Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets 554
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
Re:Why does race or gender matter? (Score:1, Informative)
This make sense in a way, they would be shooting themselves in the foot by not hiring a certain group because of prejudices. At the same time, I can't help but think that their might be some subconscious stuff going on. What a mean is, it might not be malicious but the racism might be there.
Re:Despicable journalists (Score:3, Informative)
No you got it wrong.
What the merc is suing for is the Government data about the ethnic makeup of Googles employees.
Google is demanding that that Government data not be released to the Merc.
Even if Google is correct, it is still sort of hard to see how Google fighting this will result in anything good for google.
The very high importance that Google puts on college GPA probably skews the hiring process away from more entrepreneurial cultures and towards the more academically oriented ones.
Merc: SV Blacks, Latinos and Women Lose Ground (Score:4, Informative)
Mercury News: [mercurynews.com] Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's not the white males they're hiding. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why does race or gender matter? (Score:3, Informative)
It wouldn't apply on the job if we'd fixed it in elementary school, so they had all the same chances for a suburban-quality education back when suburban-quality educations were still good (but urban educations were not).
For that to be the case, though, their parents would have needed to have it applied on their jobs (so they could pay for a home in the suburbs and college for their kids), or would have needed it to be fixed when those parents were in elementary school, which means it would have needed to be fixed when their parents had jobs, or when their parents were in elemenary school. And it certainly wouldn't have been fixed then because segregation was the law back then.
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why does race or gender matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:3, Informative)
No that's not what they are assuming, necessarily. While you're jumping to the conclusion that the answer must be one of *either* "they're not being hired because they're different" or "they're not being hired because they're genetically inferior"
I'm not jumping to either of those conclusions. I'm just saying that the first step is to check for racism - as that's a very inexpensive and efficient step to take, before investigating the other issues you mention. If it's not racism, then go ahead and deal with the socio-economic factors.
Re:There is no such thing as race (Score:3, Informative)
Oh this is ridiculous. (Score:3, Informative)
Firstly, Google never records the race of their employees unless they fill out an OPTIONAL box on the forms at hiring time. They don't actually HAVE this data to share.
Secondly, walking around the Google campus, it's definitely not just a ton of white men. There are lots of women (and darn hot ones...), and a huge amount of East and South Asians and South Americans.
Thirdly, Google is one of the most merit-based companies in existence. Any conclusions based on the race profiles would be completely misguided. Google doesn't care if you're black or white, straight or gay, male or female... there's only one thing that matters - competence.
Re:As for Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
And the word "pad" has no other meaning than sanitary napkin. Good luck finding a word that isn't a euphemism for something.
"Pad" is not a euphemism. If Apple came up with some kind of electronic tabloid reader and called it the "iRag", that would be a euphemism.
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
It's not only legal, it's mandated by law, or almost. When you get a job here, somewhere on your forms (often on the application itself) there is a section called race, with a bunch of check boxes. You don't have to answer it, and often there is a check box called something like "decline to state" or something else along those lines. My kids are all mixed race, and it's rare in my experience to see any kind of mixed-race box on these forms. It will be interesting to see what they fill out when they reach that age.
The reason it's there has to do with federal reporting requirements. If, say, 10% of your applicants are black, 10% are hispanic, and 25% are female, yet the total of your black, hispanic, and female hires is something like 5% of your work force, the government might be interested in that. So might more than a few lawyers.
This has to do with a doctrine/policy called Affirmative Action, which in the simplest terms, holds that in order to prove you aren't discriminating in hiring, you'd better make sure you're hiring at least X percent minorities. I have, in the fairly distant past, worked with people who were most obviously hired solely because they were part of a protected class. Certainly, they were not hired because of either their competence or their work ethic because they had neither. One particularly stands out in my mind because he earned the nickname "deathbed" because at least twice a month (including every payday - how convenient) would call in sick, claiming that he felt like he was on his deathbed.
Other times, he just didn't show up. On many of those occasions, his wife would call and ask to talk to him and we'd have to say "Uh, sorry, he's not here."
It was quite obvious that he had never done the work he claimed he had done (mainframe operator) on his resume at his previous job. We eventually figured out from the one thing he could sort of do that he must have been a tape librarian. Later, a couple of us met someone who worked at his previous employer and who told us "Oh, that guy? Yeah, he was a tape librarian. We fired him. He's working for you guys now?! That's too bad."
In his first three months on the job, his absense rate exceeded (by far) the number of absences at which a person could be terminated, yet he didn't even get reprimanded. I assure you, those of us who worked our way up through the ranks in that company would certainly have been reprimanded, most likely fired. The PHB who hired him was obviously going to take no action, however. He was well known for making bad outside hiring decisions and never disciplining those people.
