Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#191

Post by rando123 » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:33 AM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #166

cb18 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Institutional racism,"(has it undergone re-branding as "institutionalized discrimination"?) is this vague, boogey-man term used as an explanation of last resort to explain the "achievement gap," among other divergences between the races. The thing is, there is tenuous evidence at best for "institutional racism," and in nowhere near the quantity that would be needed to account for all of its supposed effects. Indeed…

"Institutional racism,” also “Systemic racism,” is not a vague, bogeyman term, it has a specific and objective meaning. It can be measured and has been measured, repeatedly. In almost every area of American life, there are measurable effects. Blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crimes. They are more likely to be sent to prison and to get longer prison sentences given the same criminal recor…

As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names.

That is an oft-cited conclusion from an old study that has not been reproduced in the tech industry (the classic one is http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873, a 2003 study in Boston and Chicago where they submitted resumes based on newspaper ads), where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates.

Someone should repro this in tech, though, it would be quite useful to know how things look here and now!

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#192

Post by adnzzzzZ » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:35 AM UTC

jmcgough wrote: post #177

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it sounds more terrible but it accurately describes the problem. You shouldn't be guilt tripping white people, you should be encouraging black people to perform better. "White privilege" falls into a mentality that I call victimization, where instead of people looking at things through the lens of "how can I change myself and be better", they look at it through the lens of "how can others change themselves to h…

> You shouldn't be guilt tripping white people, you should be encouraging black people to perform better. White people are the ones in power in this country. You can't just expect people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, because it'll never happen unless the people in power put in effort to change the status quo, which is exactly what some tech companies are trying to do.

Like I said, I think both mentalities are necessary but there's a heavy focus on the wrong thing. The message it sends to people is wrong. The signal is that there are systemic problems that can't be changed because people in power are guilty of having power. This is a hopeless signal that doesn't help anyone. What we should be saying to people is that they should strive to be better because that's the only sure way they can hope to improve their situations. Waiting for other people to help you isn't going to do anything. The only thing you have control over is your own life. If the public discourse around these issues focuses solely on how other people have control and how you have no control, then the situation only becomes worse because then people have an excuse to not try, and they don't.

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#193

Post by alva » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:44 AM UTC

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #190

alva wrote: post #176

I expect this is a well intentioned mission. But to what extent do you take this? Does not making sure other (less in the zeitgeist) groups are involved mean they are failing at this? Hasidic Jews, Inuits, Wheelchair users, Men named Reginald, A person with a southern drawl, a person with one hand, a person with no hands, a 45 year old. Quick googling suggests Jews make up 1.4% of the US population. You can't really…

You're making a false equivocation between arbitrary demographic "groups" and demographic groups that have faced well documented systemic discrimination in America, both historically and continuing in the present. And to preempt a counterargument via your chosen example, yes, you could argue Jews have and do face discrimination in America - but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical…

> but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life.

Many people would find that highly offensive and ignorant. Why are you trying to diminish the struggles faced by the Jewish people in America? Why are you trying to defend a now well known anti-semitic organisation Github?? Your hateful statements are dangerous and violent. (Oh, away from my posturing as an online hate-mob, you are completely incorrect in that statement)

This game is very, very easy to play, but unfortunately, everyone loses.

Lets go on. You are saying wheelchair users, disabled people have not faced a large amount of societal discrimination that can affect their job chances? Don't you know how many public buildings and spaces aren't accessible? I cannot believe how ableist you are. Does your employer know of your hateful, bigoted views? Do your colleagues?

The problem with presenting the argument that the workplace and other groups need to be representative of wider culture, is that it will always run into this issue. If you say, discriminated groups need to be represented, and present it as a tautology, then you cannot decide which trendy group of the moment is more important.

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#194

Post by WillAbides » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:45 AM UTC

jpeg_hero wrote: post #41

> At a high level, GitHub is 64% male worldwide and 64% white in the U.S. That said, the company has improved since the end of 2014, when it was 79% male and 21% female worldwide. I wonder what their male/female split is in daily active users.

93% male / 4% female / 3% undisclosed.

source: https://medium.com/@tenaciouscb/github-com-demographics-a-st...

