What Intel's $300 Million Diversity Pledge Really Means 254
itwbennett writes Intel's Rosalind Hudnell is responsible for implementing the company's much-publicized $300 million initiative to bring more women and under-represented minorities into its workforce by 2020. But even with Intel's renewed commitment to diversity, the company's workforce will still be just about 32 percent women in five years, Hudnell estimated. Here's a rough breakdown of how the money will be spent: The funds will be applied over five years to change hiring practices, retool human resources, fund companies run by minorities and women, and promote STEM education in high schools.
What it means: (Score:5, Insightful)
Passing up perfectly qualified candidates in order to appease a quota. I'm all for qualified women being seriously considered for tech jobs, but this will do more to harm the industry than it will do to help it.
What it means: (Score:4, Informative)
Let's hire less white males!
Re:What it means: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What it means: (Score:5, Funny)
"less white" might be correct -- maybe AC meant that darker complexioned, i.e. "less white", males should/would be hired.
Re:What it means: (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly my feeling as well.
Equal opportunity != equal outcome. nor should it be.
just watch, the headline in 10 years:
"intel's diversity not reflected in team leads or management" (because they lowered the bar for underrepresented groups the over represented group's relative performance was better and hence will be promoted more)
followed by:
"intel pushes for new diversity initiative in promotions"
10 years later:
"intel files for bankruptcy after repeated market failures related to its line of privilege checking chips which underclock themselves based on the current user's level of privilege metric."
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Hopefully we can agree that men and women are of equal intelligence and capability in STEM
Dunno. Intelligence, sure. Capability? On average, you will get less work out of them. That's borne out by the statistics. It shouldn't be surprising, either. Men don't have the responsibility of making more humans. That can really cut into your schedule. That's not a reason not to hire them, nor a reason for this level of disparity, though it probably is a valid reason for some disparity.
Many have noted that women may also be less likely to put up with a career lifetime full of bullshit, since they have ot
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Another way of looking at it is that men are being exploited by employers who expect them to do more hours and take less time off than is good for them. Men should be getting the same rights when it comes to paternity leave, and not be expected to work longer hours just because they don't have kids to pick up after work. It's exploitation.
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Another way of looking at it is that men are being exploited by employers who expect them to do more hours and take less time off than is good for them.
I don't disagree with that, but since that's completely legal for them to do, from their standpoint it's the same thing. Obviously, that shouldn't be legal. Nobody should be forced to work more than 40 hours a week just because someone else can't be arsed to plan. That's just slavery lite. If your business requires people to waste their lives for you, then it sucks anyway.
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It might not hurt the industry much.
It might hurt Intel though because they would end up hiring less qualified people OR end up extra unqualified people to fill quota. If Intel hires less qualified people, it makes it harder for Intel to win and easier for others in the industry to win. If Intel just hires extra people who are 'diverse', but less qualified, these people will cost Intel money in salary, benefits, and other employee costs without sufficient return and Intel will need to figure out a way to ke
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False on two points.
1. Intel wants to hire the "best" candidate for a position, not necessarily the most "perfectly qualified". The definitions of both terms are subjective, so let me explain the difference with an example. I have interview a candidate for a senior position, whose resume was a mile long with impressive work. He had the necessary experience, and he might have the insight necessary to find novel solutions to our problems. But, in 30 minutes with him, I could tell he was an asshole. His a
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What it really means: (Score:2)
Intel justifies this move as a way to, among other things, get a more diverse set of perspectives and inputs as it moves from being just a chipmaker into more diverse markets.
Hiring "more of the same" just reinforces the echo chamber of opinions and options - more of the same. In today's world that makes it more likely to be blindsided. That would be bad for Intel, their employees, suppliers, and yes, even the shareholders. So increased diversity is a "must have" going forward. In this scenario, the best t
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A group of people rigs the game to the where where they have a stranglehold, to the detriment of ALL others.
By all means provide evidence for this rigging.
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By all means provide evidence for this rigging.
It has been shown in some specific fields (the scope of the study was limited, naturally) that women with equal qualifications are consistently rated as less competent than a man with the same qualifications.
This was found by submitting fake CVs, so quality of the applicants was controlled for perfectly.
So, this rigging has been more or less proven to exist in some technical fields.
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Re:What it means: (Score:4, Informative)
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I was referring to the PNAS article that always does the round on this thread. If you have something to refute the article, I'd be interested because it seemed reasonably sound to me.
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There's nothing to refute - it's a study in the fields of biology or something, not CS. I'm not sure why you think it applies to a story about CS and engineering.
Did you find one that applies to CS and engineering?
