Diversity at Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/diversity

by martco • 12 years ago

61 60 12 years ago

I wonder if these numbers are actually just their full time employees or if they're including their migrant workers that they employee part time at fulfillment centers.

Harper's ran a great article on Amazon's elderly migrant workforce back in August (paywalled): http://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/the-end-of-retirement/

mathgeek• 12 years ago

I made the assumption that this is just corporate, development and the like. They certainly paint a very pretty picture that stands in rather stark contrast to the various stories about migrant workers.

superuser2• 12 years ago

Amazon does not actually own any warehouses, and it also likely doesn't employ any migrant workers. That is all contracted out. (Provides, among other things, plausible deniability and a liability shield for abuse claims/lawsuits by non-technical workers.)

justcommenting• 12 years ago

true and important, but also not unlike other large companies, e.g. facebook moderators http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

as happy as i am about tim cook's support for "human rights" the other day, i wish he'd apply the concept to apple's suppliers and their subcontractors more vigorously.

but i agree that the key here is to see through the various means of juking the stats on this and hold companies accountable, especially when they make sweeping claims.

pattisapu2• 12 years ago

Some of the contractors they work with like ABM violate labor laws like the FLSA for overtime pay, making janitors work off the clock.

desdiv• 12 years ago

What about this? http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/

bennetthi• 12 years ago

It's unfortunate they don't include any total numbers, just percentages, on the donut charts.

amaks• 12 years ago

It must be really frugal diversity;-)

dreamweapon4• 12 years ago

"We're Amazon. Our global workforce is incredibly diverse, but the working conditions and real take home pay for our rank-and-file fulfillment workers are uniformly miserable."[1]

[1] Type "amazon workplace conditions" in any search engine.

Animats• 12 years ago

Diversity at Amazon would mean having more than one brand of warehouse robot.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

Amazon posts a very positive and promising story on diversity, HN finds a way to post negative comments about Amazon.

Makes ya think.

influx• 12 years ago

Hackernews used to be full of people when shown something new would say, "yes AND!". Now it's full of people who shout, "no BUT!"

I came from /. to k5 to hn. Anybody ready for the next iteration yet? I am.

japesinator4• 12 years ago

You might be looking for https://lobste.rs/

cjslep• 12 years ago

Makes ya think.

Sure, and rather than being vague here are mine: "Why is HN being negative? Probably because of the insanely dehumanizing working conditions Amazon warehouse 'contractors' are put in. Why would that prevent HN from celebrating this diversity post? Possibly because it reads like a corporate puff-piece that improves their image without actually improving the working conditions of their warehouse 'contractors'."

EDIT: To add, I think celebrating diversity is great. But to do so when workers are under tyrannical working conditions does tend to frame the piece in a 'propoganda' light more so than a genuine 'we care' light.

dreamweapon4• 12 years ago

"Positive and promising" is definitely the spin that Amazon, and many other companies engaged in systematic abuses (labor, environmental, regulatory) would like you to have about their diversity programs. Seen another way, they're merely window dressing.

x0x0• 12 years ago

Yeah, mixing engineering and call center employee numbers in the same graph does make me think. It mostly makes me think diversity numbers in jobs that make more than $10 or $12 an hour are shit.

mattparcher• 12 years ago

Note: The two donut charts for "Race and Ethnicity" are visually misleading. The color assigned to each race or ethnicity is not consistent between the two charts, so a visual comparison of the two is much less useful. ("White" is represented by blue on both charts, but green is "Black" on the overall chart and "Asian" on the Managers chart.)

martco• 12 years ago

You're right that they're not consistent between the two charts. That can be misleading.

They are ordered by percentage descending, so you can quickly understand which is the 2nd most populous, 3rd most populous, etc. The ethnicity name is right by the percentage so you can quickly grok it, even though the colors don't match across pie charts.

benrudolph• 12 years ago

You can still sort the pie charts by percentage and keep the same colors. This would aid in understanding the differences between the US and Amazon workforces which I believe is the point of using the two pie charts.

dreamweapon4• 12 years ago

Not only that -- if anything the numbers behind them point to comparative ratios in mangers-to-overall workers that are, for Amazon's purposes, decidedly less than peachy: (asian=1.38, white=1.18, hispanic=0.44, black=0.26).

Those are just "thumbnail" ratios, taken by dividing Amazon's percentages off the chart; we don't have enough information to infer the exact ratios, of course. But taking the case of gender, if we make a reasonable guess of a 4:1 ratio of workers-to-management, we can readily pop out a 60-40 split (male-female) for non-management workers, compared with the 75-25 split for management workers.

We still don't have enough information to conclude evidence (from these charts alone) that Amazon has systematic problems promoting women or non-whites to management (we'd need more hard data, and some basis for comparing with other companies). But the point isn't that we've caught Amazon at something, or that the charts are lying; it's rather that the charts are meaningless. They're simply eye candy; just don't really convey anything one way or another about the fairness of Amazon's hiring practices, or about anything else really.

