Apple’s diversity chief out after outcry

https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/?a=2

by subie • 9 years ago

49 56 9 years ago

cgore• 9 years ago

I'm a white guy. I'm a software engineer. I'm totally cool with hiring people who aren't white guys (assuming they can do the job.) It seems that Denise Young Smith understands that, but there's a weird fringe of the extreme left that only sees headcounts by color and gender, and only sees me as "a white guy", and only sees others as "an <enthnicity> <gender>", and it's sad that a black woman got fired for being reasonable instead of having a specific and idiotic political agenda.

whichdan2• 9 years ago

"people who aren't white guys (assuming they can do the job.)"

This sort of language is problematic and harmful in that it implies that "white guys" (not even white people, just men) by default can always "do the job," and that anyone outside of that group must be judged to some sort of different standard. It makes it challenging to talk about diversity when statements start off with racist and sexist undertones.

fosk• 9 years ago

Oh come on, you know what he meant.

This is getting to a point that even genuinely talking about it, and rightly so, risks backfiring at you because there’s always somebody willing to make 10 extra mental steps to find it offensive.

ksk2• 9 years ago

Your statements are needlessly accusatory, and increase rather than decrease friction. You could have said something like "Hey, I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but some people might read this into your statement. Do you see that too? What do you think?"

jasode• 9 years ago

To use the fired Apple employees idea that diversity is multidimensional, you might have the following situations:

Group 1:

  1) white man (Democrat Stanford grad)
  2) white woman (Democrat Stanford grad)
  3) black man (Democrat Stanford grad)

Group 2:

  1) white man (Democrat Stanford grad)
  2) white man (Libertarian Kansas kid self-taught)
  3) white man (South Africa bootcamp grad)

Depending on what's important, Group 2 would be seen as "more diverse and representative" even though the skin color is all the same. In that case, diversity of thought is valued more than diversity of skin color.

If that was the idea that Denise Young Smith was trying to get across, that nuance got lost in the backlash.

omegaworks3• 9 years ago

* Why assume Group 2 has, or can produce, higher-valued thoughts?

* Why are there only three seats at the table?

Diversity and inclusion is about analyzing and addressing systemic assumptions and the arbitrary, exclusionary constraints we put on ourselves as an industry.

Contrived hypothetical scenarios fail to frame the real problem because those contrived scenarios are exactly what good policies push back against.

dilap• 9 years ago

nah, it wasn’t missing nuance — this idea, as you expressed it, is considered unacceptable by many people right now.

LordKano• 9 years ago

I'm a black guy in tech. I have never had a problem in the industry solely because of my race. I have had personality conflicts that may have been exacerbated because of culture differences but it was the personality conflicts that were the root.

Now, even I am being painted as "Not diverse enough" for the contingent of which you speak. Recently, I read this and it sums up where it's all heading next.

https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-...

bertomartin• 9 years ago

I guess we all have different experiences

rocmcd• 9 years ago

Thanks for the link. That was an eye-opening read.

rurban• 9 years ago

Insanity prevails. Why Apple, why?

whatyoucantsay4• 9 years ago

The far left often misses how multi-dimensional concepts like diversity or privilege are but how can a team without minorities be diverse? By definition, it would be composed only of people who were in the majority on every dimension!

Her comment was almost certainly false, though public humiliation and firing after a 20 year career is a bit of an excess. Why not discuss the matter and ask for a gracious apology?

dragonwriter2• 9 years ago

The far left often misses how multi-dimensional concepts like diversity or privilege are

I think you are confusing the shallow tribal identity groups with weak ideological consciousness on the left with the far left; the complex multidimensional nature of diversity and privilege is pretty much the core of intersectionality, which is a pretty key concept for the left, especially (much of) the far left.

Or you're talking about the narrowly economic faction of the far left that sees non-class identity largely as a distraction from class issues, with diversity as a non-issue, and all privilege and discrimination boiling down to class warfare. But even they don't really miss multidimensionality, they just see the multidimensionality as a multipronged distraction.

whatyoucantsay4• 9 years ago

I am referring to the way many on the far left speak of intersectionality as a number of diversity or victimhood points to be tallied. The truth is, like many multivariate functions, more complex.

Here is an example. Being male is not a privilege for a young black man being stopped by a police officer in the United States. On the contrary, it greatly increases the odds he will soon be unjustly killed.

