The point is that without diversity, even awareness of these problems can be missing. Obviously once you understand what the skill/experience gap is, you can go out and try to fill it. But a team lacking in diversity will also end up with these sorts of blind spots. Latin Americans can (and did :) ) notice this gap and now it is beginning to be filled.
But my point is that it's diversity of experience/knowledge, not racial diversity that solves those problems.
My point is not that the best way to solve these problems is through racial diversity. My point is that they inevitably crop up due a lack of awareness when you do not have diversity.
For the millionth time. The distribution of populations not lining up with the general population distributions is not indicative of discrimination. Not to mention that the "anti-brown people" narrative absolutely dissolves in the face of the massive overrepresentation of Indians and other Asians. To say that Silicon Valley has a "race problem" and only include the employment statistics as they relate to the populati…
>massive overrepresentation of Indians and other Asians As indicated in the article, there's evidence [0] that there is profound underrepresentation at the leadership level relative to junior representation. [0] https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.ascendleadership.org/resource/...
Yes, but again, the assumption is racial discrimination. That is the de facto assumption for every possible case. What about language, or culture, confidence, etc? If you are a foreigner to a country, of which many Asians are either first or second generation, you might be comfortable performing culturally agnostic technical feats, but not at all confident taking a leadership role. Or if we want to entertain that there is discrimination at play, how does cultural discrimination map on to racism. You discriminate culturally when choosing who to be friends with. If you like bros, hipsters, nerds, outdoorsie types, etc, you're making a cultural discrimination. If there is a degree of correlation between culture and race/ethnicity, which there is, then how might that come into play regarding the roles people assume in an organization? The presumption of racial discrimination in a vacuum is a refusal to content with any level of nuance or complexity.
Women and blacks should have the right to choose their own destiny, who are we to tell them they're supposed to go into tech?
Is this what I said? Some straw man. What I said was we should we work towards removing any obstacles underrepresented groups may face when trying to enter STEM careers. Plenty of research that supports the existence of such obstacles and the higher drop out rates of these groups even after having a go at pursuing a career in a STEM field (particularly in tech - https://hbr.org/2016/09/what-it-will-take-to-keep-women…
You said: "If certain groups shy away from STEM careers, why not try to do something about it?"
You didn't say "If certain groups are blocked by obstacles...", you said "If certain groups shy away from".
We should respect all peoples' rights to choose their own destinies. As someone who enjoys sitting behind a computer monitor more than half my waking life, I'm solidly in the minority.
No amount of derogatory school treatment, opportunity gaps, lack of prestigious work, or any of the other alleged obstacles in your link, would change my mind that I enjoy sitting behind a monitor listening to music through my headphones all day every day!
Male and female representation is also a function of domain interest. Last time I checked there were not that many women applications in brick layering.
So what changed in 1984? https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Male interest in the field exploded when people realized that you could build things with computers and not just crunch numbers while female interest progressed in the same rate as before. After that the gender ratio in computer science aligns very well with what they have in other engineering fields, data which that article very conveniently left out.
Step one (and really the only step) is that people have to want to become developers/scientists, sit in front of a computer all day, read and learn, all the time. There are a million different reasons someone may not want to do that or may be encouraged against it, but you'd have to look at every individual and culture to find out why. It may not even turn out to be a bad thing. What if someone wants to become a chef…
For choosing a major and career I think step makes sense but I think that is near the end of the pipeline. What about exposure to the field and introducing computational thinking into earlier pars of the education system? Not necessary making kids program as their first exposure, but exposing them to computational concepts (maybe start with power of twos when learning multiplication, or control-flow-logic for writing…
I think even more helpful would be framing how this actually translates into the real world - what does this sort of thing enable in the real world.
I loved the show Numbers because it was a show about how math helped detectives solve crimes. Way more interesting than just doing algebra about speeding trains.
I think sometimes there is an idea that everyone has the same problem and your problem is universal.
For example I heard about a hackathon for black and latino kids. And the ideas that came out of it were really different. One app was a social networking platform for private school kids to connect with other black private school kids to talk about their experiences and vent. Another idea was a payment app to send money to Mexico without having to go to Western Union or whatever.
There is a startup in Oakland that has an app to help people who are caught up in the criminal justice system to keep track of court appearances and hearings and stuff so they don't need to go to jail for bogus stuff like missing a court appearance.
Technology has the opportunity to enable and transform - if we make sure everyone has access.
For the millionth time. The distribution of populations not lining up with the general population distributions is not indicative of discrimination. Not to mention that the "anti-brown people" narrative absolutely dissolves in the face of the massive overrepresentation of Indians and other Asians. To say that Silicon Valley has a "race problem" and only include the employment statistics as they relate to the populati…
To me the issue is not discrimination but rather representation. I will give you a concrete example. Our team (working in medicine) had very few Latinos for a long time. As a result of this we completely avoided gathering training data from Latin America because no one was well versed in how to conduct business there, yet we had data/deals with US, Europe and Asia. As a result our algorithms will likely not help Lati…
> Cancer presents differently for different races for example.
Ok, but ... you've been talking about Latino as if it is a race. Does the word Latino describe a race or a culture?
For the millionth time. The distribution of populations not lining up with the general population distributions is not indicative of discrimination. Not to mention that the "anti-brown people" narrative absolutely dissolves in the face of the massive overrepresentation of Indians and other Asians. To say that Silicon Valley has a "race problem" and only include the employment statistics as they relate to the populati…
> Suggestions to anonymize the interview process typically produce results that are even less representative of their desired distribution, because almost every company is actively discriminating in favor of women and "marginalized communities." Two citations needed. I've been on hiring committees for years, at both very large, and very small companies. I've hired and rejected both men and women. I've never seen a "d…
If we're doing anecdotal, I have been in many hiring processes and have been told to favor diversity.
Blind/anonymized hiring (which I am in favor of and would love to see advocated) has examples going in either direction. The orchestra one you referenced is the go to example of it doing its job well, but if it generally produced the results they were looking for, it would be a noncontroversial strategy being pushed, which it is not.
"And as criticism grows over Silicon Valley’s bro culture and its lack of minority representation" Isn't 40% of the tech industry made up of east and south asians? Do they not count as minorities? If anything, you'd think SV would be praised for being one of the most diverse industries. "A growing body of research shows diverse perspectives bring tangible benefits to firms that support them" You see this so much in t…
You realize the "diversity" problem is also impacted by the funding problems. It is really hard for people of color and women to get funding - from any source. Banks, VCs, Angel investors and so on. Combine that with the wealth gap and it makes it a lot harder to get started.
One look at the website of Seattle's Garfield High School (34% black/latino) CS Club website pretty much sums it up: http://www.garfieldcs.com/ The makeup is similar at the college level: sitting in on CS courses at UW you see a sea of white, east asian, and south asian faces. I can count the number of black or latino students (out of the several hundred enrolled students I saw) on two hands. It's a pipeline problem,…
And corporate diversity goals are based on the pipeline, not the general population. Lots of folks in this conversation seem to be making utterly incorrect assumptions about programs that they seem to have deep contempt for. Unsurprising.
It's certainly true that some minorities are underrepresented in tech. A lot of the irritation you're seeing comes from the repeated accusations and implications that this is due to some unspoken policy of discrimination at tech companies.
Companies can and should make an effort to ensure they're hiring a diverse range of people. However, it needs to be done with the bigger picture in mind - otherwise it becomes a defacto quota system.