
Our plan for a more diverse Pinterest - minimaxir
https://blog.pinterest.com/en/our-plan-more-diverse-pinterest
======
BhavdeepSethi
Isn't this wrong at some level? I support the idea of promoting programs like
Women In Engg., but hiring based on race/gender is so wrong. Do you lower your
hiring bar to get the numbers you've aimed for? And assuming some of these
employees turn out to be under-performing, how do you deal with the appraisal
process?

I'm not sure if Pinterest posted this article with some other intent (like
having more support programs), but in it's current state, it seems
discriminatory.

~~~
ksenzee
This very common assumption -- which I used to hold -- has it exactly
backwards. Let's assume tall people and short people are equally good at
cracking eggs. Mathematically, if 90% of your egg-crackers are short, you've
_already_ hired under-performing egg-crackers. You've passed over some really
good tall people in favor of the short people you hired. If you want the best
egg-crackers, you need to interview a bunch of tall people.

~~~
debacle
If 90% of all egg-crackers are short, and you want to hire the best egg-
crackers, it's very likely that 90% of your egg crackers are going to be
short.

~~~
ryanthejuggler
If 90% of all egg-crackers are short, it's likely that there's a huge problem
driving tall egg-crackers out of the field.

~~~
debacle
That's a bit specious. 90% of nurses are female but there's nothing driving
men out of the field.

~~~
BrainInAJar
Do you know any male nurses?

There actually _are_ things driving men out of the field. Look at how many
head nurses are male. Men in nursing is a problem as well. But this isn't
NurseNews, it's HackerNews.

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thadd
This seems like it's pursuing skin-deep diversity. Diversity of thought is
much more interesting to me, and probably much more apt to drive profits than
this.

