Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's
You know, as a minority (foreign-born Hispanic, naturalized citizen), I'm tired of hearing and reading these kind of headlines. Companies are not supposed to actively try to correct failures in the social fabric or failures in government policy when it comes to access to education across racial and income barriers.
It is nice when companies donate to charity, or hire interns or have outreach programs to increase their diversity pools. But those are nice-to-have, those are not imperatives.
If companies have few African-American or Hispanic engineers, or female engineers, shit, that is not the fault of the Yahoos, Googles, Facebooks and many other (comparatively) progressive companies in this country. It is not a fault that need to be corrected by them.
It is a social issue. African American and Hispanic communities should ask themselves why they do not produce more engineers. And yes, they they have suffered from discrimination and lack of equal access to resources (even now). But that doesn't completely explain their reduce representation in the STEM workforce. It is about culture.
I mean, as a Hispanic, I see it all the time. At least in my community, we have zero role models, zero focus on education when it comes to the media that is targeted to our community, etc, etc. Same with the African-American communities.
We have Chinese-American, Japanese-American, Indian-American, Hmong-American, -American communities with old and recent arrivals that produce engineers. Why not us?
There is a cultural component that we need to be responsible for, as well as a government policy that needs to ensure education is affordable, geographically accessible and, more important, diversified beyond the mere 4-year college goal (.ie. vocational training.)
Asking a company why it has so few X-ethnicity engineers is barking at the wrong tree. We should be asking those communities why you don't produce as many engineers as this other minority group.
It is barking at the wrong tree, it is putting the blame away from where it belong.
Source: Minority engineer fucking tired of seeing fellow community members dumbing down their own potential.