What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#2Question:
What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?
How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?
Diversity for thee, but not for me.
Also, while we're discussing Things You Should Not Notice: what are the numbers as far as litigiousness of "protected" groups? If I'm looking to hire someone, non-protected status (whether it's race, unionization, etc.) means I'm more likely to hire them (all else being equal). Like the blowback from affirmative action, I don't see an objective discussion about litigation risk (whether or not it's substantiated). It's human nature to asymmetrically attribute failure to others and success to oneself. Add racial/gender rent-seeking to the equation and you get an especially potent, counterproductive miasma. Just look at Buddy and Pao - they've made entire careers out of entrepreneurial race/gender grievance litigation.
Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#3Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#4Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
On the flipside, what if Caucasian [sic] men were better than everyone in this field? Many people are happy to assert that diversity is good because it means multiple different viewpoints. What if the viewpoint of the Caucasian male[0] happened to be more suited to a particular field or company?
[0] Given the obfuscation around race and culture, this might not be clear on first reading, but I am only discussing the possibility that the culture that is highly correlated with being "Caucasian" might have some advantage, not being "Caucasian" in itself. Thus my claim is entirely analagous with "You should hire more Black people because more (cultural) diversity will add more viewpoints to your company and hence increase productivity".
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#5Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
White men are over represented at large tech companies? White people make up around 80% of the U.S. population [0]. They make up less than 60% of tech workers at Google[1] and less than 55% of tech workers at Facebook[2]. That's underrepresented.
Asian Americans make up less than 5% of the U.S. population[0], but almost 35% of tech workers at Google[1] and 36% of tech employees at Facebook[2]. That's over representation by a factor of about 7 times.
Yet, the media will continue to harp on the over representation of white people at tech companies. Why? Because "diversity" really only means "not white".
BTW: I bring this up not because I want fewer Asian Americans in tech or more white people in tech, but to point out the hypocrisy of the reporting on diversity in tech.
[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/google-diversity-sta...
[2] http://recode.net/2015/06/25/facebook-employee-demographics-...
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#6Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
On the flipside, what if Caucasian [sic] men were better than everyone in this field? Many people are happy to assert that diversity is good because it means multiple different viewpoints. What if the viewpoint of the Caucasian male[0] happened to be more suited to a particular field or company? [0] Given the obfuscation around race and culture, this might not be clear on first reading, but I am only discussing the p…
> what if Caucasian [sic] men were better than everyone in this field?
That's her point: given the data, claiming it's a meritocracy implies that Caucasian men are "better" than everybody in this field. That's not a useful attitude if you're trying to improve diversity.
> What if the viewpoint of the Caucasian male happened to be more suited to a particular field or company?
Then the particular field or company has evolved to favor Caucasian males (or if you prefer the culture that is highly correlated with being "Caucasion"). In other words, it's got embedded structural discrimination. If you want to improve diversity, that needs to be acknowledged and removed.
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#7Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
Privilege increases merit via education and culture. Why would you ever assume meritocracy would naturally lead to a diverse workplace? A cursory glance through most "white" or "male" privilege arguments shows this is very much not true.
Given that this is true, the responsible thing would be to both acknowledge that you want diversity and that certain groups are underserved in the field. How to resolve this in terms of policy as a business is going to be a difficult decision for anyone. But I don't think it's responsible to not acknowledge that white men are not the best qualified candidates (though I was under the impression Asian males also do quite well in the tech industry)--i think that is doing a disservice to young people trying to understand the industry and the truth about the massive disparity between minority population distribution and minority hiring distribution.
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#8Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
White men are over represented at large tech companies? White people make up around 80% of the U.S. population [0]. They make up less than 60% of tech workers at Google[1] and less than 55% of tech workers at Facebook[2]. That's underrepresented. Asian Americans make up less than 5% of the U.S. population[0], but almost 35% of tech workers at Google[1] and 36% of tech employees at Facebook[2]. That's over representat…
You think that 80% of the US is male, let alone white male? There are some big problems with your argument.
And it's exactly this type of argument that is the problem: underrepresentation as a majority is far less of a problem than underrepresentation as a minority.
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#9Question: What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold? How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound? Diversity for thee, but not for me. Also, while we're discussing Things You Should Not Notice: what are the numbers as far as litigiousness of "protected" groups? If I'm looking to hire someone, non-protected status (whether it…
> What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?
> How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?
> Diversity for thee, but not for me.
Can I ask you a quick question here? What does any of this matter? Diversity isn't about protecting yourself from character assassination. It's about promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.
If you look in the past of anyone, you will find things they regret and things that may draw censure from the pro-diversity and intersectional feminist mindset. That's natural. That's to be expected. Society is, by any reasonable and several reproducible metrics, extremely biased in favor of white men. We all grew up influenced by that society. It is therefore almost inevitable that anyone with these sorts of experiences has and will continue to have both privilege and mistakes in their past.
What matters is going forward, how we all take these things we've been fortunate enough to be handed (along with the misfortunes and difficulties we've endured) and use those to promote a fairer, more just world for those who come after us.
We can sit here and argue if this messenger is the ideal messenger. Which is odd, because in many other fields we view past mistakes as a teaching opportunity. Ultimately, the people in power should cede and share some of that good fortune and cultural windfall to create a more equal world rather than waiting for history to repeat itself with violent uprisings. History suggests that such uprisings are not kind to even bystanders.
> Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis ...
Because creating an environment that mimics the societal advantages white men get in the US and most of the western world is infeasibly expensive.
I mean, seriously. How would you even? You'd have to raise kids from birth in a theme park with meticulous care to shield them from the deleterious effects of racism and sexism.
> rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?
Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.
Re: What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
#10Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented."
White men are over represented at large tech companies? White people make up around 80% of the U.S. population [0]. They make up less than 60% of tech workers at Google[1] and less than 55% of tech workers at Facebook[2]. That's underrepresented. Asian Americans make up less than 5% of the U.S. population[0], but almost 35% of tech workers at Google[1] and 36% of tech employees at Facebook[2]. That's over representat…
Your argument is using some old data and substantially flawed reasoning and I'll let other people talk about it. But there is one thing I want to point out:
It is possible to be both marginalized in one aspect and privileged in another. It is definitely the case for Asian Americans in tech. Very few will say they're not (in aggregate, individual experiences vary of course!) better off than other people of color in this field, even as they also suffer racism. The numbers, as you suggest, do not lie. It's a similar phenomenon to the treatment of homosexual people in tech on the west coast. Just because someone is a gay man doesn't make them suddenly not white, for example.
This is a really important and often overlooked feature of intersectional feminism: nearly everyone has privilege even if they're also marginalized. That's why it's such a worthy cause, nearly everyone has something substantial to gain.