It's weird that the article describes Facebook as "largely white" when it's significantly less white than the US as a whole: (54.4% vs 61.6%[1])

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

Yes, feel good quotas mean nothing. You are probably diverse enough if your staff match the ratio of people enrolled at university 5 years ago, and even then i think its wrong to favor employing people based on race or gender at all.

It's not racist as long as you favor the right race. /s

> Facebook says it wants its workforce to better reflect the diversity of its 1.7 billion monthly users—85% of which are outside the U.S. and Canada.

Yeah, I held up for a second because of that, but the data presented is from the US EEOC, so presumably applies to their US workforce. Their workforce might be "largely white" when compared to the worldwide FB userbase, but not to who they're allowed to hire domestically.

Then shouldn't Facebook hire more Chinese and Indians? They comprise ~35% of the world population.

Since Chinese people are not the users of Facebook he should not hire any Chinese :D.

I wonder how they plan to deal with the GFW-induced disproportionally low Chinese users problem.

I think the author forgot that Asians exist and assumed that "not black" equalled "white". It's a common mistake in the US where racial politics is very "black and white".

These policies are always just band-aids for a deeper rooted problem. In the best case scenario, it masks the problem and diverts attention away from actual solutions that actually provide equality of opportunity at an earlier stage for underrepresented segments.

Why is it a problem? I personally think it's a problem that there are so few women coal miners. Clearly this is a sign of deeper societal problems. We need to get women interested in coal mining at a younger age to help solve the gender gap in coal mining. Once we solve that we can tackle diversity in professional basketball and hockey. Obviously more white and Asians should be in the NBA and more blacks in the NHL. That the ethnic breakdown of these particular sports doesn't match up with my personal beliefs can only mean one thing: everyone is racist.

It was a problem that there weren't more women mining coal when mining coal was an up and coming industry and one of the best ways for people to get ahead economically. It just wasn't really talked about because that was then and this is now. But we still see the ripples of "men's work" being the most lucrative in that era, and it's very laudable to try to reduce those same ripples from our own era emanating into the future.

For as long they have conducted the survey, its has been quite stable Swedish statistics that women in average prioritize social status and work environment over pay, while men prioritize pay over social status and work environment. Statistics from other sources like dating sites has also shown the same priority, where profile from women (that mention work) more often talks about social status and coworkers, while profiles from men that mention work more often talk about earning money.

As such, I don't believe your statement that women mining coal was a priority for women when mining coal was an up and coming industry. Coal mining has always been a low status and dangerous job, and as such its been exclusively a male profession.

A similar situation currently exist with under water welding. It is one of the highest paying jobs there is, but its below average in social status and has a very risky environment. As one of the most lucrative area, you would think there would be a push by gender equality advocates, but no. The focus is only to get more women in jobs which has high social status, rather than to create change in current gender culture.

Thanks for the interesting comment! Do you have a link to that survey?

Is software low- or high-status work?

I did not save it, and search engines are not really great on finding specific news articles based on queries like "what women and men want". Too much noise.

I did find people who has done a similar study, like http://www.sverigesingenjorer.se/Global/Dokumentbibliotek/Ra... page 18.

As for software development, there has been quite a few movies so far about CEO's of large software companies. I don't think there is that many other professions that get hero worshiping like that, except for doctors.

> It was a problem that there weren't more women mining coal when mining coal was an up and coming industry and one of the best ways for people to get ahead economically.

At which point you're seen as only caring about equality when it disadvantages women, which isn't how equality works.

It's just as important that we have a gender balance in coal miners (and nurses and teachers and prison inmates) as it is for software developers.

>It's just as important that we have a gender balance in coal miners (and nurses and teachers and prison inmates) as it is for software developers.

Or maybe we should stop preoccupying ourselves with this equality of outcome nonsense because in a free market people are allowed to choose their own career paths.

It's clear that tech is the Golden mine of XXI century, so democratize this industry in particular is important.

