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Comment by horsecaptin | Hacker News Reader

It starts with education, people. How many blacks and women start studying engineering to begin with? How many of them see it through to graduation? How many decide that they actually want to work in the field that they went to school for?

I bet those that already work at Facebook and Google don't want to work with people who aren't qualified to be there, strictly in the name of diversity.

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Agreed.

There's another industry that lacks proportionate participation from all visible minorities: veterinary medicine.

> “Contrary to societal trends, veterinary medicine remains one of the least diverse professions in the United States,” the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges said on its site.

> The veterinary community has been working to change that notion, promoting veterinary medicine as a meaningful career path for science-minded students by reaching potential veterinarians long before college with the message that the career can include more than just working with animals. There are also jobs in public health policy or food inspection, said Dr. Beth Sabin, associate director of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Notice that the policy is not shame companies into increasing more diversity, it's let's educate people before they hit the workforce about the benefits of studying and becoming a vet.

I have to agree. But it's also a cultural issue. There are disproportionally few American women in tech, but if you look at Eastern Europe, China and India, it's not as skewed, and some of those cultures are sometimes characterized as 'patriarchal'.

So, yes, education but also culture which eliminates cultural barriers --which tend to begin in the home as well as peer groups where someone who wants to study something not popular in that group is steered away from pursing such avenues. It's not feminine, or you're going mainstream, etc (i.e. breaking with subculture dynamics)

Even in the US, computer work was originally seen as a "woman's job" -- an extension of things like phone routing and secretarial work.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

> I bet those that already work at Facebook and Google don't want to work with people who aren't qualified to be there, strictly in the name of diversity.

No one is saying they should hire unqualified people.

They implicitly do when they compare diversity statistics to the entire population, rather than the population of qualified workers. And that distinction right there ties directly in to GP's entire point; it comes down to education. For instance, it's not exactly a secret in the US that women are underrepresented in STEM education. So of course they are underrepresented in STEM careers.

If the pool of qualified workers does not have the same statistics as the general population, what is a workplace supposed to do about that, other than hire unqualified people?

The "pipeline problem" isn't nearly as cut and dry as you seem to assert and ignoring systematic biases in hiring, promoting and funding by just saying it is an education problem isn't helpful. Thinking from a top down instead of bottom up, what if the lack of STEM education in a community is due to that community seeing no representation in the leadership (or even employees) of major companies? I don't think you can get people into STEM if the people think the game is rigged against them when it comes to hiring.

> The bachelor’s to Ph.D. STEM pipeline no longer leaks more women than men: a 30-year analysis

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

> Top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley...

I wasn't ignoring them, or at least only as much as you're ignoring the points you're responding to. There's a "hidden" population of qualified workers between firms hiring and the general population. Comparing the latter two without comparing to the former gives some information, but does not necessarily point to where the disparity occurs. It could be occurring in education, or hiring, or both. Ignore either one at your own peril.

Also, your first article is covering a topic that's not even relevant here -- How many STEM bachelors continue to a PhD. That doesn't mean that women are entering nor achieving STEM degrees at a proportion comparable to the general population.

you're bang on.

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