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When you said "it has been shown in some specific fields", name it, give us the links, show it to us that those 'evidences' are valid
AC must be one of those guys who can't even use Google. If you do your own searching, you can control whether you're being fed only one side of the story. Since you can't do it, maybe you can have your female assistant do it for you :-)
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Eh my bad, claim with no evidence. There's a fairly well known article in PNAS. Can't search and provide link because on phone. Fortunately someone else in the thread dug the article out for me. So, there you go. Scan the sub thread for it if you care.
Scratch that, Slashdot wants me to wait Five minutes. Guess I can dig out the link. So, here you go:
http://m.pnas.org/content/109/... [pnas.org]
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Re:What it means: (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious. Do you happen to know of any specific people or groups of people who've been, how did you put it, "passed up for a century" for a job at Intel?
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Kudos for taking a statement out of context so knowingly - making it sound as if I was implying that Intel has done something wrong. (Learn how to read, or at least make a valid point)
Minorities (women, or non-Caucasian males, doesn't really matter) aren't traditionally considered on equal footing. It's not some new concept. But you know that already, don't you?
"passed up for a century" meaning that, even when qualified - blacks have quite famous been "last hired, first fired" from WWII until the well af
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benifits... here come the nazis...
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TFA is about Intel doing things to "level the playing field". It's not about society in general.
Intel may or may not need to do things to "level the playing field", depending on their own internal culture. I've got no opinions about that.
But Intel's need to fix things (or not), and the methods they use (or don't), are the subject at hand. NOT society's problems in general. Not even the tech industry's problems in general, though a lot of commenters have extended it to that.
You, on the other hand, see
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Those of us who live near the beast already understand everything that Intel does wrong - in terms of how it subjects its manufacturing employees to time theft, to how it pollutes local environments. Working at Intel is considered a last resort around here. The benefits to any "encouragement" they give to minorities in STEM will first go to any other company in the area which generally provide better working conditions. They're known for doing th
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Yes, tell me again how those Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people have had the game rigged against them by that bogeyman of bogeymen, the cis-white-hetero-male.
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You're right Rideak.
Most men prefer jobs that are about things.
Most women prefer jobs that are about people.
It's the truth but yet a lot of people just put their fingers in their ears and go "la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you" because they think it's not politically correct. Well, fuck you politics.
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Bingo. While I work at a .gov lab, I've attended numerous courses and events at semiconductor and photonics companies in Si Valley. At one course (Xilinx), while helping the foreign instructor get his points across, I noticed that the class was composed predominantly of Asians, and Indians, and a few white folks. At least 2:1 non-white to white. In engineering/tech firms in Si Valley, Asian and Indian women and men are present in no obviously differing amounts. The only missing species is white females
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bay area resident, here. living here for quarter of a century. born and raised in the US.
bay area companies (cisco, etc) are about 95% asian, at this point. wander the hallways, if you get a chance. its not about men vs women, its about US vs non-US. you can walk the hallways and not hear a word of english, for many hours at a time. people think nothing of speaking some foreign language while at work, doing work, in a large open setting.
when I grew up, it was considered rude to 'talk in codes' in fro
Extortion (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a nice company you got there. It would be a real shame if someone accused it of sexism...
Hewlett Packard, a generation ago (Score:3)
When the company was still run ethically, the ethics included opening the engineering department to women, not just on paper but in real life.
The word spread. Women in engineering schools knew where to apply when they graduated. HP had a larger pool of bright people to choose from, people who were shying away from their competitors.
There's more to being open than sticking the phrase "Equal Opportunity Employer" on the recruiting ads. Get it right, though, and it's sound business.
Tech needs more women like... (Score:5, Informative)
... The fashion industry needs more straight men. I'm all for increasing stem programs for high school. But don't be bigoted about it. Let everyone participate. And if women don't want to go into tech by choice... Get the fuck over it.
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I actually do agree that more straight men need to get into fashion. Because the idea that straight cisgender men are just more likely to not get into fashion by the nature of their being is offensive. Women are being actively discouraged against being into STEM at young ages in a variety of ways. Some are really subtle but do have a disproportionally larger effect than you'd think.
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Sex (the biological definition, not the act) and gender are not the same thing
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But what if women do want to go into STEM by choice but are put off by the wizards and dragons in their way?
On the other hand, you and the other SJWs vaguely refer to these "gender based barriers placed in their way", and then proceed to "address" them without ever identifying them. What are these barriers? Are they actually real?
The most important part of addressing a problem is identifying the problem. You can't just wave your hands and pretend that the problem is whatever happens to fit your preferred solution the best.
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And which barriers would those be? I've heard them referred to but every time they've been examined in any detail they don't go anywhere.
Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is discrimination fought with discrimination...
Do people not know how to hire the best candidate anymore?
