"Regardless of where the failure is there is clearly something about the software engineering industry and the pipeline leading to it that is biased against minorities"
How can you say that when East and South Asians are so overrepresented?
Re:Apple releases diversity numbers
by chimeracoder on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @03:30PM
(#8169673)
Three things:
1. You are confusing P(A|B) with P(B|A).
2. Even if it were true, a lack of bias against a few minority groups would not invalidate the statement that there is bias against other minority groups.
3. You are conflating a very wide and disparate set of ethnic groups in a way that is very misleading (and mathematically similar to Gerrymandering[0]). If we were to break those very broad categories further, we would see that many groups that qualify as "East and South Asian" are still themselves under-represented.
1. How so?
2. True, but the comment I responded to made a different claim.
3. is irrelevant. There are always under-represented groups depending on how you look at the data, but if you claim general bias against minorities when some minorities are doing very well, you have some explaining to do.
Regardless of where the failure is there is clearly something about the software engineering industry and the pipeline leading to it that is biased against minorities and women, which implies we are failing to optimally place the most talented (or potentially talented) people in the right positions assuming talent if evenly distributed among various ethnicities and sexes). Which means our economy is not as productive as it could be and we're missing out on the increased opportunity for possible break throughs in software development and other related fields with similar bias.
It's clearly a problem. It may not be directly the fault of say Apple or Google but it is naive to see numbers like that and not be concerned.