Tech Workforce Diversity At Facebook Similar To Google And Yahoo 265
theodp (442580) writes Facebook is mostly white dudes, writes Valleywag's Sam Biddle, cutting to the chase of Facebook's inaugural disclosure of diversity figures. "We're serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics," said Facebook, which has a tech workforce that's 15% female and only 1% Black. By contrast, Wikipedia's Baseball Color Line article notes that "by the late 1950s, the percentage of blacks on Major League teams matched or exceeded that of the general population." So, is it surprising that the company whose stated mission is "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" is having problems connecting with the general population in 2014?
This means nothing without context (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?
Are there out of work fully qualified programmers that can't work at facebook because they are black? Maybe the ratio is the way it is simply because there are not enough minorities looking for high end development work (Unlike baseball). That doesn't make it Facebook's fault if it is truly hiring the most qualified workers.
We all know... (Score:1, Insightful)
That the color of your skin matters more than your abilities! Yay for ending racism!
wtf does baseball have to do with anything? (Score:1, Insightful)
wtf are you even talking about? No, it's not surprising that not many black USians work for facebook. Seeing as how not that many Black USians work for tech companies of any sort. Wouldn't you think the latter has a lot more to do with facebook's potential diversity, or lack thereof? Wanting to be diverse doesn't mean refusing to hire white men if that's the majority of the available pool of applicants (not even getting into who's better qualified).
The problem with all of these stories (Score:5, Insightful)
See: Morgan Freeman (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies can't create a diversified talent pool (Score:5, Insightful)
out of thin air. The internal demographics of these large companies reflect the demographics of graduates in the relevant fields. The right answer is to get a more diversified college population in computer engineering and computer science, which requires getting more K-12 interest in those fields amongst underrepresented groups. And that's exactly what the big companies are doing--investing in programs that will build a more diversified pipeline of future employees.
The comparison against MLB is outrageously stupid. African-Americans were already playing baseball in high numbers in separate leagues; MLB just started poaching players from those leagues. Are you claiming that there are some all-female or all-black companies full of millions of computer engineers that Facebook could start hiring from tomorrow?
Re:This means nothing without context (Score:5, Insightful)
Number of people in the room? 40
Number of women in the room? 2, 1 was from corporate.
Free to sign up, free to attend, so where were the ladies? I think this is just another made up issue people are looking to find a solution for.
Re:This means nothing without context (Score:5, Insightful)
So when the GP asks about the ratio of available talent, I get the sentiment... although with a company the size of FB or Google and with a local diversity like Kalifornia's, you'd think the statistical significance of those numbers would mean more, which is why people are a bit outraged about it.
Re:This means nothing without context (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really.
I live in a black suburb (it's cheap) with poor people, 3 blocks down from a Jewish white suburb. The black suburb is full of trash, broken down cars, town homes with no yards, rental properties, liquor stores, and copious gang and firearms violence--all the amenities of a poor, black ghetto. The white suburb is made up of large single-family homes, huge yards, separated residential and commercial zones, and clean, well-maintained roads--because the city sends more road work out there so the people they collect the most taxes from don't leave.
There's also a poor white ghetto out east. Muscle cars, double-wide trailers, booze, slutty girls, drugs, and people occasionally get hit with a pipe wrench. These white folk aren't like those white folk, or like those black folk.
People identify culturally by geographic area, by surrounding interests, and by race and smaller cliques (IT people, security people, bouncers, car people, martial artists, etc.). Putting any critical mass of people together will develop a unique culture. We have plenty of black doctors and lawyers, probably as a result of racial tension: black people get out of slavery, they either become angry, miserable, violent sub-humans or they become philosophers who want to work for the greater good. Time goes on, and black people get rights, but they still get treated like shit. The racial tensions still exist today, and it creates the same forces: they either become angry, miserable, violent sub-humans or they become philosophers who want to do something in the world.
White people, by contrast, are largely just coasting. Racial tensions to us are mostly in the form of black people getting angry at us for saying something stupid. Nobody has told us white folk that the black man is keeping us down. We aren't living under the world's first black president. No white man in history has ever given a speech about how, one day, his children might be allowed to go to school and learn to read and write like all them black children. There is a lot less pessimism, and we just find it natural that everything we want should be at our fingertips.
Trying to cross that barrier is easy for a white man, but a black man has to get over all this shit that basically makes him feel like the world's holding him back. The ones that can push by that naturally have more energy--more optimism--and reach for higher goals. Lots of white folk can't imagine being a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist, but can imagine being a computer programmer or some other mundane job that sounds meaningful but also doesn't sound too hard.
It's just culture. Humans recognize patterns; the most disruptive effect of this is recognizing patterns in human appearance. If we were all white, we would start recognizing round-faced humans separately from square-jawed humans.
Re:SO (Score:0, Insightful)
....said no one who wasn't white, male, and middle-class.
Re:This means nothing without context (Score:4, Insightful)
As for women, there's a lot more evidence that HR departments do discriminate
Which is ironic given that almost 60% of HR staff are women [aol.com], apparently. Maybe HR companies should start hiring more men to bring a male perspective and lived experience to these roles?
Re: SO (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope companies can hire the most talented candidate and not base decisions on something else. Reverse racism is still racism.
Re:SO (Score:5, Insightful)