Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/12/facebooks-diversity-efforts-show-little-progress-after-five-years/

by AnatMl2 • 8 years ago

25 87 8 years ago

poster123• 8 years ago

"In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook."

No mention is made of the fraction of Asians, because their over-representation would undermine the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities. This intellectual dishonesty irks me.

There are industries such as education where the vast majority of workers are female. If men and women are in the workforce at about even levels, there must be some industries where men predominate.

blahblahblogger3• 8 years ago

I completely agree and I'm not sure why over-representation isn't a larger issue.

ceejayoz3• 8 years ago

Honest question: Is your concern about over-representation limited to Asian people, or do you have similar concerns about white male over-representation in tech and elsewhere?

colordrops5• 8 years ago

I don't see much noise about bringing men into female dominated industries either.

Frondo• 8 years ago

There are groups working on bringing men into nursing and teaching. You can find out more about these with a few google searches.

ceejayoz3• 8 years ago

There are industries such as education where the vast majority of workers are female.

Yes, and they've tended to be the lower-paid professions. Nurses instead of doctors, teachers instead of principals, etc.

This argument is a little like citing "black people have water fountains, too" to defend the segregated South. It misses the point.

neoburkian• 8 years ago

Female dominated professions, on average, have more time off, more flexible hours, significant social components, less physically dangerous, etc. Maybe these things matter, on average, more to women than men. Why should we expect women to have the exact same distribution of preferences as men? Why are we accepting the frame that the only thing that matters is salary?

If women choose their profession based on factors other than salary, it is a little strange to analogize them to black people under segregation. Just because someone has different values doesn't mean that they have false consciousness or are acting under duress.

waisbrot• 8 years ago

the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities

You made up that narrative. The narrative presented in the article is

Williams noted that, "diversity is critical to our success as a company"

Achieving "diversity" is not the same as mirroring the demographics of a company's home country and "over-representation" is not directly related to lack of diversity.

radiantswirl4• 8 years ago

If "diverse" != mirroring the demographics of one's home country, then what does diverse even mean? What could possibly be a better metric than that? Mirroring the demographics of the world at large? If so, why would that be better?

ryanmercer12• 8 years ago

"In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook."

So they're actually MORE diverse than the country racially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

"The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61.3% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 76.9%"

ryanmercer12• 8 years ago

At some point it boils down to who applies.

Example: Women are GENERALLY more petite, they struggle carrying firefighter gear (45-75lbs depending on your load out) and aren't interested or can't pass the necessary requirements to ensure their safety, they get fewer female applicants and thus more men are firefighters type of thing.

I imagine there are still fewer qualified female applicants than male. I imagine there are far fewer female applicants for entry-level construction jobs than male applicants too, doesn't mean a construction company is dropping the ball or being discriminatory by default.

s-shellfish10• 8 years ago

What does this have to do with software development? Are you actually suggesting women have some physical attribute that makes them less applicable for programming, mathematics, or computer science jobs?

This reasoning is part of the problem. It's not rigorously inspected or accepted, because it's circular logic that can be self proving given one dominant party enforcing such a reasoning structure as 'the rules'.

colordrops5• 8 years ago

I think it's an analogy. The point is that there are deep social and cultural factors at play that bias women against software, so the applicant pool is small, and it can't be fixed by some localized corporate initiative.

_sfsa• 8 years ago

Don't put words in their mouth..

ryanmercer12• 8 years ago

What does this have to do with software development?

Everything. If people aren't applying to the jobs, they can't be hired.

Then of course even if the minority/gender a company is lacking on applies for a job, if they aren't the most qualified candidate a company shouldn't be expected to hire them.

Are you actually suggesting women have some physical attribute that makes them less applicable for programming, mathematics, or computer science jobs?

No, clean your display off, I said "Example: Women are GENERALLY more petite, they struggle carrying firefighter gear".

It's an example, an analogy. Firefighters often have the exact same diversity issues, fact is more Caucasian men apply than other races and genders. In the case of a firefighter a man selected at random is more likely to be more physically cable to do the job than a woman, with firefighting strength comes first then firefighting theory.

With computer sciences, you have a far larger pool of men to draw on than women. n 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 18 percent (https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/st...).

That means out of a pool of applicants, roughly 1 out of every 5 (with a degree in the field) will be female. Add to that the fact that white Americans make up the racial majority of the country and what happens? Your pool of applicants is far more likely to be male and white than female and any other race.

