Intel Pledges $300 Million To Improve Diversity In Tech 341
AmiMoJo writes: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced plans to improve diversity not just at Intel, but in the wider tech industry. Krzanich wants "to reach full representation at all levels" of the company by 2020. For instance, Intel's workforce is currently four percent black; if the company were to adjust its numbers to reflect the number of qualified workers in the tech industry, that number would increase to about six percent.
To help address one of tech's underlying diversity problems — that there are fewer qualified women and minorities available to hire than there are white or Asian men — Krzanich pledged to spend $300 million over the next three years. According to the New York Times, much of that money will be allocated "to fund engineering scholarships and to support historically black colleges and universities."
"I have two daughters of my own coming up on college age," he said to the NYT. "I want them to have a world that's got equal opportunity for them."
To help address one of tech's underlying diversity problems — that there are fewer qualified women and minorities available to hire than there are white or Asian men — Krzanich pledged to spend $300 million over the next three years. According to the New York Times, much of that money will be allocated "to fund engineering scholarships and to support historically black colleges and universities."
"I have two daughters of my own coming up on college age," he said to the NYT. "I want them to have a world that's got equal opportunity for them."
Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Besides which, at least in the UK there are scholarships and other funds for people who can't afford to study.
Re: (Score:2)
they still get preferential treatment when it comes to jobs, career advancement, internships, etc.
No, "they" do not. Some of them, on an individual basis, get an unfair advantage. And some do not.
It's a statistical phenomenon, and statistically it *is* reality, but at the individual level it's dehumanizing and unjust exactly the same way as every other kind of prejudice.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, and let's get equal leave for paternity
Where I live, the parents are free to divvy up the parental leave any way they wish.
money spent getting males into Vetinary sciences
The number of women who are veterinarians has only outnumbered men since 2009. The problem in IT has been going on much longer, and runs much deeper.
Plus, the same chance of being the stay at home partner when children arrive (males are vastly under represented here.
Maybe if women were able to make the same amount of money for the same experience in the same job, the numbers would be better. Also, there's nothing to prevent from doing this - it's something that should have been discussed before having kids.
Oh, and compulsory genetic testing at childbirth (so every male will have the same knowledge that the child is theirs as the mother has)
Sure, if we can also have a
Re:Waste of money (Score:4, Interesting)
The Department of Labor commissioned a study on the gender pay gap. None could be determined to be caused by discrimination. They could not even conclude that there was any pay differential when all non-discriminatory factors were accounted for. "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women" [consad.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The Department of Labor commissioned a study on the gender pay gap. None could be determined to be caused by discrimination. They could not even conclude that there was any pay differential when all non-discriminatory factors were accounted for. "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women" [consad.com]
If you bothered to actually read the paper, you would have noticed this:
Many researchers have independently derived results in statistical analyses of different data sets that consistently indicate that the main factor accounting for the gender wage gap is differences between the occupations in which men and women typically work.
That's referring to why the "raw" pay differential is 20%. And this:
After accounting statistically for human capital factors other than gender, however, their results indicate that female workers are more concentrated than male workers in low-paying industries. As a result, based on their estimates of gender wage gaps for the most detailed set of industry categories, Fields and Wolff have found that the industries in which the workers are employed can account directly for as much as 22 percent of the gender wage gap. Further, the observe d difference in the distributions of male and female workers among the industries can account for an additional 19 percent of the gap. In total, industry can account for as much as 38 percent of the raw gender wage gap.
The thing is, why do women end up in lower-paying jobs in the first place? This program is designed to address some of that by giving more women the qualifications they need to move into higher-paying jobs.
Re:Waste of money (Score:4, Informative)
I have read the paper many times, thank you for trying to belittle me. I was objecting to your particular claim that women are paid less for the same work. Now you are raising completely different points about men and women doing DIFFERENT work. I don't deny that men and women do different work and that societal expectations about gender roles is the primary cause of this. I fully agree with that.
