Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

https://github.com/blog/2176-diversity-and-inclusion-at-github

by ahhrrr • 10 years ago

104 222 10 years ago

"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable."

Why is it unacceptable? Just by virtue of the number of different kinds of people -- race, gender, etc there's no way to have 'one of each' for every position for maximum diversity. This sort of thing is so creepy because it treats people like collectible figures ("Oh yeah? Well I added a black transgendered person to our team today! I have way more diversity points than you!") instead of actual people you judge on their merits. How is a white person supposed to feel about applying to Github management position after reading "Its unacceptable we don't have a black manager"?

I'm not white and I don't want to be treated as some statistic you can show off on your diversity report card. Thats really demeaning and insulting.

cjbprime3• 10 years ago

Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US, indicating a probable bias in their hiring, retention or promotion pipelines that they're announcing they find concerning.

You're making it about individuals, not GitHub. They're comparing statistics.

atom-morgan2• 10 years ago

We can determine bias simply by comparing one company's numbers to national trends?

Pyxl101• 10 years ago

Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US

Where's the data for this? Often people talk about these things as assumptions, but I've never seen credible data. Can you share a source?

Furthermore, even the comparison that you mentioned is not accurate. It should start from a funnel like: "the number of qualified black applicants to GitHub with CS degrees", or something along those lines. GitHub can't hire people that don't apply.

prodigal_erik• 10 years ago

Was that percentage equally high in 1990? Fresh grads are not qualified for management.

pedrorijo91• 10 years ago

I kinda have the same thinking. Saying that "we have no Black/African-American (...)" seems way more racist that don't saying anything at all. People should get hired according their skills, not race/gender/etc. If a company is focused in hiring non-white males, aren't white males in disadvantage on recruitment processes?

antimatter• 10 years ago

Agreed. These types of reports make it seem like Github cares only about skin color which to me is racist.

mcphage• 10 years ago

People should get hired according their skills, not race/gender/etc.

And what do you do when you find out that you're not actually hiring people according to their skills? Like, when that's what you're trying to do—and believe that you're doing—but the data reveals the opposite?

drhayes93• 10 years ago

I think not talking about race is more damaging than talking about race in many contexts. I also think that a decrease in institutional privilege (white male, in this case) is not discriminatory.

I also don't think "quotas" are a good solution, e.g., "Hire one more Mexican woman and we're good!" But acknowledging some statistical realities and taking a close look at what got you there isn't a bad thing.

jshevek5• 10 years ago

Yes, of course github necessarily has had a racist hiring bias against white males these past two years. It is for a good cause.

pron3• 10 years ago

I think that the reason you find this objectionable is because you misunderstand the goal and the premises, and therefore the statement.

It is not, "universally, we need one of each", but (goal:) "we must ensure no group is marginalized" + (premise:) "blacks are marginalized" = (conclusion:) "we must reduce the marginalization of blacks" = (statement:) "it is unacceptable that there are no blacks"

In general, most prescriptive feminist and anti-racist notions are not founded an a manufactured set of axioms for a hypothetical society, but with premises based on empirical observations of our real society, and so are based on the assumption that there exist marginalized groups, and we know which groups they are (or some of them, at least). You can think of it as statements not prescribing how a new society must be built, but how our existing society must be fixed. I.e., you are given a delta value, not an absolute one.

You may argue with either the goal (a value statement) or the premise (a factual statement), but right now you're arguing with the wrong ones.

ajhurliman2• 10 years ago

This strikes me as centralized planning for jobs. It seems like the best way to go about this is focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake. Making assumptions about the outcome of those hiring decisions independent of the actual applicants seems neither fair nor good for business.

djtriptych5• 10 years ago

Creepier than a few centuries of slavery? Creepier than a few centuries of anti-black, anti-woman laws at every level of government? Creepier than nearly universal, measurable, provable anti-black, anti-woman implicit bias today?

Sure guy.

twunacceptable2• 10 years ago

Discriminating by sex and race is what caused those issues in the first place.

tetrep• 10 years ago

It's awkward that all these statistics seem to focus on the output of system without any regard to the input. There's a passing comment about "improve recruiting" but there's no details presented as to who is actually applying.

The hiring process/system is very complicated an difficult to reason about in an objective manner, mostly because it's humans dealing with humans, compounding our human-y traits, non-objectiveness being a hallmark.

I don't see how I'm supposed to take seriously an initiative at attempting to uncover/rectify biases of a system with only the output taken into account. It just seems silly.

davidcelis• 10 years ago

Looks like the link to the actual data[1] was posted and subsequently removed, making it unable to be submitted. Why?

[1] https://diversity.github.com

brandoncordell4• 10 years ago

Weird, it seems like some of their team has been decidedly anti-white.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-a...

Edit: Removed Breitbart link

_toastie• 10 years ago

really? breitbart.com?

brandoncordell4• 10 years ago

Sorry, I grabbed the first link. Are they a poor source (honestly don't know)?

I also found http://www.techinsider.io/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-... and http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/githubs-diversity-is-just-a...

The tweets and images came from Githubbers themselves.

arprocter• 10 years ago

Kind of disappointing how those who attacked the original source have now fallen silent

jbob2000• 10 years ago

I wish so much that I could be picky about my hiring like GitHub. I wish I could have so many qualified candidates applying that I am able to create a diverse team. But I put out job ads and get like 2 qualified responses.

How the hell are they able to find all these candidates such that they can start being picky about who they hire???

Maybe Toronto just sucks for tech talent... Argh...

chickenfries2• 10 years ago

Hiring remotely seems to be one thing they have over you.

