HR Chief: Google Sexual, Racial Diversity "Not Where We Want to Be" 593
theodp (442580) writes "In 2007, Congress asked Google, "How many [Google employees] are African-American?" "I don't actually have that data at my fingertips," replied Google HR Chief Laszlo Bock. Seven years later, Google finally disclosed diversity data for the first time ever, revealing that 17% of its tech workforce is female, and only 1% is Black. "Put simply," wrote Google's Bock, "Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity." To put things in perspective, it looks like the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers — commemorated in last year's Google Doodle of Jackie Robinson — put up better Black diversity numbers than Google was able to muster 67 years later. Things could have been worse, but the EEOC doesn't ask for and Google chose not to disclose anything about the age makeup of its workforce, aside from a mention of the existence of Greyglers, a group "for Googlers 'of a certain age.'""
Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to hiring the best person for the job?
The whole "there aren't enough females in the tech industry" seems like a manufactured issue to me. What exactly is the problem? How is it a problem? Etc.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
> What happened to hiring the best person for the job?
One of the qualifications for the job is perspective. Google's own stats show that more diverse teams perform at higher levels.
"What we have seen internally is teams that are diverse, not just in skin color and gender, but in terms of sexual orientation, in any kind of way you want to look at it, in terms of belief system, they come up with better ideas. They do more interesting things.
There’s interesting research out of MIT that actually looked at the relationship between productivity of teams that are homogeneous and ones where you mix in women. And what they found was that, as you increase the proportion of diversity, teams get more and more and more productive."
--- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/googles-diversity-record-shows-women-minorities-left-behind/
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more diverse teams perform at higher levels
Maybe at Google.
My anecdotal evidence at the university shows that teams of white people did better.
Of course this was mostly because all the white people came from a similar culture and actually understood each other, whereas all the other teams were just the people who couldn't get a team and were thrown into a group.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
You said "Google's own stats", but then supported it with a subjective anecdotal statement from Google.
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Does that happen because open-minded people will tend to form more inclusive groups AND perform better, or because switching up sexual orientation and skin color makes people perform better? That is, do inclusiveness and higher performance merely coincide together with the third variable of open-mindedness, or does inclusiveness itself trigger higher performance?
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the qualifications for the job is perspective. Google's own stats show that more diverse teams perform at higher levels.
I think the question is whether this diversity-related increase in performance (which I find quite spurious) outweighs the drop in performance you suffer by having to relax the hiring criteria.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
that makes no sense whatsoever when the politically correct premise is that attributes like race, sex and orientation aren't supposed to be relevant to job skillset. I wonder if the study was biased in order to promote more affirmative action.
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Well, tell that to the PC crowd that cheers all female corporations. If what you say is correct, then these traits DO matter and therefore discriminating based on them is ok. If the traits didn't matter, then the relative heterogeneity of these traits in your office would not make a difference.
Re:It happens every day in my job. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a hiring manager for a Fortune 100 Tech company (my boss reports directly to WW HR VP) and have been told point-blank that all hires must pass the "if all else is nearly equal" rule. In other words, when presented with two applicants who are "nearly" equally qualified for a position, that we are to hire the one that best addresses a minority concern. Period.
So if Jack rates a 9, and Jane rates a 7 in our interview results, Jane will always be hired. Any manager hiring Jack over Jane in this scenario will not be one much longer.
So which racist and misandry company do you work for so we can all avoid buying their products and services? Tell us so none of you can be there much longer.
Re:It happens every day in my job. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was a manager at Home Depot for years and can tell you they do the same thing. When I got hired we had a man as a regional manager who didn't give a shit what race or sex you were. He hired the best people he could and our team became the envy of the entire company. We literally wrote the book on how to do our jobs better and most things considered 'best practices' came from our regional team at some level. Then his boss was changed to a woman who decided their were too many white men in our region things got really bad. When hiring the last three lower level managers under me I wasn't told if candidates were nearly the same, I was told I HAD to hire more females and minorities. After giving interviews for three months, and finding zero decent female or minority candidates, my new regional manager pulled me aside and basically accused me of being a racist and a sexist. I was told I had two weeks to fill the position or someone would be found to do it for me. The best of the bunch was a black woman who had been an HR department head. I had to fire her six months later for theft and was then blamed for hiring her in the first place. I ended up leaving HD because I got tired of the stupidity. At every level of the company they have gone off the rails. Management at the upper levels of the company have decided that anyone but a white male should be hired and most of the time that means not hiring the best candidate. Men are more physically capable of doing the bottom end jobs so more men are hired for those jobs. When it comes time to hire for their boss should I hire one of them who knows every aspect of his own job plus most aspects of his boss' job or a female who knows nothing about either position as an outside hire? In nearly every case it was better to hire from within but that meant I was a racist and a sexist for thinking people most capable of doing the job were the ones I should hire.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
white males should (Score:4, Insightful)
When Google says "Not Where We Want to Be" , what they are saying is that it is time to start discriminating against white males and hire other less qualified candidates because some groups are getting uppidy. We never hear similar claims of needing "more diversity" from the NBA or the National Felons League, but when we find an area where white males excel by working hard, it is time to put a stop to it.