There were many claims that women were being paid less for the same work. The Department had a legal obligation to prevent this as a civil rights issue, so they tried to discover what exactly was happening. They could not determine that such a thing was happening. Of course, every economist was saying the same thing: Investors almost universally invest in the highest expected return. If women were doing the same work for less pay, investors would invest in firms that primarily or solely used women as workers, thus increasing demand, and pay, until an equilibrium is reached.
The final conclusion: "As a result, it is not possible now, and doubtless will never be possible, to determine reliably whether any portion of the observed gender wage gap is not attributable to factors that compensate women and men differently on socially acceptable bases, and hence can confidently be attributed to overt discrimination against women. In addition, at a practical level, the complex combnation of factors that collectively determine wages pad to different individuals makes the formulation of policy that will reliably redress ay overt discrimination that does exist a task that is, at least, daunting and, more likely, unachievable." (pg. 36)
The Department of Labor has not done an equivalent study since this 2009 one.
Re: (Score:3)
What are you talking about? You said I never bothered to read the paper. I did. You simply used a scurrilous personal attack against me. It has nothing to do with who chose what.
None of the links you gave say that they are paid less for the same work. They are talking about women being paid less in toto.
Women's employment earnings are less than men. No one is denying this. That is totally different claim from the incredible one you originally made: That women are paid less for the very same work.
"And t
Re: (Score:2)
Males tend to be more aggressive when asking for money (not always, just a tendency, and aggression isn't limited to salary).
And that's also part of the problem - the aggressiveness isn't limited to money. Look at the incarceration rates for men vs women - men take the lead at something like 15 to 1.
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately it's a small chance. Most of the difference in interest/ability/selection/whatever in STEM by gender is already evident by the end of high school. Too lazy to look it up now, but you can look at things like math SAT scores, AP calculus scores, intended major selection, etc. and see that there is already a pretty significant difference between the sexes already. And it's already so big that it doesn't really get bigger over time. Since a stitch in time saves nine, it seems like the best use of
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, I'll buy that mentoring/role-modelling is a pretty good answer. But then shouldn't you just pay women who are currently in STEM fields to mentor school age girls? Or pay their way through workshops that will enable them to to it themselves?
I don't mean to be down on someone trying to help, but the idea that we are going to correct a 70/30 split in high schoolers by equalizing college and the workplace first and then hope that it feeds back just doesn't seem like it will be that effective. Not that i
Re: (Score:3)
We already know what happens in middle and high school: social pressure to fit in, and follow socially accepted roles, where "socially accepted" is defined, in large part, by underage peers. Being a "nerdy engineer" is socially acceptable for men because it provides the opportunity to make a pretty good living, which makes them socially desirable as a mate. There's little of the same incentive for women, who aren't ranked as much in desirability by their salary -- despite the fact that women under 30 are
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is it a waste of money, or is it CYA? Intel cares about diversity... at least to the tune of 300 million dollars.
Re: (Score:2)
. . . so, are there any Intelers here on Slashdot, who have been told by their managers, that there is not enough money in the company to give them a raise?
But Intel seems to have 300 million to piss away . . .
Re: (Score:2)
Dunno about these days, but they've often told entire R&D groups that they don't have enough money to keep the group going, and so everyone in that group went into the pool to find another job in the company (you get 3 months - after that you're basically unemployed).
Re: (Score:2)
First we should ask whether we even need diversity.
What we should strive for is equality of opportunity. If you can get that sorted out, and you still have more white males than black women working in tech, well, that's probably because (readers of a sensitive disposition should look away now) they're different.
"I have two daughters of my own coming up on college age," he said to the NYT. "I want them to have a world that's got equal opportunity for them."
Yes, good. But don't judge your efforts simply by the relative numbers of different groups going into a particular profession.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a large body of evidence correlating economics & culture to educational outcomes.
Genetics correlate also, but this is mostly genetic differences between individual families, not "race".
Gender difference in mathematics is only apparent in individual countries and fairly nonexistent when looking at the world as a whole [apa.org] (implying that gender differences in mathematics is due to culture).