MustardTiger5• 10 years ago

But I put out job ads and get like 2 qualified responses.

And 200 completely unqualified ones. It is crazy how many people apply for jobs they have absolutely no qualifications for.

sotojuan2• 10 years ago

Anyone can apply to a programming job—it's not like you need formal education like lawyers or doctors.

baudehlo• 10 years ago

Tech talent is tight in Toronto. There are too many jobs and not enough talent. Job postings suck at attracting people here. You literally have to crawl through LinkedIn to find people. Stack overflow careers is actually pretty decent though. But a lot of small companies aren't willing to pay for it.

Your best bet here? Frankly a recruiter if you're willing to pay them. They are still the gold standard for finding good tech talent in Toronto.

I wish we could offer our product for developers, but we are very focussed on sales recruiting right now. Maybe in a year or so.

guessmyname• 10 years ago

This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All".

Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people. You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company? Or that 10% are black women? Or that 35% of women are in a leadership role? Like who cares? Are their roles assigned based on their gender and/or skin color?

Jesus, even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things. Let people build their career based on how they work and not their ethnicity nor gender, otherwise you will be incentivizing more racism and more sexism.

jacalata2• 10 years ago

If you want to look for examples closer to home, try reading about the Mapucho.

superpatosainz3• 10 years ago

Mapuches you mean?

Well, living in Chile, I've learnt that there's no racism here BUT:

-There's classism, a lot. Both from the lower classes to the upper and vice versa. There's also a lot of anger left from the various dictatorships that ruled in the eighties.

-In some countries, here included, there's also big prejudice against native cultures like the Mapuches. "They're all lazy drunkards".

These problems mostly stem from colonial times, where the Spanish didn't respect native culture and since the Europeans were seen as the "civilized, more advanced people", the aristocrats here did everything to imitate their lifestyle.

See also: mestizaje.

chickenfries2• 10 years ago

There are literally countries that have laws mandating gender representation in government. Since you don't seem invested in the topic, why not assume that GitHub has benefitted in the way that they say they have in this post?

zyxley2• 10 years ago

The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to please other people.

It's not "just to please other people"; it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country.

Studies have shown[1] that, for example, people with "White-sounding" names get more responses from job applications than people with "Black-sounding" names, even when the resumes sent in are identical.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...

said2• 10 years ago

Given the widespread use of pro-black affirmative-action (practiced by GitHub, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft; nearly every major university; many government contractors; and probably the majority of F500 companies), isn't it only logical to view black resumes with more suspicion? Objectively, blacks need to display lower competency in relevant skills to achieve identical resumes as whites.

On a side note, affirmative action policies ultimately help middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites. The upper-class whites who push for affirmative action are not affected by it, and neither are their children.

Helping middle-class blacks at the expense of lower-class whites is a prime example of virtue signaling gone awry.

jsmthrowaway• 10 years ago

It's not "just to please other people"; it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country.

Your counterpoint to that quote can itself be reduced to "just to please other people," for what it's worth; it just slightly changes who the "people" are and what "pleasing" means, if you really think about it. Perhaps you and GP don't entirely disagree, depending on how one interprets things.

Important: I am not stating an opinion on this because I know better in these threads. That is an merely an observation on the observation.

lr4444lr3• 10 years ago

it's to attempt to counteract the institutionalized discrimination against minorities that exists throughout the country.

No. The reason companies hire in this way is to defend against discrimination lawsuits. The Supreme Court already decided against the principle you're describing in the ruling of the Bakke case.

cb186• 10 years ago

"Institutional racism,"(has it undergone re-branding as "institutionalized discrimination"?) is this vague, boogey-man term used as an explanation of last resort to explain the "achievement gap," among other divergences between the races.

The thing is, there is tenuous evidence at best for "institutional racism," and in nowhere near the quantity that would be needed to account for all of its supposed effects. Indeed to the contrary we've had decades of policies seeking parity between between certain segments of society on various measures, and yet the gaps remain virtually unchanged.

There are other exceedingly more plausible explanations for the "achievement gap" and the other divergences. But people in certain segments of polite society have a nasty habit of trying to ruin the lives of anyone who so much as mutters these other explanations.

For the "institutional racism" proponents...

Has anyone attempted to explain why all this "institutional racism" seems to be working to such great benefit for north-east Asians in the US, who consistently rank above the supposed "evil white oppressors" in various socio-economic metrics?

Or why we see common patterns of achievement and behavior between races across societies with wildly different institutional histories?

walshemj• 10 years ago

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone - South Americas treatment of the aboriginal inhabitants is nothing to write home about.

djtriptych5• 10 years ago

It's a privileged viewpoint to even suggest there is zero bias in extant hiring practices.

You think that's what we would find if we measured? We can test for this you know.

MustardTiger5• 10 years ago

It's a privileged viewpoint

That is a meaningless way to try to dismiss someone's opinion.

vertex-four• 10 years ago

You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

So the issue is: most companies are somewhat discriminatory by default. Left to their own devices, they'll hire people who are similar to the existing group. If you have a company made up of white men, you're going to wind up hiring more white men.

And the worst bit - when they do eventually hire someone different, they're going to keep all the little bits of culture which, while they worked as long as you all had much the same background, are harmful and distressing to people coming from other backgrounds.[0] After all, if it's one person complaining, and everyone else is OK with it, it must be that one person's fault, right?

The result of this is that once a member of a minority sees that a company is made up primarily of white men, well, it's probably not for them.

