males) and standards could be raised if we could choose from a larger set. "Carve out your own space and get hired" is simply a gross over-simplification of the situation. Lack in basic nutrition, healthcare, education, credit, role-models and many other factors and their interplay might be a factor perhaps?
As a woman I know most women don't like math (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sensationalist summary (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a little difficult to believe there is a "glass ceiling" at Yahoo considering Marissa Mayer is in the highest position in the company. I'm pretty sure she's a woman, and there is no single position within the company over the CEO.
The board of directors might disagree.
Anyhow, it appears that Yahoo has a higher ratio of female to male IT workers than what the schools produce, which tells me men have a harder time finding a job there than women do.
"opportunities" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your definition of "massive fucking problem" is different than the one commonly used.
Where are the women who aren't getting the tech jobs they want? If they're rallying in the streets, the news sure isn't covering it.
No, I suspect this is just another chapter in the Millenials' war on 'privilege'.
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:4, Insightful)
66% of Computer Science graduates are white, 15% Asian, 3% black, and 5% Hispanic. I'm surprised they have such a high percentage of Asian workers. Of course 60% of students graduating with master's degrees in computer science aren't Americans so maybe that's where they are coming from. Also 80% of Computer Science graduates are male and 20% are female, so it's not surprising that tech companies have primarily male workers.
http://cra.org/uploads/documen... [cra.org]
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Finding qualified women is less difficult than finding qualified blacks as long as you aren't looking for qualified _white_ women. If I scrap management and QA from my company, we have exactly one white woman in tech. We have as many Hispanic women. To put that in perspective, we have more (at least semi) out of the closet gay and lesbians than either of those (with at least 3 lesbians in management). The only black guy I work (directly) with is native Ethiopian who attended college in the US and then got a green card and eventually citizenship.
When I interviewed prospective employees last, I interviewed 40 (mostly) white men, 0 women, 1 person of color (Indian from India), and one man from Ecuador that spoke English poorly. How are you supposed to diversify when you don't even have diverse candidates? We ended up hiring a white guy and the person from India, even though I recommended against him (most of the white guys were better qualified). Incidentally, HR wanted us to hire a woman for diversity reasons, but that is kind of difficult given that we didn't have any female candidates. We have hired women for my site, but mostly in India and China and then relocated them.
This feels like high school again (Score:4, Insightful)
Back when the hot girl only sits behind the nerd when she needs to cheat off my exam, and me, being all too eager to comply because girls just never gave me the time of day.
Seriously, the IT field is getting flooded with the "bullying" types, from both the bros and the hos that claim to hate them. Traditionally, engineering and the bookish, eager to work with one another and do cool shit, we're now infiltrated by assholes and douchebags of both sexes taking advantage of those who are less socially integrated. You can't go a day without reading about some Silicon Valley "magnate" who wouldn't rate a 3 on a 10 point geekscale making some bone-headed, wrong-sided statement, and then the 15 articles about how Silicon Valley is some sort of boys club written by people who couldn't spell Javascript, much less write any.
And we've let them. Geeks, long the whipping boy of the popular, buying into this whole alpha male bullshit. Jesus fucking christ, guys, your Silicon Valley heroes? They're *salesmen*, not geeks. Wolves in sheep's clothing. They talk the talk, because that's what they're good at. Give them an editor and what do they produce?
They're preying upon you (us). They want you to doubt yourself because that's what you do best. Your insecurity is their lock on you, whether that be "come on bro, are you cool enough to hang with the jocks?" or the "come on, geek, I'm pretty, I bat my eyelids and you go fetch." Think for yourselves.
Re:skill is no longer a valid factor (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:3, Insightful)
this is just another chapter in the Millenials' war on 'privilege'.
This is the new chapter: The millenials' war on "earned privilege".
"You didn't build that!" (spewed the fucktard).
Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? (Score:4, Insightful)
I grew up in the 80s under that same concept as well: "equality means everyone is treated equally"
But again, we're in a different world today. The fresh crop feels that a special status called 'privilege' exists, and that anyone who even tangentially benefits from that status is less of a person because of it.
And in fact, they probably don't realize what a piece of shit they actually are, until they shed their 'privilege' and join the war against the machine.
Or something.
These are the kinds of people who wonder why too few Google employees have thrown themselves off cliffs in order to bring the gender gap down.