
Tech Journalism Is Less Diverse Than Tech - fossuser
https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diverse-than-tech/
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chasely
Having had a significant other that worked in journalism, this makes sense to
me. Journalism has become a profession which is much easier to follow if you
have an "elite" background. It can be a prestigious job, but with a low salary
for decades. To break into it you often have to earn your stripes and work
your way up. In "elite" journalism--major newspapers and outlets--this often
includes very low paying or non-paying internships in some of the most
expensive cities in the country. It's a lot easier to do this if you have
parents that can pay your rent or max out their non-taxable gifts to you each
year.

To even get these internships it helps to go to one of the top 5 J-school
graduate programs, which are expensive ($30k+ tuition/year) and in high cost
of living cities (except Mizzou). Due to the racial wealth gap in the US--
which was caused by systemic racism--this means that upper-class White people
are going to be the ones that can best outlast this system and end up making
it as a journalist.

~~~
jseliger
There's also an extreme supply-demand mismatch in journalism (as there is in
acting, music, and similar fields), meaning that many persons in the field
take a lot of their "income" from the profession via non-monetary sources:
[https://jakeseliger.com/2019/11/19/have-journalists-and-
acad...](https://jakeseliger.com/2019/11/19/have-journalists-and-academics-
become-modern-day-clerics)

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est31
Note that linked study [0] uses too high white percentages for Facebook.

> As of 2020, the percentage of white employees at Facebook is 63.2%.

It links to this [1] document where if you click on "whites" in the "US
ethnicity" section, there is indeed a 63.2% percentage. But that number
corresponds to the green curve which concerns people in leadership roles. The
number for all facebook employees (including the technical engineers, etc) is
the blue one, which only has 41%. In the image, facebook would thus be closer
to the other tech companies and further away from the journalists.

It's also interesting to note that the percentage of nonhispanic whites in the
US population is 60.1% [2], so they are actually underrepresented in big tech
companies (and overrepresented in tech journalism). Didn't know that!

[0]: [https://tech-journalism-diversity-report.github.io/code/](https://tech-
journalism-diversity-report.github.io/code/)

[1]: [https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/](https://diversity.fb.com/read-
report/)

[2]:
[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219)

~~~
himinlomax
To add to that, that's counting Jews as white. When you don't, two very
unfortunate things happen: first non Jewish whites are now the most
underrepresented category, and two you end up sounding like Charlie Chaplin
with a mustache.

~~~
jariel
Most Jews in America are Ashkenazi and are essentially German, Polish,
Ukranian for them most part.

i.e. 'Zuckerberg' 'Sandberg' 'Goldman'.

They are genetically not different from other Europeans other than for some
possibly some minor specific linkage way back. That wing of the diaspora has
been in Europe for at least 1000 years, originating in the area from
Netherlands down to Frankfurt and spreading Eastward towards Russia.

Even many Sephardi jews, from the Med (i.e. Spain, Greece, Turkey), are more
European than they are Middle Eastern at least genetically.

~~~
himinlomax
The point here is to show the silly consequences of categorizing people by
"race", not to argue about the minutiæ of how to properly do race
discrimination.

~~~
jariel
So I think that's a fair point, at the same time I don't think 'race' is quite
a silly thing, just not a hugely important thing.

If race is silly, then is BLM a silly concept?

We could say the same thing about 'silly culture' or 'silly language' or
'silly attitudes' or 'silly politics' ... so that we can just all focus on the
_truly important_ things like our 'iPhones'.

At very least it's history, and interesting on that level, more
controversially, it's part of our identities at least in a broad sense.

I find this [1] basically fascinating.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews)

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at_a_remove
I remember a photo of a Gamergate group as compared to all of the HuffPo
journalists together. The latter was nothing _but_ white women, as compared to
the actually varied racial and gender composition of the former. Physician,
heal thyself, I guess.

~~~
theobeers
You may be thinking of this much-lampooned tweet with a photo from a
Huffington Post editors’ meeting:

[https://twitter.com/lheron/status/733758898855940098](https://twitter.com/lheron/status/733758898855940098)

It looks even worse at a few years’ remove.

~~~
shum1
I'd invite everyone to take a look at the picture in above link, but I don't
think it's "nothing but white women" as the grandparent comment suggests.

Maybe it's not this picture, but just want to make sure the criticism is on
the right thing.

~~~
ric2b
I guess one of them is asian? Maybe there's a very white latina as well? Can't
tell.

