
Alphabet shareholders reject diversity proposal backed by employees - Jerry2
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-inc-agm/alphabets-stockholders-vote-against-gender-pay-gap-diversity-proposals-idUSKCN1J22BS
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harimau777
Sort of a side issue, but something I've never understood: According to
[http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-
report/](http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/) and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States),
56% of Google employees are white compared to 77% of the US population.
Doesn't that mean that racial minorities are actually overrepresented at
Google? Or am I understanding the statistics wrong?

~~~
ProfessorLayton
Seeing as most of Google's technical workforce is in CA, specifically the Bay
Area, it would make more sense to compare to compare to the population
surrounding HQ rather than the US as a whole.

~~~
harimau777
Good call. According to:
[http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm](http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm)
it looks like 52% are White (42.4% White and Non-Hispanic), 23% are Asian, and
6% as African American. So this would suggest that the difference between
Google and the Bay Area is still significant but not as much as between Google
and America as a whole.

~~~
adventured
There are two plausible arguments there.

You either have to go one step further and break that down by available tech
talent to be recruited, with the premise being that you can't magically
manifest a certain % of white/hispanic/black/asian tech employees if they're
not available locally (eg if the population is 12% hispanic, but only 5% of
the tech employees available locally are hispanic; that presents a very
difficult recruiting scenario).

Or the argument is that a company like Google can afford to recruit nationally
and relocate whatever demographics they see fit to the bay area, such that
local restrictions do not apply as much to them. If the local bay area pool of
tech talent is 3% black, and the national pool is 6% black, Google can afford
to relocate black employees from around the US to bolster their diversity
efforts locally if that's their aim.

------
bsaul
This kind of issues is so typical of SV... When i think at the average salary
at Google, the fact that they’ve lived as a company out of the same product
for more than 15 years, and still do, and that their biggest concern isn’t to
survive or gain marketshare, but rather PR issues... i feel like looking at
those reality TV shows , seeing the lives or insanely privileged people that
really don’t know what to make of their time, while the rest of us strive just
to have a decent life.

It’s really time other geographical places, in other countries, become good
competitors.

~~~
pm90
Its all just your perception. In those 15 years they have made the following
contributions (and this is just a select few): Golang, MapReduce, Kubernetes,
Containers (well, C Groups), GMail, Android, Chrome. Not to mention all the
amazing open source contributions and god knows what else they do in secret.

~~~
kyle_v
Just to name a few more: translate, drive, adsense, images, earth, maps,
glass, cloud platform, chrome TV, sketchup.

Yes they are primarily a search engine, but they are heavily diversified, not
to mention one company being responsible for basically the entire consumer
internet is insane.

------
theatraine
I'm curious if anyone has examples where diversity led to better product
creation, or counterexamples where companies were hurt by since the designers
overlooked certain groups. One notable example was Google photos racist
blunder:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866)

Arguably Apple not focusing on women's health for the longest time could have
also been mitigated by more female product people as well.

~~~
trjordan
Try Googling "diversity performance teams."

"Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter" \- HBR [1]

"Diversity and Work Group Performance" \- Stanford [2]

"New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work" \-
Forbes [3]

There's a drumbeat of this stuff, both old and new, that comes out constantly.

[1] [https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-
smarter](https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter)

[2] [https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-
group-p...](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-
performance)

[3] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-
resea...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-research-
diversity-inclusion-better-decision-making-at-work/)

~~~
jl2718
These are interesting evidence, but they don’t explore the question of why.
The idea that mere color of skin would be causal to performance in anything
other than hide-and-seek is kind of anaethema, right?

I’m certain that there is a legitimate reason for the effect, but people are
right to be skepical without any exploration of the cause. Are diverse teams
more likely to disagree? Do they exhibit complementary recall of facts?
Different modes of creativity?

I think a more complete explanation of causality would result in a much more
concerted effort to increase diversity and a lot less resistance. As it is, it
feels like the diversity ‘lobby’ is actually trying to create controversy
instead of proving value.

~~~
colemannugent
It's sociology, they can't tell you the reason why because they don't know.
Instead they rely on people wanting it to be true, so they build a "common
sense" argument that lacks evidence.