Now, at some point between anti-discrimination laws being written and now, some people decided this is not a particularly good state to be in, and a whole bunch of people spent a whole lot of effort trying to persuade society that this isn't a good thing. And hence, eventually we get to a situation where HR paper pushers and high-level managers are explicitly thinking about people's race, gender, and so on and so forth while hiring - although the law says that you have to avoid doing so.

The issue is that this really isn't what we want people to be doing, but as long as nobody's caught doing it, the law and society incentivises it. It's a better position than the one we were in - you can actually get employed in the sort of company I described above if you don't come from the same background, and you can complain if people misbehave in an egregious manner - but it's still not good enough.

What we want is for companies to signal that they're open to changing their culture to fit the needs of their employees - which of course is flipping the power dynamic on its head, but there you have it. We need companies to signal that when their employees raise an issue with how the company works on a social level, they'll actually be listened to. And then we need companies to actually follow through with that.

Until then, we'll have discrimination in hiring and in the workplace.

[0] I've worked for a company which regularly had the majority of its employees take clients out to strip clubs, and had a porn-sharing Friday, and this was a normal and expected part of business. And that's the really blatantly obvious things. We had one female employee who was not an office manager - and my boss specifically mentioned to me that she was tough as nails to be in our industry.

geofft3• 10 years ago

The United States has a unique history with race relations, and we still haven't figured this stuff out. I think part of it is geopolitical, and related to the histories of various ethnic groups in America, which is very different from the histories both in Europe and in South America. If it were in fact the case that nobody cared what color your skin was in America, nobody would care about consciously ending that caring, either.

Remember that Europe and I think South America managed to relatively-peacefully get rid of slavery in the early- to mid-1800s (in those countries that had slavery at all). The US had an extremely fractious war about it, because half the country's economy did not work unless you exploited people's lives for free, and that part of the country morally justified it to themselves by saying that some races were more like animals than humans.

zjaffee• 10 years ago

Companies want to be in a possition where if a talented candidate is african american, female, gay, transgender, ect. that they wouldn't turn down the offer simply because they didn't feel comfortable working there/there is another company that is more diverse that makes this kind of person more comfortable there.

The talent war is so competitive that companies are doing everything they can to keep up, including diversity blog posts.

reader50006• 10 years ago

But the flip side of that is that talent not in the coddled identity class of the day will feel that they should find companies with actual important shit to focus on to work for.

nojvek2• 10 years ago

I still find the whole "talent war is so competitive" statement a bit of a hype. Is there any data on this? There are millions of Engineers in the US.

advantark• 10 years ago

I have never heard a good argument explaining how affirmative action is good for a company or society outside of college.

nevir• 10 years ago

It forces a company to try multiple approaches to hiring. E.g. having many criteria for what the company considers a good candidate.

For example, a tech company that requires college degrees for all candidates might want to loosen that, and figure out other signals that indicate strong candidates without a degree.

There's a strong tendency to hire what you know (e.g. people like you, and to interview how you've been interviewed).

Thriptic• 10 years ago

I personally question the legitimacy / usefulness of affirmative action, but the best argument in support of it which I have heard is that people bound their career prospects based on the individuals they observe to be occupying those roles in society. For example, if a person is female and all the software developers they see are male, perhaps they believe that software development is inherently a male job and not for them. This could then lead to a negative feedback loop where females are afraid to make the first step into the industry because no one has done it before them, and the industry misses out on people who could turn out to be very qualified workers. Affirmative seeks to break this loop.

tbrownaw• 10 years ago

It's not good as a general practice. It's probably a sensible imposition against companies that persistently get in relevant legal trouble.

vacri2• 10 years ago

If South Africa hadn't mandated that companies have a certain percentage of blacks in senior positions, then the economic and political power still would have been heavily lopsided towards the white minority after apartheid ended. Things aren't golden and fantastic there now, but it's still more equitable than it would have been without that affirmative action.

whatever_dude• 10 years ago

You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

That is not true.

Racism (and other forms of discrimination) exist in South/Latin America. It's just very well hidden. It does not exist in discourse, but profiling is blatant and in many ways even accepted. I'd argue that it's so culturally entrenched that even discussing it is crazy talk. People just like to assume it's not there, and even minorities seem to assume it's a given that they're mistreated. But it exists in very acute ways.

almostApatriot12• 10 years ago

It's complete BS. Even anti-semitism in South America is through the roof.

"A 2011 poll conducted by the Gino Germani Research Institute of the University of Buenos Aires on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League and Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas showed that a majority of Argentines held anti-semitic sentiments or prejudices. Of the 1,510 Argentines surveyed, 82% agreed with statements "that Jews are preoccupied with making money," 49% said that they "talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust", 68% said that they have "too much power in the business world", and 22% said that the Jews killed Jesus. The majority of people interviewed also expressed belief that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their country of birth"[0]

[0] http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Study-reve...

calibraxis• 10 years ago

even my European co-workers make fun of Americans for these things

Are they not ashamed to ridicule those with some cultural advances? (Laugh about our backwardnesses, not innovations.) Do they also chuckle at those more advanced scientifically, economically and technologically?

Rojava in many ways seems more advanced than cultures I've lived in. Not only do they do they mandate co-leaders at every level of their bottom-up democracy (1 woman & 1 man), but they do this while beating ISIS. If I laughed, the joke would be on me. And these "Europeans" you mention seem doubly backwards as even I am, so they must work twice as hard to catch up to civilization.

Why do they care if there are no "Black/African-American" in their company?

Maybe it's hard to make social media innovations while socially backwards?

tacone• 10 years ago

This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All".

