Live data from Hacker News

Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

reuters.com

271–280 of 443 posts

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, that's wrong and un-American, I thought everyone is created equal. I'm not sure what the reason for this recent surge of neo-racism where every "tribe" has to be treated differently.

Everyone may be created equal, but they are not treated equally as they grow up, making them unequal as adults.

separating people into groups based on race and treating them differently is literally the opposite to treating everyone as equal

By “affirmative action” Google perpetuates racism

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#272
I do analyses like these for companies sometimes. They almost always get it wrong. I'm surprised Google's report doesn't seem to do it correctly either.

The issue is rarely that people of a specific race are leaving faster than other races. The issue is almost always that turnover is high in lower level roles and that's where the bulk of your black / latinx population sits. You CANNOT look at overall attrition rates for a company. You must segment it by level unless your levels have equal mixes of races, and they never do. I'd bet heavily that low level attrition is just higher than usual. You can see it in their charts that attrition has increased across the board. It just fails to notice that attrition is going to be among low level employees and low level employees are more likely to be black.

In order to not have black employees leaving at higher rates than white employees overall, while black employees occupy lower level roles, you would need black employees to leave at significantly lower rates than their white colleagues, normalized to level.

edit: and I'll also note, for a growing company the more important number is hiring. They're at 8.8% black/latinx each up from ~6% each last year. That's very good. The overall representation has improved by ~0.6% since 2020. That's also very good. Headline is misleading. Google's making strong progress on its diversity goals.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#273
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A problem I have heard female friends speculate about is with promoting women in higher positions. If the female population is too low, and you try to get them into higher positions, two effects occur according to this theory. First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thin…

You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation. However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us. Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point. I se…

> while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement

I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#274

How incredibly weird is it to witness American schizophrenia* when it comes to races (and gender) from a non-american perspective. "Black+", "Latinx+", "LGBTTQQIAAP". Putting people in smaller and smaller box in the name of equality and diversity. I am the only one to feel this is coming to an absurd point ? I'm not an alt-right fan, nor would I vote Republican if I could, I'm a leftist in what's considered a traditi…

It feels like an "emperor has no clothes" situation. I'm sure that even the people at Reuters find the terminology stupid, but they're afraid of what others might think of them if they say so or if they don't use it.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#275
If you are non-white or female, and can fog a mirror business wise, can't keep the money, or power, or press off of you. On the other side, it's really fun to be berated and pushed away your entire life, only to see leadership fawn over mobs who just looted and burnt down their business. I used to think leadership was blind or naive. It really is cut throat. If siccing a blood thirsty mob boosts earnings, well then, black lives do matter.

Those wounded warrior commercials, how many women or minorities do you see blown to bits or burnt alive or brain damaged? It's not 54% women or 40% non-white. Climb the ladder high enough, you see everything wounds. Claiming oppression is a convenient luxury to squat on the lower rungs and make failure palatable. Means as much as a carnival freak show. You're still going to get it bad.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#276

> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity. This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone…

> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt

What is the correct racial / gender / sex breakdown for a tech industry with no diversity problems?

I’m not sure how we can say we have a problem if we don’t know what the correct breakdowns are. We’re implementing all these solutions with no metric to measure success. That seems like a perfect system to create more discrimination.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#277
post #166

I happen to be very familiar with Google's diversity efforts and have many Black and Latinx friends and acquaintances in the company. Google is one of the most racially inclusive tech companies in the world. It really tries hard to fix historical disparities between races in ways that you don't see in most companies, ranging from very active promotion of minorities to programs dedicated to hiring them. The interview…

When I was an employee at Google and did interviews, I was told that for diversity reasons, I couldn't ask where an interviewee "was from" because that would bias my decision. I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question, and have far less bias (well, employee distributions that more closely map to underlying population distributions) in hiring. Most of what Google is doing is to reduce its l…

> I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question

I'm pretty certain that if I asked HR about this, they would say what Google said: Don't ask this question as it could be viewed as discriminatory. I don't think Google is an outlier here.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams have to work with each other. If he needs help from someone who is disgusted by his manifesto google has a problem.

> If he needs help from someone who is disgusted by his manifesto google has a problem. This is mostly a cultural issue. Being professional is being able to work with people you fundamentally disagree with from a political perspective. But maybe Google shouldn't be a space where people discuss wedge issues to begin with, or write memos about anything on the matter.

Sure, but the fact still remains. There absolutely are people who would behave this way within google, so google's choices are fire hundreds or maybe thousands of people or fire him. It was an easy choice.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech. People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certai…

a good example of this is the disabled. any of those same brilliant tech workers could acquire a disability at any time - they come from the same group of people , but we seem quite under-represented. and the developer tools themselves tend not to be accessible (I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.) it's curious, right?

[deleted]

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The ideology of individualism is dependent on a denial of the past as relevant to the present… Individualism denies the significance of race." -- Robin DeAngelo Robin DeAngelo, is a frontrunner of 'white guilt', CRT, and other strange sides of the woke movement. This quote pretty much sums it up, they want to put group identity first, above individualism.

I see this criticism of CRT/wokeism etc very often and I really want to address a point about people talking past each other. Proponents of CRT don't say they want to divide people based on group characteristics, they say people are divided based on group characteristics and they recognise that whilst individualists deny what is evidently true. Essentially it's the position that people are negatively impacted due to…

It’s about using racial rhetoric in a self-serving way. Isn’t that what people are talking about here?
Post reply on HN