There is nothing stopping anybody with an Internet connection and a little bit of curiosity from learning to code. The computer doesn't care about your race or gender.

This issue strikes a chord with me because I spent years programming while others called me a nerd. Now that my skills are useful people claim I must be doing well because of my sex and skin color.

> It's clear that tech is the Golden mine of XXI century

What's the evidence for this claim? I think tech is fun, pays for a good standard of living, and is a solid career choice for any person entering the job market. However, according to the bureau of labor and statistics, you're still better off going into a host of fields like medicine, dentistry, airline pilots, law, and finance.

[0] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

I think it's a skewed view based off looking at the billionaire outliers, not the majority of us mere peons.

So your recommendation is that Facebook completely ignore lack of diversity and rely on childhood mentorship and less tendency for CS to attract men in college to fill in the gap in twenty years?

The problem is you can't solve it from there. If men are 90% of the qualified applicant pool, all you get by hiring 50% women in one company is that four other companies that size then have to be 100% men. How is that better?

The obvious conclusion is that math is racist.

The article doesn't mention any focus by Facebook on diversity of age.

Along with data on race and gender, does the company make public the percent of its workforce that is over 40 or 50?

Is this just a confirmation of what many of us here suspected all along, that the interview process is way to late in the game to correct for diversity?

No, I don't think so. We don't know what the recruiting funnel looks like at FB, but it is entirely possible that the hiring process has been designed by a group of engineers who, through their homogenous demographics, are either drawing on similarly-homogenous professional networks for references or selecting for characteristics they possess (which could be bad for anyone who's not like them).

Based on my own anecdotal experience with hiring developers, the m/f ratio is highly unbalanced before our own biases even come into play. A while ago, we had a recruiting agent helping us to find candidates, based solely on a list of technical criteria. She (yes, she) sent us almost only men, a dozen or two of them. The one exception was a woman who choked on the fizzbuzz test. That was actually really saddening.

Did these technical criteria skew towards mid-level or senior? I've observed this as well, but I've observed a more even balance of junior candidates.

If so, this could be a manifestation of the high attrition rates for experienced female engineers.

It's certainly an anecdote that could be interpreted that way. I think the main answer to things like these are always the same: a multi-pronged approach. Searching for a silver bullet for something as complex as human-human and human-society interactions is somewhat futile: usually we improve these by tackling it in as many ways as we can. I think diversity in hiring is similar, personally.

There have been plenty of folks who have proved this wrong. This is the classic "pipeline" argument, which is really just a case of the company restricting the "pipeline" through various practices.

There are plenty of posts out there about why Facebook's recent declaration that their numbers are that way due to the pipeline problem is wrong. There was a particularly good one I recall, but I can't find it sadly. But the other articles out there should suffice too.

There are also many self taught programmers out there, which are not affected by the "pipeline". Interview practices often subconsciously discriminate against them (for example, an overabundance of datastructure questions -- most self taught programmers I know are good enough with datastructures, but haven't become super awesome experts at them because that's not very useful when actually programming. Focusing your interviews on solely these questions excludes nearly half the "pipeline").

The college I was in has an extremely skewed gender ratio. There are many companies out there that nearly exclusively hire from a set of similar colleges as a matter of prestige. And of course have a large gender diversity issue, which they (well, employees there -- in this country there is less of a push for diversity and companies don't make public statements about it) blame on the pipeline. This is absurd. What Facebook does is similar, though not as stark.

Yep, but this discussion creates a lot of projects targeting to improve these numbers in the future

Improve. Yes. I for one am going to lobby the government to provide early training for young women who might be interested in coal mining. Hopefully we can reduce the number of men in coal mining in favor of more disadvantaged groups who are less interested in back breaking labor.

Otherwise known as affirmative action? My guess is that the recruiters realized that selecting for people who could actually pass the interview process and stand a chance at getting hired is a better strategy to getting good performance reviews. It's gravy if its a minority, but you can't count on it.

