
Pattern Matching, Racial Diversity and the Hypocrisy of Big Tech Media - OoTheNigerian
https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/06/diversity-and-big-tech-media/
======
mc32
It’s all signaling and not really doing anything. (That dog don’t hunt, to
turn a phrase). They’re also afraid of the the same hypocritical media will
denounce them for not being woke, while the media get a pass while it itself
ignores the long arc this requires. You don’t just snap fingers and things
happen.

It’s easy to say so and so is bad because they are not voicing in unison the
clamor for fairness etc. but in reality all most are doing is buying time and
buying forgiveness.

Real change does not happen overnight. It takes years of hard work. You have
to start young and follow through for a couple of decades.

Employers barely want to train people they have vetted and hired, so I don’t
expect them to put money where their mouths are in terms of building and
sustaining the systems necessary to bring disadvantaged populations into the
same opportunities afforded others.

It’s like the Chinese bots castigating the US for civil liberties issues while
they have re-education camps with millions. It’s a sideshow.

~~~
chillacy
That's what a lot of us have been saying in industry for awhile now but tech
media has been pretty relentless in implications without clarification of the
underlying difficulty (the pipeline we have to work with). It's good to
highlight the hypocrisy.

~~~
Avicebron
I think the pipeline argument is a little biased, it implies that only certain
kinds of people can learn "the skills". This thinking back propagates down the
line from what the ideal resume looks like, to where someone went to school,
down to something like gender or class.

I think this is patently untrue and encouraging training and taking chances on
different types of applicants would do a lot to improve this.

As someone with a bit of an odd background and a bit scattered of a resume.
I've experienced this stonewalling first hand.

~~~
filoleg
> I think the pipeline argument is a little biased, it implies that only
> certain kinds of people can learn "the skills".

I don't think so. I truly believe that a lot more people from disadvantaged
populations can learn "the skills" than the numbers we currently have, to the
point where it would equal out to be the same as people from other
demographics. They have the inherent ability to get good good at it just like
anyone else. The issue comes with those career paths and opportunities not
being as often encouraged and "advertised" to them when growing up. And that's
the part that needs to change.

We need more supplementary coding opportunities for children in disadvantaged
communities. They need to be exposed to those opportunities. Those
opportunities need to be presented as viable paths for them, and not something
like "you need to learn tons of math and you will be sitting all day at a
computer like a drone". If you don't already have great math skills (which
most people don't) and don't have role models that encourage this (e.g., an
uncle who is a software engineer), then no wonder that this pitch won't
convince you to seriously consider a career in software engineering, no matter
how actually capable you are.

Of course, a lot of people would scoff at this approach, as it takes time to
come to fruition and deliver the results. And it isn't a flashy "bandaid"
solution you can put on this issue and proclaim a loud victory, without
actually making a systemic change. But big systemic changes like this take
lots of time and effort, and we should be focusing on that, rather than giving
it up in favor of more "bandaid"-tier solutions.

~~~
jimbokun
"and you will be sitting all day at a computer like a drone"

Um, this one is kind of true of many programming jobs. Also true of many non-
programming jobs today, too.

~~~
filoleg
Sure, but that's not how it should be presented to children. You can paint
almost any modern job this way, as you said. So programming needs to be
presented as a viable alternative, just like all the other jobs.

No one gives a classroom speech to kids on how being a doctor means doing many
years of medschool after finishing college, getting into debt, and then doing
24-36 hour shifts in residency while being paid peanuts, before you can
actually start working as a doctor. And I don't think that presenting
programming to kids should be done this way either.

It should be presented in a similar manner to how it got many of us into the
field due to the love of programming. It is all about solving intricate
problems, puzzles, automating things, and doing all sorts of cool stuff with
it. In fact, I believe that it is especially shameful how it is usually
presented to kids as a menial/robotic job, given that programming has a lot of
potential for showing kids cool applications of it, way more than most other
fields. Programming robots, computer systems on board of space shuttles,
soccer balls that have systems tracking performance, programmable music
instruments, etc. The potential for making it entertaining and captivating for
kids is gigantic.

------
OoTheNigerian
Hi, author here.

I live in Lagos, Nigeria but visit Silicon Valley frequently and follow the
situation closely.

Being near but far, has given me unique perspectives on these type of issues.

I sent my report to 22 US media companies (the ones covered, NYTimes, WaPo,
CNN, Guardian, Wired etc) and was essentially blackballed. Thankfully we can
self-publish.

I am here in the comments and happy to answer any questions you may have.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
thanks for this great post. I was wondering how does the Tech community in
Nigeria feel about the renaming of Tech jargon as currently implemented by
Githab, Redhat, Twitter and others (links below). Do you think this is
something companies should be doing? It seems like a cheap shot to me
personally and it would be cool to get your opinion on this in a future post
on your blog.

thanks!

[https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/tech/twitter-jpmorgan-
sla...](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/tech/twitter-jpmorgan-slave-master-
coding/index.html)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-
racially...](https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-
loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/)

[https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article243876977....](https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article243876977.html)

[https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-dropping-coding-
term...](https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-dropping-coding-terms-master-
slave-2020-7)