Similarly, being Jewish may well be a privilege for a wealthy London banker, but is just as easily a death sentence for anyone, including an elite, in Lebanon over the past 25 years.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

More on her comments: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...

Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, made controversial comments last month during a One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia.
“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.
“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
Her comments appeared to defend Apple’s overwhelmingly white and male leadership at a time when the company’s makeup is markedly uneven.

Wow what a shit show, even if she believes this nuanced, thoughtful view of diversity, she should have realized that she was hired for one reason only: racial extortion. Now apple can go out and hire the shakedown artist they deserve.

coryl2• 9 years ago

Racial extortion...interesting term, haven't heard that one before.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton? That's their bread and butter.

minimaxir• 9 years ago

The article title is misleading as it implies causality. Per TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/apple-vp-of-diversity-and-...):

Young Smith had been talking with Apple CEO Tim Cook about the next phase of her career and life since about a year ago, according to a source. Over the last few months, Apple has been searching for a successor to replace Young Smith. It’s not quite clear, however, when exactly Young Smith decided she would leave Apple. But based on that timeline, it seems as though Young Smith made up her mind before those comments in Bogotá, Colombia for which she later apologized.

danso4• 9 years ago

Obviously it is wrong to assert causality without proof, but why is it wrong to imply causality if no other official explanation is offered? TechCrunch refers to an anonymous source who, for all we know, could be Tim Cook or any other Apple official wanting to reduce the embarrassment for the company and for Denise Smith, who had been at the company for 20 years and in the job for 6 months.

Yes, journalists are too quick to argue causality when there is only correlation. IMO, the burden more on the TC reporter to explain why she accepts her anonymous source's claim, which implies Apple was incompetent enough to hire someone for a highly publicized position who had planed to quit 2-3 months after getting the job, as opposed to being pushed out for not being wanted in the position, even if she had never made those controversial comments.

Harder to swallow is that if this really were the case, then why is an anonymous source pushing this angle. Why would Apple try to hide the innocuous explanation for Smith's departure?

lovich• 9 years ago

Whatever your views on diversity are, I think we can all agree that the subject is so politically charged right now that this job is going to be like the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts

tscs373• 9 years ago

Curiously, I think the DADA is probably a safer job consider you survive most of a year on average.

tomtompl• 9 years ago

It almost seems like all those diversity preachers are the biggest racists scums.

exabrial• 9 years ago

The more stuff I see like this, the more I'm convinced the only way to actually help diversity along is a free market solution. Instead of demanding quotas, just have the data available publically.

The reasons are many, but the biggest is that I feel that hiring people that are bad at their job but have some physical characteristic, will make the problem much worse in the long run by "proving the biased people right" about their biases.

yedava• 9 years ago

People can learn on the job and can become not 'bad', right? Or is it the case that some set of people have some innate quality that makes them always be bad at a job?

tscs373• 9 years ago

Some people don't understand computers at all. Teaching them to engineer software, for example, can be a long and expensive undertaking. Which these people might not be interested in since they are good in other things.

I think it's not good to simply assume that you can insert any random person in a job and they'll "just become not bad" at it.

And this is not restricted to any nationality, gender, etc, either, you can take any two random humans and they'll (with high probability) like and perform at a job at different levels, irrelevant of the amount of learning performed (respective to the learning level atleast)

It's not some innate quality, it's just how people all over the globe are made: different.

vixen99• 9 years ago

Apple: "We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation”.

The company is certainly innovative but it's predominantly (2017) white and male but on the other hand Apple don't say what % diversity is needed to do this driving. Don't they just choose employees on merit irrespective of any other consideration? They'd be dumb if they didn't.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-releases-2017-diversity...

jabretti• 9 years ago

Honestly, that "diversity drives innovation" is a total goddamn lie. Hiring the best people available drives innovation. Diversity itself has never been shown to be of any value.

If you look at some of the most innovative places in history, they weren't particularly diverse. It doesn't seem to have held them back. Renaissance Florence wasn't especially diverse, it was a bunch of Florentines sitting around doing Florentine things. Victorian London wasn't all that diverse, either, but they were innovating at an astounding rate.