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

I find it fascinating that this new wave of post-modernist "equalism" demands segmenting and dissecting every group into ever smaller minorities. Black, Asian, Latino, Gay Asian, Lesbian Latino, Hetero Black Woman, etc.

Ignoring for a minute that post-modernism is an absurd philosophy based on the denial of empirical science, how is this in any way productive? Would it not make more sense to focus on an employee's skills and experience, rather than their genetic and ethnic backgrounds?

It is increasingly obvious due to the irrationality of these initiatives that this is indeed a form of political posturing, and nothing more.

Ironically, a community of entrepreneurs such as HN would pay the highest price for ignoring empirical evidence in favor of political posturing. Small companies can't trade political posturing for special treatment by the government. That practice is firmly reserved for established monopolies such as Amazon.

throwaway5752• 12 years ago

Ignoring for a minute that you're the one that inexplicably brought post-modernism into the discussion (and even more inexplicably tie it to anti-empiricism)...

What empirically shows diversity is bad? Empirically speaking, certain groups are underrepresented in hard science. Empirically speaking, intelligence differences between those groups is somewhere between highly disputed and nonexistent. Therefore, a well-managed company would seek to exploit that arbitrage opportunity.

edit: Empirically, good working environments improve business results. Most decent people see the benefit in a diverse workforce in furthering that goal. And it would be beneficial if it just weeded out the types of personalities that are strongly averse to diversity.

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

Empirically speaking, certain groups are underrepresented in hard science.

And this is wrong, why? Post-modernism is at the heart of the entire "equalist" movement precisely because it ignores the scientific process of modernism.

It begins with an a-priori assumption: racial and sexual representation in all disciplines must be in proportion to the population. If the representations are even slightly off, there is discrimination, racism and sexism. Proponents of this line of thought then look for statistics and conjure up conspiracy theories to explain these deviations from their own asserted optimum.

This line of thought is absurd to anyone with basic training in scientific reasoning. Unfortunately, scientific literacy is a rarity in the modern world which was built by it.

Torgo2• 12 years ago

What empirically shows diversity is bad?

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

Lower trust, lower cooperation, lower confidence in government, fewer friends, lower reported happiness.

emotionalcode• 12 years ago

I agree absolutely. Categories like these imply discretely definable differences across something uniform. That which initially begins as a uniform definition (human beings, mammals, things that have consciousness, individuals, individual life) is then examined for 'properties', in which a collection of 'properties' define not only a label, but implicitly defined, correlative associations to that label (cultural assumptions).

I think that society might eventually find itself moving past linguistic categorization to process absolute information about reality, if the computational calculation of lots and lots of data about the individual becomes so individually defined, so complex, and so multidimensional, that words can not express meaningful information - both generally and specifically, because it is derived from abstracted layers of object data points [data] and the abstract relations that structure and organize them [composition of theory].

Generally speaking, we need the ability to compose correlations from data in order to infer information about day to day things. This is generally called common sense, or rational knowledge. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's totally irrational. As a ---, I don't see the point in companies pointing out how diverse they are. All I care about is how much I'm going to learn about code, math, and computer science. I want the assurance that I will be treated equally. Otherwise, it's like trying to get a pendulum to stop swinging by pushing it equally hard, the opposing way.

sbilstein2• 12 years ago

This has less information than the numbers Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn released. There manager vs non manager breakdowns but what about tech vs not tech? I'm fairly disappointed to see so little information from Amazon.

http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-...

http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...

dreamweapon4• 12 years ago

Good call, but the Amazon post wasn't meant to be "informative." It was meant to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling.

donatj• 12 years ago

"Look at us, we're not racist, watch while we single out and show off our ethnic people" scoff/sigh.

blazespin• 12 years ago

You have to wonder what their diversity looks like when you factor in salary. HQ versus Fulfillment centers.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

Apple and Google released similar figures, so of course there will be pressure on Amazon to do this also.

Torgo2• 12 years ago

It may be social signaling, but I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with companies publishing demographics.

gambiting• 12 years ago

I am being completely serious with this question - how is caring about "race diversity" not racist? It always strikes me as such - if you care about race diversity that means you perceive race as having a meaning, while in reality it doesn't have any. Am I the only person with such an opinion?

jpwright• 12 years ago

No, don't worry, Stephen Colbert agrees with you. By not seeing race, he is by definition the least racist.

DanBC• 12 years ago

People have biases. Making sure your hiring[1] decisions are not subject to those biases are one way to avoid racist behaviours. It also helps an organisation to avoid institutional racism.

Being polite: this is entry level stuff. A quick web search would have turned up some useful resources to answer your question.

[1] and other

smtddr• 12 years ago

Let's try this from another angle:

1) Do you believe racism exists?

