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?
SO (Score:4, Informative)
Who cares? This isn't a national tragedy.
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)
Re:SO (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because the Asian-American experience doesn't speak in favor of the sort of social engineering desired by the types that favor affirmative action and other sorts of reverse discrimination. They're literally at a loss to explain why the Asian-American community isn't mired in poverty in spite of the best efforts of the evil white man to keep them down. They also ignore the experiences of the multitude of different white peoples (Italians, Irish, Poles, etc.) that faced discrimination and somehow managed to build productive lives for themselves and their progeny.
The only answer they have is to take from the successful and give to the unsuccessful, which brings to mind the quote about teaching a man to fish....
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well according to the bullshit and ever changing definition of 'racism' and 'minority' Asians aren't always considered a minority. Since compared to whites they have higher average incomes, lower incarceration rates, and better educational attainment.
If there has ever been a field that is democratic it's technology. Up until (and it's probably still the case) all you need is a computer (price is constantly decreasing), internet access (still decreasing in price), and possibly a book or two(still cheap), a
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Yar, but compared to other professions (law, medicine, engineering) IT is one of the few that you can be reasonably successful at without having a degree in the field. A CS degree isn't bad, but it certainly isn't necessary.
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Re:SO (Score:5, Interesting)
Non-hispanic whites are 64% of the US population, but only 57% of Facebook's employee base. White people are under-represented.
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.
The can of worms... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it really skills and training? Or is it something more innate like IQ or visualization ability, especially for the technical jobs? Do we really want to find out?
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The females and minorities I've worked with have had equal ability. It seems that there's just far more white men in the US that are inclined to be software developers than there are females and minorities who are inclined to do so. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and many others are merely reflecting the demographics of the broader industry.
Sure, you can emphasize females in computer science education as Google is doing, and you'll likely see some improvement in the numbers, but we'll probably never see a 50/50
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I think it's just demographics of who goes into CS and engineering, though slightly skewed because I could swear a majority of students in STEM tracks were Asian, not white. T
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.
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Another part of the problem is the hiring process itself. An initial requirement for one position I've taken in the past was a Masters degree in computer science or related field. Nothing about the job required a Masters degree and they got no applicants. The reason for the requirement? The hiring managers all had MBAs. There is a tendency
Re:This means nothing without context (Score:5, Informative)
Black [cra.org]: Blacks make up only 3.6% of CS graduates, 6% of CE graduates, and 7% of generic IT graduates at the moment.
Female [wikipedia.org]: Female CS/CE graduates peaked in the '80s at 37%, and has fallen ever since to a current low of only 12%; the previous link also shows them at about 50% higher rates in generic IT, or 17% total.
Sorry if that doesn't give your axes a nice fine edge, folks, but the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook don't hire only misogynist racists for their HR departments - In fact, all three soundly beat the above graduation rates, making them arguably biased against hiring white males.
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Even taking into account the lowest of your figures of 3.6% black graduates in Computer Science, this would still leave the 1% rate of black employees at Facebook substantially lower than their potential hiring pool. Also consider that Facebook reported that their percentage of black employees among non-tech workers is not any better at a measly 2%. Considering that blacks represent 10% of all college graduates [directemployers.org], this would imply that your average black college graduate is 5 times less likely to be hired at
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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.
8% of MIT's class is black [mitadmissions.org] Among the general college population the numbers are closer to 14%. But even assuming Facebook, Google and Yahoo were exclusively recruiting from the top Ivy-league universities, their numbers should be significantly higher than the mere 1% of black employees that they are showing. If my company were showing such significantly different demographics from the graduate population they are recruiting from, especially among such a large employee base, we'd be under investigation for
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Full MIT numbers are not necessarily representative, because the majors people pick in MIT are not really all that close to those found at tech companies.
It's like looking at STEM as a whole vs Software companies. There are plenty of women entering STEM field, they just tend to focus on the S or the M (pun not intended, really), instead of on the T and the E. And even in Engineering, you'll mostly find them working on biotechnology. You'll find plenty of them in companies working on genetics, but not on you
Re:This means nothing without context (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure that is factually incorrect, unless you literally have never been to Slashdot, or any other site that allows comments, ever.
