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Comment by almostdeadguy | Hacker News Reader

> Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?

Why should I trust data I can't verify?

> You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?

Junk in, junk out.

> The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.

So when you said "Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they", what did you mean?

> Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.

Who actually knows, which is precisely the point.

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> Why should I trust data I can't verify?

Have you tried? Does archive.org have those urls? Are there other reports on those companies' diversity? Have you checked their mandatory government EEO-1 diversity reports [1]? It rather seems that you're nitpicking, looking for an excuse to ignore what by all accounts looks like someone's honest work. Do you have, for these companies, reports suggesting wildly different demographics, that is making you so skeptical?

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/legal-requirem...

Who is actually making the claims here about these companies "achieving diversity"? Me? Do you want me to do your homework? It's quite easy to post specious data to support your specious claims on the internet. Quite easy to generate a desired reaction that way.

You're claiming the data is specious, but you have offered zero evidence to that end, only very shaky speculation. You say some of the links 404 - of the ones that do not, were their numbers significantly different from the table in the article?

Here you want to look at data? Let's look at Amazon's EEO-1: https://assets.aboutamazon.com/64/79/d3746ef14fd99cc6be94532...

Amazon in your table lists 21% black employees. Maybe a lot has changed since 2017, but it sure seems like that might be misrepresenting the picture when 79% of those black employees are listed as laborers in the EEO-1 from 2023. But who can say!

Akin to this, the 2023 EEO-1 says 47% of professional employees are Asian! Wow sure seems overrepresented. Do we know anything about the compensation packages of these employees? No. We don't. We have no ability to tell if these are offshored employees, H1-B, under-compensated, what their tenure is, or even what the actual role of these employees are besides an incredibly broad categorization for them.

Also hmm, interesting that number gets cut by more than half when looking at the percentage of first/mid-level managers. Again have no idea if there's pay equity or equal opportunity at different levels of management.

What can we actually say about diversity at Amazon? Well "mission accomplished" obviously.

The table you link shows that execs/senior level managers are 63% White (over-represented 1.09x compared to US population) and 24% Asian (over-represented 4.08x). Mid-level officials and managers are 50% White (under-represented 0.87x) and 19% Asian (over-represented 3.29x).

My claims that the main beneficiaries are Asians, and that Whites are generally under-represented, are accurate.

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