Someone with a computer science degree in the U.S. is statistically likely to be a white male. That's not racism, that's not sexism, that's reality.

isthisnagee2• 8 years ago

I don't think your example applies in the context of a tech company, so I'm going to comment ignoring it.

If it boils down to who applies, then we need to make sure that we're reaching out to communities that are not well represented in our field. It's not about waiting for them to come to us.

atomical2• 8 years ago

Why respond at all if you aren't addressing the comment?

blahblahblogger3• 8 years ago

I think his point may have been that "who applies" is the END of the funnel.

If there are issues earlier in the pipeline then we can't just focus on the end of it at the "who's applying" stage.

If we want more representation, are women more represented in comp sci programs? Are they going into related engineering fields? Do they go to meet up groups or construct new ones if they don't want to go to existing ones?

ryanmercer12• 8 years ago

I don't think your example applies in the context of a tech company, so I'm going to comment ignoring it.

18% of CS majors are women. 76.9% of the U.S. is white. Statistically someone in the work force with a CS degree is a white male.

That absolutely applies in the context of a tech company, unless you want them to hire unqualified applicants and spend months or years training them before they return profit.

The problem isn't with who a company is hiring, the problem is women aren't seeking out the training and non-Whites are a literal minority of the population.

Until more women pursue degrees/training in the field, and everyone starts partnering off with someone of a different race to make melting-pot babies, then it's just going to be this way purely due to statistics.

atomical2• 8 years ago

"Anyway, worldwide, Facebook is 36 percent female, up from 31 percent in 2014."

This article isn't written professionally.

ceejayoz3• 8 years ago

It says "techcrunch.com" right by the link.

ryanmercer12• 8 years ago

Burn.

lawlessone• 8 years ago

Techs diversity problems start early in school before college. Facebook are just the last mile.

The sex based targeting of childrens toys would be a good place to start , but you won't see results for 20 years.

nsxwolf• 8 years ago

Sex targeted toys sell. Most parents want that for their kids. It's not a conspiracy by the toy companies.

jonathankoren• 8 years ago

I wouldn’t say, “most parents want [sex targeted toys]”. Rather parents give the toys their kids want. Kids want what they see, and the see gender specific toys.

frgtpsswrdlame2• 8 years ago

I see this a lot and I just don't understand it. Everyone in this problem seems desperate to point the finger to someone else. And it's not just sex, it's race too.

Having problems hiring black tech workers? It's the college's fault.

Having problems graduating black students with BSs in STEM? It's the high school's fault.

Having problems graduating black students from high school? Really it's the fault of the community or family that raised them.

Having problems fixing the community's culture? Really it's the fault of poverty.

Having problems fixing poverty? Really it's the fact that no good jobs will hire us.

This isn't a pipe that just spits kids out when they're about to be hired, every single person in that pipeline is desperate to pretend that it's someone further down the line's problem, except once you go far enough down the pipe you end up back where you started. It's not a linear pipe spitting individual kids out that we just can't do anything about. It's a cycle and wherever it is that we exist in that cycle, be it elementary education or hiring Senior Devs at a FAANG, we have a responsibility to step in and do something about it. Enough passing the buck.

java_script2• 8 years ago

It’s just a regressive position on diversity masquerading as being a reasonable progressive one. Take something that’s easier to fix from a centralized location, and instead argue for individual responsibility. Like how instead of complaining about oil companies destroying the environment and corrupting our political system, we should all just recycle and buy Teslas, like a buncha radicals or something :)

I think sure, do what you can at an individual level if you want but that’s so much less important. You’re not gonna change the household conversations happening in millions of houses, and telegraphing what YOU are doing for your daughters in Silicon Valley is more narcissistic than political.

seanmcdirmid2• 8 years ago

It is the supply pipeline. It takes 20+ years for the easy path to grow a competent software developer. If the supply stalls in primary school, you don’t recover from that. Looking at the end of the pipe isn’t that useful.

Even the hard path (someone going into it starting at college) takes 4+ years.

All FAANG is doing right now is concentrating a limited supply, making diversity worse in the rest of the industry. They aren’t magically creating new supply via aggressive hiring practices.

swalsh2• 8 years ago

Maybe because I'm a white dude, perhaps that means I'm not allowed to be a part of these conversations. I fail to understand what the goal of these efforts is. Why did we decide race, and sex are the important immutable factors that we're going to measure?