This evidence is a good place to start understanding the problem and search for improvements. Therefore scholars
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because people are inherently tribal. We want to associate with our own group and exclude people we feel do not fit well within our group.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Is diversity for diversity's sake that important when it comes to coding something? 1's and 0's are pretty color and sex blind and don't seem to care who is juggling them around.
While I think the opportunities for anyone QUALIFIED to get jobs in the industry, why is it so important what the sprea
Re: (Score:2)
Geez, I gotta get some coffee in me and read before I hit submit.
"While I think the opportunities for anyone QUALIFIED to get jobs in the industry should be open and equal..."
Re: (Score:3)
The mindset that "girls would make bad programmers ...
Nobody is saying that. What they are saying is that girls are less interested, not less capable.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, what, there's no politically correct way to say things that are sexist bullshit? I wonder why that is.
Re: (Score:2)
To all the people who say "women don't want to work in tech", note that women were the MAJORITY in the early days of computing, right up until the advent of personal computers. ( Source [npr.org]) From the article: "... families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers."
So it's quite probable women WOULD go into tech fields ... if they had encouragement, a pleasant working atmosphere, and at least some assurance that motherhood w
Re: Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
...and at least some assurance that motherhood wouldn't throw them completely off their career track.
And therein lies the rub. Unless he mandates a hysterectomy before hiring at Intel, that biological clock will be there, ticking. There isn't shit that you (or the Intel Corporation) can do about it, either. I know quite a few women in tech (including Intel employees) - the highly successful ones are childless, and have no inclination of having kids (the only exception is a former manager of mine - and she has an MBA, not a CompSci degree). The reason why? They forewent the child-rearing thing and went all-in when it came to technology - just like the guys do.
When you bear a child, your priorities change - hard. All the sudden, that project/application/datacenter/whatever doesn't seem so damned important anymore, and your life's focus changes. It's not sexist to say that women in general are affected by this a hell of a lot more than men are. Guys are generally used to sucking it up and getting on with the business of focusing back on that whole hunter-gatherer thing - it's how we're wired. There are exceptions in either direction of course, but they're not the general rule. Generally, the business of getting that little snot factory raised, educated, nurtured, and prepared for the world becomes a woman's focus much quicker than it does for a guy.
Even with compromises (day care, schools, etc), it still changes the top priority for most (not all - most) women. This in turn throws the statistics off pretty hard for careers that require constant education and constant renewal.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You mean hard wired to sacrifice themselves to take care of their family?
Re: Waste of money (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny how single moms manage to do both, isn't it?
...usually because they have to, not because they want to. I was raised by a single mother who would have vastly preferred to have not had to hold a full-time job.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes it is funny. Except it isn't. It's just more of the same thinking that when a women does it, she's a hero... when a man does it, he's a self serving pig or whatever he is labeled as for whatever 'it' is in a given discussion.
Guy codes? Must be a smelly fat hot pocket eating misogynist hater living in mom's basement.
Girl codes? She rocks, go girl power!
Male teacher bangs student? Male and female alike want his nuts cut off.
Female teacher does the same? Well, the boy was lucky... where were female te
Re: Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the thing - it isn't that they put their careers "over" their families - they do it because of their families. That woolly mammoth isn't gonna kill itself, you know (or the modern equivalent? 'That mortgage ain't gonna pay itself.')
Most guys would love to stay home all day and help raise the kids, enjoying every moment - instead they have to get out there and make double-damned certain that the wife and kids were provided for, and kept secure, safe, fed, and warm. That's the hard-wiring I'm talking about. Some guys manage to do it (e.g. stay-at-home dads) - good for them! (no, really - I'd be totally envious of such a situation.) Most guys however don't get to do that - they have to get out there and work for the long haul, for the family.
That's why I specifically wrote "sucking it up" - not because they want to, but because they have to.
Re: (Score:3)
You confuse instinct with circumstance. Most single mothers go out there and work because circumstances say that they have to. Most two-job families see both parents working because financial circumstance demands it.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought the government provides support (the basics) to the single mothers? Also, they can get child support payments from the father, for a very long time.
I thought you knew all this? Weird.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought the government provides support (the basics) to the single mothers? Also, they can get child support payments from the father, for a very long time.