It's also completely accurate. It is certainly not completely impossible that there are occasionally racists (or more likely, people who have slight biases and don't even realize it) in hiring departments for major companies. It is, however, much more likely that this issue is more cultural and/or class-based: one, minorities are more likely to be poorer by virtue of having been marginalized in the past, and poor people are less likely to have had the opportunities required to get into the tech field. Two, cultures push different things, and minorities who stick together form cultures. That is not racist, that's, well, obvious. Not all skin-color-based minorities stick together, obviously, but enough do (which is also partially class-based, as you don't really have a choice to have been born in a crap environment, and it's harder to get yourself out of one.)
As for women, there's a lot more evidence that HR departments do discriminate, and some more obvious reasons why they might want to (which are still BS and should be burned mercilessly, but which still make sense why they happen). Still, it is *also* almost certainly true that more men than women have the inclination and ability (more the former than the latter) required to get hired at tech companies, and that's not really the fault of those companies.
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?
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Because you are now touching on one of the more interesting issues / intractable issues when it comes to closing the "gender gap". IIRC women who have the same skills and job experiences as their male counterparts earn 95% of what they earn. The reasons why women earn far less than males is that they tend to choose careers which have a better work / life balance.
You can take 5 years off from being a HR person and you skills won't be out of date. Harder to say for a engineer. A saw one study that women who g
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.
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OK, I wasn't going to say it but now I'm going to say it. Black people are good at sports. Better than me. By the numbers, anyway.
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Remembering (early 2000s) my comp sci classes (and to a lesser degree higher math) I was pretty heavily outnumbered (compared to my classmates back then I'm black), the few girls in class had it even worse. As soon as I went to one of my electives (even something science like Bio or Chem) the makeup changed, e.g. enter the arts department and I was once again outnumbered but then again so were the white dudes (mostly women with a decent mix but still dominated by white chicks).
While I have no issues with di
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Here in Cambridge, computer science has a worse gender balance than mathematics, which is worse than the national average. I think the only department with a worse gender balance than us is the veterinary school (which is something like 90% female - apparently it's easier to find women who want to to take a degree that involves a lot of time with your hand up a cow than to work with computers).
I find it hard to credit logic that says women have more of a natural aptitude for mathematics than for computer
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(compared to my classmates back then I'm black)
How about compared to your coworkers now? Are you still black? ;)
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Having interviewed for both Google and Facebook I think this really does come down to skills (knowledge and ability). Being a white male didn't do shit for the fact that I simply just didn't understand linux file systems, networking and software development as well as I thought I did. In fact I didn't get a single question as to my age, race, or sexual preference during those first phone calls where I was ripped to shreds with technical questions. It was quite apparent after 5 minutes of the 2nd interview t
The problem with all of these stories (Score:5, Insightful)
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See: Morgan Freeman (Score:5, Insightful)
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"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." -Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
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The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." -Chief Justice John Roberts
Roberts is a fool. Sure that sounds great to conservatives and libertarians, who are opposed to anti-discrimination laws out of principle (and some hidden racism) but that's not how the world actually works...because people don't stop discriminating. Sometimes it's even subconscious.
In a perfect world without assholes, Roberts might be right, but we don't live in that world.
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So your solution to a handful of people being assholes is to disadvantage everyone of European and Asian descent
Leveling the playing field isn't disadvantaging, though I can imagine some are upset that they are being called on their unearned privilege.
My family came here in the 1930s, from Germany, and settled in the Northeast. We had nothing to do with Jim Crow or slavery.
But that doesn't mean you or I (my ancestors arrived here in the 1630's in Virginia and New York) didn't benefit from it, because we're still feeling the effects from it and our ancestors didn't have to compete fairly.
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Unearned privilege... that's like original sin, right? Everyone white or male has it, and it's sufficient unto itself to justify any punishment which may be dished out.
Yeah, at least until you invent baptism, I don't think I'll be subscribing to your philosophy.
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Unearned privilege... that's like original sin, right? Everyone white or male has it, and it's sufficient unto itself to justify any punishment which may be dished out.
It's NOT punishment, you may see it that way, but leveling the playing field to reduce the effects of unearned privilege is not taking something you earned by skill or right.
It's something you had, no matter how good intentioned you were.
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So your solution to a handful of people being assholes is to disadvantage everyone of European and Asian descent
Leveling the playing field isn't disadvantaging, though I can imagine some are upset that they are being called on their unearned privilege.