This. It's just ridiculous. Just as racist as negative discrimination.

dragonwriter• 10 years ago

I've known a number of people from various Latin American countries, and am married to one of them, and they've pretty consistently report that racism is a feature of society there, though the particular forms vary. Anti-black racism is apparently significant in many parts of Latin America, as is (though not separate in the same places) anti-indigenous racism.

e40• 10 years ago

Just the other day I read a comment on HN, I think, about how in Mexico there is racial stratification between light and dark-skinned people, and how they even have different ways of speaking. The point was that people can tell immediately which class you are in and act accordingly.

So, yeah, I think this is a (bad) feature of humans everywhere, not just the US.

jshevek5• 10 years ago

This probably plays a role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt

nijiko• 10 years ago

Pretty much. You get tax breaks for it though.

GunboatDiplomat7• 10 years ago

I don't think you do.

danudey• 10 years ago

Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States. For example:

Despite similar rates of drug use, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use,⁴ and black males are often given longer sentences for crimes than their white peers.⁵

[ from https://medium.com/@dan_nott/what-is-mass-incarceration-ff73... ]

Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

So called 'affirmative action' movements and diversity pledges are a direct response to the acknowledgement of our unconscious biases. If you know that you're 20% more likely to judge a candidate as unfit just because of the colour of their skin or the sound of their name, then that means that, over time, you're losing out on a lot of talented candidates.

Likewise, if you're less likely to fairly evaluate a woman's performance or contributions, then you're going to promote talent to positions of leadership or management less often, meaning you're not going to put your best people in those positions.

Lastly, diversity is important. You don't get anywhere by looking at only one viewpoint. Look at the state of American media right now: you have tons of content on Fox News that repeats the same few lines as facts, and they've all convinced themselves that it's true because they hear it everywhere. With that environment, why would anyone consider a different fact? When you're surrounded by people who have the same experiences with you, the same viewpoints as you, the same background as you, the same friends as you, you're never going to learn anything.

It's when we surround ourselves with people different to us that we grow and learn. We start to see things from other points of view, we learn about new experiences that we didn't have growing up. We create new collaborations that build on our different backgrounds to produce something that feels new, and not just a retreading of existing works.

In other words, the reason for forcing diversity is to both counter our own (and others') conscious and subconscious biases, as well as to ensure that you're exposing people to as many new and differing viewpoints as possible (and, in turn, taking those viewpoints seriously), so that you have more resources to build from, which makes for a more robust environment.

towlejunior• 10 years ago

Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States.

Who's throwing bananas at their black soccer players?

vacri2• 10 years ago

Europe doesn't have the sort of ingrained racism that exists in the United States

O_o

There's plenty of ingrained racism in Europe. From constant and persistent jokes about the French in the UK, to the French hamlet called "Death to Jews" that only recently changed it's name, to the consistently poor treatment of Romany people in most places, right up to the ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia in recent memory, there's plenty of ingrained racism in Europe.

yarper• 10 years ago

Likewise, women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

I see this everywhere, and yet no citations (and when asked, I usually get referred to someones blog - not from a respected scientist completely unaffiliated with the feminist movement). Either that or I get linked to 4 or 5 default papers which have little reference to the claim.

People need to accept that bold statements like this are absolutely not excluded from burden of proof - and what's more if you live in the UK (I expect much of Europe) it's time to speak up, it's illegal to pay less based on gender.

The usual problem with this is, that the actual fact is that women earn less than men on average. That's kind of a crazy comparison - software developers earn less on average to CEOs, on average sewage workers earn less than those in hedge funds and so on.

It assumes fairly boldly that women and men operate in equal proportions in every industry (which is false).

In another note, just by writing this I'm opening myself to someone telling me to check my privilege, which is a codified way to tell me as a white male there's some secret sauce I can't possibly know about (so should be quiet on the issue). The deepest irony is that this behaviour is exactly what the movement was designed to disassemble.

almostApatriot12• 10 years ago

Europe has a different type of racism though. There's a reason why the Muslims there become extremists but stuff like that almost never happens in the USA.

paloaltokid5• 10 years ago

Europe has plenty of ingrained racism. I was born there and I can tell you for a fact that racism is alive and well in Europe.

cb186• 10 years ago

Despite similar rates of drug use, black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use

This can be pretty obviously understood as the result of compound charges, of which the drug charge is a minor component.

Bear with me, facts incoming...

Black people, particularly young black males commit crimes at a much higher rate than other groups. In committing these other crimes and then being arrested, a certain percentage of them happen to have a bag of weed in their pocket, which then gets tacked on as an accessory charge.

Before anyone wants to argue about the objective and carefully tabulated crime rates. No, whites don't just get away with more of the petty, street, and violent crime we are discussing, race ratios of victim reports match those of arrests.

women tend to make significantly less money for doing the same work, in the same positions, at the same company, because of (largely) subconscious biases.

No, because of intentionally faulty statistics to calculate such things.

The gender wage gap uses bogus statistics - Christina Hoff Sommers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58arQIr882w

https://www.google.com/search?q=milo+wage+gap

If women are doing the same work as men and accepting significantly lower pay to do so, why aren't companies tripping over themselves in trying to hire all women staffs and significantly reduce costs?

diversity is important.

"Diversity" in the sense it is used in social policy(for some reason only in the west, no one is harping on Japan, or Saudi Arabia, or Angola about diversity) is harmful and destructive to otherwise healthy societies.

