What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech
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Because it is. You can only remove bias by removing bias, not by introducing counter-bias. Removing names from resumes works, imposing quotas doesn't.
The problem with trying to counter bias with bias is that you can't make a shift on one axis without affecting five others. A bias in favor of e.g. racial minorities exacerbates the bias against everyone else of an underrepresented sex, economic status, religious minority, country of origin, disability, etc. But trying to enumerate all of the underrepresented groups is not only impossible because there are innumerably many of them, it leads to tokenism. Get yourself a couple of employees who each check multiple boxes and the numbers look good even when most of your employees are still white or asian male christian americans from middle class families.
By contrast, the bias in referral networks is the status quo. Hiring the people your existing employees know doesn't make a lack of diversity worse in any direction, it only fails to improve it by making future employees look like current employees. In theory there is an argument that when the status quo is unbalanced, anything that continues the status quo is also unbalanced, but that doesn't actually point to any solution. The status quo is the continuation of the status quo. Figuring out what will make positive change takes more than objecting to things that make no change.
And one way or another you still have to get 'em while they're young.
But I don't think this quote is about quotas. At least not quotas for employment. The program is merely for getting resumes of underrepresented groups. If the employee referral network only produces resumes from homogenous candidates then this is a positive change.
Quotas for resumes don't in principle work any differently than quotas for hiring.
And I still don't see how that solves the pipeline problem. The problem in 1950 was that middle class jobs were unavailable to qualified women and minorities. The problem in tech in 2015 is that qualified women and minorities are unavailable to middle class jobs. You can't solve it in the same way because it isn't the same problem.
Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No single thing can. At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.
I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.
Then state what they are so we can figure out why.
> And if you believe the pipeline is the only problem then our principles are irreconcilably different.
There is a difference between a problem being the only problem and being the biggest problem. Amdahl's law. You can't fix more of the problem than the thing you're changing represents. The pipeline problem is not the entire problem but it's a huge proportion of it. It's the sine qua non of fixing the overall problem. Without addressing it you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
> Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No single thing can.
It isn't that it doesn't solve it, it's that it hardly even addresses it. By the time you're at the interviewing stage you're already at the end of the pipeline.
> At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.
Do the math on this. There are nine overrepresented candidates for every underrepresented candidate and you would normally interview five people. Now everybody decides to make the fifth candidate the underrepresented candidate. The underrepresented candidate would have to do ~twice as many interviews to allow all the employers to make their quota but can still only be employed by one of them.
The only way this even does anything other than waste everybody's time doing interviews at companies where the underrepresented candidate won't end up working anyway is if in the alternative the underrepresented candidate wouldn't have found employment in the industry. But the demand for programmers is such that if you're qualified you can almost always find work. It's a solution aimed at a very small corner of the problem that rarely occurs, but has significant costs because everyone ends up doing many fruitless interviews when they could be interviewing candidates more likely to actually work there.
> I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.
Now you're talking about a different scenario where the makeup of the existing employees differs from the makeup of the overall pool of qualified applicants, both the employees and the referred candidates are completely homogenous, and the company hires only by referrals.
That scenario is a completely different kind of problem. It's an internal company problem vs. the industry-wide problem we have in tech. The internal company problem is easily solved by considering candidates from the broader pool of qualified applicants. The industry-wide problem is not helped by that at all because the skew is present in even the broadest pool of qualified applicants.
This is certainly true in SV and many other cities. However, top tier companies are criticized for not discovering and attracting qualified minority candidates. I want these candidates to have a shot at the best jobs. Going back to our original conversation about referrals. A referred candidate gets preferential treatment. If a company is entirely homogenous then few minority candidates will benefit.
On the other hand, I have noticed that underrepresented candidate are already treated better. Of course there might still be biases and other things against them but that's not what we set out to discuss. Yes, the pipeline is a large problem. Retention is too. I think there are many things our society should fix.
The EEOC example is an extra incentive for companies to try harder to expand their candidate pool. Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to see at least a few Asian programmers.
In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy. But you clearly are not and I want to thank you for this conversation.
