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Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

Google hires many people who are not from the US to come work in the US, so I don't think the 61.5% is reflective of their hiring pool.

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Oh, okay. So we can keep claiming Google, a US company, favors white workers until when? Until less than 10%* of their US workers are white? Is that what being favored means? That companies in your own country look elsewhere to import workers?

*Ballpark white global population.

All I'm saying is that your statistic does not disprove the allegation that Google's hiring processes might favor white workers. You're making an apples-to-oranges comparison, and drawing a conclusion that isn't demonstrated by the data.

I'm also not saying that these numbers prove that Google does favor white workers. Only that they are not sufficient to disprove the idea.

The choice of hiring pool is part of the hiring process. Expanding that pool to other countries is itself an act of disfavor to US workers.

Google serves the world as their customers. It seems to me that having a preponderance of US-based employees that's wildly out of proportion to their customer (or revenue) base is still heavily in favor of US workers.

Many large companies serve the world (Xiaomi, Hikvision, Hitachi, Samsung, Mitsubishi..) while their employees in their home countries are overwhelmingly native. So if international customer bases are the norm, but only Google (or US companies) have significant international hiring, that effectively disfavors US workers.

Should the null hypothesis be that Google discriminates in favor of white, Asian, and male applicants? Or should it be that Google is not discriminating improperly?

It seems strange to put people in a position where showing a datapoint that would otherwise tend to refute a hypothesis (which IMO should not be assumed to be true in the first place) is not enough to be considered as evidence against the hypothesis being true.

I'm not making any claim about what the null hypothesis should be here. I'm simply disagreeing that the datapoint says what the poster claims it says.

I'll say that you'd probably want to set your null hypothesis at "presumption of innocence" here.

The general trend I see in the community is that there's a strong belief that google, and by extension, the tech industry, is biased in favor of white workers.

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