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hankchinaski
we should be promoting equality of opportunity not equality of outcome - i
dont understand how this chart with %of white people makes any sense at all -
did you do multivariate analysis to see what factors are a concause for
someone to be hired?

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Equality of opportunity is really close to equality of outcome. If two groups
are offered the same opportunity, but one is pressured to take it and the
other is pressured to take something else, the opportunity is the same but the
fact that the outcomes are different speaks to something else going on, like
the pressures in my example. Given the history we have, inequal outcomes can
pretty frequently be directly tied to issues that still don't provide the
kinds of agency we want. I think of it as equal opportunity being a lever,
while equal outcome is a measurement.

For example, suppose you find some data about outcomes in different groups
with covariate X. Maybe there's an outcome gap between groups which goes away
when you account for X. That doesn't mean the disparity in outcomes is fair.
It just punts that question to a new question of whether the disparity in X is
fair. And so on.

~~~
manfredo
This is a vast assumption, and one that often produces inequalities more than
it reduces it. In reality, people's preferences often do vary between groups
even without discrimination or inequalities of opportunity. E.g. over 90% of
pediatricians are women, and there's no evidence that this is due to
discrimination against men. The representation of women in technology is
actually highest in countries with less opportunities for women, and lowest in
countries with the greatest equality between men and women. Efforts to force
an equal outcome in the context of unequal preferences does not reduce
inequalities of opportunity, it produces inequalities.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
I would say the same about the case that you’re making. It’s a vast assumption
that produces more inequality than it reduces. It’s a question of nature
versus nurture. Our preferences are a function of our expectations and the
expectations of us. I agree that the underrepresentation of men in pediatrics,
for example, is a function of preferences. But I think those preferences are
functions of nurture more than nature. If men were the primary caregivers for
children, I expect the representation would be flipped.

Taking today’s society and culture as a given, yeah I agree with you. But I
think that’s a problem with the prevalent culture.

~~~
manfredo
If these disparities are attributable to culture, we'd expect different
cultures to produce different outcomes. This is not the case. Women make up
the majority of pediatricians in all societies that give men and women equal
opportunity to become doctors. Men outnumber women at least 2:1 in all
countries. And what variability does exist is actually inversely related to
equality: women are _more_ likely to be in STEM in patriarchal countries, and
less likely to go into STEM in egalitarian countries.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
> If these disparities are attributable to culture, we'd expect different
> cultures to produce different outcomes. This is not the case.

This isn't good evidence. We don't have cultures where birth control was
invented hundreds of years ago and then they evolved independently. Or where a
knowledge economy mattered more than raw strength for any reasonable time.
Biology mattered so much more across cultures for most of history, so the fact
that they all have patterns like this isn't really evidence that it must not
be culture.

~~~
manfredo
I think missed the crucial part of the previous comment: when birth control
was invented and countries became more egalitarian, the disparities between
men and women in many professions _increased_. Societies where women still
aren't permitted good accesses to reproductive control see higher rates of
women in STEM. Had birth control been invented earlier, current trends
indicate that disparities of women in STEM would be even greater.

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hsson
Sorry but "18% other" just doesn't seem fair to write. Come on, an article
about diversity that just groups ~1/5 into "other"...

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one2know
Tech human resources, legal, and recruiting are overwhelmingly white women, to
wit no one cares. Truck drivers are 94% men, no one complains about that. The
business and political community is hyperfocused on software engineering jobs
for two reasons. Corporations want political support for H1-B. And, in some
cases, STEM workers have high importance in influencing the political world as
we saw with Facebook in the 2016 elections. Therefore, the political world is
hyper-focused on those specific jobs to hire people that they think are
sympathetic to their political parties, usually along race and gender lines.