~~~
mc32
While some terms can be improved or neutralized, it’s also true that people in
Africa like any other place, are also afraid of the dark. It’s part of the
human experience. And lack of light or darkness is one ingredient in how or
why people perceive things in particular ways.

~~~
psalmadek
What exactly are you trying to say? what is light and what is darkness?

~~~
jbay808
GP is saying that most terms using black with a negative connotation, like
"black list", didn't originate from racism towards people with dark skin, but
from the fear that many people have of darkness. GP is suggesting that this is
pretty universal across humanity, including among African cultures.

------
daenz
Out of curiosity, has there ever been another point in time where a dominating
culture has made efforts to represent non-dominant races/cultures
proportionally in the upper levels of society? Were there lessons learned from
that? This phenomenon seems relatively new so I'd like to learn more about how
it works in practice.

~~~
tropdrop
I am not sure about "dominant races," but there has been something akin to
this move in another aspect of society: gender. Here's an article that
outlines the effects of finally having enough men in congress convinced to
ratify the 19th amendment (enabling universal suffrage) [1]. In this case, the
"dominating" culture is the more correct term than "dominant," since the
proportion of males to females in society is usually close to 50/50 - but I
think it does give us some idea about the kind of policy ramifications that
might happen with more representative representation:

> _Some of the legislation championed by women lawmakers, such as the
> enactment in the early 1990s of the Violence Against Women Act and the
> Family and Medical Leave Act, are remembered as signature achievements more
> than a generation later. But other victories were shockingly prosaic,
> correcting gender inequities that few would now believe lasted as long as
> they did, from giving women access to credit to ensuring that medical
> research included women as subjects._

A good example of the kind of prosaic mentioned: most people do not know that
the NIH was not required to include female subjects for drug trials until
1993, though it is shockingly obvious that a drug could affect female bodies
(e.g. reproductive system) differently [2].

[1] - [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/how-
wom...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/how-women-remade-
american-government-after-suffrage/591940/) [2] -
[https://grants.nih.gov/policy/inclusion/women-and-
minorities...](https://grants.nih.gov/policy/inclusion/women-and-
minorities/guidelines.htm)

------
wholien
I'd prefer the article to be more upfront about "racial diversity" being "what
% are Black", and not "what % are Black, Latino, Asian, etc". Billing Black %,
though important, as racial diversity erases all other non-Caucasian groups.

~~~
purple-again
Does it erase them or does it just take a moment to focus the conversation on
the black part?

I’m pretty sure “racial diversity” here doesn’t mean “not white” but instead
means racial division in proportion to the population in context.

~~~
daenz
The "Silicon Valley Tech Media Diversity Report Card" listed in the article
has a column for "Black %" as its only diversity metric.

------
djohnston
i cant say much more than "wow, thats pretty damning", particularly because
many of the already small number of black people included seem like celebrity
tokens (snoop, will smith, nba players) rather than bonafide contributors. im
surprised i hadn't heard about this before, though unfortunately not surprised
that it is the reality. thanks for sharing!

------
baron816
It’s really not fair to criticize Big Tech for not having demographics that
mirror the US population as a whole. There’s so many large, societal factors
standing in the way of black people and people of color from being able to
even consider pursuing a career in tech that putting all the blame on
discrimination or prejudice means your not talking about the real issues.

If Big Tech/Big Tech Media want to help those communities, they should lobby
the government to stop mass incarcerating and start educating their future
engineers.

