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Getting to work on diversity at Google

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Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#221

Post by kaitai »

Dewie wrote: post #169
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…

First I though that people should give X more of a chance in hiring, because they shouldn't assume anything about X's background just because they are X. Now, at the same time, people say that we should hire X because they have a different background. That sounds like a fun backroom conversation in cases where the diversity-part doesn't work out - "We hired that black guy because we wanted more diversity on the team.…

Don't worry so much: your black guy (or woman) can never escape his (her) fate in America! I don't think you have to worry about the being pulled over while driving, followed by shopping, and arrested when trying to get into one's own house stopping soon.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#222

Post by borplk »

ng12 wrote: post #25
dandroid17 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that a huge majority of that 30% female workforce is in HR, marketing, and other non-engineering roles.

That's one of the interesting things. Statistically HR has a similar gender ratio as engineering, only reversed -- 72% of all HR professionals are women ( http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf ).

And where are the crowds crying out loud for diversity and bringing more men to HR?

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#223

Post by criley2 »

enneff wrote: post #99
philipwalton wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a Google employee, the reason I'd like to improve the diversity of my work place is so I can work with more than just a bunch of white dudes. I mean, white dudes are great and all, but I really value diversity of opinion and experience in my life.

This is the feeling I'm scared of:

According to Google's numbers, whites are underrepresented at Google compared to the US at large.

What? What did I say?

Yes, european whites make up roughly 72% of the US, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat..., and 61% of Googlers.

If anything, you should be wanting to see less Asian faces overall (insanely, dramatically overrepresented, 30% of Googlers compared to 4.7% of Americans), and want to see more black faces and more white female faces.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#224

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

orbifold wrote: post #189
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a company perspective the reason is you may well be missing out on great talent and the great teams that research shows come with greater diversity. I don't necessarily agree with affirmative action, but if you believe that many of the factors which contribute towards easily measured ability (attending a good school, work experience) may be skewed, then you presumably also accept that there is untapped potential…

I agree that there is a lot of potential lost due to unequal opportunities (for example children with poor parents, versus children with rich parents) and peer pressure / gender stereotypes. I've studied physics and the 5% of female students consistently were well above average for example, which suggests that only a portion of the extremely talented females even considered studying physics. I am not sure if an indiv…

I'm not suggesting that companies change the system, more that they look at the criteria they use for recruitment to see if there are ways they can better judge underlying potential that what grad school people went to.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#226

Post by rcthompson »

hueving wrote: post #162
rcthompson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints. I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed…

>At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. That's a pretty prejudiced statement. I have not observed this at all when it comes to work-related items, which is what is relevant in the workplace.

Well, maybe I didn't phrase it very well. What I mean is that in my experience, women consistently bring unexpected perspectives to my attention that are attributable to the differences in life experience between men and women in the same society, even in subjects and areas where I wouldn't expect these differences to be relevant. So I definitely see the benefit of having a more balanced ratio of men and women in the workplace, regardless of what the work consists of.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#227

Post by Mangalor »

xienze wrote: post #220
Mangalor wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that in reality Google is not 61% Black. If it were, you'd have a point. And people do complain about lack of diversity in the NFL/NBA, on both sides. These are such small percentages that you wouldn't even need to reduce head count to increase representation, just hire a few more workers. But even if they did have to replace, why are you so focused on saving every last White or Asian soul to the detrime…

> why are you so focused on saving every last White or Asian soul to the detriment of addressing the problem? Because I take offense to people saying that having a majority of white workers at a company located in a white majority country is a "problem".

Well, minorities take offense at having a 2-5% rate of employment in a 37% non-White country so you can pick your problem, but don't just assume your personal concerns trump all others.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#228

Post by julesbond007 »

I wonder how many of those minorities are working the low ends at Google...the details of course didn't say. Also, they stopped short of saying it's the perception and blame the facts on 'statistics'. I'm sure they have no problems hiring cooks, janitors, etc who are minorities.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#229

Post by swampangel »

crazypyro wrote: post #195
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 :)

Are role models in CS (and even other industries) really what drives people to pursue the career? Just looking at my own experience, its hard to pinpoint a "role model". I'm curious why there is always such a huge focus on role models (is it a grandfathered idea from the past?) and not on the herd of other problems, such as access to tools, ease of self-learning and targeted tutorials at under-represented demographic…

No research here, just opinions: "Representation" might be a better word than "role model".

Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. You can imagine that person overcame many of the same obstacles that you face.

People point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg to show that you don't need a comp sci degree to be a coder and an innovator. These examples are used to encourage people to continue in the field, not as models to pattern your behaviour after.

On the other hand, if you look at a sample of people in an industry and you don't identify with any of them, you might imagine that people like you (a) don't enjoy the work experience or (b) face some serious obstacle to success.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#230

Post by curun1r »

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…

If you want diverse points of view, race is only one dimension of what you're looking for and using it as the sole measure of diversity isn't really that productive. For instance, I have coworkers that were born in Ukraine, France and Germany who are all lumped into the Caucasian group with me that offer perspectives much more different from mine than my African-American and Asian-American coworkers. My belief is that Country/Region of origin plays a much larger role in your point of view than skin color. This is particularly true when you get to technical skills since different countries educate children in different ways. I have one coworker who attended University in Dubai who's an excellent engineer, but has an approach that's very different from mine.

Also, Asian is way too corse a classification, especially for our industry. It should, at a minimum, be broken down into Middle-Eastern, those from the Indian subcontinent and East Asian. These numbers would be a lot more interesting if they subdivided Asian and then subdivided each category into US and non-US. Knowing what percent of Google's workforce is Caucasian-American rather than simply Caucasian would provide a lot more insight into Google's diversity.

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