That is a drastic oversimplification.

The employee pool can only hope to be reflective of the pool of those who seek employment at that company and are qualified.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the employee marketplace for that industry at large.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the pool of people who have the right education and experience.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who graduated with the appropriate degree for which they're hiring (in most cases).

Which can only hope to be reflective of the people who got accepted into those schools.

Which can only hope to be reflective of those who chose that education/career path to begin with.

Which can only hope to be reflective of the population that sought out things like math and science when in secondary school.

Which only then can only hope to be reflective of the general population.

At each step there is filtration. It's affected by people's upbringing, their role models, what advertising they were heavily exposed to as impressionable children, who their friends are, who their teachers were, whether computers were popular when they were going through school, the list goes on and on.

The problem of under and over-representation in tech is a real one, but pretending that companies just need to somehow make up for all of this filtration, at the very very end of a literal lifetime-sized pipeline, is folly. Outreach needs to happen much, much, much sooner than that. At the end of the day, companies are at the mercy of who's in their hiring pool.

I even had a chance to ask a well known SV entrepreneur/investor about what VCs look for, and he said one of the things is "people who look like him." I appreciated his honesty, but it certainly seems like there is a lot of talent that is ignored because people and companies are using poor hueristics.

As to why they do it? I'm guessing that they either don't know not to bring up race or they don't care about discriminating based on race because they probably won't have any consequences.

I've seen plenty of casual workplace sexism and racism in my life. It happens.

At my previous employer, there were some positions with salaries so low that the only people who applied were foreigners who were so desperate that they were willing to take it. White Americans (and American-born Indian Americans for that matter) with computer science degrees simply had more options than to take such a terrible role at such a terrible salary. It had nothing to do with the company discriminating.

None of what I've said has happened at large companies I've interviewed with like Google or Uber, but small startups definitely have some "interesting" practices.

Which I guess would be a question about race? in a way?

I wouldn't ask a white person who spoke swedish and had a very swedish name as I'd assume they are swedish by birth.

Race is orthogonal to nationality and citizenship. Especially in countries of immigrants like the US and Canada.

So if companies are rejecting someone that means as whole (read net), they are expecting more bang for the buck.

Unless your model accounts for such things, it's too simplified. Particularly when it comes to human factors. And if your model is that deficient, it's not really providing useful insights.

Modeling complex phenomena well is tough. But you need to have enough humility to understand when your toy model might be deceiving you.

If the shoe fits....

At least that's what I was told at the talk about diversity and inclusion during my orientation at one of those big tech companies.

Apparently it's because we benefited from being able to make quick judgments before civilized society was a thing.

If there is a strong shortage of supply, you can be sure a lot of people will get over their prejudice -- but in labor markets, there often tend to be more offer than demand, so companies can choose whoever they want, without hurting the business whatsoever.

However, asking in the interviews is unheard of, at least in shudder retail. And while outright denyig someone for their race isn't as common as you might think, people do instinctively like people who look like them, and they also have this bad habit of not questioning it when they like something...

I seem to be lucky in that I haven't directly seen any racist hiring policies. But, then again, I've only worked hourly retail jobs; for all I know, the higher you go, the less likely a hispanic man is to be hired. And it doesn't help that there's so many variables to control for--as other comments stated, it's filters all the way down. As an example ffrom the entertainment industry, I have never owned a computer powerful enough to handle both running a recently released game and recording footage of the gameplay, which means that my dreams of becoming a Youtube Star are rather limited. And don't even get me started on capture cards. The rich kid down the block can afford it because his parents buy it for him; my parents don't, and the reason for that could extend as far back as the lessons my grandmother learned when she had to work her way to the top of the Georgia Pacific packaging plant where she made her living.

False (as stated in a sibling comment)

> because race is always included in the job application

I have not once ever been asked my race. Perhaps because they'll be able to tell at the interview? But it's not "always included"

> and always under the same header as questions for, say, disabled or veteran status.

I've only ever been asked about disabled or veteran status after employment.

You're right, it's not just on some tech company to fix societal racism.

What I don't get is why people are always so goddamn defensive of companies and their hiring practices. "The problem lies elsewhere, don't blame the company!!"

I mean, jesus, the status quo does not need any defense. It's already winning by default.