We show that ethnic diversity or fractionalization and values diversity are distinct and while the former has a negative effect on innovation, the latter contributes positively. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2015.11...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

Diversity DESTROYS Social Cohesion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTROCGb5qj8

"Diversity is our Strength" ^ watch that

as well as to ensure that you're exposing people to as many new and differing viewpoints as possible (and, in turn, taking those viewpoints seriously)

Actually, historically successful societies have pretty refined heuristics for what to take seriously and it has served them well.

It is absurd to say we should take all viewpoints seriously.

How are you defining 'viewpoint', and 'seriously'?

What does it mean to take seriously the viewpoints common in Islam that --

gay people should be persecuted, to the point of being thrown off buildings, stoned to death, or beheaded?

family members should kill other family members in the name of 'honor'?

murdering non-believers is acceptable?

How seriously do you take these viewpoints?

Were NASA hindered in their mission to get to the moon in the 1960s because it was a bunch of white guys with viewpoints grounded in careful observation, excelling at math and science and a kind of boundary pushing audaciousness that seems quite particular to men of European descent?

paloaltokid5• 10 years ago

You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.

Are you aware that Brazil, the largest South American country, imported more slaves than anyone else? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil

I find it extremely hard to believe that racism does not exist in Latin or South America.

jayroh• 10 years ago

I'm an American born to a Brazilian father and American mother and I can confirm that racism is more than alive and well down there.

At least where the paternal half of my family is from (the northeast)

sotojuan2• 10 years ago

I am originally from Peru and yeah, people over there are very racist against the mountain/native people so much that people try to get away from their native heritage very often. A white skinned person with a European name and/or complexion has way more opportunities and an easier life.

That said, GP may not feel this way because racism in those countries (well, mine at least) is not called out often like it's in the US, so it doesn't feel like it's a problem because no one gets in trouble or protests it.

rmc• 10 years ago

Plenty of non-USA countries are concerned with the amount of each group in other groups. Ireland gives political parties less money if there aren't at least 40% female candidates.

brbsix• 10 years ago

Ever since Zach Holman "left", it appears as though GitHub has been eaten away from the inside by intersectional feminism. There appear to be subversive efforts to turn tech companies into platforms for social justice. I can only imagine it must be really uncomfortable to work in this sort of environment.

djtriptych5• 10 years ago

Slightly less comfortable for the most-privileged people on earth; probably more comfortable for everyone else.

cf. Every other American industry's initial foray into diversity.

PeCaN• 10 years ago

Personally, I don't think I would be very comfortable knowing I was hired because company X has to meet diversity quotas and not solely because I was the best candidate for the job. I think it's an offense to hackers in general—I'm hired based on merit.

dijit4• 10 years ago

Oh, it's fine that it's racist, because I as a white male have it so good?

Seems odd to me mate, there are things that being white certainly doesn't buy, it's not a ticket to middle-class.

Being cis doesn't make me any more worse at my job than being gay would, don't judge me on that merit it's bullshit.

FWIW I grew up incredibly poor and my "advantage" in IT was that people don't care about your background. If I had wanted to be a lawyer or doctor I would bet my life that I would have failed. Tech is definitely inclusive as hell by default and making it less so is rather stupid.

If there are people who are actively stopping women in tech or downplaying them then those people are at fault, I would argue as at fault as a company that wont interview me based on my skin colour or gender.

jshevek5• 10 years ago

No. Giving irrational ideologues structural power in the workplace can make any thinking person uncomfortable, regardless of their privilege points.

siegecraft• 10 years ago

There was an interesting write-up on this by Hintjens at http://hintjens.com/blog:111

millstone• 10 years ago

GitHub is definitely focusing more on social justice than any company its size.

Maybe it pushes out some employees, but ultimately allows GitHub to hire from a larger pool of developers. They attract the best and succeed in the market. Diversity and a social justice focus is proven to make a company more successful, and historically marginalized groups are inspired by the GitHub leadership. A great outcome.

On the other hand, maybe it becomes a significant distraction from the business side. The "social impact team" increases its influence, and the culture becomes one of fear of saying the wrong thing or offending the wrong person. Employees leave, and are difficult to replace due to the negative reputation of the internal culture. The company fails.

Whatever the outcome, it's a great experiment and we're sure to learn something.

powertower• 10 years ago

To me every example of diversity basically has been the concept that "there are too many white people in the room." And to a smaller degree that "there are too many straight men...".

I've never seen this applied to non-whites, at least not to this degree. In fact, 100% black-demographic teams (or businesses or organisations) are oftentimes praised for being "authentically black".

IMO, the way I see it is once a productive homogeneous group (which by definition is composed of members that are able to agree with each other and engage in actual progress rather than in-fighting) puts in the effort and spends the time building the infrastructure/business/etc and makes it successful - then other groups see this as an opportunity to get something out of it... "Diversity for the sake of diversity" only comes in at the end, never at the beginning.

It is also odd that when someone says diversity is our strength, they never really share the actual details of that strength.

To me this is a turning point for a company that goes from being work oriented to becoming a race/gender oriented cesspool where everything is about your color, genitalia, and gender.

djtriptych5• 10 years ago

So you would bet there is no bias in extant hiring practices? How do you know?

spriggan3• 10 years ago

You're answering literally every comment on this thread, with this "passive aggressive" tone that will do nothing but derail the conservation. That's the definition of a troll. Why don't you make a point of your own instead?

wozer• 10 years ago

Previous discussion of GitHub's diversity culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

petsormeat• 10 years ago

Anybody besides me impressed that they released data about employee age ranges?

hokkos• 10 years ago

I like how the graph is carefully crafted to make it like there is good age distribution when it does NOT. There is twice a subdivision in ages 20-40 than in ages 40+.

jpeg_hero• 10 years ago

At a high level, GitHub is 64% male worldwide and 64% white in the U.S. That said, the company has improved since the end of 2014, when it was 79% male and 21% female worldwide.