That's not to say there aren't extremely talented women and racial minorities, but I'd imagine they have their pick of the litter right now as everyone is clamoring to have that perfectly homogenous workforce so their director of HR can post their "diversity numbers" and get a big raise. That's the real reason driving this nonsense.

The problem is in the supply of the candidates, which starts long before they make it to the recruiter, so it's of no surprise the recruiter can't do anything. It's not like by giving these points we suddenly opened up a hidden cache of women engineers somewhere.

If big tech companies really cared about minorities, they would offer minority scholarships, complete with an offer of employment afterwards, sponsor after school programs and help find those kids that have been left behind in the institutional education system. Take that extra budget allocated for this banal and hopeless program and give it to the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization and mandate the recruiters attend and mentor someone there. Of course, those results will not be visible in the HR Director's next OKR meeting. Some problems cannot be fixed easily or quickly and that's just how it is. They could be doing these things....but they won't.

Instead, we get recruiter "point systems".

Bravo, Facebook!

it always struck me as funny watching this issue unfold in my industry, that the people on the "frontlines" belong to another highly gendered career path - human resource workers seem to be overwhelmingly female.

first of all, does anyone know whether i'm right about this?

and then, does anyone else think we might have to address the gendering of all careers in order to get at addressing those careers which attract all of the concern?

I don't see this surprising. It's like trying to find the target market for your product. It's possible that the market size is too small or you are being too restrictive. It also could be that facebook's recruiting itself is biased.

Facebook Recruiter: "I won't be able to afford to send my kid to college unless you wear this sombrero to your interviews."

Isn't that racist and sexist to give bonus to hire specific sex or race. Hiring by competency is still a concept that we cannot handle in 2016?

The really sad thing is that viewpoints such as yours are considered racist and sexist in today's society. These issues are so politically charged that it's impossible to have any honest debate. If you even remotely disagree with feminism, Black Lives Matter, or Israeli occupation of Palestine, you're immediately labeled sexist/racist/anti-semitic and no one else will dare agree with you.

Facebook is significantly less white than US in general. Given that white people are over represented in occupations like programmers I would expect them be actually more white than USA.

It appears that Facebook does not hire enough whites and these sort of point systems appear more like an active discrimination against white people.

It sounds like it's an incentive system for recruiters to find non-traditional candidates. It's easy to only recruit from top colleges and universities but I think the system tried to get a better pipeline of candidates from other sources.

It doesn't like the Hiring Managers (who decide offers?) got that same system.

I'm not sure how this is surprising for anyone. Of all of the female friends I had growing up, I don't know a single one that went into software. I had one study "Happiness" at Mt Holyoke, one study Gender Studies at UMass, a few Biology majors who now are lab techs, one law school graduate who works with the ACLU, and a bunch of women who didn't even go to college.

If we want to fix this problem, we need to encourage women to stop studying such ridiculous nonsense feel-good bullshit. The problem lies with our culture and how we raise children, not "racist/sexist/whatever-ist" employers.

This is the worst comment I've read on HN in a long time. You extrapolate from some weird personal anecdotes to "women study ridiculous nonsense feel-good bullshit" and then ironically imply that sexism is not a problem. I suspect you'll be downvoted eventually (and be flabbergasted as to why) but I thought I'd drop a comment with my gut reaction to your post instead.

I think his statements can be supported by data too. Look at the gender distribution for CS programs in top colleges.

I think people who insist that 50% of developers should be women are nothing but sexist of high order who objectify as some number that needs to be bumped up. Women have different priorities than men. They prefer jobs that provide more security and more immune to gaps than jobs that require more attention. I don't understand why it is so hard for people to accept the simple fact that women have their own mind and preferences and it can be different than men ?

P.S. This is not to say there aren't gender issues in any industry. But I dont think it is as black and white as people make it out to be.