Race-based hiring is not leveling the playing field, it is leveling the score after the final results are in. The game started long before the job applications were submitted; before college; before primary; before birth even.
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Race-based hiring is not leveling the playing field, it is leveling the score after the final results are in. The game started long before the job applications were submitted; before college; before primary; before birth even.
Fine...then what do we do to remedy it then? Nothing? How do we fix the game then? If having a high paying job helps the next generation, then you need to fix things so that the hiring of the next generation is more balanced. But no one is wanting to do that because it means some overprivileged white guys in the burbs have to basically give away their unearned privilege and they don't want to do that. And they're resenting being told they should. The entire fucking anti-affirmative action movement is
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Fuck You Mr. Over Literal slashdotter using "Citation needed" to deny problems exist. Read a fucking news magazine or watch TV or read the demographic data.
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You've lost the battle of public opinion, as well as the legal one, and whether you like it or not racial quotas are soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
You know why quotas are gone...a bunch of guys like you didn't want to give up their power and privilege so they got a conservative court to agree with them and made statements like "affirmative action only gives us unqualified people" just so they could keep on doing the same bigoted crap they'd been doing for ages.
What other measurement can you use? Really, how do we solve this problem? or do you think it's not a problem? Or do you just not care, you've got yours, who gives a damn about anyone else?
Diversity is not a virtue (Score:5, Interesting)
Why force diversity? There is nothing worthwhile in diversity in and of itself, despite the dogma of 40+ years of social engineering.
I had to laugh at Google's I/O presentations yesterday; they were obviously finding every single non-white, non-male person, sexually ambiguous person they could find for the presentations. Don't get me wrong: None of the talks were bad; everyone was competent. But it was obvious that Google was going out of its way to seem inclusive. It just comes off as needy and foolish. "See, we're INCLUSIVE!". /notes from a white patriarch
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They probably hired communication specialists from the LAPD.
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Re:Diversity is not a virtue (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does it need to stop?
A huge problem -- that few people seem to speak about -- is that using gender, nationality, or, most frustratingly -- race, as a measure of "diversity" is implicitly bigoted.
The diversity that people _claim_ to want is one of perspectives, life experiences, etc.
The things that are relatively easy to bucketize - gender identity, race, socio-economic status, etc.... these things in and of themselves are not a valuable source of "diversity"
The implicit bigotry in the "diversity" argument says that, if you hire more black people, you'll get much different ideas than what you already have. Why? Because all black people are different from the white people you already have.
I've never seen a more stark illustration of _racism_ then that.
The conjecture here is that if a population distribution doesn't' look the way certain people expect it to, then there is some upstream social problem that needs tinkering with.
That conjecture is only ever true or false on a case by case basis. The real problem that needs to stop is for people to believe this conjecture in the general case; the real problem is that people don't even agree or are not willing to state what their expectations are for the "ideal" population distribution, but, are still willing to cry foul and to assert that a problem exists.
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Lucid, cogent and very much what I wanted to say, here. Thanks.
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So where is the problem? Many would argue that it starts well before Google and others make hiring deci
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It is certainly racist.
You are using race as the determining factor to make a presumption about an individual human.
What other useful definition of racism could there be?
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It is certainly racist.
You are using race as the determining factor to make a presumption about an individual human.
What other useful definition of racism could there be?
The actual one: that inherited differences between the races naturally makes one inferior to another.
Believing one race has a tendency towards some cultural beliefs or another is not racist. As the different races come from different geographic regions, and cultural influence tends to be likewise limited to geographic regions, it is perfectly accurate (and historically verifiable) to say race & culture are tightly coupled without implying inferiority.
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it is not bigoted or racist to assume that someone of a different skin color may have had a different upbringing than you
Which is why nig^H^H^H people of color steal cars. That's what you're getting at right? That people should lock their doors if they see one of these people. And that "driving while black" is totally grounds for being pulled over.
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Irony is seeing you use a _google_ search to defend google in a diversity contest... (dons tinfoil hat)
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?
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This.
First, you start with the talent pool, which is very low on minorities and females.
Then you cut off the 95% bottom part, as these companies get more applicants than the average tech company, and can be somewhat more picky. You have even fewer (not because women or minorities can't be good, but certain demographics statistically do better at showing off their strengths in the shark pool).