I thought you knew all this? Weird.
"Basic support" is less than minimum wage. And sometimes it's not possible to get child support payments because the father is himself unemployed or not around or maybe even deceased.
Re: Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do you explain all those single moms who manage to do both?
Disclaimer: I was brought up by a single mother...
The truth is, the vast, VAST majority do no such thing. They typically have others (friends, daycare, relatives) take care of the kids during the day/afternoon/evening whilst mom is working. They are "out of the picture" as much as a father who goes to work to earn money and comes home at night to spend time with the family, eat, and sleep. The concept of a "hero-mom" who works 8+ hours a day AND is home for the kids all the time is a highly-flawed one.
Re: Waste of money (Score:5, Interesting)
To all the people who say "women don't want to work in tech", note that women were the MAJORITY in the early days of computing, right up until the advent of personal computers.
Most of those jobs were for data entry clerks. A man would write a program with pen and paper, hand it to a woman, and then she would sit at a card punch machine and type in the program. Once personal computers became common, the man could type in his own program, the paper and pen went away, and so did the woman "tech worker".
So it's quite probable women WOULD go into tech fields ... if they had encouragement
The problem with this hypothesis is that it doesn't explain why woman have been so successful in fields like law and medicine, where they not only faced blatant discrimination, harassment, and discouragement from their peers, but also institutional barriers. Yet women fought through all of that and prevailed. So if you think that "discouragement" is the explanation, you need to explain why it only happens in tech.
Re: Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Nursing is hard. Veterinary medicine is hard. Biological sciences, particularly at the graduate level, are hard.
All of these are heavily female dominated.
Women don't avoid hard fields simply because there is challenging material.
It's almost like the situation is more complex than "Tech is just too tough for delicate ladybrains".
Re: (Score:2)
It's almost like the situation is more complex than "Tech is just too tough for delicate ladybrains".
Well clearly there's some reason based on hunter gatherers and cavemen and hunting and evolution. That must explain it.
Re: (Score:2)
No. I think it's a broad cultural issue. People tend to be drawn to the well glamorized professions. Like anything else in America, this is a SALES issue and has nothing to do with the tech industry.
It's not glamorized. It doesn't have a reputation for being lucrative.
The geek bashing done by the feminist press doesn't help.
Re: (Score:2)
The geek bashing done by the feminist press doesn't help.
What are you referring to? Do you have any links supporting this?
Re: (Score:2)
Ever seen Big Bang Theory?
Re: (Score:2)
Ever seen Big Bang Theory?
Is Warner Bros part of the feminist press now?
Re: (Score:2)
"Tech is hard"
Nah. Women gravitate toward Biology, Botany, Medicine, Chemistry, and other fields that are intrinsically non-linear and cannot be easily constrained. Men in Engineering and Physical Sciences which are easy to constrain and make linear. EEs for example spend a fair amount of effort ensuring that their designs have linear responses. In the fields I just mentioned you do not have that luxury.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess that would also be a reason.
Produce More Qualified Workers to Not Hire (Score:2)
For instance, Intel's workforce is currently 4 percent black; if the company were to adjust its numbers to reflect the number of qualified workers in the tech industry, that number would increase to about six percent.
So what stopped them from hiring these qualified workers in the first place? Maybe there's more to the story?
Re:Produce More Qualified Workers to Not Hire (Score:4, Informative)
Something that helps a lot (in all industries, including academia) is stripping names and gender/race identifying characteristics from resumes and papers. When those documents are assessed in a context absent the nature of the writer, they're considered more equally. They've done experiments where the same paper has been submitted with male, female and neutral names, and the female names see more critical judgement and a higher rate of rejection. This is for exactly the same paper, remember.
The problem isn't overt racism, it's subtle, institutional discrimination that most of us suffer from. Even female researchers and professors are guilty of discriminating against other women.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hire the best person (Score:4, Insightful)
How about hiring the best person for the job, and fits well with the rest of the team regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual preference, etc? If it happens to be someone who is white, hispanic, or black who cares?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That would be great, but it is not PC, while discrimination that favours people belonging to groups that were previously discriminated against is.