It's because we've been in roles in companies like these, dealt with diversity and hiring policies that seemed ineffective, counter-intuitive, and bureaucratic, yet there still always seems to be this cloud over us that assumes we're all secretly just racist.

It feels like we already bend over backwards to try to hire diverse candidates and comply with policies that suggest / require that. I'm sure Google, Oracle, and Palantir certainly have them. Yet these lawsuits have these big bold headlines basically implying the companies' policies are racist based on (if you think other factors are much bigger causes) unreasonable assessments. When we see it happen to them, we know it can happen to us, and it's easy to get defensive.

Everyone is carrying around unconscious biases in them. It's built into being human, so bullshit if you're about to say you're somehow immune.

We're also all biased to think the status quo is the way things ought to be, so when we see a company that's mostly white folks hiring a few more minorities, suddenly MINORITIES ARE EVERYWHERE.

Look, the problem isn't that you or I have unconscious biases. That's normal. That's human.

The problem is that we insist we don't, we're doing everything right already, and there's nothing wrong. That's where the problem is. That's how this shitty status quo that has effectively locked minorities into a second-class life gets perpetuated.

> Everyone is carrying around unconscious biases in them. It's built into being human, so bullshit if you're about to say you're somehow immune.

> Look, the problem isn't that you or I have unconscious biases. That's normal. That's human.

Agreed, and I don't think I am (or anyone else is) immune.

> The problem is that we insist we don't, we're doing everything right already, and there's nothing wrong. That's where the problem is. That's how this shitty status quo that has effectively locked minorities into a second-class life gets perpetuated.

I'm not insisting we don't. My point is that it's easy to get defensive when it's implied that you're racist over and over again regardless of the truthfulness.

It's not even good for the people allegedly being discriminated against. When focus and resources are put on the wrong area (e.g. tech company employee racial proportions), it just frustrates those of us in the industry and ignores the actual reasons for the issue (mostly cultural). We could be spending that money and resources toward getting girls into tech at a young age, or getting more computers into inner-city schools. Something that might actually affect the hiring pool.

But we don't have that discussion because the lawsuits imply the problem is with tech companies. Whether it is or not isn't even a discussion because it appears to be rampant if you've never been in a hiring role in the tech industry. If you have, you know what the hiring pool looks like, and you know you (and other companies) are being held to an unreachable standard if you're expected to align with racial proportions that don't apply to tech.

Because the problem actually does lie elsewhere. Being a corporation is not evidence of guilt.

Maybe my defensiveness comes from the fact that I'm in a hiring position in one of these big companies, and I'm fully accustomed to how hard it is to find candidates outside the typical racial and gender mix you tend to see in tech.

Not that it isn't worth it to try, but I just think we should be careful about placing too much blame in any one place... because it's so easy to refute (since it's not 100% the company or hiring manager's fault) and then real subtleties can be lost in the discussion.

I guess because as people who are likely to be subject to those hiring practices, they like them as they currently are.

This is a weak assumption to base the rest of your chain on. It falsely posits that the company isn't in control of who seeks employment there. In reality, the company controls where and how it advertises job openings and how it markets itself towards potential employees. When a startup advertises a hackathon with incentives of "hot women to serve you beverages", they can't claim to be helpless victims of an applicant pool devoid of female engineers. And while most examples of encouraging or discouraging certain demographics aren't as blatant as this egregious-and-yet-actually-happened example, there are plenty of subtler but very strong ways companies discourage women and minorities from applying.

There is no polite way to put it, but I would be surprised if among black applicants having a "black" name did not predict worse actual performance than having a "white" name. The same goes for white applicants with "white trash" names. If there are Asian equivalents, same for them.

I mean honestly imagine a resume that says: graduated from Yale 2011 with a BS in Computer Science. Worked for Qualcomm for 2 years before taking a job as a PM at Google. Currently looking for a new job to move back to the east coast to be nearer to their family.

And you're telling me you can predict this person's future job performance based on whether their last name is Park, Lewis, or Johnson?

So, even with equality of opportunity, there can be gross disparity of outcome over time.

The pursuit of happiness is still the best policy, though.

For instance, if we play the game 1000 times, heads might come up 505 times and tails might come up 495 times. Over time, the difference between the number of times tails comes up and head comes up will go to 0.

Therefore, over time, we'll both stay at $1 million.

That doesn't preclude arbitrarily-large variances in between that could add up to a Head/Tail difference > 10^6.

