
What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech - jimsojim
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/kapors-2/
======
AnthonyMouse
> Or changing employee referral networks. When I ask if companies have
> employee referral networks, most say yes. But if I ask whether they’d have a
> structure for referrals of underrepresented groups, people often think
> that’s discriminatory and unfair.

Because it is. You can only remove bias by removing bias, not by introducing
counter-bias. Removing names from resumes works, imposing quotas doesn't.

The problem with trying to counter bias with bias is that you can't make a
shift on one axis without affecting five others. A bias in favor of e.g.
racial minorities exacerbates the bias against everyone else of an
underrepresented sex, economic status, religious minority, country of origin,
disability, etc. But trying to enumerate all of the underrepresented groups is
not only impossible because there are innumerably many of them, it leads to
tokenism. Get yourself a couple of employees who each check multiple boxes and
the numbers look good even when most of your employees are still white or
asian male christian americans from middle class families.

By contrast, the bias in referral networks is the status quo. Hiring the
people your existing employees know doesn't make a lack of diversity _worse_
in any direction, it only fails to improve it by making future employees look
like current employees. In theory there is an argument that when the status
quo is unbalanced, anything that continues the status quo is also unbalanced,
but that doesn't actually point to any solution. The status quo is the
continuation of the status quo. Figuring out what will make positive change
takes more than objecting to things that make no change.

And one way or another you still have to get 'em while they're young.

~~~
kelukelugames
I agree with your criticism of affirmative action. The last company I worked
at had a strong Women in Tech program, but one of the women of color described
it as "white feminism." The company favored one axis, which was enough for it
to become self-congratulatory.

But I don't think this quote is about quotas. At least not quotas for
employment. The program is merely for getting resumes of underrepresented
groups. If the employee referral network only produces resumes from homogenous
candidates then this is a positive change.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> But I don't think this quote is about quotas. At least not quotas for
> employment.

Quotas for resumes don't in principle work any differently than quotas for
hiring.

And I still don't see how that solves the pipeline problem. The problem in
1950 was that middle class jobs were unavailable to qualified women and
minorities. The problem in tech in 2015 is that qualified women and minorities
are unavailable to middle class jobs. You can't solve it in the same way
because it isn't the same problem.

~~~
kelukelugames
Your principles are different from mine. And if you believe the pipeline is
the only problem then our principles are irreconcilably different.

Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No
single thing can. At least it gets the company to interview someone they
normally wouldn't.

I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only
hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the
employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Your principles are different from mine.

Then state what they are so we can figure out why.

> And if you believe the pipeline is the only problem then our principles are
> irreconcilably different.

There is a difference between a problem being the only problem and being the
biggest problem. Amdahl's law. You can't fix more of the problem than the
thing you're changing represents. The pipeline problem is not the entire
problem but it's a _huge_ proportion of it. It's the sine qua non of fixing
the overall problem. Without addressing it you're just rearranging the deck
chairs.

> Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No
> single thing can.

It isn't that it doesn't solve it, it's that it hardly even addresses it. By
the time you're at the interviewing stage you're already at the end of the
pipeline.

> At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.

Do the math on this. There are nine overrepresented candidates for every
underrepresented candidate and you would normally interview five people. Now
everybody decides to make the fifth candidate the underrepresented candidate.
The underrepresented candidate would have to do ~twice as many interviews to
allow all the employers to make their quota but can still only be employed by
one of them.

The only way this even does anything other than waste everybody's time doing
interviews at companies where the underrepresented candidate won't end up
working anyway is if in the alternative the underrepresented candidate
wouldn't have found employment in the industry. But the demand for programmers
is such that if you're qualified you can almost always find work. It's a
solution aimed at a very small corner of the problem that rarely occurs, but
has significant costs because everyone ends up doing many fruitless interviews
when they could be interviewing candidates more likely to actually work there.

> I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only
> hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the
> employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.

Now you're talking about a different scenario where the makeup of the existing
employees differs from the makeup of the overall pool of qualified applicants,
both the employees and the referred candidates are completely homogenous, and
the company hires _only_ by referrals.