Re:Hire the best person (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the goal here is to try to make more women and minorities "the best person for the job" via education, which I find far more laudable than quota-driven diversity-by-fiat that degrades team and product quality.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Quota driven diversity just makes the bigots right.
No on two counts. Firstly it only matters if everything is already equal. Secondly no matter what quotas exist, women are not de-facto inferior to men (or any other bias you choose to discuss).
If you hire based on attributes other than competence, then people having those attributes will, on average, be less competent than their colleagues without those attributes.
Indeed so: no disagreement there. However, the claim is that is ALREADY happening, with people
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fortunately that isn't what is happening here. Intel wants to increase the number of female and minority candidates, in order to increase the talent pool. They will still hire the best person, it's just that with more women and minorities applying the probability of the best person being from those two groups increases.
Intel has noticed that its workforce is only 4% black, where as in the general population about 6% of qualified engineers are black. There must be some reason for that, and they want to fix i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How about hiring the best person for the job, and fits well with the rest of the team regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual preference, etc? If it happens to be someone who is white, hispanic, or black who cares?
Because then you'll be approached by a frothing at the mouth "journalist", asking questions like "Why isn't your workforce 50% white, 50% asian, 50% black, , 50% hispanic, 50% homosexual, and 50% female?".
Hiring the best suited candidate is so 1990. Now it's all about the progressive stack and checking your privilege.
Re: (Score:2)
"fits well with the rest of the team" - So if there some hostility toward some particular people group within your team. Wouldn't your system just bifurcate?
Re: (Score:2)
Well sure, but then there is obviously some other politics at play that should be addressed. We had about 5 resumes for an open position. 1 was clearly the most qualified for the job (perhaps even overqualified), runner up was still qualified but not quite as much. We interviewed our top choice and while they were brilliant they wouldn't have fit with the rest of the team (she was extremely serious with no sense of humour, rest of the team cracks jokes all day). Runner up had an awesome sense of humour. So
Re: (Score:2)
"Well sure, but then there is obviously some other politics at play that should be addressed." - What if there's a latent bias in society? Now imagine how that affects at other levels. For example in getting an education, getting a good education, participating in open source projects and finally "fitting with the team"?
Wouldn't all these things have a winnowing effect on your pool of candidates?
And 60% of college students are female (Score:5, Insightful)
What are we doing to combat the critical under representation of men in college?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Careful, the Feminazis are watching.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is that critical? You have the same argument about women going into STEM. If women aren't interested in technical fields, why force them? If men aren't interested in going to college, why force them?
What you're not seeing are valid equivalent organizations towards advancing the male agenda. And that won't happen until the pendulum reaches the other side.
[John]
Re: (Score:2)
That's an interesting but off-topic question. Intel is dealing with a specific problem in its industry, and ultimately for its own benefit. You can't really expect Intel to try to fix education in general.
Re:And 60% of college students are female (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the first thing we need is a leadership that doesn't actually _celebrate_ men being worse off in college:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012... [pjmedia.com]
"“In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men,” Obama wrote. “This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about.”"
The article continues...
"So if a 17% deficit was a catastrophe requiring federal intervention, what are we to conclude when that same federal intervention has created a 25% level of inequality?"
This is a good question, when women had a 17% deficit the govt enacted a host of laws to balance things out, to include Title IX. Now that there's a 25% deficit for men, where's the action to fix things? It'd be bad enough it was just crickets, but instead our president is lauding this even GREATER deficit than what women suffered. In what way does that make any sense?
And yes, federal intervention most certainly has made colleges more inhospitable to men. Case in point, the Dear Colleague letter and the kangaroo courts that have followed.
5 stages of handling a PR problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like Intel has hit stage 5.
Re: (Score:2)
1. Profess shock 2. Start an investigation 3. Promise to do better 4. Apologize and abase yourself to every aggrieved group you can find 5. Throw some money at anything related, esp. self-appointed "community spokesmen" Looks like Intel has hit stage 5.