Re: white males should (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever seen an upper level computer science class? The Google numbers aren't at all far off the potential employee pool and therefore it's unlikely that there is any bias on the part of Google.
This means that in order to "correct" the problem they MUST either hire lesser qualified workers or take resources away from other things in order to seek out more minority candidates.
Re: white males should (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, what makes you or any of the HR fucks at Google the authority that can tell these women that THEIR CHOICES ARE NOT VALID? Let women exercise their agency and stop trying to shove them all in shitty tech jobs.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Funny)
What happened to hiring the best person for the job?
I totally agree. Companies should always want the best man for the job, regardless of gender.
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People wanted equality, as such we need to treat everyone equal and stop trying to fit quotas based on the features...that the people dont want to be treated differently for!
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And you cite a study that not only doesn't prove your point, but talks about women with traditional engineering degrees going into computer programming.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Applying general demographics to a targeted job applicant pool is very misleading anyway. We can't expect Google to hire 51% females when females only make up 13.4% of CS undergraduates [cnn.com].
And what if they do? That means, naturally, that they took more than their fair share of female applicants and now there exist fewer female applicants for other companies to choose from. And then we get articles like this, except moaning that Apple now has fewer females than they should.
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True, but IT jobs greatly outweigh others at Google. The fact that Google's workforce is around 16% female, and CS graduation rate is around 13% female, that seems reasonably aligned without more knowledge.
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The problem with that is if you are Jessie Jackson and the best people for the job are Asian and not black, you will look like a fool. Rather than trying to get your race to pull up its pants and go to school [rense.com], you want free handouts while the Asians are working their asses off for those Google jobs.
It is really sad that 1% of their workforce is black. That tells me that Bill Cosby said it right: it is a cultural problem and he is right to be ashamed of it.
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Are you saying that all White males are assholes without decent social skills? That sounds racist.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you saying that all White males are assholes without decent social skills? That sounds racist.
Not really - he's also applying it to East and South Asian males.
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You decided to start WW I and WW II
How did some white kid working in a coal mine in Wales 'decide' to start WW 2?
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
You decided to start WW I and WW II.
Hmmm...guessing in your part of the world the Japanese started WWII. And we all know the Japanese were a paragon of racial harmony especially back then. Even the European part that started much later was primarily an effort to fight against an obscenely racist power. By no means were the Western Powers perfect but they're better than most of the alternatives. Think the British were bad? Try to picture India ruled by Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan.
In my home country, we are still suffering from the British culture of rape.
If you're from India as I'm guessing, why is it the culture of rape legacy your country suffers from involves the high casts raping the lower casts? The Dalit existed long before the British arrived.
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Don't kid yourself, at the beginning of WWII Britain was pretty racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, as was the US. In the US black people weren't allowed to sit on the same bus seats as white people or even use the same toilets.
I am by no means disillusioned as to the racist proclivities of the Western powers in the mid 20th Century. My point was the Western power's level of racism were fairly mild when compared to those of pre-WWII Germany and Japan. And the Western powers had governments that allowed those attitudes to change in the right direction.
but their primary targets were - the Jews and the Romany gypsies, the mentally ill and gay German people, and the communists - all white.
That's only because those were the only other races they had access to. And it wasn't communists it was Slavs in general. They refused help from a fairly strong Ukrainian separatist m
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We need a lot less angry testosterone driven assholes.
Why don't you just say white men? That's what you're talking about, right?
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need a lot less angry testosterone driven assholes.
This is just another form is sexism. I'm really tired of this bullshit about the "testerone driven male". As if all aggression is male and derived from masculine hormones. Can we please stop this bullshit? Men and women are different, it's true. But is one form of being an asshole any better or worse than another? Is asshole diversity somehow "good"?
The pendulum of sexism is drifting towards males, and there seems to be a distinct anti-male form of sexism in the world now. It's exemplified by this statement about "testosterone driven", as if men are simply slaves to hormones. It's just as sexist as women being accused of the same thing. (I think we're all familiar with the women controlled by their fluctuating hormones meme). Reversing it and putting the same thing on all men is just as sexist. So please stop this stereotype.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're sort of missing the point. Sexism is sexism. You're still dividing the world up into sexes and saying one persons sexism is better or worse or not as important than someone else's sexism. Uhh.. also a form of sexism.
