Plus, the demographic of people graduating with CS/engineering degrees should be really close to your hired demographic, if there’s no bias. These tech companies don’t control the output of those universities, which do have a bias. That bias will change slowly, as well.
Tech companies have a bias as to what universities they hire from, which when coupled with people recommending others they know, results in a reinforcing policy.
I am aware of people and execs who would preferentially choose Ivys and the big private schools, sometimes even specific schools (e.g. Stanford grads). Given the high end schools have also historically been super racist (e.g. explicitly banning black people entirely until that was ruled absolutely illegal), and still maintain that racism after that through a bunch of subtle mechanisms - for a number it's still seemingly deliberate.
It should be fairly clear how in that environment it is necessary to explicitly pay attention to who and how you're hiring in order to avoid simply reinforcing and repeating existing biases.
Very good point.
Re:Apple WWDC20
by aspenmayer on Friday June 12, 2020 @10:08PM
(#23506100)
If the industry doesn’t produce the desired diversity, Apple could always create its own in-house training program. I think that’s a great idea, actually, as long as it’s open to all prospective applicants equally, ideally for no charge to the learner. Even better would be to open it to the public, gratis.
The first is obviously kind of meaningless - presenters aren't standard up and announcing their orientation at the beginning of each session.
But if you actually do watch there are numerous PoC and woman in the sessions.
Is it a flawless representation of the real world? no, while apple may have better stats than other tech companies, that's still a super low bar.
Even once people accept that there is a problem, meaningfully changing the diversity of a large company takes time because you the large existing set of employees will swamp the overall company stats for many years.