That scenario is a completely different kind of problem. It's an internal
company problem vs. the industry-wide problem we have in tech. The internal
company problem is easily solved by considering candidates from the broader
pool of qualified applicants. The industry-wide problem is not helped by that
at all because the skew is present in even the broadest pool of qualified
applicants.

~~~
kelukelugames
I see. Your point is a qualified minority is going to find a job anyway.
That's a really interesting way to look at it. It's a really good point too.
Thank you for sharing.

This is certainly true in SV and many other cities. However, top tier
companies are criticized for not discovering and attracting qualified minority
candidates. I want these candidates to have a shot at the best jobs. Going
back to our original conversation about referrals. A referred candidate gets
preferential treatment. If a company is entirely homogenous then few minority
candidates will benefit.

On the other hand, I have noticed that underrepresented candidate are already
treated better. Of course there might still be biases and other things against
them but that's not what we set out to discuss. Yes, the pipeline is a large
problem. Retention is too. I think there are many things our society should
fix.

The EEOC example is an extra incentive for companies to try harder to expand
their candidate pool. Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd
because I expect to see at least a few Asian programmers.

In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy. But
you clearly are not and I want to thank you for this conversation.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to
> see at least a few Asian programmers.

It's actually not that unexpected. If you take a majority-white population and
distribute employees completely at random then you would expect to see several
companies that are entirely or almost entirely white, because random is not
the same thing as uniform. And then there are several benign things that tend
to create clusters, like geography. (There is a lower proportion of Asians
local to Boston than San Francisco etc.)

Diversity doesn't mean every company has every group in exactly the same
proportion as the general population. That isn't diversity, it's uniformity.
The only way you get that level of uniformity is authoritarian decree.
Diversity is _so much messier than that_ because natural diversity is a
derivative of Darwinian forces. It doesn't care about made up unscientific
nonsense like race, so the distribution of "races" in a completely egalitarian
society is not uniform, it's completely arbitrary.

> In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy.

Probably most people who point at the pipeline problem can see it plainly but
don't know how to fix it. If you sit down in a computer science class your
classmates might be 16 white men, 10 Asian men and one Asian woman. After four
plus years of that, try to be shocked to hear that the industry doesn't employ
very many black women.

The "problem" with the pipeline problem is that it doesn't have a center.
There is no single thing that causes it and no organization responsible for
it. So it's easy to point to it, _because it 's real_, but how do you fix it?
Pass a law prohibiting high school girls from ostracizing their peers who
spend time learning about computers? It's a big problem but not an easy
problem.

------
jdp23
Excellent point from Freada: "My first piece of advice is to stop thinking
about yourself as a meritocracy. Because if you believe you’re a meritocracy
and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit
message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s
who is overrepresented."

~~~
throwit542
White men are over represented at large tech companies? White people make up
around 80% of the U.S. population [0]. They make up less than 60% of tech
workers at Google[1] and less than 55% of tech workers at Facebook[2]. That's
underrepresented.

Asian Americans make up less than 5% of the U.S. population[0], but almost 35%
of tech workers at Google[1] and 36% of tech employees at Facebook[2]. That's
over representation by a factor of about 7 times.

Yet, the media will continue to harp on the over representation of white
people at tech companies. Why? Because "diversity" really only means "not
white".

BTW: I bring this up not because I want fewer Asian Americans in tech or more
white people in tech, but to point out the hypocrisy of the reporting on
diversity in tech.

[0] [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/geos/us.html)

[1] [http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/google-diversity-
sta...](http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/google-diversity-statistics-
barely-impoved)

[2] [http://recode.net/2015/06/25/facebook-employee-
demographics-...](http://recode.net/2015/06/25/facebook-employee-demographics-
a-little-less-white-a-little-less-male/)

~~~
KirinDave
Your argument is using some old data and substantially flawed reasoning and
I'll let other people talk about it. But there is one thing I want to point
out:

 _It is possible to be both marginalized in one aspect and privileged in
another._ It is definitely the case for Asian Americans in tech. Very few will
say they're not (in aggregate, individual experiences vary of course!) better
off than other people of color in this field, even as they also suffer racism.
The numbers, as you suggest, do not lie. It's a similar phenomenon to the
treatment of homosexual people in tech on the west coast. Just because someone
is a gay man doesn't make them suddenly not white, for example.

This is a really important and often overlooked feature of intersectional
feminism: nearly everyone has privilege even if they're also marginalized.
That's why it's such a worthy cause, nearly everyone has something substantial
to gain.

~~~
throwit542
>Your argument is using some old data and substantially flawed reasoning and
I'll let other people talk about it

If I'm not mistaken, all of those sources are from 2015.