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#195

Post by cb18 » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:48 AM UTC

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #187

cb18 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Institutional racism,"(has it undergone re-branding as "institutionalized discrimination"?) is this vague, boogey-man term used as an explanation of last resort to explain the "achievement gap," among other divergences between the races. The thing is, there is tenuous evidence at best for "institutional racism," and in nowhere near the quantity that would be needed to account for all of its supposed effects. Indeed…

>Has anyone attempted to explain why all this "institutional racism" seems to be working to such great benefit for north-east Asians in the US, who consistently rank above the supposed "evil white oppressors" in various socio-economic metrics? Since others are picking apart your argument in the large, I'll just add this. Institutional racism, though it continues to manifest in the present, can only be fully understoo…

Since others are picking apart your argument in the large

Ha! No one else has even evidenced reading the post, I applaud you for seeming to have at least read it.

so they've had much less time to be dragged down by systemic racism.

They're not being "dragged down" at all, they're being "pushed up." There is no reason to think that given enough time they will eventually be dragged down.

There is not some race in the US conspiring to keep other races down given enough time. I'd imagine any race accussed of such a thing would find it highly offensive.

Far be it from me to make the accusation, but there is precedent to say that Asians and Jews are oppressing everyone else in the US because of their greater average income, and because they hold "high prestige" positions in proportionally greater numbers.

There is no evidence for societal wide mechanisms keeping particular races down. People looks at measurements, see differences, then try to blame the measuring stick, i.e. society for the differences.

the fact that they are lighter of skin tone tends to make them a less targeted group by racist actors.

That doesn't even sound like the way people like to imagine "institutional racism." I thought the whole point was that there is no conscious targetting and not anyone particular actor but society as a whole in some fuzzy, unspecified way is to blame.

Who is 'we' and what exactly do 'we see'??? I'm dying to know.

I don't get this tone here.

We is anyone who looks, what we see is similarity in crime rates, test scores, achievement, SES, income, etc. anything people in the US try to ascribe to "institutional racism." Yet we see similar metrics and behavior in countries with different institutional histories, and in the countries where these US minorities originate.

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#196

Post by ganeshkrishnan » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

paloaltokid wrote: post #150

e40 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the other day I read a comment on HN, I think, about how in Mexico there is racial stratification between light and dark-skinned people, and how they even have different ways of speaking. The point was that people can tell immediately which class you are in and act accordingly. So, yeah, I think this is a (bad) feature of humans everywhere, not just the US.

An Indian colleague of mine told me that she felt it was the same in India with respect to the caste system (she was born a Brahmin). She said she could tell from the way people spoke what caste they were from. When I hear folks from India talk about the caste system, it sounds very similar to how people in the US talk about racism against blacks.

No, you cannot tell what caste a person is by the way they talk. There are 800+ languages and thousand of dialects in India. On an average the dialect changes every 7 kilometer is any direction. You cannot also visually tell the difference between high/low caste.

The best indicator is last name and hence social strata (centuries of exploitation has left them 'backward'). There are plenty of 'backward caste' people in high position and extremely rich.

Though racism and casteism have similar effects they are not the same

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#197

Post by xenadu02 » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

reader5000 wrote: post #185

resu_nimda wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So obviously there is quite a lot of overlap between companies doing important things (by that incredibly broad definition) and companies that devote some of their resources to diversity. It's almost as if working on important things and caring about diversity are not mutually exclusive, that people/companies can care about multiple things... I don't get why it is so irksome to you that a company would make a diversi…

"Do you assert that that doesn't happen?" Yes. Many (most?) ethnic minorities are significantly more successful than whites in the US. Whites represent the largest group of people in the US living in poverty. Whites must face the entire ideology of diversity which is that they must be replaced by non-whites due to inherent moral inferiority. Wait you're right I think systematic disadvantage does happen..

Citation needed.

I've been directly involved in hiring/interviewing under these circumstances and the idea of lowering technical standards just to meet a quota was never entertained. We simply recruited through diverse avenues. Mostly the diversity statement itself was sufficient to let potential candidates know they could apply without fear of rejection for not being "like us".

I've never actually seen evidence of active discrimination against a more qualified white candidate. Maybe it happens but it certainly isn't a result of diversity policies.