It's actually not that unexpected. If you take a majority-white population and distribute employees completely at random then you would expect to see several companies that are entirely or almost entirely white, because random is not the same thing as uniform. And then there are several benign things that tend to create clusters, like geography. (There is a lower proportion of Asians local to Boston than San Francisco etc.)
Diversity doesn't mean every company has every group in exactly the same proportion as the general population. That isn't diversity, it's uniformity. The only way you get that level of uniformity is authoritarian decree. Diversity is so much messier than that because natural diversity is a derivative of Darwinian forces. It doesn't care about made up unscientific nonsense like race, so the distribution of "races" in a completely egalitarian society is not uniform, it's completely arbitrary.
> In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy.
Probably most people who point at the pipeline problem can see it plainly but don't know how to fix it. If you sit down in a computer science class your classmates might be 16 white men, 10 Asian men and one Asian woman. After four plus years of that, try to be shocked to hear that the industry doesn't employ very many black women.
The "problem" with the pipeline problem is that it doesn't have a center. There is no single thing that causes it and no organization responsible for it. So it's easy to point to it, because it's real, but how do you fix it? Pass a law prohibiting high school girls from ostracizing their peers who spend time learning about computers? It's a big problem but not an easy problem.
Asian Americans make up less than 5% of the U.S. population[0], but almost 35% of tech workers at Google[1] and 36% of tech employees at Facebook[2]. That's over representation by a factor of about 7 times.
Yet, the media will continue to harp on the over representation of white people at tech companies. Why? Because "diversity" really only means "not white".
BTW: I bring this up not because I want fewer Asian Americans in tech or more white people in tech, but to point out the hypocrisy of the reporting on diversity in tech.
[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/google-diversity-sta...
[2] http://recode.net/2015/06/25/facebook-employee-demographics-...
It is possible to be both marginalized in one aspect and privileged in another. It is definitely the case for Asian Americans in tech. Very few will say they're not (in aggregate, individual experiences vary of course!) better off than other people of color in this field, even as they also suffer racism. The numbers, as you suggest, do not lie. It's a similar phenomenon to the treatment of homosexual people in tech on the west coast. Just because someone is a gay man doesn't make them suddenly not white, for example.
This is a really important and often overlooked feature of intersectional feminism: nearly everyone has privilege even if they're also marginalized. That's why it's such a worthy cause, nearly everyone has something substantial to gain.
If I'm not mistaken, all of those sources are from 2015.
You seem to be interpreting my statement of the facts regarding demographics in the tech industry as as a statement that I believe Asian Americans are privileged. I'm not saying that. I think tech is the closest industry to an honest meritocracy that exists, and if there are more Asian Americans in tech than white people, then it's probably because of differences in ambition and the extent to which education is valued.
But, I brought up those stats not to make that point, just to prove the point that the way the media, and popular perception views diversity in tech is wrong.
So while it changes nothing about your comments about Asian people being over-represented, it does show that white people are not really underrepresented significantly.
And it's exactly this type of argument that is the problem: underrepresentation as a majority is far less of a problem than underrepresentation as a minority.
Acknowledging this fact does NOT imply that whites and asians are better than others. It just implies that whites and asians go into tech fields at a higher rate than others.
If you want to increase diversity, it is far better to acknowledge this and then work on finding out why some groups have a low rate of going into tech, and fixing that.
It's like Jews and doctors in the US. Jews are about 1.2% of the US population, but 14% of US doctors. This doesn't imply that Jews are better than everyone else at medicine. Jews are so overrepresented among physicians because Jewish culture in the US greatly admires and respects physicians and children are steered toward becoming doctors from an early age.
Choosing objective measures of merit first requires choosing a subjective choice of how to define merit -- what the mission is and what things are needed to fulfill it.
And, in point of fact, many "objective measures of merit" are objective measures that have a tenuously presumed connection to merit in the specific job that are adopted because of what amounts to cultural traditions in the profession.