I wonder what their male/female split is in daily active users.

WillAbides• 10 years ago

93% male / 4% female / 3% undisclosed.

source: https://medium.com/@tenaciouscb/github-com-demographics-a-st...

t0mbstone• 10 years ago

Amidst the forest of diversity demographics, I found this little tidbit:

"We have a flexible paid time-off policy and our maternity/paternity leave policies exceed the tech industry’s norm. In addition, our policies do not differentiate between maternity or paternity leave."

Now THAT is cool. I really wish more companies did that. When my wife had a c-section with our son, she got 6 weeks off of work. I got nothing.

dijit4• 10 years ago

Come to Sweden, Paternity leave and Maternity leave are basically tied up into a shared "Parental" leave, a couple of new parents get upwards of 400+ paid days between themselves to divvy up as they see fit.

Source: my colleague just had a child and I have to do all his work as well as my own now :( (not salty, glad we have this!)

Keats• 10 years ago

How about adding other parts of the company like HR/Sales/Marketing/etc etc to their data?

johnnyg• 10 years ago

"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable."

It is only unacceptable if people with the skills to be in management positions didn't get a promotion because of a non-relevant personal attribute.

Otherwise, it is acceptable and in the best long term interests of the company.

I acknowledge that America has equality of opportunity problems. There are strong and just historical reasons why the government has carried the torch on this issue. However, I think its time to let the market work. Companies that place talent above non-relevant personal attributes are at a competitive advantage as they are drawing from a larger talent pool. Letting that market run on a long enough time line means that companies who discriminate will grow weaker, as well they should.

Github has come out and said "we're going to make sure that we meet target quotas for people of X, Y and Z non-relevant personal attributes." I think that's bad business and not the equality we need to be going for.

If you have the skill set, drive and integrity to be a strong contributor to a team, I want to work with you and make wealth with you. If you don't, I don't want to work with you - go get educated, build skills and try again or if I'm wrong about you, prove it by out competing me. This is equality of opportunity and of ideas. What Github is doing isn't, nor does it get us closer to what the idea of America promises us all.

I think that providing the resources to build skills to those whose parents didn't or couldn't provide them is a great idea.

I think shaking up our education system (because the numbers show that investing doesn't produce better results) is a great idea.

I want to be fellow citizens with educated, driven people who are so in part because society ensured it'd happen.

Lets not go too far or go in the wrong direction.

drhayes93• 10 years ago

I think GH is starting from the point of "the distribution of our employees doesn't line up with the larger population of the country we operate in". If you think each of those groups of people has the potential to be as talented as any other, then why is there a discrepancy? I think they're saying, "We don't think the market is working." There are hidden biases at work.

For example, people with "non-white sounding" names don't get hired at the same rate as those with "white sounding" names when they have the same skillset. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

I think these biases operate at a low level, below most of our understanding. I like that GH is having this conversation in the open and working to rid themselves of these biases as much as possible.

To me, this is all relevant socioeconomic data. Why not look at the distribution of gender, race, sexuality, religion, etc, in your workplace? If there's a discrepancy, why not figure out what the root cause is? Given the starting point of "all these groups of people have the same capacity for talent and skill", why is the distribution skewed? What does it hurt to ask?

wskinner• 10 years ago

GitHub is focusing on the very bottom of the funnel. They are noticing the distribution of their employees doesn't match that of the larger population, then attempting to make it match. But what if the reason their company distribution doesn't match up is that the distribution of people with the requisite skills doesn't match up? They are trying to treat the symptoms of a supposed problem rather than the ailment itself, and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so.

Affirmative action doesn't work, except for the short-term career prospects of those individuals lucky enough to profit from it, and the virtue-signalers who propose it.

reader50006• 10 years ago

"all these groups of people have the same capacity for talent and skill"

What evidence is there to believe this?

MustardTiger5• 10 years ago

If you think each of those groups of people has the potential to be as talented as any other, then why is there a discrepancy?

Because you think wrong.

Given the starting point of "all these groups of people have the same capacity for talent and skill"

Why take something we know to be false as your starting point though?

resu_nimda3• 10 years ago

Otherwise, it is acceptable and in the best long term interests of the company.

Maybe the best long-term interests of the company aren't aligned with the best long-term interests of our society. If, hypothetically, the market took over, and drove racial equality/diversity in a direction such that we almost literally ended up with a white male overclass and everyone else their servants/slaves, would you shrug and say "well clearly white males are just better for the long term interests of the companies"? Or would you wonder if there were maybe some non-market-based factors at play...

"The market" doesn't magically solve all problems. It's not a simple matter of companies making non-discriminatory hiring decisions. As of now, the average white candidate probably is more qualified than the minority candidate, because of a complex web of social factors and experiences tracing back to birth. So they would always get selected by "the market," creating a feedback loop leading to the scenario I described.

The market is definitely not going to provide equality of opportunity. If that's something we care about, we have to actively push things that direction.

nojvek2• 10 years ago

Sometimes this could have negative impact if promoted too much right? Imagine the feeling that your peers thinking you're in management level because HR wants to meet the quotas and don't actually respect you for the talent.

vemv• 10 years ago

It's like a law of nature... your organisation grows, its culture becomes braindead.