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#198

Post by geofft » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

1_2__3 wrote: post #178

geofft wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint genuinely baffles me. You can only manage what you measure, and the process of monitoring a metric isn't the same thing as caring about the metric. I monitor free disk space on all my servers, but it doesn't mean I care primarily about buying more disks. In fact I don't care because I've monitored it and have determined we're okay there. However, as a result of data , if my servers were regularly runni…

The argument is that making decisions based on race is racism. Github isn't "monitoring" things, they're actively trying to change them, and using race (and other such factors that some people believe we should try to be blind to, or at least agnostic about) as a factor.

Yes. I understand "racism" (at least in this context) to mean "bias in favor of or against candidates based on their race", not "paying attention to race". The latter is something we can hopefully stop doing once we're confident the former isn't happening. I don't understand the reasoning that involves refusing to think about whether the former is happening. (And besides, if GitHub as policy does not pay attention to race, but individual interviews and reviews -- which are notoriously subject to human whim on all sorts of axes -- might be biased on race, you definitely haven't achieved the goal of your system not paying attention to race.)

Again, this seems pretty straightforward for a technical shop... if your goal is, say, "We should not have features on GitHub for Desktop that preference one platform over another," then the way to get to that goal is you add testing processes that explicitly try out things on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Even if you develop your software with some platform-agnostic library (which is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve the goal), you test the software in a non-platform-agnostic way, precisely because you want to know if you got it wrong. You don't say "We're platform-agnostic" and remove the OS field from bug reports, unless you are 200% sure that your code is platform-agnostic even when things go wrong. If you see lots of cross-platform bugs, fine! You still leave it in there so that, one day, if somehow things are disproportionately broken on Windows, you're able to actively respond to that.

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#199

Post by MaxfordAndSons » Fri, May 27, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

alva wrote: post #193

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a false equivocation between arbitrary demographic "groups" and demographic groups that have faced well documented systemic discrimination in America, both historically and continuing in the present. And to preempt a counterargument via your chosen example, yes, you could argue Jews have and do face discrimination in America - but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical…

> but garden variety American anti-semitism is not of the systemic, historical nature that makes a random Jewish American more likely to be passed over for a job because of their name, or treated drastically differently by the average police officer, or less likely to have become engaged in tech earlier in life. Many people would find that highly offensive and ignorant. Why are you trying to diminish the struggles fa…

But you're still making the same false equivocation. A "large amount of societal discrimination" ≠ institutional racism. It's a subtle distinction, but once you grasp it you can see the need for affirmative action and understand that it's not just about helping certain groups deemed "trendy".

Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub

#200

Post by braythwayt » Fri, May 27, 2016, 4:07 AM UTC

cb18 wrote: post #188

braythwayt wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Institutional racism,” also “Systemic racism,” is not a vague, bogeyman term, it has a specific and objective meaning. It can be measured and has been measured, repeatedly. In almost every area of American life, there are measurable effects. Blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crimes. They are more likely to be sent to prison and to get longer prison sentences given the same criminal recor…

You're taking observations(one of them isn't even a factual observation[0]) and then a priori assigning a cause, "systemic racism," to those observations. That is not how facts, or rational, coherent reasoning works. [0] Races aren't arrested at different rates for the same crimes, race percentage in victim reports match race percentage in arrests. Drug arrest rate appear to vary as the result of compound charges, i.…

Your entire argument is based on a false dichotomy. You say “There is no racism, everything can be explained by black people” and then try to demonstrate that black people have some problem or other.

But this is like saying that a road cannot be unsafe, look, here are statistics showing that some of the people who drive are drunk.

You trying to demonstrate that black people this or black people that in aggregate does not in any way invalidate the proposition that there is systemic racism.

Racism is, quite simply, when individuals are not judged on their merits, but on their membership in a class. If you say to me that statistically this or that or the other thing about American Blacks, that does not in any way say that individuals are not being judged and incurring negative opportunities because of their being black.

If anything, the message you are putting out is, “Yes, there is racism, but look, here is why it is justified.” I have debunked this argument before, and I won’t waste my time retyping the entire thing out.

“Racism is Socially Engineered Injustice:” http://braythwayt.com/2016/03/30/racism-is-injustice.html

And you are definitely attempting to socially engineer injustice. Witness the fact that in this alleged rebuttal, you ignored the major accusation I made: That you are denying racism exists.

What you did id completely ignore that and go back to trying to prattle on about how bad black people are. So I charge you again: Why are you so invested in getting people to believe that there is no racism?

What are you working so hard to prevent?