Isn't not discriminating on the basis of sex simply not discriminating on the basis of sex? You're kind of saying "Well fuck you and the discrimination you face because mine (or womens) is FAR worse". That's counter-productive. If you're against discrimination, you're against it, no matter who's being discriminated against.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Rolls off our backs like water? Men are overwhelmingly the victims of violence and murder. We practically celebrate the prison rape of men in this culture, and certainly don't do anything to stop it. When a young boy is molested or raped by a woman, we blame the victim for "wanting it" and the press talks about how hot she is and how lucky he is. Female health issues like breast cancer research are much better funded and publicized than male health issues like prostate cancer. Men are overwhelmingly the casualties of war.
Women are graduating from college in greater numbers than men. It's a shame that even with their advantages, few can be bothered to get a degree in computer science. But whose fault is that really? In high school there was a single girl in my AP computer science class. In college, my first computer science class had three women. By the second computer science class, there was one. I never saw another after that.
If you want a job in an industry, you have to show up and get qualified for it. I hear a lot of pro diversity folks lamenting about how there's not enough diversity, well either there's something about females that makes them disinclined to go into certain fields and we should accept that, or something wrong is happening long, long before Google starts a round of hiring.
Is it that little girls are being discouraged from trying math and science at an early age? If that's true, then blame the overwhelming majority of elementary school teachers who are female. One platform issue of early feminism was to take over society's early educational systems. The plan worked brilliantly. Male teachers are now discriminated against teaching any students younger than middle school, and the result has been lower academic performance and achievement by male students, and the now majority of college degrees going to women. But still, girls aren't going into science and math. So that can't be it...
Maybe, the answer is really as obvious as it is to anyone who has actually been in a classroom studying technical subjects like computer science. Women just don't care to be in those jobs. Maybe that's a bad thing, maybe it's a neutral thing, maybe it's a good thing? Certainly plenty of companies have been successful advancing our computer technology without a large number of female employees. Maybe we should just shrug and worry about more important issues, like violence?
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh.. the one upsmanship of sexism. What fun!
It reminds me of an old joke. During WWII a high ranking Soviet official walks out of a meeting with Stalin, obviously upset, muttering under his breath "Mustached asshole!". The secretary overhears him, and goes in and tells Stalin he just heard the official mutter "Mustached asshole!". Stalin calls in the official and asks him "Comrade, Who were you referring to when you said "Mustached asshole"? The official without hesitation says "I was referring to Hitler of course!". Stalin thanks him and calls the secretary in, asking her "And who did YOU think he was referring to, comrade?"
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we can pretend that we are blind to race, gender, creed, or whatever, but that's more likely self-delusion than honesty.
"Not a good culture fit" is the Jim Crow of the 21st century, and you don't have to have dark skin for it to apply these days.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
and you don't have to have dark skin for it to apply these days.
In many H1B shops, particularly those with *ahem* immigrant managers it's usually the white workers who aren't a good culture fit.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Funny)
It's just the Irish Catholics because they are drunks.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah man. This is BS. If you compare the amount of females in the IT pool to begin with its hardly surprising to find a similar ratio in the actually hired staff of any company.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
How's Google supposed to do that? Pay girls to pretend to be interested in something they're not?
My university has a very heavy female bias (owing to large nursing and psych departments) to the tune of ~65% or more. My CS101 class was pretty representative of this. More, way more than half the class were women. As expected, a bunch of the class dropped out after the first midterm, but there were noticeably more women gone than guys. CS102 was the start of the sausage fest. Maybe 35% of the class there was female, which is opposite of the school's demographics. By the third course, we were down to a handful of women. The fourth course? One girl. And she dropped out after a few months.
So, why did this happen? It's not that the women were being forced out by some misogynistic oppression field. They, quite simply, didn't give a shit about the material. Most of them were there in the first course (or two) because the Arts program has a core requirement of two "analytical studies" which are satisfied by: calculus and a few other 'hard' math courses, philosophy 125 (formal logic), intro linguistics (another popular choice, but not easy), and *drumroll* intro CS courses. Confronted with having to take two courses from a selection of (to them) complete crap, they opt for the CS courses thinking that, hey, they know how to use a computer - how hard can CS101 be? By the time the professor has covered rudimentary hardware design and started talking about logic gates and simple circuits, most of these girls could not possibly be more bored if you locked them in an empty room for a month.
It was after this that I stopped caring about how many women there were in CS/IT. They have the opportunity. No one's holding them back. No one's judging them. No one laughed at the one poor girl who tried to stick things out (in fact she was very pleasant the one time I talked to her - and discovered she was majoring in biology with a CS minor). They simply don't want to. Why? That's a problem for society, not Google.
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You broke the cardinal rules for avoiding sexual harassment complaints: be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive.
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I think there is a significant number of women who are interested but are dissuaded from studying computer science for some other reason(s).
