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.
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.