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Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

reuters.com

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Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#411

Post by blindmute »

vmception wrote: post #128
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asians are proof the power of systemic racism to hold minorities down in this day and age is not very strong.

Some specific cultures with Asian heritage in the West. Not intentionally trying to be obtuse, but to support that talking point it is important to recognize that there are other Asian people in the West that are underserved by this overly broad racially prejudiced assumption. There have always been cultures that adapt to certain states of the world. For example, German efficiency was there and irrelevant before the…

Maybe if some culture is not adapted to the state of the world, we should try to fix that culture, and not modify the world around it. Or, at least, just let that culture be maladapted and leave it be. No one was hiring inefficient people during the industrial revolution for diversity, regardless of how inefficient the person's culture seemed to be.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#412

Post by ikerdanzel »

Running a business is to earn profit. If you need a competitve workforce to gain advantage over your competitors, hiring the best is the only hiring criteria. Even if the person is toxic and unbearable, if able to contribute significantly, it is stil the opyimal hire. A certain fruit company kick out a dificult guy many years ago. He came back and made that fruit company the best in the world. A nicer guy would have doom it.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#413

Post by motogpjimbo »

jedberg wrote: post #245
tester756 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and what arguments are that this process is not fair? current approach challenges pure intellectual output, any other way implies bias which current system strongly avoids

If a standardized test said "what is the Yiddish word for rag?", is that test fair? It asks everyone the same question after all. But I'd bet you find that Jewish people were passing that test at a higher rate than anyone else. Obviously the biases in actual standardized tests are more subtle, but a lot of the question have an inherent cultural bias and assume some basic cultural knowledge in their test takers.

The biases must be subtle indeed if you are unable to describe one and have to resort instead to an absurd thought experiment.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#414

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #369
fennecfoxen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Latinx" is especially great because it sends such a clear message: "We wish to use this ethnic group to make us look like we're concerned about the problems social justice, but we don't actually respect that 97% of the people we're describing don't use that term or want that term."

Americans fixed the word. They also fix their dogs.

I guess neutering jokes aren't funny to a community that really likes Unix.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#415

Post by rowanG077 »

Zababa wrote: post #262
ttt0 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You also see a similar situation with "places in society". The majority of billionaires are men, but the majority of people in prison are men too. Women in general seem to have a more "stable" place in society compared to men. It seems harder for them to climb higher but also harder for them to fall completly at the bottom. If I wanted to sum it up, it would be something like "the glass ceiling comes with a glass flo…

An important point here is that this glass ceiling or glass floor is only relevant to talk about on the level of all women. It has no bearing on an individual.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#416

Post by skinkestek »

pyuser583 wrote: post #383
skinkestek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else. If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege". From what I saw en…

The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice.

Do you mean I should have quit my Bachelors degree in IT?

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#417

Post by vmception »

blindmute wrote: post #411
vmception wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some specific cultures with Asian heritage in the West. Not intentionally trying to be obtuse, but to support that talking point it is important to recognize that there are other Asian people in the West that are underserved by this overly broad racially prejudiced assumption. There have always been cultures that adapt to certain states of the world. For example, German efficiency was there and irrelevant before the…

Maybe if some culture is not adapted to the state of the world, we should try to fix that culture, and not modify the world around it. Or, at least, just let that culture be maladapted and leave it be. No one was hiring inefficient people during the industrial revolution for diversity, regardless of how inefficient the person's culture seemed to be.

You seem to not be aware that a lot of people are working to fix underperforming cultures for the reasons they are underperforming

Tech companies have not been inspired enough to do so, not suggesting it is their role

But many organizations interested in the tech industry are

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#418

Post by wutbrodo »

AlexandrB wrote: post #247
tomp wrote: 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…

> a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech

Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#419

Post by wutbrodo »

bostik wrote: post #224
sokoloff wrote: post #32

> 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…

> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me. I've been trying to call this out for years, to no avail. Trying to boost the diversity metric scores without actually working to remedy the underlying structural problems boils down to a very simple goal: "We need to poach the diverse t…

> I've been trying to call this out for years, to no avail

I think a sizable chunk of the industry feels this way. But the incentives of PR are driven more by the baying of influential parts of the public than by rational consideration of and conversation about what's just.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "metrics diversity" folks are definitely wrong. Just that the environment has long been one that responds to good-faith questions about the effectiveness of its approach with screeching instead of thoughtfulness.

I still remember, early in my career, when Google held a diversity-focused TGIF (internal all-hands). There were obvious, gaping holes between the approach and its stated goals, and I care about representation and especially about identity-driven discrimination, so I was chatting with teammates about it afterwards.

I pretty quickly picked up on the fact that everybody thoughtful that I knew considered diversity efforts to be little more than theatre, designed to appease the loud and dumb and corrupt, and that breaking the kayfabe in the name of actual social justice was professionally costly.

I don't hold quite as cynical a view as this (see a couple paras up), but the degree to which the process is widely considered to be a jobs program for useless HR people was really striking, and a formative moment in my professional life.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#420

Post by pyuser583 »

skinkestek wrote: post #416
pyuser583 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice.

Do you mean I should have quit my Bachelors degree in IT?

Sorry, but I don’t understand what you are seeking with this question.

Did your BA in IT limit your access to good advice? Did it contradict the good advice you received?

I don’t see the conflict between a BA in IT and good advice.

Could you maybe ask the question again in a different way?

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