[0] Given the obfuscation around race and culture, this might not be clear on first reading, but I am only discussing the possibility that the culture that is highly correlated with being "Caucasian" might have some advantage, not being "Caucasian" in itself. Thus my claim is entirely analagous with "You should hire more Black people because more (cultural) diversity will add more viewpoints to your company and hence increase productivity".
That's her point: given the data, claiming it's a meritocracy implies that Caucasian men are "better" than everybody in this field. That's not a useful attitude if you're trying to improve diversity.
> What if the viewpoint of the Caucasian male happened to be more suited to a particular field or company?
Then the particular field or company has evolved to favor Caucasian males (or if you prefer the culture that is highly correlated with being "Caucasion"). In other words, it's got embedded structural discrimination. If you want to improve diversity, that needs to be acknowledged and removed.
It isn't an attitude at all. It's purely descriptive.
If you're saying it's wrong to describe it as a meritocracy because it isn't one then that's one thing. If making the industry more diverse would also make it more meritocratic then that is clearly the way forward. But then what we need to do is not to stop calling it or wanting it to be a meritocracy but rather to make it live up to its name.
On the other hand, if it is (more or less) a meritocracy already then what you're asking for is not that we stop calling it that, but that we stop it from being that. And if that's what you're saying then say it clearly so that more people can disagree with you.
> Then the particular field or company has evolved to favor Caucasian males (or if you prefer the culture that is highly correlated with being "Caucasion"). In other words, it's got embedded structural discrimination. If you want to improve diversity, that needs to be acknowledged and removed.
This is a really great exemplification of the failure of your entire line of reasoning.
Let's suppose that, culturally, the parents of white and asian males generally encourage them to study engineering at university and the parents of females and african americans generally discourage it. In this not altogether unrealistic hypothetical this explains the main cultural difference leading to the disproportionate representation.
Then companies looking to hire engineers logically require that candidates have studied engineering. You call this structural discrimination and demand that it be removed. Companies are expected to what, hire engineers who have no knowledge of engineering?
Sometimes the problem is not the culture of the industry. Sometimes the problem is the culture of the people.
Given that this is true, the responsible thing would be to both acknowledge that you want diversity and that certain groups are underserved in the field. How to resolve this in terms of policy as a business is going to be a difficult decision for anyone. But I don't think it's responsible to not acknowledge that white men are not the best qualified candidates (though I was under the impression Asian males also do quite well in the tech industry)--i think that is doing a disservice to young people trying to understand the industry and the truth about the massive disparity between minority population distribution and minority hiring distribution.
That definition of "merit" implies that whites have more merit than blacks (because they tend to be more privileged) and men have more merit than women. If your goal is to increase diversity, that's not a helpful definition.
> Why would you ever assume meritocracy would naturally lead to a diverse workplace?
Exactly. Any definition of "meritocracy" will have embedded biases, and so won't lead to a diverse workplace. That's why I saw this as such good advice.
> But I don't think it's responsible to not acknowledge that white men are not the best qualified candidates
If the definition of "best qualified" favors white men, then of course white men are more likely to be the "best qualified" candidates. It's a classic example of structural discrimination.
> That definition of "merit" implies that whites have more merit than blacks (because they tend to be more privileged) and men have more merit than women. If your goal is to increase diversity, that's not a helpful definition.
What he wrote was "Privilege increases merit via education and culture". Why did you cut off the "via education and culture" part?
No, I said that it TENDS that way. Obviously, if a man goes to trade school and a woman does not (for whatever reason), the man has more merit for conducting that trade than the woman, barring any other evidence or considerations. So, privilege allows people to increase their own merit. It's fairly intuitive, and to increase diversity while still embracing meritocracy (which is just good business, IMHO), we need to increase the opportunity for people to improve their own merit.
To be utterly clear, I do not (consciously) condone the extrapolation of phenotypical traits to imply very much of anything about a person's capabilities, especially in a business sense. I'm just pointing out that there's not much use in ignoring the reality of the disparity in minority distribution between certain industries and the greater geographical reason will force obvious problems if you're trying to both be diverse and meritocratic—you can't hire people who don't exist (statistically speaking) in the hiring pool.
