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Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

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Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#71

Post by username90 »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #57
monoideism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To believe that blind applications would help increase female representation presupposes that they're being discriminated against right now, when TFA shows that women are getting preferential callbacks. That completely jives with my experience: most female candidates are highly, highly sought-after, and are quickly hired by top tech companies (leaving smaller companies looking bad in the process, despire their equal…

> most female candidates are highly, highly sought-after, and are quickly hired by top tech companies Let's say we believe that women are on average equally as capable of men, and we know there are maybe 10-20% as many women in the industry. Are those 10-20% women roughly as good as the average man, or are they roughly as good as the top 10-20% of men? Have they had the same experience as average men, or have they fo…

Your assumption relies on the women getting into the field are the best women. I don't see why that would be true. The fields with many women like law, medicine or psychology are much harder to get into than computer science or engineering so most of the best women likely ends up there.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#72

Post by ralusek »

candu wrote: post #16

There's a fascinating study on orchestra auditions, where it was found that performing blind auditions (where the interviewee's identity is hidden to the interviewer) led to more equitable gender representation: https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac... IMHO, if the tech industry wants to live up to its narrative of meritocracy, this is one obvious improvement over existing processes. No, it won…

California Prop 16 just attempted to overturn bans on racial/gender discrimination when hiring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_...

The people advocating for more representation almost invariably are not interested in removing discrimination on arbitrary characteristics, which is a near universally laudable objective, but rather work backwards from the demographic representation they'd like to see.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

If you think that the diversity and equity initiatives within companies are currently working towards anything resembling a blind hiring process, I get the impression that you're not particularly up to date on the objectives of the modern left.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#73

Post by raxxorrax »

np_tedious wrote: post #40
lettergram wrote: post #8

I always try to give the recruiter no indication of race or gender. Frankly, if we all did that it would remove the bias. The challenge is, I suspect they ask for race & gender is intentionally requested to add bias . I’ve worked with recruiters and part of the job is indeed targeting “under represented” groups to improve the figures.

I can confirm that at least two FAANG companies explicitly give diversity points to recruiters. That is, hiring a "diverse" candidate is worth ~1.5x as much to them as a non-diverse candidate for the same role. They are cagey about the exact details of who is included at a given time. But I do know it varies by rule.

Honestly, I think this is a worse situation than before.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#74

Post by giantg2 »

secondcoming wrote: post #55
candu wrote: post #16

There's a fascinating study on orchestra auditions, where it was found that performing blind auditions (where the interviewee's identity is hidden to the interviewer) led to more equitable gender representation: https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac... IMHO, if the tech industry wants to live up to its narrative of meritocracy, this is one obvious improvement over existing processes. No, it won…

> where candidates of underrepresented groups are dissuaded by a lack of pre-existing representation I don't understand this persepective from candidates. The job market must be really good if they can use this as a metric for pursuing a job opportunity. I was the only person from my country when I joined my current employer. It never even crossed my mind that it could be an issue. There was also a post on HN a few m…

At my company, you have a leg up if you fit one of the diversity metrics and are applying for a job.

I've worked on teams where I'm the only one of my race. I've been on group projects where I'm the only one of my gender. Based on the conversations I've heard on some of the teams I've been on, I have a minority political view and culture/lifestyle as well. It's almost never a problem unless you believe or think it is a problem. There can be rare cases where you get someone who is actively trying to make it a problem, but that tends to be rare. So I don't see it as a chicken or egg issue, I see it as mindset problem.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#75

Post by dbsmith83 »

belly_joe wrote: post #56
ginko wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to separate Asian applicants into their own group.

They do in their model. Being Asian carries with it the worst relative odds of being hired, though it is not responsible for the overall negative non-white male coefficient (Black and Hispanic applicants also have negative coefficients in the logit)

Seems to make sense relative to each other. D&I initiatives often times target Black and Hispanic candidates, but not Asian since they are not underrepresented.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#77

Post by username90 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #44
monoideism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To believe that blind applications would help increase female representation presupposes that they're being discriminated against right now, when TFA shows that women are getting preferential callbacks. That completely jives with my experience: most female candidates are highly, highly sought-after, and are quickly hired by top tech companies (leaving smaller companies looking bad in the process, despire their equal…

> Blind applications would probably hurt female representation. Isn't this good for gender equality?

Harvard's argument is that selecting candidates based on merit means we discriminate against those who had a harder time building merit and is therefore racist/sexist.

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#78

Post by throwawaympfsin »

treeman79 wrote: post #36

Personal experience. Got hired into a company that did everything possible to avoid hiring straight white men. Everything was completely dominated by not offending anyone over anything. Unless you were the aforementioned group. Turns out there simply isn’t a lot of the right race/gender/sex. I’m sure that’ll be different as time progresses, but for now there is clearly some catching up to do. So it was all jr develop…

That's one of the reasons I left tech and went to work for an investment bank. At least here no one pretends to be in it to "make the world a better place" or whatever agenda tech companies are selling nowadays. YMMV

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#79

Post by tdevito »

bluntfang wrote: post #47
monoideism wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if they don't capitalize "white", because that's what white supremacists do, what does that say about capitalizing "black"? A good number of the people pushing the "Black" spelling are openly Afrocentric, or profess to be.

I dunno man, are black people systemically killing other ethnic groups in America right now? Do they have a history of genocide and slavery on the scale of white people? Do we see a bunch of black people doing the black equivalent of Nazi salutes on the side of the road around the country?

[flagged]

Re: Gender and Race Preferences in Hiring at Silicon Valley Tech Firms [pdf]

#80

Post by HideousKojima »

in3d wrote: post #22
candu wrote: post #16

There's a fascinating study on orchestra auditions, where it was found that performing blind auditions (where the interviewee's identity is hidden to the interviewer) led to more equitable gender representation: https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac... IMHO, if the tech industry wants to live up to its narrative of meritocracy, this is one obvious improvement over existing processes. No, it won…

You may want to read https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-... “One of the more interesting findings of the study that I have not often seen reported: overall, women did worse in the blinded auditions.”

This happens all the time, the media will find one aspect of a study and blast it from on high while ignoring any parts that hurt their agenda.

A particularly infamous example of this is studies of drug use by race: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481...

You'll see news outlets claiming that black and white drug use rates are the same, but they're going off of the "Have use ever used X?" questions while completely ignoring the ones about how often they've used X, which shows a clear racial discrepancy. That's before you get into issues like the study being based on self reporting, or the vast majority of drug crimes that result in jail time being ones related to dealing and not mere use, etc.

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