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Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#21

Post by blahblahblogger »

isthisnagee wrote: post #16
ryanmercer wrote: post #3

At some point it boils down to who applies. Example: Women are GENERALLY more petite, they struggle carrying firefighter gear (45-75lbs depending on your load out) and aren't interested or can't pass the necessary requirements to ensure their safety, they get fewer female applicants and thus more men are firefighters type of thing. I imagine there are still fewer qualified female applicants than male. I imagine there…

I don't think your example applies in the context of a tech company, so I'm going to comment ignoring it. If it boils down to who applies, then we need to make sure that we're reaching out to communities that are not well represented in our field. It's not about waiting for them to come to us.

I think his point may have been that "who applies" is the END of the funnel.

If there are issues earlier in the pipeline then we can't just focus on the end of it at the "who's applying" stage.

If we want more representation, are women more represented in comp sci programs? Are they going into related engineering fields? Do they go to meet up groups or construct new ones if they don't want to go to existing ones?

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#22

Post by craftyguy »

blahblahblogger wrote: post #17

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers? It seems like they always end up with egg on their face. And they have no obligation to be transparent as private (or public) entities. But now they all have to have chief diversity officers and diversity councils and PR/recruiting teams for diversity - all of which cost money and hasn't seemed to move the needle very much. And which as another…

> Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers?

PR.

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#23

Post by s-shellfish »

_sfsa wrote: post #11
s-shellfish wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with software development? Are you actually suggesting women have some physical attribute that makes them less applicable for programming, mathematics, or computer science jobs? This reasoning is part of the problem. It's not rigorously inspected or accepted, because it's circular logic that can be self proving given one dominant party enforcing such a reasoning structure as 'the rules'.

Don't put words in their mouth..

They can argue back with me if they feel so strongly about it.

I am tired of playing nice and assuming everyone has good intentions when this sexist passive BS crops up. This is not a good argument. 'Who applies' is a perspective offered very clearly from only one side of the application pool - and it's severely limited because the only people that get listened to about the problem are the ones that retain authority over the business dynamic.

It is incomplete information. I don't know how to make this more clear or obvious, but if people who value reason and logic and hard facts so intimately want to shoot themselves in the foot, well, cest la vie

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#24

Post by danharaj »

swalsh wrote: post #12

Maybe because I'm a white dude, perhaps that means I'm not allowed to be a part of these conversations. I fail to understand what the goal of these efforts is. Why did we decide race, and sex are the important immutable factors that we're going to measure? I grew up in what is today Trump Country. My high school prepared me to work in a factory. Then the factory moved to China, and now the only jobs left in the area…

> Why is economic background not a class we care about too? Shouldn't economic mobility be a part of social justice as well?

It is, but those people are called socialists and/or communists. If you look, you'd find groups that try to synthesize a unified picture of our common struggles.

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#25

Post by 5874-4b22-a4e0 »

craftyguy wrote: post #22
blahblahblogger wrote: post #17

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers? It seems like they always end up with egg on their face. And they have no obligation to be transparent as private (or public) entities. But now they all have to have chief diversity officers and diversity councils and PR/recruiting teams for diversity - all of which cost money and hasn't seemed to move the needle very much. And which as another…

> Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers? PR.

When they get sued, they bring these up and say, we tried.

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#26

Post by waisbrot »

poster123 wrote: post #2

"In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook." No mention is made of the fraction of Asians, because their over…

> the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities

You made up that narrative. The narrative presented in the article is

> Williams noted that, "diversity is critical to our success as a company"

Achieving "diversity" is not the same as mirroring the demographics of a company's home country and "over-representation" is not directly related to lack of diversity.

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#27

Post by s3r3nity »

blahblahblogger wrote: post #17

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers? It seems like they always end up with egg on their face. And they have no obligation to be transparent as private (or public) entities. But now they all have to have chief diversity officers and diversity councils and PR/recruiting teams for diversity - all of which cost money and hasn't seemed to move the needle very much. And which as another…

> Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers?

Because if you don't, it looks even worse. So my guess is publicity and PR.

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#28

Post by hirundo »

> When the Cambridge Analytica scandal went down, some pointed to Facebook’s overall lack of diversity as part of the problem. That’s because homogenous cultures lead to limited perspectives and potential lack of awareness of things that may be more obvious to diverse groups of people.

If the purpose is to gain greater perspective and awareness through less homogeneous employees, then it would be more effective to hire according to heterogeneous answers to questions about perspective and awareness, rather than by less reliable proxies like gender and ethnicity.

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#29

Post by kvl7 »

This is one of the comments on that article:

------- > The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.

Why is that an upside? It seems utterly racist to me. Let’s try to substitute “white” with, say, Asian.

“The upside to this is that Asian people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”

Or how about the color black?

“The upside to this is that black people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”

I wonder how that would go down? -------

I echo this sentiment completely. Why is anti-white racism being encouraged?

Re: Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

#30

Post by Frondo »

colordrops wrote: post #14
poster123 wrote: post #2

"In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook." No mention is made of the fraction of Asians, because their over…

I don't see much noise about bringing men into female dominated industries either.

There are groups working on bringing men into nursing and teaching. You can find out more about these with a few google searches.
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