> If the definition of "best qualified" favors white men, then of course white men are more likely to be the "best qualified" candidates. It's a classic example of structural discrimination.
I don't think we disagreed; I just don't think there's any point not to acknowledge that the best hires in a pure merit sense are going to lead to poor quality diversity hires. It indicates there's an opportunity here for underserved minorities to fill a gap. IMHO there are problems all up and down the pipeline mucking with natural free market forces; as you said, structural discrimination. But we should be providing people with MORE transparency to help them make better decisions, not LESS transparency because it's an uncomfortable truth.
Honestly, I feel like the definition of privilege is fairly close to "unfair advantage". I don't really see a way to pull it apart—again by nature—from how people naturally take advantage of the opportunities they have. But recognizing them baldly is a good way to start.
> The goal is meritocracy, with diversity only desirable insofar as it enables meritocracy.
In other words "The goal is anti-diversity, with diversity only desirable insofar as it enables the anti-diversity goal."
The old great metaphor for America was that it was a "melting pot." The metaphor comes from smelting. When you smelt metal, you're not promoting diversity - you're creating a homogeneous alloy. You also skim off the slag and throw it out.
It's not a particularly pleasant metaphor when you think about it.
Meritocracy is not anti-diversity. Meritocracy is correlated with diversity. Choosing meritocracy where they diverge is nothing more than accepting that diversity is not the one true goal of all things.
What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?
How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?
Diversity for thee, but not for me.
Also, while we're discussing Things You Should Not Notice: what are the numbers as far as litigiousness of "protected" groups? If I'm looking to hire someone, non-protected status (whether it's race, unionization, etc.) means I'm more likely to hire them (all else being equal). Like the blowback from affirmative action, I don't see an objective discussion about litigation risk (whether or not it's substantiated). It's human nature to asymmetrically attribute failure to others and success to oneself. Add racial/gender rent-seeking to the equation and you get an especially potent, counterproductive miasma. Just look at Buddy and Pao - they've made entire careers out of entrepreneurial race/gender grievance litigation.
Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?
> How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?
> Diversity for thee, but not for me.
Can I ask you a quick question here? What does any of this matter? Diversity isn't about protecting yourself from character assassination. It's about promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.
If you look in the past of anyone, you will find things they regret and things that may draw censure from the pro-diversity and intersectional feminist mindset. That's natural. That's to be expected. Society is, by any reasonable and several reproducible metrics, extremely biased in favor of white men. We all grew up influenced by that society. It is therefore almost inevitable that anyone with these sorts of experiences has and will continue to have both privilege and mistakes in their past.
What matters is going forward, how we all take these things we've been fortunate enough to be handed (along with the misfortunes and difficulties we've endured) and use those to promote a fairer, more just world for those who come after us.
We can sit here and argue if this messenger is the ideal messenger. Which is odd, because in many other fields we view past mistakes as a teaching opportunity. Ultimately, the people in power should cede and share some of that good fortune and cultural windfall to create a more equal world rather than waiting for history to repeat itself with violent uprisings. History suggests that such uprisings are not kind to even bystanders.
> Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis ...
Because creating an environment that mimics the societal advantages white men get in the US and most of the western world is infeasibly expensive.
I mean, seriously. How would you even? You'd have to raise kids from birth in a theme park with meticulous care to shield them from the deleterious effects of racism and sexism.
> rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?
Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.
Except for white people, which is why the parent is worried about character assassination. It's a real worry when building a business these days. There's no amount of compliance to progressive ideals that will protect you if you have light colored skin.
Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.
Yes, it is. The pendulum swings one way for a little while, then it swings the other way. It's been happening that way for thousands of years.
This just isn't true. White people hold incredible advantages in modern society. Especially white men. When people ask you to express empathy & are bitterly frustrated when most refuse, they lash out. But that lashing shouldn't be surprising.
One need only look at how the police would treat you if you ran from them vs. the many highly publicized (but hardly unique or isolated) cases where police officers acted outrageously against people of color in the US.