Now of whats left, these companies have a biais to hire ultra monitivated/no work life balance/eat and dream computer
we speak english here (Score:2)
"So, is it surprising that the company ... is having problems connecting with the general population in 2014?"
Stupid loaded question. It is not having problems "connecting with the general population", unless by "connecting" you mean a completely different verb.
This is only facebook's problem if (Score:2)
HR discriminates based on gender or race rather than ability. The composition of its workforce tells us nothing about this, as correlation does not equal causation. ... which is not nearly click-baitey enough, so we get tripe like this "article".
I call BS (Score:2)
Segregation By Choice (Score:2)
This debacle with people complaining about Silicon Valley's low female/minority hiring rate sounds to me like a case of segregation by choice - Facebook, Google, et al are not actually discriminating against females or minorities. There's just no evidence of it, because if there was, there would be federal lawsuits pending. What this sounds like is a case of segregation by choice - there aren't a whole lot of female or minority CS grads out there applying to Silicon Valley firms. Attempting to regulate segr
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Everyone is looking for the discrimination angle but I think it is simpler than that.
New Employee of the Month... (Score:2)
Weird comments (Score:2, Informative)
I've been reading a few comments about how poor people can't afford technology.
We're in 2014, I don't believe such arguments. You can easily get more-than-capable computers for absolutely free. It may be older Pentium 4 era computers, but you can still code, program and use the Internet with them. You don't need powerful computers for the things that Facebook, Twitter and others are doing. And we're also not talking about games or HD video here, so even a low-end DSL connection will be sufficient.
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Strangely, even in 2014, there are still low income people don't have computers. Around here part of the problem is that tech recyclers have shown up to recycle the machines that might have gone to lower income people, to sell those to small businesses and non-profits. The computers the non-profits/small businesses replace basically get junked (maybe even sent overseas) because they're VERY old. (P3's/older P4's)
Also, since poorer people don't have computers, they can't take advantage of the geek resource
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It's a class issue all around. Just because a poor person can afford an inexpensive compter doesn't mean they will have the time and money to attend college. Degree's aren't strictly necessary but you need some combination of experience, education, and genius. A degree is something that is more and more considered a given for young adults from the middle class. Meanwhile the minorities that are frequently of the most concern when talking about diversity in the work place are over represented among the ranks
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I call bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
can we get over these complete bullshit stories about gender and race prejudice in high tech offices? Nothing I have seen during my 35 years of being a software developer at many different companies has suggested this is even remotely true.
Literally every company I have ever worked at has gone above and beyond all existing laws to make sure there is absolutely no racial or gender-prejudice in hiring in any way . In fact they err on the side of caution so much it actually seems to be a positive advantage at interview time to be a female, or racial minority, or disabled. if you're all 3 you could probably name your own salary (joke).
I refuse to believe that these days anyone can't get a job at a high-tech company just because of skin color, gender or racial origin. Not least because if they could even slightly prove that, they could sue and it would be all over the news, and the companies themselves are hyper-sensitive to this.
I'd bet a stack on that the fact that high-tech companies are still more filled with white guys than anything else solely because that where nearly all the (actually suitable) job applications come from in the first place.
If you want to force an actually very biassed and unnatural 50% racial and gender balance in the work place, then you need to look at why its still mostly white guys that apply in the first place, not blame the companies for hiring from the pool of suitable applicants who are actually out there.
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I don't think a company's lev
Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
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silly premises (Score:2)
If employee populations should be representative of customers, would Facebook be better off if they made the education and salary of their employees representative of their users? If paid their engineers $50k a year and hired mostly non-STEM majors? Would your hospital deliver better health care if its medical staff was representative of its patients in terms of education and salary? Would teachers teach better if they were representative of the student population? The whole point of an economy and division
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Of course, as far as race is concerned, it is just irrelevant. I mean, who but a racist would seriously believe that you have to be (fill in some race) in order to write web software for (same race)?
Unfortunately it is not irrelevant. Few people believe that a black person CAN'T do software development (for example). However it's a hard road for many, many black people to take, - especially if they are poor, which black people disproportionally are. What you have to realize is that even though the legal barriers have fallen, the social and economic barriers are alive and well.