~~~
cpeterso
What is your plan for increasing diversity of thought in hiring?

~~~
tedunangst
Everybody is different, so if I only hire people who look just like me on the
outside, that must mean they think differently on the inside....

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tzs
OK, I had a weird thought here.

1\. Their approach seems like it will work, if it does, mostly by increasing
the chances that women engineers or women engineering students will choose to
work for Pinterest instead of work for someone else.

2\. I've frequently read that there is a shortage of tech workers, and
companies like Pinterest have trouble finding the people they need.

3\. Putting this together, does this mean that much of any increase in
diversity they get will come at the expense of reducing the diversity
elsewhere (unless, of course, they significantly hire away from other
companies that are more diverse than they are)?

A bit of Googling turns up assorted claims on what percent of developers are
women, but many seem to claim in the 10-20% range.

It would be interesting to take the data from Pinterest, and from other tech
companies where this kind of data is available, and use that to classify them
into three groups: those where women are under represented, those where they
are over represented, and those where it is neither. The comparison should be
to the percentage of women in tech, not the percentage in the general
population.

It would then be interesting to see if there is something the companies in
each group have in common.

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Torgo
Based on their charts, Asians are massively overrepresented and whites are
underrepresented compared to US population. So I am curious what they mean
when they say "underrepresented", will that include more Asians? If they meant
black and Latino, they should just say so instead of vague euphemisms.

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someone7x
Maybe for Pinterest, a sum of diversity is greater than a sum of talent.

The possibility of that being true is certainly unsettling for me because I've
always assumed that hiring by merit is intrinsically superior to hiring by
quota.

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bigethan
Awesome to see a big name company set specific goals for gender and racial
diversity. I can't wait for the end of the "almost every meeting is all white
dudes" era.

And much respect to Tracy for moving the needle.

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mizzack
Not enforcing the same hiring quotas on leadership positions, I see.

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dylanjermiah
I'd suggest anyone here seriously interested in the effects of Affirmative
Action and similar policies read 'Affirmative Action Around the World' by
Thomas Sowell. It's only 200pages, but incredibly sourced and well written.
Highly recommend it for those wanting a further understanding.

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devalier
From Steven Pinker's _The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature_ :

\-------------------------

But of course the minds of men and women are not identical, and recent reviews
of sex differences have converged on some reliable differences. Sometimes the
differences are large, with only slight overlap in the bell curves.

...

With some other traits the differences are small on average but can be large
at the extremes. That happens for two reasons. When two bell curves partly
overlap, the farther out along the tail you go, the larger the discrepancies
between the groups. For example, men on average are taller than women, and the
discrepancy is greater for more extreme values. At a height of five foot ten,
men outnumber women by a ratio of thirty to one; at a height of six feet, men
outnumber women by a ratio of two thousand to one. Also, confirming an
expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for
males is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are
proportionally more males at the extremes. Along the left tail of the curve,
one finds that boys are far more likely to be dyslexic, learning disabled,
attention deficient, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded (at least
for some types of retardation).

At the right tail, one finds that in a sample of talented students who score
above 700 (out of 800) on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Assessment
Test, boys outnumber girls by thirteen to one, even though the scores of boys
and girls are similar within the bulk of the curve [NOTE this was from the
pre-1994 SAT where the math section was harder and not truncated at the top.
Today the ratio is a bit less than 2-1 at the top end.]. With still other
traits, the average values for the two sexes differ by smaller amounts and in
different directions for different traits. Though men, on average, are better
at mentally rotating objects and maps, women are better at remembering
landmarks and the positions of objects. Men are better throwers; women are
more dexterous. Men are better at solving mathematical word problems, women at
mathematical calculation. Women are more sensitive to sounds and smells, have
better depth perception, match shapes faster, and are much better at reading
facial expressions and body language. Women are better spellers, retrieve
words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material.

...

Nonetheless, discussions of the leaky pipeline in science rarely even mention
an alternative to the theory of barriers and bias. One of the rare exceptions
was a sidebar to a 2000 story in Science, which quoted from a presentation at
the National Academy of Engineering by the social scientist Patti Hausman:
"The question of why more women don’t choose careers in engineering has a
rather obvious answer: Because they don’t want to. Wherever you go, you will
find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about
ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more
interested in learning how my dishwasher works."

An eminent woman engineer in the audience immediately denounced her analysis
as “pseudoscience.” But Linda Gottfredson, an expert in the literature on
vocational preferences, pointed out that Hausman had the data on her side: “On
average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men with
things.” Vocational tests also show that boys are more interested in
“realistic,” “theoretical,” and “investigative” pursuits, and girls more
interested in “artistic” and “social” pursuits.

...

The most dramatic example comes from an analysis by David Lubinski and Camilla
Benbow of a sample of mathematically precocious seventh-graders selected in a
nationwide talent search. The teenagers were born during the second wave of
feminism, were encouraged by their parents to develop their talents (all were
sent to summer programs in math and science), and were fully aware of their
ability to achieve. But the gifted girls told the researchers that they were
more interested in people, “social values,” and humanitarian and altruistic
goals, whereas the gifted boys said they were more interested in things,
“theoretical values,” and abstract intellectual inquiry. In college, the young
women chose a broad range of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences,
whereas the boys were geeks who stuck to math and science. And sure enough,
fewer than 1 percent of the young women pursued doctorates in math, physical
sciences, or engineering, whereas 8 percent of the young men did. The women
went into medicine, law, the humanities, and biology instead.

...

Gottfredson points out, “If you insist on using gender parity as your measure
of social justice, it means you will have to keep many men and women out of
the work they like best and push them into work they don’t like.” She is
echoed by Kleinfeld on the leaky pipeline in science: “We should not be
sending [gifted] women the messages that they are less worthy human beings,
less valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be
teachers rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists,
lawyers rather than engineers.” These are not hypothetical worries: a recent
survey by the National Science Foundation found that many more women than men
say they majored in science, mathematics, or engineering under pressure from
teachers or family members rather than to pursue their own aspirations— and
that many eventually switched out for that reason. I will give the final word
to Margaret Mead, who, despite being wrong in her early career about the
malleability of gender, was surely right when she said, “If we are to achieve
a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole
gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric,
one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”

\------------------

When you combine the imbalance in high-end math test scores, with the
imbalance of innate preference for abstract work versus people work, it is not
at all surprising that only 20% of Pinterest would be female.

If Pinterest feels like its hiring practice is not meritocratic, it should fix
that.

If Pinterest feels like it is missing out on an untapped candidate pool, it
should figure out how to tap that pool.

But there is zero reason to try to make the female ratio 30% for the sake of
making it 30%. There is no moral reason, there is no practical reason. Males
and females are different, twas ever thus. This obsession with equalizing
employment number in all spheres is a bizarre (and destructive) fashion of our
age.

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jkot
Gender data are worldwide. Easy way to increase diversity is to open office in
some foreign country :-)

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cryowaffle
Bar charts should be sorted with the biggest ones at the top. It looks wierd
the way it is. And why do all of the Latino parts have a "@" next to them when
a "*" is used to reference?

~~~
jaimebuelta
I think that it may be a way of saying "Latino/Latina" that is used sometimes
in Spanish. As Latino is the male form and Latina the female one, sometimes a
"@" (which is sort of an a and an o) is used to signify inclusion.

Maybe because I'm not American the part that confuses me is the "Hispanic" vs
"Latino", are they used to mean different things? Technically (very
technically), Latin-American would include people talking French or
Portuguese, while I guess Hispanic will only include Spanish speakers, e.g.
not including Brazil. But I don't know if they are used in a different way in
the US.

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Frozenlock
> Racism and sexism is bad. To fight it, we are going to hire based on race
> and sex.

If only it was a joke...

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debacle
For a site that caters almost exclusively to white women, this wasn't the
vector for diversity I was expecting.