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Do people not know how to hire the best candidate anymore?
Anymore? Did they ever?
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Ironically enough they probably don't "feel welcome" because of how shabbily companies like IBM treat their talent.
It also doesn't help that nerds are shat on in popular culture and the communications and journalism majors never pass up an opportunity to dump on nerds even more. This article and your response is another fine example.
When measured up to "lawyer babes" and "doctor babes", how can STEM hope to captivate a crowd that is still quite honestly still in the thrall Vogue and Glamour?
Do a big push to hire male teachers and nurses (Score:2)
That way, fewer men will be available to be engineers and scientists. It's foolproof!
Diversity or wages? (Score:3)
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So your argument is that women should stay in the kitchen you keep your wages a little higher? Maybe we should just scrap STEM education altogether to prevent any future generations competing with you?
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Is it about diversity, or just having more engineers in the job market so that wages can be kept low?
Intel (and other large companies) says: Why argue when you can have both?
Hmm (Score:2)
I hope the money will not be prioritised to the items at the start of that list, because encouraging everyone to do STEM subjects is the only sustainable solution to this that doesn't pad out a quota at the expense of expertise.
How to slow America down (Score:2, Insightful)
By breaking, what works:
. No, there will be no "PROFIT!!!!" at the end — elimination (or, at best, reduction) of profit is the goal here.
Why would various corporations suddenly start doing that to themselves? The only possible reason is undue pressure... Some free country we got ourselves into...
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You can notice that all across western societies. People who are actually productive and produce value for companies are paid less and are laid off, while at the mean time management, bureaucrat and "soft skill" jobs are on the rise. In the end you will have half of companies consisting of people discussing amongst themselves but unable to produce a screwdriver.
When diversity + anti-discrimination = uniformity (Score:2)
Diversity is great, diversity of opinions and such is good for a workplace. This is well known, and documented in The Wisdom of Crowds. And for tech companies with respect to gender, it means no more lines out the men's restrooms.
Except actually pulling it off means assuming a cost, giving up the next best alternative.
I'd love to hire genders more equally, except that might mean taking on less qualified people.
Or, I could offer a bonus and better salary to perfectly qualified women from other companies. Exc
Waste of money (Score:2)
1. Primary schools are biased against women in STEM [slashdot.org].
2. Primary school funding/quality in the US is stupid lopsided against minorities & the poor [ascd.org].
Working to change High School programs is better than working to change college admissions criteria or setting hiring quotas, but until the primary school funding disparity is fixed, there is no such thing as equal opportunities.
We can't (and shouldn't) demonize or try to change cultural influences on how children are raised. If people want to raise thei
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This I kind of agree with.
However, I think it's worth investing the money to educate teachers, parents and anyone else who will shape a kid's life about the subtle nuance of sexism in our culture. I think it's worth doing it at any level. Even though it'd be way more effective at primary school levels.
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It is just as absurd to think you can fix the race & sex disparity problem at the high school level as it is to think you can cure a cold by wiping your nose.
Nobody credible thinks that can be done. But anyone who has put more than two seconds of butt-hurt thought into this realizes that you make a difference where you can and hope that this difference is compounded in the next generation.
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Nobody credible thinks that can be done. But anyone who has put more than two seconds of butt-hurt thought into this realizes that you make a difference where you can and hope that this difference is compounded in the next generation.
Obviously by doing some research I've not put more than two seconds of butt-hurt thought into this. But you do bring up an excellent point: bigots throwing insults instead of offering up their own two seconds of thought on the matter ruin discussions.
Intel can make a difference at the primary level. $300 million can make a huge difference (and I'm not talking about just throwing money at individual schools). They're instead making the wrong decision to do what is popular and visible to short-sighted mor
Just a question of pushing down wages (Score:2)
300 mil... what about womens wages? (Score:3)
I'm curious. I have no knowledge of Intels' payroll policies, but I wonder if the $300 million could not have been better spent insuring that wages are fair across genders at Intel. Unless they already have a perfectly balanced gender neutral payroll balance, any company chasing this dream of more women programmers is just marketing fluff!
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There's evidence that women are more discriminatory against women, so it's possible that an increased female workforce would encourage a greater wage disparity and fewer management opportunities.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070318083402/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/newspapers/sunday_times/britain/article1265356.ece [archive.org]
Sequel Mashup time (Score:2)
A down on his luck coder finds it impossible to satisfy the requirements of headhunters. 2 years of Swift?? C# AND COBOL??! Besides that, the jobs he CAN get pay less than flipping burgers. It seems there's plenty of jobs being outsourced, and women are being aggressively recruited... why take his chances picking the wrong one... when he can become BOTH??