You seem to be interpreting my statement of the facts regarding demographics
in the tech industry as as a statement that I believe Asian Americans are
privileged. I'm not saying that. I think tech is the closest industry to an
honest meritocracy that exists, and if there are more Asian Americans in tech
than white people, then it's probably because of differences in ambition and
the extent to which education is valued.

But, I brought up those stats not to make that point, just to prove the point
that the way the media, and popular perception views diversity in tech is
wrong.

~~~
Eridrus
The CIA data is from 2007 and counts all hispanic/latino people as white.
Wikipedia places the white population at 63.7% based on the 2000 census.

So while it changes nothing about your comments about Asian people being over-
represented, it does show that white people are not really underrepresented
significantly.

------
millermp12
Question:

What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?

How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of
from his Berkeley compound?

Diversity for thee, but not for me.

Also, while we're discussing Things You Should Not Notice: what are the
numbers as far as litigiousness of "protected" groups? If I'm looking to hire
someone, non-protected status (whether it's race, unionization, etc.) means
I'm more likely to hire them (all else being equal). Like the blowback from
affirmative action, I don't see an objective discussion about litigation risk
(whether or not it's substantiated). It's human nature to asymmetrically
attribute failure to others and success to oneself. Add racial/gender rent-
seeking to the equation and you get an especially potent, counterproductive
miasma. Just look at Buddy and Pao - they've made entire careers out of
entrepreneurial race/gender grievance litigation.

Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by
blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your
hypothesis rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering
fad?

~~~
KirinDave
> What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch
> sold?

> How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of
> from his Berkeley compound?

> Diversity for thee, but not for me.

Can I ask you a quick question here? _What does any of this matter?_ Diversity
isn't about protecting yourself from character assassination. It's about
promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.

If you look in the past of anyone, you will find things they regret and things
that may draw censure from the pro-diversity and intersectional feminist
mindset. That's _natural_. That's _to be expected_. Society is, by any
reasonable and several reproducible metrics, extremely biased in favor of
white men. We all grew up influenced by that society. It is therefore almost
inevitable that anyone with these sorts of experiences has and will continue
to have both privilege and mistakes in their past.

What matters is going forward, how we all take these things we've been
fortunate enough to be handed (along with the misfortunes and difficulties
we've endured) and use those to promote a fairer, more just world for those
who come after us.

We can sit here and argue if this messenger is the ideal messenger. Which is
odd, because in many other fields we view past mistakes as a teaching
opportunity. Ultimately, the people in power should cede and share some of
that good fortune and cultural windfall to create a more equal world rather
than waiting for history to repeat itself with violent uprisings. History
suggests that such uprisings are not kind to even bystanders.

> Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by
> blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your
> hypothesis ...

Because creating an environment that mimics the societal advantages white men
get in the US and most of the western world is infeasibly expensive.

I mean, seriously. How would you even? You'd have to raise kids from birth in
a theme park with meticulous care to shield them from the deleterious effects
of racism and sexism.

> rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?

Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the
dark ages.

~~~
striking
Something something just-world fallacy.

[http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-belief-in-a-just-
world-...](http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-belief-in-a-just-world-a-
fundamental-delusion.php)

> _expensive_

With the millions of dollars from diversity initiatives, I'm sure someone
could pull it off.

Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and just
because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of the
opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks to
fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).

I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do. The
world is not a fair place.

~~~
KirinDave
The world IS fundamentally unfair. That doesn't mean that society should
foster fundamentally unfair policies. I don't know why you would think that
this would be wise, or after even a casual perusal of history you'd think it
was novel or sustainable.

> Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and
> just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of
> the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks
> to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).

It simply wasn't the subject of this conversation. "White privilege" is a
specific set of special treatments you get in the US. It is not, "Magically
you have a perfect life." It's undeniable that with white privilege you're
less likely to be summarily executed by law enforcement, as an example.

But economic and other social divides still exist. Polish and Irish people are
excellent examples of other axis of discrimination and racism that still exist
in the world today.

> I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do.

We're all raised to accept racism as normal. It's not surprising that you feel
this way. But remember, you're not the one who's history is getting them shot
in the street in the US right now, so you're probably going to feel slightly
less personal pain and be asked to express slightly more empathy at this exact
moment.