I'll give you an example. I don't know if you're familiar with the radio show "This American Life". Anyway, on one episode t
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You're completely missing the point. Facebook says (I'm paraphrasing) "we need to be racially diverse in order to be able to develop software for our racially diverse user community". That means that they are saying that people of one race can't develop software for people of another race. That's racist.
What you are getting at, namely the fact that African Americans and Latinos are statistically underrepresented in high tech, is obvious. But when you're saying that "inequalities in our society are deeply in
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Bloody nonsense (Score:2)
At the end of the day there is a SHORTAGE of qualified IT professionals. We need all the qualified tech workers we can get our hands on.
Big companies like FB, Microsoft, Google etc are SCARED SHITLESS from getting their image ruined by a big public discrimination lawsuit. You know why? because the maximum amount of compensation is UNLIMITED. That means it takes one badly handled discharge or some bigoted idiot to lose millions.
Why do you think they keep hammering their equality statements etc? A: Reputa
Careful what you wish for.... (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, the deeper we look into these kinds of issues the more interesting it gets.
The real question here is not "why are there so few minorities at Company X" it's "why are there so few qualified candidates from minority group X to fill open positions?". We already have diversity legislation in place at Universities in America. In fact, there are more women graduates than men. Yet so few of the females grads are getting degrees in CS. Why is that? It is certainly not because of lack of opportunity. Could it be that maybe - just maybe - women don't want to be programmers?
How about African Americans and other minority groups? Well, clearly the number of University students as a percentage of the total population is much lower than society in general. The question is why? Partly economic to be sure. But loans and grants are available to nearly everyone. Yet the number of black and latino college entrants is far lower, on a percentage basis, than they are for whites. Why is that?
Is it possible that, in general, black and latino kids just don't put as high a value on a college education as white kids do? And, therefore, just don't work as hard to get the good grades necessary to get into a good college? What part does having children out of wedlock play in this? Black and latino women have a much higher instance of this than either white or Asian women.
I'm not trying to point fingers or cast blame here and I certainly don't pretend to have all the answers. But it does raise some interesting questions.
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>> Is it possible that, in general, black and latino kids just don't put as high a value on a college education as white kids do? And, therefore, just don't work as hard to get the good grades necessary to get into a good college? What part does having children out of wedlock play in this? Black and latino women have a much higher instance of this than either white or Asian women.
My father was a professor of education and his main focus was in the public education system. K-12 and beyond. In his writi
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Well said. I think that the environment that a person grows up in is a much bigger factor than race or gender. If your parents don't instill in you the value of a good education then many kids will miss out on that. Growing up poor already puts many of these kids at a disadvantage. Having parents that don't stress education just makes it worse. For the vast majority of these disadvantaged kids, education is the only way out. Sure, maybe you'll get a sports scholarship but that's a long shot.
I think that Aff
Wrong diversity pools being measured... (Score:2)
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Good thing they didn't hire 33% or 66% of all the African American new graduates.
Which is one reason there is so much focus on STEM (Score:2)
...education right now. One important question is whether the relatively lucrative STEM fields, like Software Development in this case, are drawing from candidate pools that are skewed toward certain demographics simply because those demographics have greater access to resources and encouragement in the first place.
So if American Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in the Software Development field compared to the overall American population, one question to ask is, is it because Blacks and Hispanics
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I believe you'll find the differen
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I believe you'll find the difference, at least for blacks is not fully explainable by economic factors. There is a significant middle-and-upper-class black population.
Here's some data on economic factors separating American black families and white ones. TL;DR: the presence of a few successful black families in America does not negate the fact that white households continue to have significantly higher median incomes, and thus, access to greater resources for their children:
- http://www.pewsocialtrends.org... [pewsocialtrends.org]
- http://www.pewresearch.org/fac... [pewresearch.org]
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
Just because the difference between a person with intelligence and talent and one without in more cerebral fields isn't as obvious as the difference between a person with talent in sports and one without doesn't mean the difference isn't there.
But the range of opportunities are totally different. Software development is not a "geniuse
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I didn't say economic factors didn't matter; I said they weren't sufficient. Something like 33% of black households earn more than $50,000 per year, compared to 52% of white households. For $75,000 and up, it's 18% compared to 32%. For $100,000 and up, it's 9.3% compared to 20.1%.