There should be more Basecamps around. I don't know what their equality policy is, but they sure have very little tolerance to bullshit - and don't mind letting you know!

dijit4• 10 years ago

every time I hear about "inclusive" practices at github it makes me grimace, not because it's not a good idea. Diversity is good. But because it's rather racist, partially sexist and it's increasingly the norm to be this way.

Equal opportunity, not outcome, if 4% of your applicants are British, but do not pass because of technical reasons. (I'm using British because I am one, replace with $minority), then why should I hire them? Ideally we'd interview blind and whoever is the best tech, is the best. I'm not sure why this isn't possible in our technology culture, do you really need to be face to face with a person to assess their technical merits and ensure they are the right fit for a company.

But, anyway, to me this stuff is exclusionary, I am apparently cursed to be a white male in tech, and as a majority I now have to work much harder for SV to acknowledge me for my merits, I am of the firm belief that if I were a black lady I would have enough support to prop me up above my current experienced position in no time. I'd love to test this theory honestly.

And anyway, who cares who delivers github/facebook/$website at the end of the day, hire who you think will do the job, nobody is going to feel excluded from the services you provide because you didn't meet your quota of transgender people.. and if they were, you could very easily mislead them.

edit: I know it's against etiquette to mention downvotes, but if you must downvote me please reply stating why. That is also against etiquette.

throwaway934825• 10 years ago

The last time this topic came up was around the same time that that open letter of from maintainers of GitHub repositories was making its rounds.

If I recall correctly, GitHub responded to that open letter by implementing the lowest hanging fruit - bug templates and +1s - and then went radio silent. Have there been meaningful product updates since?

Now we know what happened: they minimally addressed the PR needs of their business, and then went back to doing nothing interesting to advance their products.

I was on the fence before, but now I'm certain: GitLab is the superior experience.

yuhong• 10 years ago

I have been thinking of the problems anti-discrimination laws. Not all kinds of discrimination leave evidence. I have a feeling that they should be restricted to certain job categories. Similarly, sexual harassment leave evidence more often, but this don't mean they are worth the costs. I have been thinking of this Ask HN for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857

exstudent2• 10 years ago

As a Hispanic, I would never work at Github because I find this quest for "diversity" to be extremely patronizing and objectifying. As a male, I'd never work at Github because their policies are sexist.

BurningFrog• 10 years ago

How many republicans work at GitHub? How many evangelical christians? How do these numbers compare to the distribution in the larger population of the country?

jshevek5• 10 years ago

I'm outraged that github has not reported these numbers. What are they hiding?

kkirsche• 10 years ago

Diversity for the sake of diversity. So dumb. Promote for qualifications not junk like this

pwim• 10 years ago

Previously I thought hiring diversity for diversity's sake didn't make sense, and hiring should be based solely on "merit". After all, as a company, you want to hire the best people.

However, since then, I have found there is research that indicates diverse groups can be more advantageous than homogenous groups of highly talented people [1], [2]. So from this perspective, striving for diversity makes economic sense.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full

[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...

ASpring3• 10 years ago

I'm glad someone is making this point. Here is a concise summary pdf from NCWIT.

https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactge...

Futurebot3• 10 years ago

The goal of hiring diversity is to reach Proportional Representation; you want your workforce to resemble the demographics of the nation as a whole. If you accept that anyone, regardless of their genetic heritage, gender identity, sexual identity, skin color, etc. can do the job just as well as anyone else can, then you should be supportive of, or at least not oppose, efforts like these. If you don't think so (with regards to genetic heritage especially), there's really no discussion to be had, as that's a likely irreconcilable conflicting understanding of the science, especially at the individual level (intra-haplogroup potential ability swamps any supposed inter-haplogroup potential ability) or just plain, old-fashioned prejudice.

What are the benefits to PR? Two major ones:

- Countering structural biases in society. There has not historically been anything like a level playing field with regards to inherent attributes in this country. Many of those attributes cause people to get discriminated against, and this gets perpetuated across time. It's a "market" solution to a societal problem, which means that it can't magically counter much larger structural forces all by itself, but it can help.

- Producing better results. Many studies claim that diverse teams operate better, and potentially produce superior products and services. A major part of the reason is the introduction of diversity in perspectives, which can allow a company to understand different potential markets better and can make a company potentially more welcoming, which can improve hiring (i.e., a great candidate who might feel out of place in an environment with non-diverse demographics might decide to join if the demographics were more diverse. This can become a virtuous cycle.) Whether this is true or not, or how much it's true, is not that relevant. It certainly can't hurt.

There are valid criticisms of hiring diversity methods, but I'm not seeing many of them in the comments here:

- Can PR be achieved? Getting PR at a place with 10 employees is going to be very tough, so coming down on companies this small who can't do so should not be done, IMO. 100? Easier. 1000. Much easier. The larger the organization is, the more possible it becomes. So no, it's not always possible, and some perhaps well-intentioned activists beat up on companies they shouldn't, but that does not mean it should not be a goal that is pursued as a general principle for hiring.

- Do the people who get hired necessarily represent who those hiring them think they represent? Not always, no. If you're hiring a perfect rainbow coalition of identities, but all of them come from wealthy backgrounds or elite schools, for example, you may be getting less diversity than you think. It's not tokenism, but it's definitely not PR. Many Left criticisms of our current version elite liberal meritocratic culture center around this. The antidote is to include things like educational background, economic class/upbringing circumstances, etc. when considering a candidate vis a vis diverse hiring; that's what intersectionality is all about. You do not consider advantaging/disadvantaging attributes in isolation. Many companies have do a very poor job of the latter, but in this case, GH has explicitly said they are more open to non-traditionally educated candidates.