My school had an overall male/female ratio of something like 70/30, and most of my computer science classes were closer to 90/10. But "pure" math courses tended to be close to 50/50 as well as more racially diverse if I remember correctly. Courses cross-listed between both departments fell somewhere in between.
Shouldn't there have been a large overlap between the grou
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Funny)
How's Google supposed to do that? Pay girls to pretend to be interested in something they're not?
Paying girls to be pretend to be interested in something they're not is the oldest profession in the world...
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Funny)
That industry has gone the way of the IT industry...
It used to be very lucrative, great hourly rates were available to the best in the field. Now there's been an influx of eastern europeans, and customers have discovered they can order cheaper options from the far east...
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you even read your cites, or do you just expect everyone else not to?
1) Computer Science was not considered in that report. It concerned strictly engineering degrees. There's no comprehensive list of which ones, but Computer Engineering is NOT cited as one of the degrees represented.
2) Those deciding not to start engineering courses were not considered.
What WAS considered were those women who finished an undergraduate engineering degree and then went into a different field, and those women who finished an undergraduate engineering degree, worked in engineering, and then left the field. It is specifically mentioned that some of those left engineering FOR computer programming or IT.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can they do magic, too?
Where do you connect wealth, power, and presence with the ability to draw more women into the IT pool? How would you respond if someone tried to convince you to become a nurse because "there aren't enough men in nursing"? Furthermore, why is it Google's responsibility to get women involved in IT?
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Why? Why do we need to "draw" women to IT? Why does everything need to change to suit women, instead of women changing to suit the field? If men drop out of an IT field people say they weren't cut out for the job. If women do it... suddenly we blame the job and not the women.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a few thoughts:
1) I've seen nothing like that, and I've been in the business for years.
2) How do you know that it's your sex that's turning them off, as opposed to something else? People can have remarkable blind-spots regarding their shortcomings.
3) "I say this is her." It might be your command of grammar ;)
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I disagree completely. Having been interviewing for a role at a large silicon valley company recently, out of about 20, every single applicant we've had has been white, male and in his 30s. This isn't caused by bias in the hiring process, it's caused by bias in those applying. The problem really comes in when the profession being seen as a white male 30 year old's job causes itself to become a self fulfilling profesy.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:5, Informative)
Americans: Are your African-Americans really born in Africa? Because, otherwise they're just Americans.
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The only black programmers where I work actually are from Africa.
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The first is that if you assume that women are a) not inherently less qualified to do tech jobs and b) given an equal opportunity
and c) are, on average, equally interested in tech jobs on the first place.
Maybe you think they have different brains or something.
Uh... they do.
Whatever it is, there's some subconscious bias somewhere that is holding women back
Or perhaps women are also simply generally less inclined towards that kind of job.
By all means, fight discrimination and "bro culture" where it exists. But you can't assume it must exist simply because a 50/50 mix hasn't been achieved.
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The even larger problem, as I see it, is that being hired because of a quota is the ultimate stigma: "Look at her, she only got this job because of her tits." No-one takes the quota employee seriously - even when they actually are the best.
This is a very serious problem and has actually led to an increase in biases in some parts of the world. If 90% of a population of doctors of a particular caste/ethnicity/gender are hired based on quotas, then there's a good chance that when you see a doctor who meets those criteria that they will be less competent than someone who doesn't. You then start assuming that everyone in that category is less competent, even if you're unaware of the quota. For the 10% who deserve to be there, this makes life di
Asians != Diverse (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta love when 30% of the non-white asians don't count whatsoever into the diversity formula for these nitwits. Does anyone know what the correct mix should be btw?
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Diversity is affirmative action. It has no inherent value. We are trained to mouth words that it does because affirmative action has had trouble in courts in recent decades. So everyone goes through the motions that it is of vital importance.
Re:Asians != Diverse (Score:4, Insightful)
Diversity is not synonymous with Affirmative action. Hiring a woman just to say you hired a woman is Affirmative Action. Hiring a woman to gain the experiences and perspectives that she has is diversity. This doesn't necessarily apply to the obvious physical indicators such as black, woman, asian, etc. I'm a white male, but I can guarantee you that I have more in common with a black male from upstate New York than I do with a white male from Mississippi, and that black male from upstate New York has even less in common with a black male from Africa than he does with myself and the white male from Mississippi. Diversity is about recognizing this and using it to build a stronger team. The downside is that in promoting diversity people often focus on physical characteristics as being the only aspect of diversity, when those are really only indicators. I once asked a group of new employees if they felt they were a diverse group, and they said "no" because there was only one black person in the group (and all were male). Yet each one had a different religion, some had no religion, they were all from different parts of the country and each one had a different professional experience level. Granted, a racist, sexist or other bigot could probably twist the above to justify only hiring from their preferred demographic, others will recognize that pushing for greater diversity in the workplace, especially for companies which serve areas larger than a small town, can strengthen their business. A diverse marketing team will do a better job of marketing to a variety of markets than a homogenous one would. A diverse design team can leverage their cultural differences in the appearance and interface of their products. Similar statements could be made for engineering teams, sales teams, research teams, etc.
