
White Employees Are Heavily Over-Represented in Tech Leadership - kiyanwang
https://hackernoon.com/white-employees-are-heavily-over-represented-in-tech-leadership-te1q3y9s
======
rbecker
It's naive to expect all strata of society to change with immigration without
any lag. The US was 83% white as recently as 1980, which could be the
population that has had time to climb up to leadership roles - something that
can easily take a generation or two, especially when education is so
expensive. In 2017, it was down to 73% white (61% if limited to non-Hispanic,
but the older data doesn't make that distinction, making comparison difficult)
[1].

83% / 73% = 1.14, while the "heavy" over-representation the article mentions
is, estimating from the graph, about 1.17. I.e. if comparing to 1980
demographics, whites are over-represented in tech leadership by a whole 3%.

But more puzzling is this statement: _Not only are employees of color under-
represented in leadership positions in tech, they are also under-represented
in tech in non-leadership positions._

The graph immediately following shows whites are under-represented in tech -
"heavily" under-represented, if we were to use the author's own metric (the
author chooses not to mention this). So both whites and people of color are
under-represented?? Of course that same graph contains the answer - Asians are
over-represented by 483%. 17% over-representation was "heavy", so the author
was unable to find a sufficiently strong adjective for 483%, and wisely chose
not to mention it at all.

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

~~~
rbecker
Correction: Asians are over-represented by 383%, not the 483% I first claimed.
Their numbers are 483% of what you'd expect if representation was
proportional, and I forgot to subtract 100% from that.

~~~
np_tedious
Thus Asians are definitely underrepresented in leadership vs employee
population, but still overrepresented vs general population.

I'd be interested to see how this chops up by immigration status, years in
country, and English proficiency. I guess then we'd be in even less PC waters,
but it's quite clear PhD -> h1b crowd is quite different from Asian Americans
in a lot of ways, and I'd have to imagine this is one of them

~~~
rbecker
> Thus Asians are definitely underrepresented in leadership vs employee
> population

Only slightly - the graph in the article shows Asians are ~87% represented in
leadership roles, compared to their (over-represented) numbers in tech.

Meaning, using the article's own numbers, a random Asian is 5.3x as likely to
be in tech as a random white, and 3.9x as likely to be in tech leadership.

------
julienreszka
Why are Americans this obsessed about race? If this isn't _idée fixe_ I don't
know what is. Like in most other parts of the civilized word racial statistics
should be outlawed because it's not a correct classification system.

~~~
rbecker
There are places where racial statistics are outlawed?

~~~
julienreszka
I can give you the example of France, my country where they are illegal, this
is a relevant legislative text: [https://www.cnil.fr/fr/la-loi-informatique-
et-libertes#artic...](https://www.cnil.fr/fr/la-loi-informatique-et-
libertes#article6)

Translated with google: "It is prohibited to process personal data which
reveal alleged racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or
philosophical beliefs or the trade union membership of a natural person or to
process genetic data, personal data biometric for the purpose of uniquely
identifying a natural person, health data or data concerning the sexual life
or sexual orientation of a natural person."

~~~
lixtra
It comes with the qualifier.

> for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person

So making a poll in your company to identify how many are in a trade union is
not illegal by that article while building a database that contains the fact
that John Doe is in a trade union would violate that law.

------
vixen99
Based on these findings it's reasonable to suppose that extensive reservoirs
of talent are not being recognized, exploited (in the best sense of the word)
and put to universally profitable use benefiting employers and employees
alike. Why would companies (apparently) knowingly choose to ignore such a
resource?

~~~
danieltillett
Or it is more reasonable to assume the findings are wrong. At this point I
think we can conclude that any analysis involving race is wrong.