When these people push for diversity they often mean "have every skin tone
represented in your team photos". While this feels nice and would certainly
repel any accusations of not being "diverse enough" it is the wrong kind of
diversity. Now here is my "common sense" argument:

What people actually want is a diversity of opinions. This you can imagine
having a positive effect on performance as each member of a team would have a
slightly different take on things that may allow the group to discover a
better solution. This would explain why the diversity of skin tone type
approach somewhat works, as different races usually have different
experiences, which usually means more diversity of thought when compared to a
completely homogeneous group.

The obvious drawback to diversity of thought is that it's harder to quantify
and optimize for. Anyone can look at a team photo and tell if a race is
over/underrepresented because we have evolved incredibly advanced pattern
recognition abilities. You can't easily tell what someone's opinions are
without talking to them for a little while. Management already has trouble
hiring qualified candidates since they don't know what qualified candidates
look like, so adding diverse thinking to the list of criteria just exacerbates
the hiring problem. Plus if you actually could select thought diverse
candidates you run the risk of not including all races, opening yourself up to
accusations of bias that can be devastating in today's politically charged
climate.

Social science can't accurately model single humans well, let alone groups of
humans as they attempt to solve problems. Even my analysis that we really
ought to be concerned with diversity of thought is based on intuition rather
than experimentation. It's a hard problem domain, and the solutions may not be
intuitive.

~~~
foolrush
This is pure, uneducated rubbish.

The reason that social science can't model (aka overfit) many phenomena, is
that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are
involved.

Do some reading. Educate yourself. You may change your vantage.

~~~
colemannugent
> _The reason that social science can 't model (aka overfit) many phenomena,
> is that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are
> involved._

Right, they currently can't accurately model the phenomena and thus their
models have little to no predictive power. We are in agreement then. Also, it
seems to me that social sciences tend to produce models that are underfit
rather than overfit.

So why then do we accept conclusions from scientists who have weak models with
little predictive power? This is what my comment above was talking about.

> _This is pure, uneducated rubbish._

It's definitely not uneducated and I don't think it's entirely rubbish either.

------
jeffreyrogers
My understanding is that most diversity proposals do not have evidence showing
that they work to increase diversity (other than affirmative action type
policies). I would love to be proven wrong on this.

I'm not criticizing the goal of increasing diversity. I think it's important
to provide the same opportunities to people regardless of background, but we
should judge policies by their effectiveness rather than their intentions.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
How do you define diversity? What are you even measuring? Am I diverse because
I’m left handed or does it have to be about skin colour, gender and sexual
preferences?

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I think I see where you're going with this, and it's not really a discussion
I'm interested in getting involved with because any time I've seen a
discussion about whether and what diversity matters it devolves into the two
sides talking past each other. On the one side you have people arguing that
personality traits are unevenly distributed through the population so pursuing
diversity is not worthwhile since the existing state of things already
reflects people's ability to do the required work. On the other hand you have
people arguing that systemic oppression prevents minority groups from being
represented in proportion to their abilities.

Whichever side is right is largely irrelevant to the point I was making, which
is that even if you care about diversity, there aren't really effective ways
to increase it besides affirmative action style policies. I might be wrong
about this, but I have not seen evidence of other diversity policies that are
actually effective.

~~~
Eridrus
> there aren't really effective ways to increase it besides affirmative action
> style policies

I think it depends on how broadly you define "affirmative action style
policies", i.e. if you say that encompasses anything that helps one group more
than others, then sure, but if your comment is more about quotas/preferential
selection I think there are plenty of policies that exist.

Assuming you do mean the latter, some examples I have seen implemented
include: more flexible work environments, interview coaching for diverse
candidates, outreach to diverse groups to ensure that they actually apply at
the rates that they exist in the pipeline.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
By affirmative action I just mean policies that apply lower hiring standards
for certain groups.

I have seen those examples too, but I don't believe they are very effective in
practice.

------
nimish
Burying the important info that Alphabet's major shareholders are its founders
and senior executives.

The headline should read "Alphabet management votes down employee backed
diversity proposal".