The comment may be wrong, but a LOT of people have similar ideas. This is your opportunity to educate, not punish with downvotes.

Punishing merely makes people afraid to tell you their ideas, which means they just go on believing them. How does that help?

ignoring the color added by "nonsense feel-good bullshit", are women underrepresented in STEM degrees?

TE: under represented, SM: over represented, at my uni, anyway.

This whole thing is way overblown, imo. If, for some reason, far more women want to be doctors than engineers, then good for them. The last thing we need are grumpy doctors who treat their patients like machines, or bored engineers who make a special snowflake out of each server.

Imagine how ridiculous it would be, if when I was enrolling in uni, an advisor had said something along the lines of "Are you sure you wouldn't rather be a doctor? Because we need more male doctors, and the engineering fields are way over their quota for males. In 4 years, you might not be able to get a job in that field, unless you discover that you are actually a woman in a man's body."

Are men underrepresented in non-STEM degrees?

quite possibly - i have no idea though :)

careers such as nursing, teaching, and (ironically given the op) human resources seem to be highly gendered towards women.

The answer to both questions is yes.

The relevant question is whether they are underrepresented in non-"nonsense feel-good bullshit" degrees. But then we would have to agree on a definition of that. Having no statistics handy, I suspect by my definition the answer would be "no", while by yours (which perhaps is just equivalent to STEM?) the answer would be "yes".

Sorry, so you're suggesting the problem is that women don't study computer science? Hmm. [0]

It sounds like you're chalking this up to the famous "pipeline problem." [1] This is empirically incorrect. In particular, Figure 8.2 demonstrates that the quit rate for women in "high tech" is almost 2.5x higher than the quit rate for me.

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-technology-stanford-...

[1] http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-...

The fact that the quit rate is higher doesn't disqualify the pipeline problem as an explanation. It sounds like your assumption is that a hostile work environment must be the reason for the higher quit rate, and thus that fixing the pipeline wouldn't fix the issue. I'm not sure this is as ironclad as you're pretending it is.

I personally know people from underrepresented groups in tech (African-American, women etc) who attest that, even in work environments that made them feel 100% welcome/comfortable, they felt a mental cost from the very fact of being underrepresented. That is to say, even if you were to remove all the consciously and unconsciously biased behavior from workplaces, some people still have a negative reaction to being the only present member of a group that they identify with. The pipeline problem is the only solution that could possibly address that[1], by addressing the imbalance per se.

[1] I suppose short of having people stop feeling this way about being underrepresented. I've been underrepresented ethnically in almost every group I've ever been in, but it has never bothered me. Far be it from me to tell other to stop feeling a certain way though.

> It sounds like your assumption is that a hostile work environment must be the reason for the higher quit rate, and thus that fixing the pipeline wouldn't fix the issue. I'm not sure this is as ironclad as you're pretending it is.

I mean, the data does seem to support a tech environment that applies disproportionate pressure on women to perform certain activities. From the linked HBS study, for example (Figure 6.1), 71% of women in tech feel pressure to put in face time (vs. 19% in all sectors) and 36% feel pressure to be available 24/7 (vs. 26% in all sectors).

Both of these are time-consuming activities. Myriad studies show child care responsibilities, even today, still fall disproportionately onto women. Child care is time-consuming, and that comes into conflict with time-consuming professional work.

Of course, not all women want children. And this is one study. But it wouldn't surprise me if women were underrepresented in tech due to a combination of cultural issues and the pipeline problem. It's just extremely reductionist when people assign blame to the pipeline problem, since that shifts the focus from work environments to higher education. That's a convenient result for companies.

Thanks for the data. That's a pretty compelling perspective actually: policies that are less compatible with family care in a given industry have a disproportionate impact on women in just that industry, which increasing representation (through pipeline issues) won't necessarily fix.

I am not sure what that quit rate really means seen in that isolation.

