An average white, male employee might accept that their mid-level, unfulfilling but acceptable cubicle at eBay is as good as they're going to get and stay for years. An otherwise identical minority candidate will be getting 10 recruiter messages a day for better opportunities.
Systemic discrimination against Black Americans both historically and today is well documented and understood. I could have written a long preamble about the many elements of society that factor into racial disparities, but I assumed I could skip that for brevity since everyone on HN is already well aware.
You need to look at this data with an intersectional perspective. An overly generalized label of just "Black" as an identifier does little to help and may actively mislead in certain situations. Considering multiple attributes- race, educational attainment, location, industry, job function, seniority, etc is critical because the intersection of these may cause dramatically different experiences.
Consider this example to maybe make it clear. Imagine a gay man pursuing a career as a Broadway dancer versus a gay man pursuing a career as an elementary school teacher in Alabama. Will being gay have the same risks and challenges for each man? Is it fair or useful to try to group their experiences into one "score" for if that attribute is an advantage or disadvantage?
Compare against Coca Cola's professionals:
> 5.82% - Black or African American Male
> 13.66% - Black or African American Female
> This industry is absolutely brutal if you are not white or asian, and that's seemingly just how it's gonna be.
I didn't start out in tech, and I feel like I was dropped on Mars. The demographics are so wildly skewed, and there are so many people who believe that the skew is right and just. I hate it.
Even if you feed more people into one end of the woodchipper, very few will make it out the other end intact.
The same nonsense about aptitudes, interests, whatever was thrown at women about careers in medicine. Eventually, the tech industry will even out too, because today's tech demographics are not the result of some unchangeable destiny. I just wish it would happen in my lifetime.
Here on HN we talk about CS more… because we’re on a CS discussing site, and CS generally pays better than nursing, and women have historically faced more discrimination across society.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also care about male underrepresentation in nursing, it’s just less relevant here.
Look no further than a sibling comment from sjsbdkj: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31090862
> We receive 1 woman candidate application per 20 male on average.
Unsurprising, given the first part of your answer. If a company gaslights women when they say that they face hostility, why would women want to work there?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This isn't a formal debate. Nobody owes anybody else a response, and choosing not to reply to baiting posts, opting out of poisonous back-and-forth, is not only not ceding the argument, it's upholding the spirit of the HN guidelines.
If you actually want to engage, try to show that you're actually listening to the person you're engaging with and not throwing rocks at some straw man caricature of them. A good exercise would be to couch your post in terms that your interlocutor might agree with.
Others have addressed other aspects of the disparity, but I'll chime in here and respond to this common misdirection with the reminder that everyone that everyone who works at a tech company does not have or need a computer science degree.
The thing about a tech company is that it's still a company with many of the same corporate functions as a railroad or oil company: finance/accounting, sales, marketing, human resources, facilities management, legal, etc. While it's fine for your head of HR to have a CS degree, it's definitely not the main criteria for the job. I don't have current numbers for FAANG, but would be somewhat surprised if more than ~40% of the headcount of any big tech company comprises roles that require or use a CS degree.
Incidentally: there was a robust discussion on this site today about the merits of whether a degree was even necessary, and HN commenters posted to indicate that not having a degree has not been an impediment to them working in the industry. I think having a CS degree is perhaps not the gating factor here. (Yes, I have a CS degree.)
Google has sushi chefs on staff, and yet it's still a misconception (misdirection?) that aggregate corporate numbers are skewed because of a dearth of Hispanic/Black/women CS grads. Whether that is actually the case or not, we can say for certain that tech does a terrible job at hitting their diversity in non-engineering roles, areas where Coke/AT&T/Accenture are not having a similar problem.
I guess I do wonder what, if anything, it has done to my view of the world to have virtually no professional interactions with women for nearly 20 years. The other thing is even when I've had a woman or two women on my team, all but one time it has been in a management role. I've only had one woman teammate ever in a technical role.
Actually, the BLS has detailed tables on this by occupation. Scroll down to construction jobs and women are virtually non-existent: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm. Most of them are not even annotated, with cement masons being 0%. My dad was a plumber, so apparently neither of us ever worked with women.
I suspect one thing they did was avoid making the assumption that hiring candidates from marginalized communities compromises quality.
Second, it's not like non-FAANG tech companies, despite lower standards for engineering positions, have higher numbers in the Black, Hispanic, or female demographics.
Third, if you look at the data for Coca Cola's "Exec/Sr Officials & Managers" where the "standards" without question are comparable to those at tech companies, the percentages aren't as high but they're still way better than you see in tech leadership:
> 3.37% - Black or African American Male
> 4.31% - Black or African American Female
This is an interesting way to contrast Coca-Cola with FAANG, of which the majority are routinely under antitrust scrutiny. Put another way: does Coca-Cola (market share: 43%) sell itself any more than Google (market share: 92%)?
(Aside from which: most tech companies are probably on the order of 60% non-engineers. The "engineer" part is a common bit of misdirection to elide the presence of the majority of FAANG employees, who are not engineers. People who can successfully sell plain water can probably sell other things too.)
>"nothing brutal about it. whats the percentage of asian females working as auto mechanics in the usa? if low, why is that?"
Because being an auto mechanic is a brutal physical job that destroys your body and pays a barely liveable wage. Something no one really wants to do regardless of gender or race. However, being a computer programmer is one of the best jobs on earth. We are paid like lawyers and coddled like children to write text files in our underwear. Everyone across the socioeconomic spectrum wants what we have. So why do only asians and whites get it?
To you, maybe. I’m going to surprise you, but just because you find X one of the best things in life and Y is worse than X to you – it doesn’t mean that X is universally better than Y for everyone.
> We are paid like lawyers and coddled like children to write text files in our underwear.
Because that’s what software engineering is. Uhuh.
> Everyone across the socioeconomic spectrum wants what we have.
And you found that where? On ad websites for every generic bootcamp?
There is less asian females doing manual labour because they can get better jobs.
This industry is absolutely brutal if you are not white or asian, and that's seemingly just how it's gonna be.