As has been said elsewhere, if your companies demographics don't match the general population that doesn't necessarily mean your workplace isn't diverse, though it may indicate social problems somewhere in the chain between hiring and grade school. Maybe your hiring practices are biased. Maybe the demographics of your applicant pool don't match that of the general population. Maybe that is because universities are biased, maybe only a certain demographic is actually applying to those university programs. Maybe that is because of problems in high schools or earlier, are teachers pushing students based on their race/gender/preference/etc? Are parents? Is the media? Is income a factor?
Just because the dialogue surrounding a topic is politically charged doesn't mean there isn't value to it.
Re:Asians != Diverse (Score:5, Funny)
What quota (Score:2, Insightful)
We’re not where we want to be when it comes to diversity. And it is hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.
All of our efforts, including going public with these numbers, are designed to help us recruit and develop the world’s most talented and diverse people.
So.. where does Google really want to be? Do they have a defined quota? How soon will such affirmative action be used against them by white males and asian males?
Equal Rights Equal Results (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm a boss. There are lots of right people. The right person is someone who can get along with all the OTHER people. Aptitude is not as important as attitude. Yours is kind of selfish and cynical. I'd hire a woman over you. She's more likely to be a team player. It's a stereotype, but....
I don't think I can stress this enough. For the vast majority of positions, there are plenty of people who can do the job I need them to do. There are no rock stars needed. We have rock stars. They cause problems and unne
Re:Equal Rights Equal Results (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you worked with women? Women are no more team players than men. I've observed women back-stab, gossip, manipulate, ostracize, and generally destroy team dynamics plenty of times (and I've seen men do it too). There are a lot of features which contribute to who would be best for a job. Gender, race, biological sex, none of it is relevant to a job in the tech world. By saying "I'd hire a woman over you" because "she's more likely to be a team player" you are either being inflammatory, or your boss needs to reevaluate your own position as a "boss".
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I'd hire a woman over you. She's more likely to be a team player.
You have clearly never actually worked with a woman.
Silicon Valley is such a strange place (Score:2)
It's not just Google,now, is it? Silicon Valley is a strange place, as is much of the programming "computer science" community. It's as uniform as the top of the financial industry. There's this pretense that it's one big meritocracy and, as with all lies, there's a kernel of truth to that. Smart people come up with a new idea and are able to bring in other smart people to implement it. That's the end of the meritocracy story. Then comes the larger part of the cycle. Not-very-smart people -- but peopl
Re:Silicon Valley is such a strange place (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true, but it's also just part of the way the world works. It's not just Silicon Valley. The big difference there is that Smart People have far more of a chance of first succeeding because software is "hard", and requires smart people in the first place to do anything useful.
1. By definition, most of the population is not-so-smart. (Please note, this does NOT mean smart people are better than everyone else, just smarter)
2. It takes smart people, and often times a particular kind of smart person to distinguish the smart people from the not-so-smart, but overly confident people.
3. People are heavily biased towards confident people. Confidence everyone can recognize. (as evidenced by the rise of Sara Palin, who has no business being confident, but yet was/is beloved by a certain segment of the populace).
4. There's an inverse relationship between skill and confidence. The more skillful people become, the less confident they are. (Primarly because they realize how much they really don't know).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
So given the above, it's a natural tendency as a company grows that it'll start to get filled with people who aren't quite as smart as the founders. It's really inevitable at a certain point of growth because you'll just need more people, and a larger percentage of them will be not-so-smart. They'll start promoting the confident, but less skilled people because of point 2 and 3. This will create a feedback loop (less smart promotes even less smart people), and eventually the company is filled with morons who coast on the success of others. (i.e. Microsoft).
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You'd also filter out Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
I'm afraid I don't know either of those people personally, do you? Or are you you simply relying on public image and the usual BS stories people pass around about well known people.
Jobs died because he was confident he could cure cancer with a special diet. If that's not the definition of overconfident I don't know what is.
Legitimized racism (Score:5, Insightful)
Race doesn't matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
...culture does.
If the wrong skin colors are coming into Google, look towards the *cultures* of the people who don't make it, rather than the skin color. Backwards urban cultures (where sadly most self-identified blacks and latinos live), are anti-intellectual and actively discourage those who try to make it out through education by shaming them as not being "real".
So, the question is, should Google be in charge of destroying thug gansgsta culture, and forcing urban youth to speak proper english, work hard in school, treat women with respect, and avoid violent destructive behavior?