6. Claim that there are not enough qualified graduates in the US and ask for yet another increase in H1B visas. Remind us that the US can't stay competitive without being able to hire H1Bs.
delusion (Score:5, Interesting)
"I have two daughters of my own coming up on college age," he said to the NYT. "I want them to have a world that's got equal opportunity for them."
Yeah, I'm sure a couple of rich white girls whose father is the CEO of Intel are going to have all sorts of problems finding "equal opportunity" in the tech industry unless he acts quickly.
Re: Orwell (Score:2)
I know many people who support socialism. I have never met one that wanted to be the "horse" from Animal Farm.
Re: (Score:2)
I have never met one that wanted to be the "horse" from Animal Farm.
That would be Boxer.
What this REALLY means (Score:4, Funny)
I'll bet they're outsourcing $300M of work o India and China. Best spin ever!
Why only in Tech? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious why this type of "diversity" drive only pops up in tech-related office jobs? Where is the drive in getting more men into child care jobs or social services? Why not more women in construction work? Why not more women in the army? Why not more women in sanitation, mining, welding, or fishing?
As it stands, it doesn't seem like diversity is the goal at all.
Re: (Score:2)
How else are nerds going to meet chicks?
Re:Why only in Tech? (Score:4, Insightful)
The CEO of Intel can't affect those industries, except, perhaps, indirectly and through example.
All of those are good questions. Those are all places where we should be striving to see a better mix of genders and races. You tell ME why those industries aren't trying to change. Could it be the institutional sexism that's so pervasive in our culture, starting when children are young, allotting toys on a gendered basis? Is it because we don't discourage construction workers in many of our cities from catcalling really offensive things, making women wonder why they'd ever want to work on a site like that? Is it because when women DO go into the armed forces, they're raped or sexually assaulted at distressingly high rates? Is it because we tell men that caring for children is women's work, and simultaneously tell them it's a horrible thing to be feminine?
By the time someone is looking for a job, it's probably too late. The people that want to be in construction have already made their choice, male or female.
Re: (Score:2)
Or could it be that women tend to be olympic champion complainers, and will not let an issue go until they get their way, whereas men would often rather shrug and go and do something else instead?
That isn't to say that women don't have anything to complain about - they surely do. But so do men - and male gripes get orders of magnitude less attention paid to them.
Re: (Score:2)
100% true.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you just need to google those subjects a bit more.
Recently the UK army started debating if women should be allowed to fight on the front lines with men. The Church of England recently started allowing female bishops. There has been a big push, sustained for years to get more men into child care and particularly into primary level education because young kids need male role-models. The UK government offers incentives for men who want to train for those fields.
As to why we can't fix everything with sche
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget HR. It's absolutely dominated by women. In nearly 20 years, I don't think I've ever worked with a male HR staffer. Why is that?
Re: (Score:2)
Because feminist patriarchy "theory" (in reality it barely qualifies as a functional hypothesis) is ultimately a fallacy of composition.
More PC nonsense (Score:3)
What a surprise...yet another company jumps on the politically correct bandwagon. It seems that the strategy is to jump out ahead of this "issue" rather than wait for some shake down artist like Al Sharpton to come knocking on your door.
The quotes around "issue" are intentional, indicating that there is no issue at all. The reason that there is a lower representation in Tech is simply that there are fewer applicants that are Black or female or from other minority groups. Simple as that. All you have to do is take a walk around a college campus and visit a CS101 class. What will you see? Predominantly white males and asians. Is that because colleges are discriminating against others in their CS programs? Of course not. It just means that those people chose to study other things.
If Intel wants to give money to historically black colleges that's great. I'm all in favor of that. But to suggest that it will fix some supposed problem is ridiculous. In typical American fashion, the solution to every problem is to throw more money at it. It rarely works. To blame companies for "not hiring enough people from group X" is certainly convenient, and probably popular in some circles, but in the end its not accurate.
Companies hire from the pool of labor that is available to them. To suggest that they are overlooking qualified people because of the color of their skin or their gender is absurd. It is nothing more than a thinly veiled racism/sexism charge to which there is no substantial evidence to support it.
