
Silicon Valley didn’t inherit discrimination, but replicated it anyway - elsewhen
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-03/silicon-valley-didn-t-inherit-discrimination-but-replicated-it-anyway
======
freetime2
Day one of my introduction to computer science course in university was
composed of nearly all white male students. Women and minority students were
vastly underrepresented in that class relative to the student body as a whole,
even though literally anyone in the university could have signed up for the
class and given it a go. That’s exactly how I ended up in the program, having
started university with an “undeclared” major and really fallen in love with
the subject (and this was right after the 2000 dot com crash, when job
prospects were looking fairly grim, so I think most of us weren’t in it for
the money).

I’m willing to concede that I was given a head start over many students,
having had exposure to computer programming and AP math courses in high
school. And I’m willing to believe that the struggle of being the only woman
or minority student in a class or a team is real, and causes some talented
people to get discouraged and opt out. And I am all in favor of trying to
address those issues, and any other forms of discrimination that people face.

But was the disproportionate makeup of that intro to computer science class
due in large part to discrimination? I don’t think so. I think it mostly
reflected the fact that different demographics often have different sets of
preferences.

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zpeti
Maybe just because a population has a particular makeup in terms of percent of
minorities and genders doesn't mean that exact make up will be represented at
every grouping in society. Just like the NBA doesn't represent the USAs actual
makeup in class, race, gender, either. Did they inherit discrimination or just
replicate it? Or is this a stupid question to begin with?

So unless you want to actively go out and discriminate positively and force
certain hirings and situations, you aren't going to be living in some
theoretical utopia. Maybe silicon valley just hired who it thought was best 20
years ago, rather than based on some inclusivity quota. And therefore it ended
up as it did. Not because it was malicious or discriminative, or evil, it just
happened that way.

You might think that is evil, but that is more of a political point and an
opinion than fact.

Sigh... rant over, queue the downvotes, this is HN after all.

~~~
lnanek2
> Maybe silicon valley just hired who it thought was best 20 years ago ... >
> Not because it was malicious or discriminative, or evil, it just happened

Doesn't seem like a valid hypothesis. Programming computers was originally
predominantly done by women, remember, so why is SV mostly white guys? We've
already seen both genders can do the work. I've worked with lots of women at
hackathons and know some who went through coding camps and landed software
engineering jobs at places like Etsy, so know they aren't excluded because
they "can't do the job best" like you imply.

If some white guys with money thought other white guys with money do the work
best, and made sure to hire other white guys, don't you feel like that's
discrimination? Why would a claim that it "just happened" mean it isn't
discrimination? I've definitely seen this happen at lots of startups I've
worked at. I knew a Princeton C-level from a top 10 app company who would
always only hire people from the same school that pretty much looked like
exact clones of him.

Similarly, at work, I've had directors agree to let me work on big, ground
breaking projects, but as soon as they see I'm disabled they immediately
change their tune from a transfer being "one easy email" to "oh, we changed
our mind, deal with it, don't talk to me, talk to HR".

~~~
9HZZRfNlpR
The work women did is very different from today, it wasn't programming we
thinknof today. Majority of women I know in my life don't want to fiend their
lives in front of computer doing weekend projects, skip social interactions
like nerds do. But I also think it's not good or healthy for them either.

~~~
jmisavage
All those things you said aren't healthy for anybody regardless of gender.

------
grahamlee
Silicon Valley did in fact inherit discrimination. Whether from its native
California
([https://immigrants.harpweek.com/ChineseAmericans/2KeyIssues/...](https://immigrants.harpweek.com/ChineseAmericans/2KeyIssues/CaliforniaAnti.htm)),
or the Valley’s direct founders from the East Coast
([http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/531fdd2913215...](http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/531fdd29132156674b000211#!)).
Silicon Valley has always had a problem with discrimination and is doing as
little to address that problem now as ever.

------
nabla9
In the corporate context, we can discuss all good social causes like
diversity, human rights, environmental responsibility at the same time.

Companies need to face real external forces to change or it's just PR level
cosmetic changes.

The real change comes from the unions, customers, competition, government or
the labour market.

It's not good corporations vs. bad corporations, it's just corporations.
Running a company is demanding and corporate decision making has limited
bandwidth. They hire some HR manager and offload all good causes for them and
separate them from the main business. They affect decision making only in
small ways.

------
secondcoming
> Many also incur what’s referred to as a “Black tax”—additional work such as
> representing the company at career fairs or conducting new-hire interviews,
> implicitly distorting how diverse the company is.

Ok, so how can a company show some semblence of being diverse if bringing non-
White or Asian employees to the forefront is considered a 'Black Tax'?

> Small wonder, then, that many tech companies lose more Black employees
> through attrition in a given year than they manage to hire

So Black employees are leaving because they're being asked to help encourage
more recruitment from the Black community?

What's the middle ground here? Should they be excluded from these things?
Compensated more than their non-PoC colleagues for doing the same work?