As for men/women, they've got different brains, so you'll get different outcomes. There is no shame in being a man with less empathy than a woman, and no shame in being a woman with more empathy than a man.
Re:Race doesn't matter... (Score:5, Informative)
Data seems to back this up. According to a Computing Research Association study in 2010 [cnn.com], only 13.4% of CS graduates from American universities (that have Ph.D. programs) were female, and only 4.2% were African American. You also have to factor in the demographics of the Mountain View area, where as of 2010 only 2.2% of the population is African American [wikipedia.org].
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jeez and people think us rural folk are the bigots
Re:Race doesn't matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
We're educated we speak clearly and concisely
We're educated [and|so|hence|<semi-colon>] we speak clearly and concisely[.]
Re:racism matters (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up in an anti-intellectual culture, and was persecuted for "trying to be white" when I focused on academics, proper english, and polite behavior.
I made it out. Many others I knew didn't.
If you can't understand how "urban" culture, with their thugs, gangstas, misogyny, violence and victimhood mentality, cause massive problems for those stuck in it, either you've never been there, or you're part of the problem.
Re:racism matters (Score:5, Insightful)
The final solution will have to come from within the backwards cultures themselves. We cannot impose a solution upon them, and cannot be held responsible for their lack of a solution.
For example, backwards islamic countries that treat women poorly will need to be reformed by internal leaders who manage to point out that flaw, and galvanize people around reforming it. Similarly, backwards urban cultures that objectify "bitches and hoes" will need to be reformed by internal leaders who manage to point out that flaw, and galvanize people around reforming it.
So, if you don't want to be part of the problem, and you're internal to the backwards culture, stop trying to protect it from reform and growth. Become a leader, and move them away from the self-destructive parts of culture.
Ultimately, it may be hopeless - islam has managed to stifle reformation for hundreds of years, for example. But I certainly understand that our responsibility to be honest and open about the failings of backwards cultures, is a small step in the right direction. Being dishonest, and blithely asserting that all cultures are of equal value or deserve equal respect, is poisonous and detrimental.
culture isn't race (Score:4, Insightful)
Some cultures are better than others, period. All cultures have problems, no doubt, but thug, ghetto culture definitely has more problems than mainstream culture.
Asserting that disparate outcomes are mostly due to racism, rather than mostly due to culture, misidentifies the root cause of the problem, and actively works *against* any future progress. If your arm is broken, and you've got a hangnail at the same time, you don't focus on the hangnail as the reason why you can't lift your arm.
When you're in the ghetto, it isn't the guy in the suburbs that you never see in person that is holding you back - it's the gang of thugs that beats you up if they see you carrying a chemistry textbook, or if they hear you speak proper english. Blaming some mythical "whitey", while you're beat down by the thug culture around you, is giving a pass to the cultural violence perpetrated, and unfairly scapegoating someone who doesn't deserve it.
It's time to get past the idea that "being real" means being uneducated, criminal, illiterate, misogynistic, and violent.
Re: (Score:3)
That only works if you're going to let them be responsible for those choices. If you're going to insist that no serious bad consequences occur as a result of those choices.... well, you've just got to throw freedom out the window.
Re:racism matters (Score:5, Interesting)
It's people who think like you who will forever keep us from addressing these problems.
Race is not tied to culture, and criticizing a dysfunctional culture is not racist, bigoted, or an action to be shamed. Your need to tie the self-destructive culture that is held by some urban people (of all races) to a specific race, and imply that they are unable to change their culture, is what is racist.
Thug gangsta culture is not a productive and viable culture, regardless of the color of the practitioner's skin. My saying that is not racist, but your implying that thug culture is an intrinsic part of being black is racist. We get to call out dysfunctional cultures and your attempts to make everything about race and shut down the conversation only make the world an uglier place.
Re: (Score:3)
So you bring out some examples of crazy people from the past and hold them up as your definitions of everything. Impressive argument.
Race is involved, in that participation in that culture is responsible for the failure of many black people to do well in our society, but the problem isn't race. Race is tangential to the entire issue, which is correcting dysfunctional cultures, and only figures into this because you care more about the color of people's skin than their behavior. There are plenty of white peo
Re: (Score:3)
I guess the question you have to ask is this - if your particular culture is inappropriate for a particular job or company, is it your burden to change your culture, or the company's burden to adapt to your culture?
In some cases (say, IBMs prior restraints on facial hair), eventually the company adapts to the culture. But I'd be very hesitant to say that we should have tech companies adapt to anti-intellectual, violent, misogynistic cultures, and find ways to include them.
Re: Race doesn't matter... (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is that most of the pressure against impoverished children comes from the culture around them, not the cultures beyond them.
The poor people who are biased against poor people who try to succeed are the root cause of this cultural problem. Like crabs in a bucket, they keep pulling each other down. There's no need for any external bias explanation, when internal biases more than suffice for the observations.