But we don't have equality of education, equality of upbringing, etc. so it's natural that given the equality of opportunity we get unequal results.

There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this.

You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players.

You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice.

Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.

The NBA is much smaller than entire industries: there are more CEOs than NBA players.

He's saying that within the Black community, there are fewer people who (for whatever reason) have the skills necessary to be a CRUD developer.

Reasons may include, but are not limited to:

- poverty and access to education

- cultural factors pertaining to the value of higher education

- cultural factors pertaining to the types of jobs that are valued (e.g.: perhaps Blacks take jobs that confer a certain status or that are seen as directly giving back to the community)

If this is true -- and I personally find it plausible -- then we would indeed expect blacks to be under-represented in software design.

tl;dr: Perhaps the bias in hiring is a reflection of a bias in competence. Perhaps Blacks are, on the whole, poorer candidates? If that's true, then the correct approach is to focus on education rather than punishing employers.

Whether it was intended or not, OP was dog-whistling the genetics argument, which I do not buy.

Again, no it wasn't, and even if it were it does not change the veracity of my (more nuanced) rendition.

For what it's worth - I do not disagree with your argument, but I do not think it adequately explains the situation.

OT: it's somewhat surreal for me to experience HN going all out for the status quo (regardless of subject). I just wanted to get that off my chest - carry on.

Discriminatory hiring practices are but one of many symptoms of the disease.

Is the social problem that the discriminated are pushed to 'over achieve' while the rest have no expectations placed on them and are more likely to fall into whatever work is available? I think this definitely holds true for the tech profession where for many of us the jobs appeared as extension to hobbies, not something we actually sat down to plan to do.

If we were pressured to go to school and get a good, well respected, job above all else – which I think we can say certain segments of the population are – the path into tech would have been far less obvious. Especially when you go back several years ago, before tech was 'cool', but even now doctor or lawyer sounds better than programmer.

Unfortunately, in our political climate one side of this debate has people who can say, "it seems like" and that's it. "It seems like" [...] 'we have a huge problem of sexism and racism' and if you argue against that you're this evil monster, as you described:

>most people [don't] even give a shit about equality of opportunity, even those who pay lip service to it. I think most people don't want to be challenged on anything that makes them the slightest bit uncomfortable (like having unconscious biases or structural racism pointed out).

The fact is we already have things like state-sponsored racist entrance policies to our most prestigious educational programs. In law school, it can be several standard deviations worth of LSAT points-- that is a VERY big deal. Even pointing this out, though, means someone is going to flip this on its head and misconstrue it, calling me the evil monster you described.

As I said in another comment, you're never going to see equality of outcome. The NBA will never be dominated by people of Asian descent. Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs. Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men. Men will always have more statistical outliers existing in the "fat tails" of male distributions relative to distributions of women. People are different. It doesn't mean better, or worse. For example, I'm not that exceptionally good at maths, but my friend is -- he's not any better of a person than I, though, and no sane person would make that argument. There's nothing wrong with being different. Demanding that everyone be the same will end up with us in Harrison Bergeron's world, and in that long-run scenario everyone ends up losing except those who take joy in ruling over others.

I believe it important to ensure everyone has equal outcome with respect to human rights, civil rights, and human dignity. There is no good reason why we cannot provide everyone with these. I believe that's where attention should be focused, and we're getting off track by pretending everyone is the same and demanding that the only reason for anything else is that the NBA is racist against Asians! (or coding companies are racist/sexists against whomever it is that doesn't have coding jobs).

http://www.warrensiurek.com/blog/2015/04/5-women-claim-gende...

>The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a claim on behalf of five women against an oil drilling company in another state. According to the complaint, the women applied for jobs to work as floor hands on the oil rigs, but they were turned down. The women allegedly all had the proper qualifications to be able to perform the functions of the job.

>The women were allegedly told that females were not hired on the rig because it was populated by all men and that women would not fit into the company's "man camp" mentality. The women also claim they were turned down because they were too attractive. If they were hired, they were purportedly told they would be a distraction to the men, who would be unable to get their work done.

It's clear that institutional biases and societal biases exist, and that some of these biases may act as steering currents for certain people to go into certain careers. However, there always will be some cases of people who like to "steer against the current" and work in a field that's outside the society-traditional bias in one way or another (gender or otherwise).