I grew up in what is today Trump Country. My high school prepared me to work in a factory. Then the factory moved to China, and now the only jobs left in the area are retail and healthcare. I managed to move out, but the vast majority of people I went to high school with are stuck.

Why is economic background not a class we care about too? Shouldn't economic mobility be a part of social justice as well?

danharaj• 8 years ago

Why is economic background not a class we care about too? Shouldn't economic mobility be a part of social justice as well?

It is, but those people are called socialists and/or communists. If you look, you'd find groups that try to synthesize a unified picture of our common struggles.

dongkyun2• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

aylmao2• 8 years ago

I don't know why this is getting downvoted; he has a very valid point. Economic class/background is as important when it comes to diversity.

I feel like there's little conversation about it because it's an even harder problem to tackle and a less obvious one to see. I will say though, to a large extent economic class and race still remain tied in the US.

dongkyun2• 8 years ago

They're getting downvoted because the people who do care about racial and gender equality very much do care about class mobilization and to premise the question with the idea that they don't care means at best, OP doesn't know what they're talking about and at worst, OP is using class issues in bad faith to bludgeon away any attempts at talking about the former.

mikec3010• 8 years ago

I also think it's discrimination against the tech industry to pressure them for equality more than other biased fields: hairdressers, wedding planners, childcare workers, sanitation workers, firefighters. All these occupations have severe biases that go ignored by the people who continually roll FANG through the ringer because they aren't "diverse".

Naritai• 8 years ago

Economic mobility is definitely a part of social justice. But let's note that those groups that most suffer from a lack of economic mobility are Black and Latinx groups. Even among whites, white men tend have better economic mobility than white women. See for example the data at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y....

So, race and sex are directly tied to economic mobility, which is why they are the important factors that are being measured.

jhedwards2• 8 years ago

I think the reason is that historically black people and women were intentionally discriminated against and prevented from entering school and the workplace, so there's an attempt to actively make amends for that. So politically that's why the focus is on race and gender.

I also think that people who champion social justice are also very much in favor of investment in education and public resources like public libraries to help with economic mobility. So I don't think that isn't a focus on economic mobility, it's more that we expect the federal and local governments to flex their muscle to ease problems with social mobility while companies themselves are supposed to make themselves more welcome to diverse candidates.

Jwarder• 8 years ago

It looks like a measurement issue.

The problem we want to eliminate is sexism and racism. Counting the number of times people are actually affected by a negative -ism is difficult. We don't know what people are thinking unless they tell us. Bigots have an incentive to lie about their reasons and non-bigots can be subject to unconscious biases.

On the other hand categorizing people by race/gender is easy. There is always some wiggle room, but there is a lot less ambiguity when answering "is this employee a black woman" compared to "was this employee hired because she is black".

Once you have a set of (mostly) reliable statistics then you can start looking at trends over time, patterns by industry, etc. These numbers can't tell you anything about racism/sexism on their own, but they can help show the general direction the population studied is going and if there are any outliers who might deserve more attention.

blahblahblogger3• 8 years ago

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers?

It seems like they always end up with egg on their face. And they have no obligation to be transparent as private (or public) entities.

But now they all have to have chief diversity officers and diversity councils and PR/recruiting teams for diversity - all of which cost money and hasn't seemed to move the needle very much.

And which as another poster pointed out, doesn't fundamentally change the underlying issue about who applies to these jobs, who goes to school for computer science, etc.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers?

PR.

5874-4b22-a4e0• 8 years ago

When they get sued, they bring these up and say, we tried.

s3r3nity• 8 years ago

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers?

Because if you don't, it looks even worse. So my guess is publicity and PR.

pdpi• 8 years ago

Because they care?

I know it's a shocking concept, but people actually care. "Big corporations" aren't some amorphous number crunching machine. They're staffed by people, and those people have concerns, and priorities, and principles. When you specifically hire for people who share those principles, and announce them loudly as part of your culture, people actually can, and do, get upset, and demand change when you don't act accordingly — and change can and does happen.

hirundo• 8 years ago

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal went down, some pointed to Facebook’s overall lack of diversity as part of the problem. That’s because homogenous cultures lead to limited perspectives and potential lack of awareness of things that may be more obvious to diverse groups of people.

