Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized for achievements in diversity?

https://i.imgur.com/hbmGgQD.png

It would be the NBA: http://www.espn.com/nba/news/story?id=5267604

because "diversity" means black people, not "representative of America's diversity."

In tech, if your ethnic demographics match the population, you are not diverse. To be diverse you need to hire less white people. Pinterest was not diverse because women were only 27% of tech hires. Ethnically the hires are 60% Asian, white males 35%, but the conclusion was too many white males.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3051659/inside-pinterests-plans-...

"Diversity" is not about accurate representation.

Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc.

The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal of different perspectives and experiences. Female Americans have very similar experiences and perspectives compared to male Americans, as do black Americans and white Americans.

Differences in country of origin provide much higher differences in perspectives and experiences. A black American would have a more similar viewpoint with a white American than a black African immigrant. Dividing the groups by country of origin is MUCH more effective at satisfying the goal.

When viewed through the lense of country of origin, the tech field is very diverse in comparison to every other field out there. The field has a high immigrant %, and even the Americans are generally first generation Americans with immigrant parents, providing an extra boost in diversity.

Ironically, using country of origin to divide up groups shows that tech is much more diverse than fields like journalism/HR/etc. that vehemently advocate for diversity in tech.

I don't think that's all of it. People have been pitching that as a politically-correct argument for diversity, since "There are actual racists and actual sexists among us and they have successfully biased the industry" is too offensive to say out loud. But diversity of perspective isn't the fundamental reason.

Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.

So, if these candidates truly are qualified and there's no scientific reason why they're statistically worse at the job, why are they being underrepresented? Because we have racists and sexists among us and they're in power.

Which is why it makes sense to look at race and sex and so forth more than other axes like viewpoint or country of origin: first, race and sex are particularly arbitrary, and second, that's what we know people have particularly discriminated on. There is discrimination on other axes, and it's absolutely also worth looking at, but it's a bit less egregious.

Not only offensive but also very hard to prove.

>Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.

There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.

If you want to cry foul on why they are less qualified, citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism.

Sexism, racism and discrimination are useless concepts unless properly and concisely defined before discussion because everyone's definition is different. It is very annoying to have people classify everything as "racism" or "sexism" to lazily avoid the need to justify arguments.

I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.

> citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism

Sure. But it is the simplest hypothesis; other hypotheses have a higher burden of proof. Serious, straightforward racism and sexism are within living memory; FORTRAN, for instance, is older than Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement. There's good reason to believe sexism and racism could cause the discrepancy we see.

There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.

The question you were answering was "On average, do some races/genders make better tech workers than others?". the answer is, yes some races/genders are more qualified to work in tech than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics) and to gain CS knowledge. That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.

No company is "skipping qualified candidates" because female and underrepresented minorities have not spent the time to become qualified to work in the tech field. They are, on average, literally less qualified to work in the tech field, given their current, average CS and programming knowledge.

>There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.

Denying that sexism/discrimination against minorities is the cause of unequal representation is not the same as saying that the cause is biological differences. Some easy explanations for unequal representation could be society's pressure on men to make money, Asian/White parents' pressure on kids to do well, etc.

Unequal representation is not enough to prove racism/sexism against females and URMs.

OK, sure.

But this article is about fixing the demographics at the college level: figuring out why it is that some races/genders are more likely to become CS majors, and un-skewing that - so that the number of qualified people graduating with a CS degree is no longer biased on some unrelated demographic attribute. Is it not?

And is that not a desirable thing?

> Silicon Valley companies are going after the same small pool of nonwhite, nonmale candidates

There's a limited pool of female software engineers and of non-white-or-asian software engineers. Universities are only graduating so many women, somewhere around the rate that Pinterest is hiring (~20%), if you hire more than this, you're just making sure that other companies can only have less than 20% women.

The change needs to start at the bottom, there need to be more women doing software engineering at university. You can't just hire all of the existing pool of female software engineers, or black software engineers, and then call yourself diverse, and shame on all the companies that now have only 5% female engineers.

This isn't that obscure, and we certainly don't need to engage in a false, hand wringing, semantic debate derailment along the lines of "but what IS diversity REALLY anyway?" Please. You know exactly what we're talking about here.

Your post is an exercise in identity politics as well. Welcome to same bowl the rest of us are in.

For example, HMC is attempting to address diversity, but only along gender lines. There is no attempt to address racial diversity in any means.

Further in very progressive companies like Google and Facebook, Hispanic and Blacks in leadership positions are less than 1%, compared to a US population of 17% and 12% nationwide (respectively).

In these companies, 24% of leadership roles are held by women. That means that with regards to women, they are hitting 48% of their target (if the target is to get a 50/50 gender split). Whereas, with regards to race, they are hitting 5% of their target with Hispanics and 8% with blacks (if the goal is to get close to the population sample at large). So why is that that most "diversity" program only focus on gender? I know that the two aren't mutual exclusive, but it's no secret that far more resources are spent on gender diversity than anything else.

This particular article is about gender imbalance, but I'm sure HMC has policies and controls that address race as well. I'd be curious about the numbers. I visited there 2 decades ago and it was definitely a very white student population.

Has anyone actually proven that, or is that just an assumption?

Of course, when we're talking about Google or Facebook, we at big N territory, so if you don't expect biases, the make up should reflect the general population.