~~~
asdsa5325
Incorrect. Alphabet's major shareholders are institutions. Institutions own
69.4% of Alphabet.

~~~
nostrademons
Larry + Sergey + Eric have majority voting control, though. Each class B share
(which they hold) counts for 10 class A shares and an infinite number of class
C shares when it comes to corporate governance.

------
jl2718
“a gender pay gap and lack of diversity could make it difficult for the
company to hire and retain workers”

The solution to a constrained maximization is never greater than the
unconstrained solution. So how does adding a diversity constraint make it
easier to hire?

I often wonder about the supposed rigor of the hiring process.

Google is being eaten from the inside. Will not last.

~~~
adventured
The extreme difficulty and extraordinary financial cost of challenging their
search product, guarantees it will in fact last. It can't be replaced until or
unless there's a direct hit / directly competing technology inflection that
involves search that they miss (for example, had they missed mobile and not
acquired & developed Android, that could have been an opening).

It's that way for the exact same reason Microsoft being a mess to varying
degrees for 10-15 years didn't wreck the company because the Windows + Office
duopoly perpetually printed vast profit. Even when they screwed up the
products at times.

The tolerance level of insanity, chaos, idiocy, whatever, that can occur
within Google before it's threatening to their existence, is far beyond where
they're at now. The search engine has no meaningful competitive threats
currently, they can coast for at least a decade on the search product as it is
now.

Financially, they have net tangible assets that make them look more like
Berkshire Hathaway than a tech company. Their net tangible assets are greater
than Apple's, because they're basically debt free ($140b in net tangibles,
$102b in cash). Microsoft's net tangibles are $28b by comparison. With
Google's balance sheet and the search monopoly, they can spin in circles
juggling mistake after mistake, with a rotting culture, for many years and
have nothing to seriously worry about.

~~~
pandaman
History shows us that the ability to survive chaos and general incompetency is
orthogonal to the ability to withstand deliberate and focused sabotage.

For the former you just need to be big, heavy and slow so the chaotic
movements decay and extinguish each other. And Google is, as you noticed, very
well suited for that.

The latter, however, requires active counter-actions IMHO. Being big and slow
is not going to protect you from the "fifth column". It's not like Google has
0 competition - Baidu, Yandex, even Bing, all can easily take its place in
search when/if an opportunity opens.

------
lowry
Should we read "backed by some employees"?

------
dogruck
My how times change.

Years ago, when Google was young, their recruiters contacted me. Their pitch:
We only hire the best of the best. We’re focused on top students, from the top
schools. The interviews are hard, and most people fail.

Today, it seems Google’s pitch is: Okay, we need to top-off this demographic
bucket, and you’re in that bucket. Will you help us even-out this demographic
pie chart?

------
pm90
hmmm would have helped if they had detailed exactly what some of those
proposals actually did. This is bad reporting.

~~~
gameswithgo
Yeah I read this article and have zero idea what is going on.

------
Simulacra
The whims and desires of a wealthy, privileged employee base, meets head on
with the cold realities of the stock market.

------
emerged
Equality of outcome is an ideological rather than rational stance and is
losing its foothold on account of rationally justified kickback. Both because
it necessitates active, purposeful discrimination to enforce and because the
result is less value to shareholders (at least on account of the cost to
enforce).

~~~
albertgoeswoof
You’ve created a strawman by assuming that equality of outcome is the goal of
this proposal. A drive for increased diversity doesn’t necessarily mean
equality of outcome, I think even hard line activists know that this is an
unachievable goal with diminishing returns.

~~~
Borealid
Increased diversity is an outcome. Seeking equal/"better"/"more
representative" numbers (percentage-wise) is not an equality-of-opportunity
situation; it's about outcomes regardless of how they came about.

To be clear, I'm not saying that's moral or immoral, just that seeking
"increased diversity" is factually seeking to affect an outcome, not an
input/opportunity.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Increased diversity is not the same as equal diversity though.

------
bananatron
Very interesting precedent for tech companies where the employees
traditionally have a lot of influence over policy like this.

~~~
mc32
Institutional as well as executives with controlling shares were against these
proposals. They announced their opposition a while ago in one of their
investor comms.

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senectus1
well that's an interesting line to draw in the sand.

will watch this one with interest.

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Jerry2
This story got censored pretty quick. It was on the front page, now it's on
2nd (soon 3rd) page. Why was it censored, admins?

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friedman23
If I were to ever run my own business I would never allow these stupid non
business related discussions to proliferate. I still can't believe they
dropped the Pentagon contract.

~~~
timbuckley
Do you consider ethics business related?

