Google's 'stale pale males' to be replaced by crack black chick pack Gigantic scraper ad platform Google has set aside $150m (£98m) of its annual $66bn (£43bn) turnover (that is zero point zero zero two of its money) to tackle the weighty issue of diversity within its workforce. Nancy Lee, veep of "People Operations" at the Chocolate Factory said Google is determined to tackle its "pale male …
That might sound small but that’s $15000 extra if you were hiring 10,000 workers. Or to recruit the right ones, but if there isn’t a high percentage of X type of person in the industry isn’t that discrimination against the rest of their work force? Why not the best person for the job?
The best person for the job isnt an acceptable statement any more. In order to fight racism they must discriminate race. To fight sexism they must discriminate on sex. Of course this is because white men are evil in countries that are historically (and proportionally) white and women were expected to care for the home/family back in the day when it was economically possible.
And while there still will be the odd few racist and sexist people out there in such places of power (oddly they are of all races and genders) this kind of self promoting 'progress' in the eyes of the public will do little. Actually changing internal procedures so CV's etc are anonymous until the interviews and training apprentices in house (where you can clearly show how many are turned away and why) would probably be better.
The "problem" is not sexism (against non-males), it is that the male brain is more inclined to be interested in the sort of thing Google needs people to be interested in. By ignoring that, they are actively promoting sexism against the group most likely to want to work for them.
Publishing is 75% female. Any complaints? Teaching is 80% female. Do they need anonymous recruiting policies? Medical students are 70% female. Great News! Undergraduates are 60% female. You Go Girl! Software is 75% male. HOLD EVERYTHING AND HELP THE WOMENS!!1! Men are complaining about sexism? Shut up manbaby!
The anonymous CVs were tested in France a few years ago*.
It went quite poorly : The chances to get an interview was roughly the same for women and seniors**, but it actually went down for ethnic minorities (slashed by half, from 10% to 5%).
Seems like there were more sympathetic people willing to give a chance than racist a****les in those places of power...
** "roughly" because the anonymous CV changed the "same sex/same age bracket" bias of the recruiters. One of the ironic note was that women recruiter favored men over women when using anonymous CVs...
* full report of the study, in french : http://www.crest.fr/images/CVanonyme/rapport.pdf)
There is absolutely nothing biological about the sex distribution in any IT related field. The only fields that even see a benefit from any sort of sexism are those that are heavily dependent on physical strength, or perhaps sperm donors.
All those imbalances that you're pointing out are entirely due to culture. From a very young age, we tell boys to go play outside and work hard at math. Girls? We give them a doll and a kitchen set and tell them to work on their social skills. After 17-20 years of indoctrination, they get pick a career, and big surprise, they pick something they've already got practice at.
The point of affirmative action type policies is not really to make the current distributions look more representative of the larger population, but to make up for the centuries or millennia of explicitly telling one group or another that they weren't allowed to be something. In the long run, this makes it so that applying identity blind hiring or admissions will produce representative samples of the larger population. But this is in no way expected to be fast; we spent generations telling our children that things like race and sex made good discriminating features, we can't expect a society to unlearn that in a mere 50 years.
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Ensuring that interview processes and candidate selection isn't affected by a conscious or subconscious desire to exclude female applicants or those with clearly foreign names is not discrimination.
Nor are the other things they are talking about doing in the article you just read.
Having an industry that is both historically and currently white and male wake up and try and positively counter that until the problem is solved is a good thing.
Proof required.
I think the lack of innovation, terrible financial results, low wages, and lack of international influence, among the pasty-white-male-driven companies of the US west coast over the last 30 years, should be evidence enough for anyone!
We need more superficial diversity to boost these moribund corporations and tanking economies!
Positive discrimination is discrimination surely
And thus illegal in the EU. But the sanctions for discrimination are also arguably far higher. But not so in America where quotas still apply at some universities and schools see http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/11/affirmative-action with increasingly perverse consequences. In California and New York it is now people of Asian background who are suffering. They don't seem to have the knack of developing their own trailer park culture.
"Diversity" is a typical topic for American liberals to adopt as a cause. It's a lot easier to take these things up than try and come up with meaningful social and economic policies. And I say that as a liberal myself.
In America, as in the UK, reducing tuition fees is the best way to improve diversity in education but there will almost always be a bias towards the middle class (valuing education is one of the defining traits of the middle class).
I was at a daylong biotech conference two weeks ago and during one of the less interesting presentations I counted people in the audience. Out of sixty or so attendees, the rough percentages were 40% white, 40% asian, 20% Indian/middle eastern. Cross-checking with the presentation schedule and people I actually talked to, attendance was split 50/50 between grad students and company reps.
There were no black people in attendance. I doubt that every university and company invited to attend is racist in either their hiring or selection of representation, which actually raises the more disturbing hypothesis that the pool of highly educated people that gets drawn into biotech or graduate school is significantly depleted of black or Hispanic persons relative to the general population. In turn, this suggests basic deficiencies in the equality of early education, and economic priority of public education, that disproportionately affect these ethic groups…
Of course, we know this. But it is disturbing to go to a conference and think, "If my skin color was different I probably never would have had the opportunities to get here regardless of natural ability". This isn't a problem that can be fixed by individual companies spending money on diversity recruitment; it's caused by fundamental inequalities that still exist within American society that pre-emptively hinder members of ethnic groups from entering that talent pool at all.
I wonder how Google's Caucasian and Asian employees feel about being given a broad brush categorisation of "pale and stale"? Always a good idea to belittle all your existing employees when seeking new ones.
"We appreciate all your works guys, great code. But we need it have a bit more funky ethnicity and gender diversity. Could you maybe comment it throughout in Spanish? And maybe feminise these variable declarations?"
Isn't there something vaguely off about describing your employees and prospective employees as "pale and stale" just because they happen to be white and male? It's generally not the rank and file employees fault a company can't come up (put into practice?) with a useful new idea.
I mean I don't mind who people hire as long as I'm employed and the other people are good, but I do find it a little offensive the language at play of late...
It's a bit like I find something slightly off when I watch Starcraft and all the commentators talk about the "great foreign hope" (In SC foreigners are anyone who isn't South Korean) I'm here to watch great starcraft don't care what brand of Terran wins. (That's a starcraft joke)
I mean I get it, you're promoting the underdog, that's cool, but can't we do it without implying there's something wrong with the people already doing well?
Hi, A.C.: re: "can't we [promote the underdog] without implying there's something wrong with the people already doing well?"
While this may not be true at Google, it is true at other places that people are hired because they are somehow connected to management (friends, family, golf buddies, school classmates) despite their talent or lack thereof. If management is white het males, that will probably be who gets hired, and better qualified candidates who are not white and/or not het and/or not male get passed over and the company may be cheating itself of potential. This is not news, obviously, and Google's actions are, I believe, well-intended (taking a good hard look at internal practice to either reveal areas that need improvement or confirm that all is reasonably copacetic) but as DNTP posted above, the problem with the lack of diversity in some industries has causes whose fixes are beyond Google's purview.
Google seem to have the right idea, putting engineers into schools to inspire the children. Positive discrimination is bad, it needs young adults with the right skills and the best place to get them is in school. Of course, this isn't to say that adults can't go take courses and learn, but jobs should be assigned on merit, not to fill a quota. If there's not enough then look at why that is so and fix the cause, don't just stick a plaster over the top.
Teach the children to treat others on merit rather than physical attributes but to show tolerance and understanding towards old people who can't do that on the basis that they can't help it. Let the bias die of old age while trying to make sure it isn't perpetuated.
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