2) Do you believe we should do anything about it?

3) What would you do about it? (Hint: "Nothing", is the wrong answer)

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

I don't think counting how many of each they have in each bucket is the right answer, regardless.

falcor843• 12 years ago

Perceiving race as having a meaning is not more racist than perceiving sex to have a meaning is sexist. For better and for worse, race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation and many other parameters play important parts in people's lives. Completely ignoring these would likely be detrimental, even if it was possible. We are not all the same, and it's a good thing.

See wikipedia for arguments for and against "color blindness" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness_(race)_in_the_...

RealDiversity3• 12 years ago

I totally agree. Basing hiring decisions on the color of someones skin or the form of their genitalia is one of the most blatant forms of discrimination. The fact that it is widely accepted by our society makes me sick to my stomach.

I am a female and I just hate it when a company recruiter says he can get me a job in a position I know I am not at all qualified for. Additionally I got scholarship money when going to school when those much more dedicated than me did not simply because they had something hanging between their legs.

falcor843• 12 years ago

This is a loaded subject, but I'd like to say that (in my perspective) given a mostly uniform team (e.g. all males), it's a big plus to the atmosphere to hire someone from a different background (e.g. a woman). This may not be fair to the candidates who do not get hired, but it can be a very rational choice for the team to increase diversity and thus possibly improve culture/team spirit, and reduce "echo chamber" effects.

discodave• 12 years ago

If we lived in a society with no discrimination then you might have a point. But we live in a society where certain groups are underrepresented and discriminated against, so it is the responsibility of companies like Amazon and the rest of us to try and rectify this situation.

RealDiversity3• 12 years ago

(http://gasstationwithoutpumps.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/pe...) Shows that < 20% of CS & Engineering Degrees go to females in the US

Google employs 30% females (http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html) Facebook employs 31% (http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-...) Amazon employs 37% (http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=10080092...) LinkedIn employs 39% (http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...)

Obviously these companies need to hire employees to do non-engineering tasks and in an effort to seem "diverse" They likely hire only females for these jobs. It would make sense that the company had 20%/80% doing actual engineering work as there is no reason females cannot do just as good a job with the same experience. That means that half the females hired at these companies are doing non-engineering work which pays lower. This would account for the pay gap. When people ask for further diversity at these companies and equal pay what they are asking is to give an unfair advantage to the less qualified.

I am aware this is an unpopular opinion but I felt I needed to post it as I saw someone else posted it and then took it down after being harassed.

skybrian• 12 years ago

Please do some research. What you're missing is that the pay gap is measured between people in similar jobs.

sbilstein2• 12 years ago

Yes. There are two pay gaps the way I understand things:

1) Females in the US are generally employed in less profitable fields for a whole host of reasons like access to education, poor work conditions for mothers, etc. This is where that 83 cents on a dollar stat comes from...

2) Females within the same field also see generally less pay on average for reasons such as hiring bias, raise bias, limited career mobility due to family obligations, and many more.

lotharbot2• 12 years ago

I recently did some research on exactly this topic.

What I discovered is that the pay gap for people doing the same/similar job with the same level of experience and working the same hours is fairly small if it exists at all. Different studies measure it as between 0 and 7 percent "unexplained" pay gap (ie, not a result of degree, experience, hours worked, or other legitimate differences.) And it's not like these were all right-wing studies; some were coming from left-wing women's labor organizations and still saying they couldn't detect a wage gap after controlling for the relevant factors.

The one "counterexample" someone tried to post for me was about freshly hired women in medicine, who make less than freshly hired men in virtually every medical specialty -- but the study they cherry-picked data from actually discussed how the pay gap between men and women in the same specialty had widened recently, specifically because women were negotiating more non-salary perks (like family-friendly hours) in exchange for lower salary.

The actual amount of proveable wage discrimination in the US is very small -- I was looking at labor department statistics, and the total for discrimination settlements was measured in millions (in an economy measured in trillions). This included both out of court settlements and court-mandated settlements.

I don't deny that some wage discrimination exists. But the data suggests it's not nearly as widespread or systematic as commonly believed. (And IMO it's self-evident that it's not -- because if it was, the economic opportunity for companies paying women fairly would be staggering. They could get the cream of the crop of women for average male salaries.)

bonafidebob• 12 years ago

Another factor is that the demographics are changing over time, with the percentage of women in CS dropping (dramatically) in recent years. The demographics are for the whole workforce, not just college hires.

It's also not unusual to get into CS/Engineering from a related field. For example, for some reason I see a lot of technical candidates with physics degrees.

dwild• 12 years ago

So much people have a hard time understanding that they actually discriminate while they are trying to fix discrimination. I don't believe it's the way to solve it, at least, it's not a way that I respect. I can't respect discrimination, even if people believe it's the way to solve discrimination.

Diversity at Amazon

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