~~~
lapcatsoftware
> Compensated more than their non-PoC colleagues for doing the same work?

How is being a token at career fairs "the same work"? The point is that Black
employees are being asked to spend time on activities that do not lead to
raises and promotions in the company. In other words, they're asked to
sacrifice their own personal career to make the company look more diverse than
it is.

~~~
secondcoming
> How is being a token at career fairs "the same work"?

Because they're doing the same work as non-Black employees at the career fair?

I'd have thought that being a face of the company externally would be a good
thing for when it comes to review time. Are the non-Black employees
handicapped career-wise in a similar way?

How would you suggest a company portrays externally that PoC are more than
welcome to apply for a job there?

~~~
lapcatsoftware
> I'd have thought that being a face of the company externally would be a good
> thing for when it comes to review time.

Why would you think that?

If that were true, then engineers would be competing and fighting over who
gets to go to the career fairs. Have you seen any evidence of this?

The article is very clear that Black employees are paid less on average. It
doesn't seem to be a career advantage.

~~~
secondcoming
It's not that uncommon for employees to volunteer their time doing charity
work via their employers. It looks to me like employers are damned if they do,
and damned if they don't.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
> It's not that uncommon for employees to volunteer their time doing charity
> work via their employers.

Yes, emphasis on "charity". In other words, it doesn't directly help the
employee at review time.

> It looks to me like employers are damned if they do, and damned if they
> don't.

No, I'm not sure why that's the conclusion. If the company requests volunteers
from the whole staff, and minorities choose to volunteer, fine. If the company
disproportionally requests that minorities "volunteer" in order to help the
company look diverse, that's unfairly singling them out. It's not quite as
voluntary when your boss specifically asks you and nobody else.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
And if they say no, then they're considered "not a team player", which could
hurt them at review time, even though they're personally forced to carry the
entire team's diversity efforts.

~~~
secondcoming
Alright fine. Jeez.

If you had a company and wanted to diversify your workforce, how would you go
about it?

------
woko
I would call it "inheritance" of discrimination rather than "replication" of
discrimination: the skin-colour bias arises because of the Ivy-League bias.

Quotes below:

> "[...] Facebook staffers say that despite adding more schools to the
> recruiting lists, White managers continue to select from the same Ivy League
> and West Coast schools they’d attended.

> Many of these institutions act as another racial filter because Black
> students are often under-represented.

> “Companies will give unfair weight to a school like Stanford, dipping down
> to the top 20% of students, but might pass on a student in the top 2% of
> their class at Penn State [...]"

------
cerebrum
[https://www.econlib.org/the-uniformity-and-exclusion-
movemen...](https://www.econlib.org/the-uniformity-and-exclusion-movement/)

------
thoughtstheseus
Most large companies in the valley are actively discriminating... They’re not
trying to avoid discrimination, they’re using it (unsuccessfully in most
cases) to achieve a desired demographic outcome in their workforce.

------
mnm1
Last time I checked, SV was still in America. Somehow they're supposed to
ignore the culture of racism here and be above it? That's delusional. These
are people living in a country whose entire history from its pre-history to
this current moment and into the future is racism. The entire country was
built on racism. But somehow a bunch of tech bros, most of them racist, are
supposed to rise above this and fix all of it. Completely delusional.