No amount of funding of poor schools is going to change the culture of the people attending them - that responsibility lies with the people who are part of that culture, either to reform the culture, or to firmly reject it.
As an example of this, take immigrant asians who pressure their children into taking on the trappings of proper english, strong academics, and "mainstream" culture - they may never lose their accent, or ever be as fluent in english as their children, but they have the expectation that their children will adopt a culture of success. There is no reason why a gangsta thug can't insist that their children speak proper english, do well in school, and succeed, even if they're never able to make that change themselves.
Re: Race doesn't matter... (Score:4, Insightful)
If You're Gonna Bring Up Sports (Score:5, Insightful)
80% of NBA players are black, 70% of NFL players are black. Is anyone asking them for more "diversity"? Yeah I thought not.
And 100% of the top sports leagues are male. Where's the outrage over this lack of sexual diversity?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>80% of NBA players are black, 70% of NFL players are black. Is anyone asking them for more "diversity"? Yeah I thought not.
Maybe it's because there's around 500 NBA players, and around 1700 NFL players. For comparison, Google has 50,000 employees.
So if you're concerned about people having equal access to high paying jobs, who are you going to go after, the NBA or NFL, with a combined 2000 jobs, or Google, with 50,000?
It's not about "fairness" in each industry or "diversity" (that's really just marketin
Washington Post Comment (Score:5, Informative)
From the Washington Post's Blog section: Eugene Volokh, On google's employee demographics [washingtonpost.com]
... non-Hispanic whites are 61 percent of the Google work force, slightly below the national average. (That average, according to 2006-10 numbers, is 67 percent.) Google is thus less white than the typical American company. White men are probably slightly over-represented; assuming that the 30 percent number it gives for women Google employees worldwide carries over to the U.S. (the article gives no separate number for U.S. women Google employees), white men are 42 percent of the Google work force, and 35 percent of the U.S. work force — not a vast disparity. ...Google can only accomplish that by firing well over three-quarters of its Asian employees, and replacing them with blacks and Hispanics (and a few whites, to bring white numbers up from 61 percent to 67 percent).
Indeed, if the goal is “reflecting the demographics of the country” as to race...
They have to take what they can get. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also - what percentage of Google's workforce are of Indian descent? What percentage of applicants have been Indian? Here in the US, people of Indian descent would certainly be considered members of an ethnic minority, a large number them (even a disproportionate number, perhaps?) being professionals in the IT field. I suspect that Google's workforce is representative of the qualified candidate pool from which they can hire.
Re: (Score:2)
What percentage of applicants have been Indian?
With or without H-1B's?
sexism, racism, Rooney Rule, Pittsburg Steelers (Score:2)
Google has sexist/racist hiring policies....that's the cause of this TFA
now...I'm not supporting the notion of "quotas" or forcing Google to hire unqualified workers...I"M AGAINST THAT
I favor **affirmative action**
Affirmative action in the context of a large corporation means *acknowledging society's inherent inequality* and taking steps to offer ****equal opportunity****
how does a company like Google take "affirmative action"?
let's take the Pittsburgh Steeler's super bowl winning head coach Mike Tomlin's h [wikipedia.org]
Greyglers? and I'm the Queen of England (Score:2)
the EEOC doesn't ask for and Google chose not to disclose anything about the age makeup of its workforce
Of course not - you didn't think they were actually serious about age discrimination, did you? Besides, everyone under 35 knows that everyone over 35 is not just obsolete, but senile. Except for top management of course ... no, them too, but it's acceptable if you're one of the anointed class.
Not Google's fault... (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't Google's job to feel guilty for the lack of qualified black tech workers. Universities these days are falling down over themselves trying to be inclusive, promote diversity, etc.; promising black students in technical fields are highly sought after... yet there are almost none of them. I'm in computational physics, not in computer engineering, so it's a slightly different field. However, the university I'm at now is extremely diversity-promoting -- and located in a city that is ~50% black... and there is one black physicist there. She's not African-American, either; she's Ethiopian (and competent as all hell, and headed for industry). At my previous university, there were folks from all around the world: a few Afrikaaners, Dutch, Russians, Germans, Brazilians, French, Chinese, Indians, Native Americans, Koreans, Mexicans, and so on... and no black folks at all. At the physics and astronomy conferences I go to, there are almost no black people. Yes, this is physics, not tech engineering, but I imagine the situation is about the same there.
For whatever reason, blacks (and especially African-Americans) are underrepresented in the tech sector. This is definitely worth some concern: it could be for innocent reasons, it could be for ones that need to be addressed (having to do with substandard schools in black areas, for instance), but whatever it is it's not Google's problem. By all means, let's make sure tech classes in black schools are up to standard, but it's not Google's job to worry about this.