A good goal, I think, is to ensure that merit is the chief qualification for employment. Statements such as (paraphrasing) "oil rigs are a man's club" and "pretty women would be a distraction" is way too sweeping -- lazy group collective thinking at its most absolute, playing on stereotypes of both women and men. Humans have a wide range of abilities and behaviors and it doesn't always divide neatly in binary form.

From a personal standpoint, I would call this biased group-think sort of hiring practices as far from optimal. If someone can do the job well, they should do it if they are good at it. I do know someone, for instance, who's a female welder. Apparently, only 5% of welders are women. Well, she's one of them and from all indications she's good at it. Luckily, the place she works at doesn't have a "welding is a MAN's job" sort of attitude.

(Note that this bias can also apply in reverse. Think of the current societal bias with men teaching elementary school, for instance.)

Now, whether or not government enforced action (eg, to what degree, and what tools, governments should use to challenge the bias) is a good thing or not, I think that's more of an open question. The truth is, in some cases, some people hold onto stereotype so heavily, that they will literally threaten people who challenge this "norm" with harassment and violence. Clearly in this sort of case, the government should be involved.

However, for something like standard hiring practices, I'm a little fuzzy as to how much government should dictate anti-discrimination policy, if any. I wouldn't mind seeing more data in this regard; at this point, I don't know how effective various tools have been at eliminating lazy hiring groupthink, or whether they aren't terribly effective at anything but increasing resentment.

I agree with you

>It's clear that institutional biases and societal biases exist, and that some of these biases may act as steering currents for certain people to go into certain careers.

We agree on that, too

>If someone can do the job well, they should do it if they are good at it. I do know someone, for instance, who's a female welder. Apparently, only 5% of welders are women. Well, she's one of them and from all indications she's good at it. Luckily, the place she works at doesn't have a "welding is a MAN's job" sort of attitude.

That's good. I would never want to work somewhere that had an attitude that "this is a man's job, only men can do it"

>Now, whether or not government enforced action (eg, to what degree, and what tools, governments should use to challenge the bias) is a good thing or not, I think that's more of an open question.

I agree with you there as well. Even though I wouldn't want to work for a company that refused to hire women due to some illogical bigotry, I don't think it's government's role to force results on to who companies can hire.

Look, we agree on almost everything, but I think you and others are missing my point because this is an emotionally sensitive topic for some people, and one that the media has also blown out of proportion. The idea that there are no differences between people is totally fraudulent. When are we going to sue the NBA for discriminating against Asians? What's the point if we don't? There are huge differences even between men and women. Serena and Venus Williams claimed they could beat any man in Tennis, and so they ended up playing a 203'rd ranked player "after he had a case of beer and a smoke," and neither could barely score a single point against him. There are differences between people and that's the way it is.

If any of these people arguing against this actually cared about human rights or civil liberties they'd have said so by now. What they really care about are their feelings. That's what this is about - that, and lawyers cashing in on new diversity laws.

Yeah, and girls prefer pink... How much of this is because of how women are brought up, believing that these are mens jobs, rather than by nature? Women do plenty of physically demanding jobs, just not generally these stereotypical "mens" jobs.

Hell, if you look at poorer countries, you see women doing all kinds of physically demanding stuff like carrying water for miles. Its not that they can't or won't do them when they have to, its that when they have a choice that they don't and I believe that's because from a young age and in media these things are portrayed as very un-womanly.

This means that even if preference for pink was purely by nurture (which I also consider unlikely), the data on toy preference strongly suggests that preference for certain jobs or activities is not purely nurture, and has at least some nature aspect.

Now, it is difficult to quantify how much exactly is the split between nature and nurture, one of the reasons being the fact that lots of what you would call nurture would never take place if a nature didn't provide people with preferences in the first place. However, blaming everything on "upbringing, culture and media" is certainly incongruent with reality.

>“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

― George Orwell, 1984

If people were really so equal, the NBA should be sued by Asians. There have been 2 (2!) women in history who have been able to dunk a basketball in a NCAA game. I could dunk a basketball in high school. Give me a break, the whole thing is ridiculously fraudulent. I would not want to work somewhere that had some bigoted, awful idea and attitude that a 'woman can not do a man's job,' I would never want to work somewhere like that -- but that's not the role of government to decide. We need people in government who are going to fight for civil liberties and human rights, people who will progress humanity off this planet and into the stars. People who will fight against corruption. Instead we get people who want to take advantage of people's feelings for their own profit or security.