If the purpose is to gain greater perspective and awareness through less homogeneous employees, then it would be more effective to hire according to heterogeneous answers to questions about perspective and awareness, rather than by less reliable proxies like gender and ethnicity.

montalbano3• 8 years ago

Agreed, genuine diversity of intellectual approach is the gold standard IMHO.

radiantswirl4• 8 years ago

It seems like a completely unattainable standard to me. Can you give me an example of a situation in which "genuine diversity of intellectual approach" has been a net positive for an organization, rather than a divisive detriment to morale?

IMO if your organization has a "genuine diversity of intellectual approach" that is truly genuine, then you will soon no longer have an organization — you will have two different organizations, each ideologically homogenous but definitely "genuinely different in intellectual approach" from one another.

kvl7• 8 years ago

This is one of the comments on that article:

------- > The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.

Why is that an upside? It seems utterly racist to me. Let’s try to substitute “white” with, say, Asian.

“The upside to this is that Asian people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”

Or how about the color black?

“The upside to this is that black people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”

I wonder how that would go down? -------

I echo this sentiment completely. Why is anti-white racism being encouraged?

jhedwards2• 8 years ago

Because historically many American companies were 100% white and controlled all the financial and political power. We never had a homogenous Asian or black majority in our society, so there is an attempt here to make up for hundreds of years of segregation where black people were not allowed in the office, the church, the restaurant etc, simply because they were black.

seanmcdirmid2• 8 years ago

Well, diversity efforts at Microsoft China were trying to move away from the 100% Chinese office. Of course, that being China meant a few foreigners here and there. Some effort really pays off in a very homogeneous environment.

pwaivers• 8 years ago

"The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook."

I am all for diversity, but this sentence upsets me. Decreasing one population in the place should not be the goal.

throwawaymath• 8 years ago

But percentages are zero sum. You can't increase diversity without decreasing homogeneity.

frgtpsswrdlame2• 8 years ago

Increasing a minority will require decreasing the share of the majority. Either you're okay with that or you're not.

manfredo2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I follow. If a company has 75% from group A and 25% from group B while these groups make up 66% and 33% of the population respectively then it makes sense to address the underrepresentation of group B. But why would we applaud a 50/50 ratio? Isn't that just an underrepresentation if group A? A majority is not necessarily an overrepresentation.

This line if thing seems liable to give credence to the notion that "diversity" is a dog whistle for achieving an underrepresentation of undesirable groups (men, Whites, and increasingly Asians).

java_script2• 8 years ago

Then by definition you are not "all for diversity".

manfredo2• 8 years ago

Depends. In my view you can be all for diversity but at the same time not deliberately attempt to achieve an underrepresentation of a particular group.

swalsh2• 8 years ago

It reminds me of mercantilism.

nodesocket• 8 years ago

This Techcrunch write has a long storied history of playing identity politics some would even argue with racist undertones.

I recently saw a new "the more you know ad" on YouTubeTV and was really impressed with the message. Instead of playing identity politics and blaming "patriarchal white men" it encouraged women to join the engineering and science movement and become more active in technology. That's the message we should be sending.

hw• 8 years ago

The fact is that diversity doesn't start at companies. It needs to be part of parenting (encouraging daughters to explore STEM). Needs to be part of early education in schools, and also colleges. Until the diversity spectrum in college admissions and graduates improves, companies are going to find it hard to meet their diversity requirements if there aren't enough diversity in skilled workers out in the market.

hugh4life• 8 years ago

The serious way to boost diversity: go to poor/minority communities in west and then developing countries in general and give young children the Raven's Progressive Matrices test and recruit the best scorers into specialized academies.

21• 8 years ago

Looking at the graph, they seem to have the Harvard Asian problem.

Maybe they can solve it the same way, by hiring based on "full personality assessments".

eezurr• 8 years ago

This is slightly off topic, but are their any numbers on what percentage of [women, black, hispanic, white, men etc] WANT to sit in front of a computer and program all day? I think we need those numbers in order truly measure diversity progress. [1]

If only 10% (made up number) of women are interested in software development, and 95% of that 10% are working in software, that's good! Looking at all women and saying only 9.5% of women are working in software misrepresents all the progress has been made.

[1] Why these numbers would be different for each class of people is a whole different conversation involving nature/nurture/culture/etc.

ryanmercer12• 8 years ago

https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/st...

"In 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 18 percent"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

"The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61.3% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 76.9%"

0x445442• 8 years ago

And yet there doesn't seem to be much concern that only 4% of Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations workers are female or only 25% of Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations workders are men.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

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