Bell Labs in the 1960s was mostly nerdy white dudes with pocket protectors, and they were massively innovative -- because what drives innovation is thoughts like "What if we laid down amorphous silicon dioxide directly onto the wafer and annealed it to reduce electron traps?" rather than thoughts like "omg, I just saw a person with a different colour skin, my mind is totally blown".

alphabettsy• 9 years ago

You threw your argument out the window with this; "omg, I just saw a person with a different colour skin, my mind is totally blown”.

People from different social and cultural backgrounds can bring different experiences and skill sets. There are many, many examples of this throughout history.

It would seem many of the diversity programs are in some ways meant to address past racism in this country. That may be a whole different topic.

Johnny555• 9 years ago

I thought skin color didn't matter and it's what inside that matters? So skin color is the most important factor when determining diversity?

hashberry• 9 years ago

Yes, skin color does matter, read up on Critical Race Theory. To be colorblind is to be racist because it ignores the disadvantages one can't see due to one's own privilege.

The theory states that inequality is due to racism and anyone who is part of the dominant race not only benefits from racism but unconsciously perpetuates it. This is why everyone is so sensitive, because this is what is taught in the humanities in college. "Everything is racist, everything is sexist, etc."

jamesrom2• 9 years ago

Serious question, if everyone was colourblind, what disadvantages would there be?

danso4• 9 years ago

Which diversity policies have you read that skin color is "the most important factor"? Certainly that's not the case at Apple.

rdtsc• 9 years ago

they “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it.”

Indeed, diversity is about filling a quota on visible traits like genders, shade of skin color and so on.

“More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed.”

Well it's good to know what Apple's view of diversity is.

Sometimes it can be ambiguous and one might actually believe them when they say "We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation". But this cleared it up. Yeah they don't really believe it drives innovation. If they did every manager in the chain and team member would go out of their way to hire "diverse" people because it would directly improve the product and the bottom line, but they don't believe that as institution.

Neither does Google or other big tech company. They wouldn't need a "diversity president" if they did. Diverse candidates would find their way to their new positions pretty easily, helped by stock options, good salaries and so on. Look how efficiently these companies seek and find leaders in various technologies or project or areas of interest.

What they believe is avoiding bad PR. They don't want to be criticized by some tech gossip blog about not being "diverse" and deep down they know how that tech blog measure "diversity".

Also tangentially related, notice how many times age is included in "diversity" spectrum? Somehow hiring people of various ages is not seen as improving diversity because well, it's not about gender or skin color, so gossip tech blogs won't notice and still criticize them.

In light of that, it makes complete sense that Denise had to apologize. But it was a very useful move as well simply because it made the true values more transparent. Given everything else, at least it's good to have more transparency and clarity.

interfixus• 9 years ago

This surrealist diversity fascism is getting scarier day by day. And poses, in full dystopian ironic splendor, the greatest imaginable threat to real human diversity.

burntrelish1273• 9 years ago

I don't buy "Apple is a SJW shop" hysteria automagically. If it were the case, that would be depressing because win-lose, collective-punishment identity politics is corrosive, victim-bully fascist ideology masquerading as egalitarian enlightenment. Such behaviors wouldn't add value and encourage talent to stay. Smith seemed to have the right ideas but perhaps couldn't implement them and/or had political troubles. Maybe she said other things that were inconsistent. Only Apple management and her have a better idea of what transpired.

TYPE_FASTER• 9 years ago

It's always the vocal fringe that's covered and published by the media. When I was at college during the nineties, the college paper and the news coverage of the school was usually about some political fracas involving one to ten people.

The other 15k+ people were trying to pass their classes, partying, or both.

Simulacra• 9 years ago

I am a woman, and I work for a software company. We essentially hire by resume only, and we pay a service to scrub resumes and cover letters of anything that might reveal gender, race, or ethnicity. The outside firm does all of our interviews, whiteboards, etc. and only at the very end does the hiring manager get to meet the prospective employee, and say yes or no. To my knowledge, we've rarely said no, and we let the qualifications speak for themselves. This has lead to an office of about 45% women, and 40% minority. I think this is very good diversity.

gnicholas• 9 years ago

Why is there a need to scrub resumes if they're doing all the interviews/whiteboards/etc?

Also, you mention an office of 45% women and 40% minority. Is the split the same for your technical team?

Apple’s diversity chief out after outcry

Related Stories