Forcing Google at Al Sharpton-point to seek out and hire black folks, regardless of whether they are able to do their jobs well or not, is only going to make things worse, as people will ask "Is that guy over there able to do his job, or is he a quota hire?"
Re: (Score:3)
You can only hire what's on the market (Score:4, Insightful)
My team here consists only of white males. Why? Because only white males applied for the jobs.
If a black, gay, transsexual Jewish woman applies AND displays the necessary skill set, I'll hire her. But certainly not just because she's a black, gay, transsexual Jewish woman.
How about.. (Score:3)
We just look for qualified people? Who really cares what color/sex/orientation they are?
If you end up 'diverse', great, but if not, who cares? ( other than busybodies that operate off entitlements and the government )
Article is totally misguided. (Score:5, Interesting)
As a computer engineering student, after five years of the program I've had exactly three black classmates. All three described being ridiculed and physically beaten by their black peers for being 'nerdy' and being into science and math. All three had friends with similar interests that gave them up due to peer pressure.
In high school I frequently recall black and Latino students who were literally afraid to turn in homework in front of their peers. They'd wait for the hoodlum kids to leave first and turn in papers with a whispered apology to the teacher. This happened all the way from 8th grade to 12th grade. I've seen kids get beaten up after a teacher announced they got the highest score on a test (this was back in the 90s when you could still single out students for their accomplishments).
So what is the problem here? A culture that equates educational success with selling out or otherwise punishes people for excelling. It's the same culture that called Bill Cosby a sell-out because he want from a teen in the projects to a millionaire with a Ph.D, despite his life-long efforts to help his own people and encourage education and success. This is a culture associated with poor people of ANY ethnicity, including whites. Believe me I've seen enough pot-smoking tatted up white trash hitting their children to know we can do it too.
BTW my campus is one of the most diverse in California, and whites are the minority, with Latino students in the middle and the majority is Indian and Asian, mostly Chinese. So diversity and support of non-white students is definitely not an issue. We have tons of black students too, just not going into the hard sciences.
So let's not talk about "Google needs to hire N amount of black employees" and say "How do we reach out to the black community and remove the stigma on educational success". THAT is the issue.
Re:Article is totally misguided. (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings up a good question, should we?
Should we reach out of Asians and tell them to be less focused on academic success so that they get similar results to whites?
Should we tell than them that the Violin matters less than they think and some of their kids should be learning to play the drums, or just have more time to play video games or watch TV?
Is the exact right amount of interest in academia the While Male Standard, and all other numbers and styles inferior for one reason or another?
The big elephant in the room (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry for being cynical, but they may be trying to take the eyes off an even worse number.
The major thing they left out of their diversity statistics is how many people are over the age of 40. It's pretty clear that ageism is pervasive in the tech sector - and the internet. Last time I mentioned this, there was a serious sneer response to my post saying that "old people" (i.e. people over 40) should be discriminated against, "because they have issues."
There you have it slashdot. You had better be looking over your shoulder! You aren't getting any younger!
We oppose age discrimination or pay support . (Score:3)
It's going to be one or the other.
Welfare runs about 18,000 a year.
Prison runs about 31,000 a year.
If you won't protect people over 45 from age discrimination (over two decades from retirement and social security) then you are going to end up supporting them on welfare or in prison.
Age discrimination has grown enormously since 2009 when SCOTUS gutted protection from age discrimination. Many companies now openly require the actual high school graduation date for positions that require advanced degrees. The ONLY reason you need that information is so that you know the age of the candidate. That should be made illegal immediately.
Let women decide for themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
Who cares if a small percentage of the IT workforce is women? I sincerely doubt that a 50/50 split of men and women are applying for these jobs. Now, if the percentage of male/female applicants WAS 50/50, then something would definitely be wrong. I'd be interested to see data on that.
For the record, I realize I may be privileged (and I cringe using that term, to be honest). I'm reading back on some comments about students getting picked on for taking an interested in science and technology, and that never happened to me. Even though I was pretty much always the only girl in my tech-related endeavours, I was never picked on for it (I was picked on for other things though, but I'm sure it would have still happened even if I liked more "traditionally female" things).
That being said, even if there wasn't a perceived stigma attached to those interests, I doubt the numbers would be much higher.
More valid question! (Score:3)
2) How many women apply every year?
3) How well do either female or African Americans interview?
4) Can you demonstrate given this information that your ratio of females to males and Caucasians to African Americans makes sense?
That is a simple way to judge if the work place is being restrictive or fair, you can't hire more women or diversity if they don't apply and if they don't interview well.
Re:Equally Important Question (Score:5, Insightful)
In America "racial minority" means "black or Hispanic".
There's a deficit of Chinese people in football and Jews in growing soybeans but nobody really worries about that.
Re: (Score:3)