What is the quit rate of women in other sectors ? What is the quit rate in high-tech in general ?

All those questions are very important. My wife left her job after marriage because she had to relocate and later she took a break for childbirth while I was at the same job.

"Pipeline problem" is not really a problem. It is not the case that women will suddenly come to CS if we paint classrooms pink. If the reason women are not attracted to CS is probably those young girls have done their research an decided that they will be better off being something else other than CS major. Hostility at workplace might be one of the reasons but I highly doubt if that is the only one. At least we need data to indicate that quit rate is not a useful metric.

How does it compare with the quit rate in highly-paid but non-high-tech occupations such as legal, middle/upper management, aviation, medicine or finance?

One would assume there's a natural attrition across all industries due to women taking time off to have/raise kids as well as some common base level of quitting in general due to reasons common across all industries (better pay elsewhere, bad managers). Is 2.5x coefficient very high, very low or just about same as other industries?

> Sorry, so you're suggesting the problem is that women don't study computer science? Hmm. [0]

The reference you cite says that

> about 214 women are majoring in computer science, accounting for about 30 percent of majors in that department

and

> only about 18 percent of all U.S. undergraduate computer science degrees go to women.

While the WSJ article states that

> Women made up 33% of its global workforce, up from 31% in 2014.

So, exactly a pipeline problem.

It's interesting that you have not addressed the high attrition rates for women who do enter tech. Is that also a pipeline problem? Should schools also teach women to tolerate hostile work environments?

This comment is mind-numbingly anecdotal and runs wildly contrary to reality.

'"Happiness" at Mt Holyoke' - here's the list of majors at Mt Holyoke: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/majors. 'Happiness' appears nowhere on the list.

"bunch of women who didn't even go to college" - females outnumber men in college 55/45.

Beyond the blatant disregard for facts, the comment is dangerously reductionist, attributing the diversity gap to a single cause- a lack of encouragement for females to pursue technical fields at a young age.

Yes, this is part of the problem, but no matter how much the talent pool increases, women are going to continue to leave tech at alarming rates until tech culture issues are improved as well.

> '"Happiness" at Mt Holyoke' - here's the list of majors at Mt Holyoke

Congratulations, you can Google! Maybe if you exercise that talent a little bit more, you'll realize that My Holyoke, not unlike the infamous Evergreen College, allows students to design their own major.

> the comment is dangerously reductionist, attributing the diversity gap to a single cause- a lack of encouragement for females to pursue technical fields at a young age.

How is that any different than the OP suggesting that hostile work environments are the single cause of poor diversity?

> How is that any different than the OP suggesting that hostile work environments are the single cause of poor diversity?

I'm baffled by how this could possibly be your impression of the article. The WSJ is reporting on a recruiting push that failed to hire minorities and women. It's the only thing they talk about for the first five paragraphs, then they immediately reference the pipeline problem (emphasis mine):

> The move shows how Facebook is applying its trademark data-driven approach to one of the tech industry’s most stubborn problems: the homogeneity of its nearly 15,000-person workforce. But its lackluster results reflect the limits of that method when tackling deep-rooted issues such as inequality.

The article raises the pipeline problem again in multiple places:

> Facebook says it wants its workforce to better reflect the diversity of its 1.7 billion monthly users—85% of which are outside the U.S. and Canada. But last month, it said it couldn’t substantially increase the diversity of its workforce because there weren’t enough qualified women or minority candidates. That drew fire from tech diversity and inclusion leaders on social media.

> The extra incentive points—awarded in job categories that are too homogenous—are an unusual effort to expand Facebook’s “pipeline,” which is the pool of candidates recruiters identify to interview for a position.

Here is some relevant data for anybody trying to add some facts to this post: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/28/359419934/who-s...

Conclusion: it's complicated. Women make up about half of science and business degrees, and relatively small percentage of engineering and computer science.

it would be interesting to know whether any societies don't have this bias in educating women.