Finally, after about a year, we got a different manager, and he'd heard all about deathbed and was going to have none of his crap. Within a couple months, deathbed was fired and there was great rejoicing. And deathbed himself? He robbed a nearby liquor store a few days later and was arrested. No one was surprised.
That was in the early eighties. Things like that don't happen too much anymore, at least in my experience, although they probably do at government agencies.
There was a lawsuit that ended not long ago in which some city had held promotional exams for firefighters (for lieutenant or captain, IIRC). None of the firefighters that passed the exam was a minority, so what did the city do? They threw out the results completely. They'd made up their minds that they were going to have minorities pass the test and be promoted. Naturally, the firefighters who had passed the test and would have been eligible for promotion sued. A few months ago, they won and had their eligibility for promotion reinstated.
On the flip side, there are charter schools in the US that are 100% minority, or nearly, and are so by the choice of the students and their parents, who believe that the programs, specifically tailored to the ethnic groups and the challenges they face in often high-crime neighborhoods, give them a better chance of a good education and completing school. I wholly support them. Nobody knows better than the
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:5, Informative)
No, your understanding of equal opportunity is flawed.
Equal opportunity is not "you must hire x percentage of blacks", equal opportunity is "you may not refuse employment on the basis an employee is black". It's a very big difference.
Equal opportunity is never used pro-actively, only defensively. Otherwise it becomes racism whether used to enforce a certain number of minority workers or to limit the number of minority workers. So a convince store owner is not obliged to hire an Asian man but may not refuse employment on the basis that the man is Asian.
Corporations and government departments in Australia may maintain ethnic diversity policies (hiring X number of aborigines) for their own reasons (PR, accounting and so forth) but in no place is this mandated by law. Saying "we don't hire abbo's" is however.
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:5, Informative)
He, like a lot of other people in this thread, seem to say "equal opportunity" when they mean "affirmative action". I don't know why this is, but I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of US laws or media have actually confused the terms themselves, saying that ethnic quotas are "equal opportunity". They are not. Equal opportunity can only apply to individuals. Ethnic quotas are a form of affirmative action and very dubious indeed.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:1, Informative)
In Soviet Russia they kept track of how many Jews people were hiring, just to make sure they stayed in line. Here they're trying to keep tabs on the Blacks. Good intentions be damned, this just doesn't smell good.
They do this in Northern Ireland today. You MUST by law collect Religion information of all employees. And hire equal, based on discriminating against others to have that balance.
Oh no... this again (Score:3, Informative)
Employers are not sexists and are not racists. They are impatient and cheap. They will pay the lowest wage that anyone will accept. They will hire the first qualified people to fit their needs.
Business doesn't care and the race or gender of its employees so long as they get the job done.
Instead of looking where women and black people AREN'T, I think it would be better to look where women and black people ARE and to see why they are happy (?) where they are. If the people who see injustice in the workplace want to make changes, it would be easier to interest these groups of people to move into other professions by making them less comfortable in the jobs they populate today.
Where I work today, there are five black people. Five out of around 150 employees. Two of those black people are women and they are literally in the paper-pushing department. Two of the black men are exceptionally intelligent people and are employed into some highly technical roles and the other is in administration. The three black men have failed to fit within their stereotype moulds and no one seems at all uncomfortable with that... in fact, I doubt anyone gives it any thought at all except to wonder why they are so different from other black people they may known to see.
I seriously doubt the black people we have working with us today were hired because of some quota-guilt system. They seem to have been hired because they are qualified for their jobs and seem to do their jobs quite well. In contrast, where we see most black people employed are in roles that are close to the government -- federal, state and local. Why is this? Could it be all the effort that goes into "fairness and equality" has managed to unbalance distribution in another unfair way?
I guess what I am saying is that perhaps we need to re-examine our current system and philosophy where it comes to "diversity." We have been forcing and enforcing policy for so long, we don't have any idea if the problem has been solved already or not -- or if the solution is actually perpetuating the problem. (By that, I mean to say, are current policies and practices in government actually "guaranteeing" jobs to 'minorities' and therefore making the idea of competing in the marketplace a less attractive option? I think so.)
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Asian is worse in that regard. Look at map, look at how many countries are on that continent. Political correctness run amok.
Being from the UK, I always have to do a mental translation in my head - Asian, in the US, seems to refer to what we would call Oriental - generally East Asia.
In the UK, Asian means India and Pakistan. A chinese person would never identify themselves here as Asian.
Re:I'm pretty sure (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure what country you're from or which one you're talking about, but here in the United States that's not true. In the US Affirmative Action cannot place quotas, and several court cases including the Supreme Court have upheld that strict racial quotas of any sort are unconstitutional (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger). Colleges, for example, are allowed to consider race as a means to an end such as "diversity", but they are not allowed to set any quotas or use race-based admission as a redress for historical racism. Although the "right wing" in our country likes to raise affirmative action as a boogie-man, things don't actually operate that way in this country.