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Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

reuters.com

291–300 of 443 posts

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#291

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…

Are these based on self-identification? How do you account for that in the analysis?

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#292

> 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…

Yes, this bothers me as well. If 40% of all graduates in a particular field (like engineering) are women, and a company wants to have 50% female employees, that would mean they are overrepresented, since the employment pool isn't the general population. Same thing for all kinds of groups, like disability, race, ethnicity, etc. Everyone should feel comfortable and welcome, but we shouldn't aim for certain gender or racial ratios as the measurement to optimize.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#293
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK there is an often-repeated statistic: the 20% of girls who take A-level physics outperform the 40% of boys who take it. And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions. The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typica…

You say you don't need discrimination to explain it, but your explanation assumes discrimination ie. you have to be really damn good in order to even have a chance as a woman. There is another explanation, the distribution of IQ between men and women: > Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of…

I'm not attempting to explain the under-representation of minorities. I'm explaining why minorities in teams will naturally perform better than average.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#294

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…

Are these based on self-identification? How do you account for that in the analysis?

Very few people opt out of sharing race with their employer. It's not generally an issue.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought making everyone cartoon yellow was more empowering. Especially on the Internet, with pseudonymity, we're all nothing more than the ideas we present. An egalitarian dream was twisted into a woke nightmare for bad actors to earn free PR by pitting people against each other.

Why is yellow the “neutral” color? Why not black, or red, or white? Letting people pick whatever color seems more empowering to me.

I always thought it was because of The Simpsons, but going as far back as the Tracy Ullman show, so that could have been an influence as far back as 1987.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#296
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a under representation problem in tech, but a mis representation problem. There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! But those aren’t the “right” m…

> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are spe…

> There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?

There are, they’re called “Nigerians”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans

> In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households.

https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3...

> Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions.

Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is yellow the “neutral” color? Why not black, or red, or white? Letting people pick whatever color seems more empowering to me.

Because no one is bright yellow irl unless they're a few days from dying of cirrhosis.

Yellow is obviously much closer to lighter skin color than darker skin colors.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#298
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't go to HR and ask them what I'm allowed to do.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#299

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…

Is this Simpson's Paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#300

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.

As a European right winger, I find it strange how group identity, which is important to us, is valued by left wingers in the USA.

Simplistically... The right wing believes in keeping the old traditions and the left believes in modifying those to 'fit the day's or to achieve 'progress'.

In this framework the difference you notice makes absolute sense.

America is a country founded on enlightenment ideas, which were part of the leftist school of thought in the old borderline ecclesiocratic aristocracy that would have formed the 'right wing' of Europe.

Thus the american right wingers look back to what you'd consider leftist thought as their model of keeping society as it should be, whereas a European right winger may look back to the older days of European monarchs, national identity and religion.

In america, the right wing, looking back towards our american enlightenment ideals, wouldn't really believe in any of those things in the same way.

There are some bits of overlap, especially in the social issues since those are recent changes. But overall an american right winger is going to be a European classical liberal which is typically considered leftist.

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