~~~
CMCDragonkai
In my opinion is a very strange that HR is overwhelmingly female. It seems to
me that many companies consider HR to be just administrative bureaucracy. Yet
talent development and organizational psychology have been pioneered by male
researchers and psychologists.

~~~
watwut
HR are administrative bureaucracy. They are neither expected nor trained to do
anything with organizational psychology. Nor have power to change
organization.

They do know some psychology, but more of tactical "how to calm this person
right now".

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Yetanfou
May I suggest a follow-up article with the title _' Journalism is politically
less diverse than its audience'_ in which a rallying cry is heard to shake up
the market? To do anything else would be rather hypocritical given the great
drive for diversity in everything and anything.

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kepler1
Maybe I'm getting more conservative and irritable in my old age, but I've
really gotten saturated and tired of diversity, diversity, diversity -- "we
should reflect who our customers are", etc. As if that's the durable standard
and goal of our society. I just don't buy it.

Here's what I'm _for_.

I'm for removing barriers to anyone being able to be interested, educated, and
encouraged to do the things they want to do. And we should work to make it
easier for people to be identified as having skills and talent in whatever
field they choose.

Then let the chips fall where they may. This push for equality of outcome +
diversity is political bullshit of the moment. Every field and industry and
job will reflect the demographics of who is interested in doing that job, the
pipeline of people who seek to become educated and qualified for it, and the
proportions of who succeeds at showing their skills. You will not escape that
truth -- and trying to do so will cause more frustration and political
backlash than working within that truth.

Fashionable as it may be to latch on to a message right now, I don't think the
majority of people buy the idea that diversity in itself means that any
selective field _ought_ to equal the proportions of the groups you choose to
divide general society into. People can simply see that it's not true as an
outcome. And that movement will lose.

~~~
tsimionescu
Thinking about this with an engineering mindset, how can you know that you are
offering equal opportunities of you don't measure the outcomes? What can you
measure that shows men are as likely to be given a tech job as women, if not
the outcomes of men and women working there? For do you know you've made it as
easy for a black student to be a great software developer as it is for a white
student, if you don't look at great software developers and measure how many
are black or white?

~~~
kepler1
How do you know if the measurements you're taking at the end of the process
are valid to interpret, if you don't know the inputs?

I'm not willing to trust the one (or act on it in a way that distorts what
could be an otherwise fair/unbiased process) without knowing the other.

My problem with this approach is that people are too willing to stop halfway
and claim that the outcome looks biased, without seeing what the inputs were.
And cause (or seek to cause) massive change to people's lives based on that.

~~~
tsimionescu
I absolutely agree, you need to try to measure boy side of the equation, not
only the outcomes.

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hardwaregeek
This is important information and an interesting point, but I'm not surprised
that it's less highlighted. Tech companies are some of the most powerful
entities in the world. They pay their employees extremely high salaries, make
billions of dollars and control how basically everybody goes about their life,
from using the internet to interacting socially.

Tech journalism...is none of those things. Oh sure they have power in that
they can critique the companies and expose their issues. But their influence
is not on the same level as tech companies' influence. Their journalists are
not getting paid high salaries. They're not controlling our daily lives.

Journalism as a whole? Diversity is definitely a hot topic there. Tech
journalism? Ehh.

Of course we should care about diversity throughout society. But that's not
how it works. We care about diversity when there is power, either an intense
amount of it or an intense lack of it. We care about the diversity of Ivy
League schools and the diversity of prisons. We don't care about the diversity
of baristas. Therefore we don't care about it in tech journalism.

~~~
thinkingemote
The point is that we care about stuff that journalism says we should care
about.

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jariel
In this particular case, it's not about white people's representation, it's
Asian. Asian people are highly represented in tech, and they are not in
journalism. That's the qualifying issue. So understanding why that disparity
exists is the key, it has little to do with 'diversity policies' or anything
like that.

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0xy
I'm hardly surprised they don't practice what they preach. The majority of
journalistic outlets have rapidly descended into yellow journalism, lies,
doxxing and slanderous allegations.

Journalism is a race to the bottom in quality, and journalists absolutely
don't put the effort in anymore. Hitting the streets and risking their lives
to get that one big story just isn't a thing anymore, now they get all their
information from Twitter and engage in some pretty egregious conduct against
ideological opponents.

ABC News covered up allegations against Epstein. NPR falsely accused innocent
assault victims of being "right-wing extremists", then refused to retract it.
New York Times thinks doxxing controversial people is okay. All of them
vehemently support censorship, and some even call for the prosecution of their
own sources.

These institutions don't need to be saved or reformed, they need to be burnt
to the ground.

~~~
goatinaboat
_ABC News covered up allegations against Epstein_

And NBC covered for Weinstein, see Ronan Farrow' book.

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surajs
interesting, one assumed that journalism per se is diverse than other fields.

~~~
tdeck
One reason could be that journalism typically requires a college education and
then doesn't pay that well. Many media internships are also unpaid. That means
you need some source of "runway" in the form of previous savings or family
wealth to get started and build your career.

~~~
flak48
On the other hand tech is one of those industries where someone from say even
a journalism degree can get a job after a short bootcamp (and there are many
free ones if you are a woman or minority)

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jayd16
I think the article is right to raise the point about diversity in tech media.
However, posting it here and some of the comments just feels like
whataboutism.

