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Getting to work on diversity at Google

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Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#111

Post by nl »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #97
nl wrote: post #64

Are these diversity numbers for the US or for Google as a whole? If they are world-wide, I find it quite interesting how closely the location of the Google offices where software development occurs[1] matches the ethnicity numbers. Notably, there is only one development office in Latin America (and none in Spain/Portugal), and the only development office in the Middle East or Africa is Tel Aviv (not clear what ethnic…

You are aware that every country has "race" distinctions, even if they aren't the same as the US. E.g. in Tel Aviv, it would be interesting to know how many Palestinians are employed, or in Latin America, how many Africans and natives, in China, how many Tibetans and Uighurs? Upstream is important, but we should still make an effort.

It's possible Google has this data internally but haven't released it externally yet. They don't do any breakdown by location.

And yes: I agree that change takes both upstream push and downstream pull.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#112

Post by yummyfajitas »

nostrademons wrote: post #42
Torgo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence." The founders of Twitter and Facebook are mostly rich white dudes and don't seem to be having this problem.

Twitter and Facebook also had significant uptake first in the rich white tech dude demographic (or in Facebook's case, the rich white college student demographic). It's just that they later grew to encompass...everyone. For that matter, look at the social networks that have flourished abroad: Orkut (developed by a Turkish engineer) and WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian). So there may be something to this...

Orkut (developed by a Turkish engineer)...

...and wildly popular in Brazil and Iran.

WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian)

...and wildly popular in India, South Africa and Egypt.

Looks like white dudes of assorted nationalities are actually pretty good at building apps used by men and women of totally different nationalities. Maybe the white/asian guys at google can actually do a good job - they certainly have so far...

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#114

Post by kirkbackus »

philipwalton wrote: post #13
Dwolb wrote: post #4

It's great to be open and all, but they never mention what their goal is. Do Google believe diversity is good for workplace cohesion, their own social mobility goals, good corporate moral policy, etc.? The data is interesting in it's own right but I don't better understand where Google is going with diversity; I only understand where Google currently stands.

As a Google employee, the reasons I hear is that we'd like the diversity of our workforce to more accurately reflect the diversity of our users, so we can serve them better.

That's more of an ideal, not really an achievable goal. How does Google measure the diversity of its users? How does Google measure the quality of their service to each people group? Does this mean Google's ideal workforce would be a near 1:1 mapping of employees to the general user population?

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#115

Post by jpatokal »

asdfologist wrote: post #87

I'd be really curious to see the gender/ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it's hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.

The "Tech" stats at the PBS article are just that:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workfor...

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#116

Post by thaumasiotes »

nl wrote: post #83
[deleted] wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

It sounds to me like you believe that some ethnic groups have intrinsic (genetic) advantages over others in some areas. Like most things to do with race there is a tiny, tiny sliver of truth in this, but not enough to explain the outcomes. sigh Lets look at sports. Sprints: The ACTN3 gene[1] is associated with the fast-twitch muscles, and is more prevalent in people of West African descent. Out of the last 7 Olympic…

> Lets look at sports.

> Sprints: The ACTN3 gene[1] is associated with the fast-twitch muscles, and is more prevalent in people of West African descent. Out of the last 7 Olympic 100m mens finals all 56 finalists have been of West African descent. Only 2 out of the top 500 100m race times are by people without African descent.

> Case closed? No. The proportion of sprint wins by West Africans is much higher than the prevalence of the ACTN3 gene would explain, and other power sports (notably weight lifting) are dominated by other ethnic groups with a more average distribution of the gene.

It's hard not to conclude that you're purposefully trying to fool someone here. It never occurred to you that more than one gene might be involved in sprinting?

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#118

Post by hindsightbias »

Torgo wrote: post #28
heydenberk wrote: post #17

It's {{current_year}} and people are still asking, "why does diversity matter?" Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic diversity is strongly correlated with diversity in points of view. You want the people building your products to come from many walks of life. Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. If you want the…

"Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence." The founders of Twitter and Facebook are mostly rich white dudes and don't seem to be having this problem.

Perhaps it would be worth looking at who Naomi Gleit's peers would be at Google+ and Twitter.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#119

Post by thirsteh »

waveman2 wrote: post #103
heterogenic wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability. I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50,…

> I would hypothesize that this is false Citation required. And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics. The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is…

Citation required.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#120

Post by eropple »

cbhl wrote: post #88
groby_b wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not Google's job, but Google is in a good position to fix upstream. One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is that there are no role models. Sending female engineers to university events is a small step, but it can have huge impact. In a nutshell, it's playing the long game :)

I'm not sure I would want to take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine if it was mandated that every female engineer had to participate in university events. Now the job responsibilities are different between the genders, and you've made the problem worse on a different axis (equality of job responsibilities). Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are in…

Do you seriously think they don't have a surfeit of volunteers? C'mon.
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