So perhaps by economic factors alone you'd expect black tech workers to be under-represented by 50% compared to white people. Non-Hispanic black people make up 12% of the population, non-Hispanic white 64%. Facebook has 53% w
Given little variation between them... (Score:2)
...it seems like this is obviously due to larger cultural factors with the *applicants* rather than with the people doing the hiring.
The idea that HR departments at both Facebook and Google could be not only both racist, but equally racist, defies imagination.
On the other hand, Facebook and Google draw applicants from the same demographic pool - and those whose culture is technically and academically successful happens to correlate with self-identified "race" (a sad and arbitrary distinction if there ever w
Resume requirements (Score:2)
How can poor minorities obtain employment in the tech giants when one of the requirements is to list "lived in Mom's basement for 1 year"
Scholorships (Score:2)
Lets start seeing some sponsored scholarships to organizations like SACNAS ( https://sacnas.org/ [sacnas.org] ) by these companies, if we want to promote more diverse geek workforce, and not just give lip-service about it.
Similar, you say? (Score:2)
Tech Workforce Diversity At Facebook Similar To Google And Yahoo
Well then, that can only mean one thing - they must all be equally racist! ...or they're not racist at all, and that's just the way the world is when it comes to finding people with the right skills for the job.
I, simply, don't believe it. (Score:2)
My entire life, I've been told diversity is a critical component of success -- building a robust and varied environment out of people from a range of different experiences, etc.
Now you're telling me that two of the most successful companies on the entire planet are, in fact, super homogeneous?
Yeah, right. This flies in the face of everything I was indoctrinated to believe.
lllll AJ
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You say that as if George W. Bush wasn't a simpleton.
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Do you know what Obama's approval rating is amongst blacks?
87%
(http://www.gallup.com/poll/124922/presidential-approval-center.aspx)
My god, how our country is cursed by these nitwits.
If "diversity" means putting more of those simpletons into positions of power, fuck diversity.
You realise there may be all sorts of legitimate reasons for this. Maybe the approve because they see Obama as no worse than most other politicians, but see that he also provides a positive role-model for blacks. Maybe more black people are in demographics that benefit from his policies. Maybe they value different things to you when evaluating how good he is.
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What's a 'Chuuch'?
[John]
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"Chuuch" is an exclamation or interjection largely synonymous with "okay". It is used to express assent, agreement, or acceptance.
Unique to a particular branch of African American Vernacular English, it is most commonly heard in the pimp community.
Let's turn to popular culture for more:
Snoop Dogg's thoughts on "Chuuch" [mtv.com].
Urbandictionary on "Chuuch" [urbandictionary.com].
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As much as I hate "USian", what's the preferred alternative? American? America isn't a country, it's a pair of continents. Argentinians are no less American than New Yorkers are. Argentinians are no less American than New Yorkers are.
Nobody uses the term "American" to refer to a resident of one of the two American continents. That would be as dumb as referring to somebody as a "Eurasian", or an "Afro-European." Argentinians aren't "American;" if you insist on referring to them as residents of a continent, then they are "South Americans."
The "USian" name is an attempt by the PC brigade to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist. In English, the term "American" when applied to a person always refers to citizens of the United States
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But... they do!
A Brazillian refers to himself as American if using the english language.
http://www.usaisnotamerica.com... [usaisnotamerica.com]
It's kind of amusing that your link starts with the assertion: "America is the name of a whole continent."
Which is, of course, incorrect. There is no continent called America.
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Don't be a dolt. A smug dolt.
By your logic the Irish would be "British" too since since they are residents of the British Isles.
American in most contexts refers to the USA. Argentinians are as you said, Argentinian. Both the New Yorker and the Argentinian live in the Americas, but one is Argentinian and one is American.
If you're referring to the continents, you'd say "Americas"
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As much as I hate "USian", what's the preferred alternative? American? America isn't a country, it's a pair of continents.
There is no continent named "America". There is North America. There is South America. Just like there is the country United States of America. If you are consistently ignoring the beginning of each of the names, nobody can be called an American because there is no such place named just "America". But you're not, and I'm not sure why you arbitrarily decided to do that.
Argentinians are no less American than New Yorkers are.
Actually, I would argue they are because "American" when used in the context of continent is ambiguous: North or South. Whereas when u
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That's not discrimination. That's Progress.