> The pendulum swings one way for a little while, then it swings the other way.
Sorry, but this is wrong. The world is consistently more progressive and permissive over time. We certainly have had major reversals of this in history, but these never recover to quite the same level of conservatism.
And quite frankly, we all have agency in this. We can change the world for the better, if we act in concert. The sum of individual actions is our society, and the sum of societal actions is the arc of history. So stop acting like it's inevitable.
Not anymore. There was a white man recently who could only get his work published by using an Asian pen name. Look at all of the white men who have had their careers destroyed by the mere allegation of sexism, racism or homophobia, the scarlet letters of your so called "progressiveism". Just ask Pax Dickinson, Brendan Eich or Brad Wardell.
The world is consistently more progressive and permissive over time.
This is easily disproved if you knew even a little world history. Any time a civilization gets significant wealth and comfort, it becomes more progressive. That progressivism in turns creates its downfall, after which wealth becomes scarce and the people become more conservative again. Round and round it goes since the creation of Babylon. The Roman Empire followed this cycle, until it was sacked by the Visigoths. It was followed by the dark ages. Then came the renaissance and its progress, followed by the stark conservatism of the Victorian era. We just finished a long upswing. The pendulum has already started swinging back towards conservatism.
Technology continues to progress. Humanity and its flawed ideologies follow predictable cycles.
Come on.
As for Eich, his career and finances remain intact. He received censure for doing his job poorly, his career wasn't over.
Lying by implication is still lying, and _tu quoque_ is no defense. So @PopeOfNope said "careers destroyed", which I agree is overstated in my case if not in Pax's. That does not justify you making stuff up to assert "intact". Since I cannot retire, I'm doing the next thing, and we shall all see how intact I am when it launches.
As for "censure", look it up. All the definitions that do not include the essential adjective "official" have to do with judgment, and unofficial judgments like all opinions vary. Mozilla received more criticism from all sides (and still does) than I did over what happened last spring.
BTW, I came here via subtweets. Feel free to at-name me directly in the future.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-belief-in-a-just-world-...
> expensive
With the millions of dollars from diversity initiatives, I'm sure someone could pull it off.
Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).
I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do. The world is not a fair place.
> Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).
It simply wasn't the subject of this conversation. "White privilege" is a specific set of special treatments you get in the US. It is not, "Magically you have a perfect life." It's undeniable that with white privilege you're less likely to be summarily executed by law enforcement, as an example.
But economic and other social divides still exist. Polish and Irish people are excellent examples of other axis of discrimination and racism that still exist in the world today.
> I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do.
We're all raised to accept racism as normal. It's not surprising that you feel this way. But remember, you're not the one who's history is getting them shot in the street in the US right now, so you're probably going to feel slightly less personal pain and be asked to express slightly more empathy at this exact moment.
One other thing, you underestimate the magnitude of this problem. You'd literally need to make a private island with a controlled social environment and raise children from birth meticulously in a Truman-Show-like theme park to actually isolate all the cultural influences that are being discussed here.
Take the issue of sexism. This is baked into NEARLY ever message children receive, from birth and onwards. How would you ever actually reverse that? You can't, outside of a vacuum. You can only try to counter-balance it and hope the next generations can continue that process.
Even if that were feasible, it'd be unethical.
Serious question: is it also "expected" that people will lose their jobs because of those things, like Brendan Eich?
"Lose their jobs" has emotional impact precisely because one envisions a hard-working, paycheck-to-paycheck breadwinner with minimal savings. The inability of a man who'd been around for Netscape's IPO to advance from CTO to CEO -- whatever you think about whether that's good or bad, or whether Eich had a way to recover the situation, or anything -- is a very different matter, and implying a comparison between the two cases leads to unclear thinking.
Once we've made the distinction clear, we can say, no, it's unjust for a non-management worker who's not representing the company to be fired by their manager over political activities, and no, Eich "losing his job" isn't precedent because it's not at all related.
Hold on, I'm shedding tears I'm so frustrated for him. Maybe he'll have to retire as a multi-millionaire at 65 instead of 60 now.
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