~~~
mekoka
The article is not pointing the blame toward _discrimination_ , it addresses
the hypocrisy of those with the means to affect change, who are glad to
denounce while remaining _passive_. Apathy while in a position to influence is
a form of tacit approval of the status quo. Basically, the article denounces a
common form of virtue signaling by these people/organizations when it's
convenient (like right now); They publicly plaster donations as flares to
deflect attention, but then go back to their color blind ways once the storm
has passed. If you're part of a community that has no valid reasons to be
delineated along racial lines, at some point you have to wonder why people of
a certain minority are underrepresented in your (tech, business, friends)
circles. Do they ever ask? Do they care at all? Your stated _explanation_ ,
incarcerations and lack of education, tends to be the quick goto. But it
doesn't explain everything. It's rather increasingly becoming an excuse since,
as the article is pointing out, there are instances of talent striving to
emerge from those under-favored minorities despite the odds, yet the
underrepresentation persists. If anything, the custodians of communities that
supposedly transcend backward concepts like "race", should make efforts to
encourage more forward-thinking notions such as diversity, as everybody ends
up winning from the enriched perspective.

------
runawaybottle
I really really don’t want what I’m about to say taken to mean anything other
than the condemnation of corporate face saving.

Companies certainly don’t care about addressing the underlying issues, and
they can’t have their institution represented on those charts like that.

Going forward, if you can help fix those data visualizations, you are going to
be an auto hire. This is how they see the world.

I think we’re just getting started with this stuff, and more breakdowns of the
data are coming for all facets of society.

------
1cvmask
You overlook a number of high profile African Americans (Tony Prophet and
Robert F. Smith for example) in tech and Silicon Valley and highlight a number
of Africans (Nigerians in particular). Is your criticism also addressing the
lack of Africans in Silicon Valley as well?

~~~
OoTheNigerian
Not at all.

Without media coverage, it is hard for even myself to know of black founders
in US tech.

Did you know the founder of the very popular Calendly was black? He lives in
Atlanta and is Nigerian but I only got to know of him recently.

I just wanted to list a few names of people "I KNOW" that are doing
spectacular things.

I hope more people make more lists of Black founders. We cannot have enough of
them.

~~~
klipt
Statistically, the American immigrant population from Africa (around 2 million
people) seems to have a very different background from most American born
African Americans (around 40 million people).

Overall, African immigrants (like many other immigrant groups) tend to have
very high education/economic mobility, due to the selection effect - if you
don't have those characteristics, it's hard to immigrate to the US.

But if you lump both groups together as "black", the likely result is that
tech companies trying to make up for lack of representation in American born
African Americans, will end up filling most of the gap with African
immigrants, because immigrants are more likely to have the background tech
companies are looking for.

Which is great for immigrants, but does it end up helping African Americans?

------
CryptoPunk
Diversity among the Black Civil Rights Establishment now means 'what
percentage of the workforce is black'.

------
centimeter
Anyone who claims that hiring racism/sexism/ageism/etc. dominates in some
industry should be ignored unless they’ve already conditioned on obviously-
relevant factors with sex/race/age/etc. correlates, like the desirable
strength/intelligence/etc. distribution of workers in that industry.

You might naively claim that professional basketball has a racist preference
for black men, until you remember that black men are vastly more likely to
fall into the height and athleticism distribution optimal for playing
basketball. There are also industries where you rationally expect e.g. whites
and asians to be disproportionately represented.

~~~
doorstar
Are you flat out saying that some races and sexes are not intelligent enough
to be in the tech industry?

~~~
user982
They also said that non-white races look too alike for facial recognition:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568)

~~~
zozbot234
They didn't say "they all look alike", they said that white faces have more
contrast so are easier to differentiate even with a naïve CV algorithm. It's
one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the
comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups.

~~~
user982
_> It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially
given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups._

centimeter's posts in that thread directly reject your proffered line of
thought:

    
    
      > your training data does not have enough people with dark skin or African American face features
      This isn’t the issue - the issue is lower variance across black faces in any basis.