PR and hiring diversity is not going to fix all society's problems; for that, we need major reforms like free higher ed, federal, rather than local, funding of K-12 education, GBI, UHC, ending the drug war and a dozen other things. Can it help, especially by helping push American culture towards greater acceptance of diversity and pluralism? Yes, so companies should strive for it.

this2shallpaas• 10 years ago

The goal of hiring diversity is to reach Proportional Representation; you want your workforce to resemble the demographics of the nation as a whole.

What about when that is reached, or is nearly reached? What's the medium term end goal? Long term end goal? I think here is where people disagree even more than the means to get there.

Whether this is true or not, or how much it's true, is not that relevant. It certainly can't hurt.

It can lead to distrust, skepticism, disrespect, worse communication. All sorts of negative things.

If we include ideology in the general diversity conversation, and class, rather than primarily gender and race, I'd respect the intention much more.

ps4fanboy3• 10 years ago

I dont want to live or work in a society where employees at every company reflect the demographics of that society, where everyone gets equal pay, feels less and less like diversity and more and more about conformity. Its the road to socialism, if all of this diversity was valuable the market will reward companies accordingly.

ASpring3• 10 years ago

And it does. More diverse companies perform better financially.

https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactge...

ps4fanboy3• 10 years ago

After reading the sources I would say there is evidence that employees in the survey they conducted self reported better financial performance from the following options:

"how would you compare your organization’s performance over the past two years in terms of market share? .|.|. Would you say that it was (1) much worse, (2) somewhat worse, (3) about the same, (4) somewhat better, or (5) much better?”

Surely we can be more factual than this?

balls1874• 10 years ago

It chaffes me when I see companies talk about diversity and inclusion (ignore that the blog post is written by a young white guy).

You want to use data to make Github more diverse--great. Just shut up about it and make it happen. Posting your diversity data like this, like it's some badge of honor, is ridiculous.

Someone wants to know how diverse you are? Great, show them the data, and tell them you're working on it.

Just please stop it with the public discourse.

You know what I don't see--companies like MSFT, and Google, and Facebook, and Github who talk about their inclusion showing up to the poorer parts of my neighborhood trying to address diversity issues there.

ghrifter• 10 years ago

I am now a #GitLabMissile

nolepointer2• 10 years ago

I moved all my code over to BitBucket when this nonsense started.

jchiu1106• 10 years ago

In NBA, 74% players are Blacks while Asians are at 0.2%. Maybe some SJWs should lobby to get NBA "reflect more the demographics of the society"???

If you haven't figured out already, I was being sarcastic. This just shows how ridiculous and superficial this whole trend is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA

Gigablah• 10 years ago

You jest, but discrimination in the NBA is a real issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvaM0pMj-8o

rubyfan• 10 years ago

Explains why they haven't delivered a notable imporovement in the last year and a half. They've been focusing on social justice instead of making a great product that we all want to use.

nolepointer2• 10 years ago

Jesus Christ, I never want to work on the Left Coast.

alva2• 10 years ago

I expect this is a well intentioned mission. But to what extent do you take this? Does not making sure other (less in the zeitgeist) groups are involved mean they are failing at this?

Hasidic Jews, Inuits, Wheelchair users, Men named Reginald, A person with a southern drawl, a person with one hand, a person with no hands, a 45 year old.

Quick googling suggests Jews make up 1.4% of the US population. You can't really pull out the privilege card on them before anyone tries it. This is far higher than the estimates of transexual people. Are GitHub anti-semitic? Why do they hate Jews so much that they refuse to include them in diversity reports? Do they not care for their struggle? Why is it important to stress the number of transexual people they hire over the number of Jews they hire?

It is a race to the bottom.

MaxfordAndSons3• 10 years ago

You're making a false equivocation between arbitrary demographic "groups" and demographic groups that have faced well documented systemic discrimination in America, both historically and continuing in the present.

And to preempt a counterargument via your chosen example, yes, you could argue Jews have and do face discrimination in America - but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life, etc.

alva2• 10 years ago

but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life.

Many people would find that highly offensive and ignorant. Why are you trying to diminish the struggles faced by the Jewish people in America? Why are you trying to defend a now well known anti-semitic organisation Github?? Your hateful statements are dangerous and violent. (Oh, away from my posturing as an online hate-mob, you are completely incorrect in that statement)

This game is very, very easy to play, but unfortunately, everyone loses.

Lets go on. You are saying wheelchair users, disabled people have not faced a large amount of societal discrimination that can affect their job chances? Don't you know how many public buildings and spaces aren't accessible? I cannot believe how ableist you are. Does your employer know of your hateful, bigoted views? Do your colleagues?

The problem with presenting the argument that the workplace and other groups need to be representative of wider culture, is that it will always run into this issue. If you say, discriminated groups need to be represented, and present it as a tautology, then you cannot decide which trendy group of the moment is more important.

garfieldnate• 10 years ago

My questions:

* Do you run the same diversity program in every country you have an office, so that, say, in Japan you try to hire Chinese and Brazilians?

* Do you actually give points to someone over other candidates for filling a minority slot, or do you just focus your recruiting towards the target groups?

* If you hire remote workers from anywhere in the world, do you even bother with diversity for them, since the definition of diversity would have to depend on their country?

* Do you look for diversity in communication styles, personalities, philosophies, etc. (read Quiet), or do you only look for diversity in the trends you mentioned (sex, "race", etc.)?

* What about fighting ageism?

* Will you please write a post giving basic information on the advantages/goals you hope to achieve through American-style diversity? As it is I think everyone will just argue about what your agenda is.

Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

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