Then why developers are mostly men? And why there is more and more female football/soccer players?

It might be harder for females to get muscles, compared to men but it does not mean they do not want to do and can do physically demanding jobs.

Modern mining is done primarily by machines which are tended to by mechanics. Ever wonder why there are so few mining jobs these days? That would be automation improving the efficiency and taking away manual jobs.

Speaking of which, truck drivers... will be obsolete soon. Even so, driving is not a task that inherently favors upper body strength.

OK, so the physical argument holds no water. What's left? Prejudice and social expectations -- which is to, say a prevalent institutional bias.

Besides, by focusing 100% on this physical aspect you're nearly just attack a straw man argument and ignoring the substance of everything else. Not every person is exactly the same and it doesn't matter. Get over it.

Work under a hot engine bay for 8 hours: no, but I've worked outdoors carrying construction material during heat waves, and I've worked indoors in cold data centers.

Holding my hands over my head until pain develops: yup. I don't recommend it to anyone.

Used an angle grinder: no. I have used lots of other power tools. Should you trust me with one? Not until I'm trained on it.

Lifted 300lb pieces of granite: no. We have these things called wheels, you might have heard of them? Using wheels and levers and ropes and pulleys, I have moved much heavier things. I recommend using appropriate tools. Hoists? Cranes? Block-and-tackle?

"Women will never be asking for equal "opportunity" working jobs in the north sea on offshore oil rigs."

QED

I will not be engaging you further.

OK, so convince me you're right. Ignoring your condescending, short-termpered, dismissive remark based on attacking some minutiae in what I said (that we can both agree doesn't change anything), we now have an example of one very American, money-making lawsuit, representing 5 people. Alright, so what substantial movement can you source to convince me that you are right that women are seeking equal representation working on oil rigs in the north sea? What about auto mechanics? Plubming? There's many entrepreneurial businesses such as those that require no hiring decision. Why are women so underrepresented there? The work is much less physically demanding or as dangerous as working on off shore oil rigs.

But if they win their case and help to integrate oil rigs, it seems the next 5 women to seek a job on an oil rig will be easier to find. Fields that are not diverse are less attractive to diversity candidates, but that doesn't mean that diversity candidates wouldn't be interested in working in a more integrated environment.

The joke is that everybody does that. Most people are just totally blind to their own side's issues.

Now watch as people begin commenting to say that their side isn't like that..,

Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.

Every single person should be given every opportunity as every other, but we shouldn't continue this state-forced results based on people's personal politics about how they believe the world works.

Why do we have issues with providing everyone with healthcare, clean water, and safety... We're bombing seven countries, funding jihadists in Syria, creating a surveillance police state. Some US cities have murder rates higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East. We can't provide everyone with housing, and we can't successfully protect our environment. Give me a break. This issue is not about human welfare, dignity or equality. This is about people's personal politics and lawyers finding a way to cash in on laws that may have been well intentioned but since gone out of control.

The social ladder and ranking is also attached to the same incentives. A mans ranking is (mostly) based on his ability to support a family. A womans ranking is (mostly) based on her ability to raise a family. As sad and depressing that is, the message it sends on a cultural level is that no one wants to be near a poor male or infertile female. On the flip side, women are not punished by society for not focusing on maximizing earning potentials, and men aren't punished by society for not focusing self care and longer lifespans.

Going even darker when looking at incentives for earning and lifespans, we can look at the link between low income for men and suicide. About a factor of about 1000% according to some studies when comparing high vs low income. Suicide is also the most common cause of death for men at ages 15-50. The negative impact from unemployment (and low income jobs) effects men more, and a natural conclusion would be that the incentives to avoid it is thus stronger.

So yeah, sure, if you look at the scenario in simple isolation, then you could argue that there is a "greater opposing force".

Does the CEO have the highest IQ in the company? Is the president the most intelligent person in the country?

Palantir got sued for hiring Asians at a ratio of 20%. 4 out of 21 were Asians, this was too low given the size of the applicant pool.

What if they were actually the better candidates?

Bias in hiring may well reflect bias in talent.

If you incentivize sob stories about women in tech, you get sob stories about women in tech.