"Google revealed that its tech work force was 1 percent black, compared with 60 percent white. Yahoo disclosed in July that African-Americans made up 1 percent of its tech workers while Hispanics were 3 percent."
Affirmative Action has worked in other industries.
Simply stating a number like that adds absolutely nothing of value. There are a lot of questions you need the answers to in order to make any kind of judgment:
- What is the racial makeup of the accepted applicant pool?
- What is the racial makeup of the interviewed applicant pool (including those not extended offers)?
- What is the racial makeup of the overall applicant pool (including those not invited for interviews)?
- What is the racial makeup of people otherwise qualified to apply?
The whole way up to the overall population of I think 12-13% African-American. Even without seeing numbers I can guarantee that African-American applicants to Google and Yahoo are much closer to 1% than they are to 13%. It's a systemic problem (I am not referring to systemic racism) and you need to address the root causes of each stage.
But it's much easier to say "Silicon Valley is racist" I guess.
Edit: And assuming that average foreign worker is equivalently skilled and cheaper than average American worker, of course they're going to favor hiring the foreign worker. It's economics.
How about non-engineering applicants?
Why is there also little or non-existing black non-engineering (accountants, lawyers, project managers) staff in SV?
Probably because it's totally asinine to say to someone "Hey you're black, come work for us!"
If you're suggesting that African American Computer Science majors should all get hired immediately out of school so that Google can increase its count from 1.0% to 1.02%, it doesn't work like that.
Two things in this discussion actually matter if you want to affect meaningful change:
1. The racial makeup of graduating Computer Science majors compared to the makeup of the US population. If only 2% of graduating CS majors are from a race that makes up 13% of the US population, you will never have anything approaching proportional representation.
2. The racial makeup of applicants compared to the makeup of those applicants extended offers. This is really the step where, if there are company-level systemic issues around race, they will show up. If 10% of your applicants are a given race but 1% are extended offers there might actually be an issue. This is much harder to determine because not only is it very hard to get the data, but you need a sufficient number of applications to get meaningful results. If you only get 100 resumes a year for a dozen positions, you won't get anything useful here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/technology/silicon-valley-... ...
"Google revealed that its tech work force was 1 percent black, compared with 60 percent white. Yahoo disclosed in July that African-Americans made up 1 percent of its tech workers while Hispanics were 3 percent."
Affirmative Action has worked in other industries.
Why does it fail in Silicon Valley?