FWIW, there are Asians (and even then, that's a simplification of the term since Asia is such a large and diverse continent) at these companies. Yet for whatever reason, we are never counted as part of tech diversity.
FWIW, there are Asians (and even then, that's a simplification of the term since Asia is such a large and diverse continent) at these companies. Yet for whatever reason, we are never counted as part of tech diversity.
What I'm really trying to say is, that particular phrase is repetitious, but not useless.
Because 'Asians' are too broad a category to be meaningful.
If a company of 10,000 people had 480 people from China and nobody from any other country east of Turkey, they would have the exact same percentage of "Asian" people as the general population in the US, but that doesn't mean that "Asian" people are not underrepresented at that company.
So, I am not really sure if there is some more precise definition, that some administrator would use in push for greater diversity.
I say this as an Asian who has most likely benefited from being hired/selected by companies/institutions to be part of their overall "minority" percentage. And yes, I agree with you that people are too quick to lump all Asians into one group...I've found that my experience growing up as a child of Vietnam War refugee parents in the Midwest has been significantly different than the experience of 3+ generation Chinese/Japanese-Americans.
There are lots of successful companies in Asia, Europe, Africa, India, etc, who are super successful and aren't diverse, racially, socioeconomically or by gender. Now, it does become more important if your company globalizes, but you'll probably hire a local and likely not locally diverse workforce to conduct operations in country.
So I think the focus should be diversity for its own sake, rather than trying to couch it as something else.
But to dismiss this issue in Silicon Valley by pointing at other countries is besides the point here. SV by and large is the most well known tech hub, and notorious for waxing poetic about its meritocratic structure. That is what is at issue here; is it a true meritocracy, or are there enough confounding factors (recruiting at specific schools for instance) that end up resulting in a workforce that doesn't reflect the racial/ethnic/demographic makeup of the country in which it exists?
One of the factors as pointed out elsewhere is the availability of bodies. Is that pool of available candidates representative of the pop at large and also do the staffs reflect the characteristics of the availability pool . Companies continually show they are willing to go thru sponsorships of visas and surely hiring a local workforce, diverse as may be, would be easier than scouring continents for talent.
Indians and Chinese don't have much in common except for being in the same legal census bucket.
We start to head down a dangerous path when we paint with broad strokes like this.
Starting off by talking about Indian culture as if it's a single entity (as opposed to an incredibly heterogenous set of cultures that happen to exist in the same sovereign state) does not lead to an accurate or nuanced perspective for the discussion at hand.
Agreed 100%.
Honestly, even lumping all South Asians together and all East Asians together is pretty silly and obscures a lot of cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, etc. differences that are hugely important when talking about "diversity".
Let's not forget that literally over half the world's population is South Asian or East Asian[0]. It'd be ridiculous not to assume that these are incredibly heterogeneous groups that can't be all bucketed under the same category, but sadly, that's what people generally do.
[0] Before someone points out that "Asians" are a smaller percentage of the US population - yes, but that misses the point. These group definitions are arbitrary (and have changed greatly over the years). If we're going to talk about racial and ethnic origin as a component of diversity, we can't gerrymander the group definitions unless our actual goal is to artificially inflate metrics on diversity.
Well, not terribly much more silly than lumping all caucasoids together at least.
"Caucasoid" is a term that already includes a large chunk (if not a majority) of South Asians, so yes, it is silly.