Quite frankly, there is more evidence to support discrimination based on age or medical health than age or gender. Where is the outrage over that? Where are all the big companies promising to throw all sorts of money to address it? Crickets.
Kind of diversity (Score:2)
Diversity as in, yet another Linux distro?
Re: (Score:3)
If anything changes in hiring practices it's less positive discrimination and more active searching for candidates that are a minority. Instead of only actively searching for white and asian males because you happen to know candidates like that.
Re: (Score:3)
I'll say it:
All other things (education, experience, interview, etc.) being equal or close enough between two candidates, one of them being a white male and the other being someone in a racial or gender minority class, yeah, I'm going to hire the person in the racial or gender minority class.
It isn't for a metric - it's because, all other things being equal as you stipulated, a person from a class not normally found in the field is likely going to have had to overcome obstacles and challenges on the way the
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and furthermore:
If conditions 1 and 2 above are actually true (I personally think it's racist/sexist bullshit, but those are arguments people trot out on the regular): 2 candidates being equal means to me that the white male candidate must be exceptionally lazy. After else, if whites and males are both socially and biologically more suited to working in the field in general, how then could a white male manage to not do a better job given equal education and experience?
The answer has to be either that wh
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Does he want bog-standard, shallow, progressive "diversity" - everyone looks different on the outside but diversity of thought or opinion is not tolerated while every member is assigned rigid roles based on mere appearance, or real diversity where no one cares about how to categorize group members into various victim classes?
The former is the standard, and the money is going to organizations that deal only in the former.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What is it about wanting to introduce more people into IT that gets people into a blind spitting rage? It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game guys.
Maybe its the gross unwelcoming attitude that puts people off.
Because a lot of people have worked damn hard to get somewhere and to build something. And all of that effort is being diminished to no small extent by this preferred treatment program.
If you work your ass of for 10 years, making sure to be the best, only to get passed by for a rookie on a "diversity" quota, wouldn't you get a little grumpy? That is why so many here are asking for the 'best candidate' treatment rather than the 'look how minority I am' treatment. That is why yet another of these "diversity"
Re:why the hate (Score:5, Informative)
If you work your ass of for 10 years, making sure to be the best, only to get passed by for a rookie on a "diversity" quota,
Is that any different from working your ass off for 10 years, making sure to be the best only to get passed by because you're not a man? Is it possible for science to identify bias using a randomized, controlled trial?
Why yes!
http://blogs.scientificamerica... [scientificamerican.com]
So the thing is you're assuming everything is equal and therefore quotas are hurting men. The thing is that they're not equal and women are demonstrably being passed over in favour of men simply by vitrue of not being male.
So what do you think should be done. Unless you have a good rebuttal for that study, something is clearly messed up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But if as the study shows, women are being passed over simply because they're female then doesn't bias in grants simply serve to even up the odds so that there is no average disadvantage or advantage to being a particular gender?
Re: (Score:2)
I really do not understand how your analogy relates to my link to an article about sexism.
Re:why the hate (Score:4, Interesting)
Working your ass off for 10 years? Try 30 and fighting age discrimination. It has nothing to do with diversity, people of different cultures, genders, etc. If it's being supported by these companies it's all about increasing the labor supply so they can screw over their workers more easily for less money. For those of you who think otherwise, you're naive and supporting your oppressors' schemes. Employment becomes a zero-sum game if the pool of workers is growing faster than the number of open positions.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't Asian men count as a minority?
Because they accept responsibility for themselves and actually work to succeed, and don't blame others - especially whitey - when they fail.
Can't have that, now can we?
Re: Asian men - not a minority? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why don't native Americans count as minorities? How much of that $300 million will go to native American schools? What are their Native American employment numbers?
nobody cares about diversity. They care about not looking bad. White people don't like racism, so Intel has to look like they don't either. Black people are constantly whining about all the things they don't have, so Intel caters to them. Meanwhile, native Americans are forgotten, again.
Re: (Score:2)