Working as a tanned, eastern-accented, weight-lifting coder named "Vidya De Milo"... Jim Carrey finds out people start to treat him a little differe
Bruce Jenner (Score:2)
Its simple guys... make like Bruce Jenner, only be a better woman driver.
Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Insightful)
What a Diversity Pledge Really Means is that a company is committed to discriminating against the best qualified candidate if that candidate is a white male. Let the lawsuits begin.
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Insightful)
What a Diversity Pledge Really Means is that a company is committed to discriminating against the best qualified candidate if that candidate is a white male. Let the lawsuits begin.
I have dumped all my Intel stocks or else I would launch a class-action suit against Intel of wasting shareholders' money to promote discriminatory practices
$300 million is not a small amount, you know?
I rather Intel distributes that $300 million to the shareholders than to use it to promote a discriminatory program !
I do not care what they want to term it - be it 'diversity' or 'reverse-discrimination' --- the whole thing walks, quack, and smell like a racial segregatory and gender segregatory program, and no amount of political correctness is going to help America's technology to become even more advance!
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Its an issue If they hire a less qualified woman over a more qualified male just because she's a woman. Thats exactly what programs like this encourage.
Should more women enter technology? Sure. Is anyone stopping them? NO. Is it outside the realm of possibility that less women are interested in the technology sector than men? NO. I have a lot of female friends. I grew up with 2 sisters and no brothers so I have more female friends than male. Only one of them has any interest in technology and ive asked why..ive asked if they were ever discouraged from any stem field and they all said no, they just WERENT INTERESTED.
The one who's into technology works in a robotics lab. She loves it and has never has any issues with the men around her.
This whole current pushing of this nonsense no women in tech is going to turn and bite the sector in the ass. You can't force interest and if you start lowering the bar to meet hiring quotas thats not only unfair to everyone else its also a great way to lower quality output.
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People are also getting in the way of *men* entering technology. You're crazy, simply crazy if you think otherwise.
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If you literally believe that nobody is getting in the way of women entering technology, you're crazy. Simply crazy. .
I'd like to point out that this could be good news, as Intel is seriously under quota for crazy employees. Microsoft on the other hand [theregister.co.uk] ....
Re: Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Insightful)
If there are some women who are perfectly capable of learning to do the job, and they're being steered away from tech careers by well meaning guidance counselors because "vaginas!" then it is NOT an issue. Even if it *is* an issue of emphasizing genitals over ability, that is NOT "segregation," as the GGP poster stated.
It isn't "segregation", but it is discriminatory hiring practices. If we take the view that less qualified individuals should be hired on the basis that they are "perfectly capable of learning to do the job", then Intel and other companies shouldn't be targeting women, but high school drop-outs, illegal immigrant farm workers, and convicted felons who will be cheap and easy to find. Those groups are most certainly more under-represented than women in that field.
We can debate the merits of a strategy utilizing apprenticeships for certain jobs, but the fact is that there are plenty of people who don't need to learn to do the job who are looking for work. Until it comes to pass that that's no longer the case, then hiring anyone but the most qualified for the job, especially when race, sex, or other such factors are overriding job qualifications, is prejudicial and discriminatory and it ought to be illegal. That goes both ways; excluding women or minorities as well as excluding whites and males.
If we want fairness, let's have fairness; not unfairness in the other direction.
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Women are paid less than men with equal skills and equal jobs. And yet somehow there are still fewer women. Could it be that companies are so foolish with their money that even though a just as competent woman is cheaper, they would still hire the male?
It's not that simple. Like most business decisions in the real world there are plenty of mitigating factors. Knowing nothing else about the candidates it can be shown that a woman hire is statistically much more likely to take time off for family reasons or maternity. This has a non-zero cost to ongoing projects, long term productivity and the like, all of which must be discounted to balance the risk a company takes when hiring a woman instead of a man who is much less likely to take time off for family rea
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Yes, it could be, in fact. Few companies are on such an existential knife-edge that they can't afford to make a few godawful decisions. If you don't believe that, I have a couple of teambuilding activities and motivational speakers to sell you.
As it happens, I think that companies do rush to hire competent women, and even less competent women due to quite rational reasons (a company's productivity is not simply the sum of its employees skills). It's a supply problem, and it starts long before high school. B
Re: Somethig wrong with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Also ignore the STEM aspect, if women were paid so much less then men, then the natural effect of capitalism would make it so they are much more desired.
As a business owner, you'd be able to cut your employee salary by 30%, that is a lot to most businesses.
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You're right - it's total segregation to want to bring more women into the workplace with men!
No, idiot. It's total segregation when you attempt to SEGREGATE a particular gender/racial/ethnic/religious group by your hiring practices. You know, like discriminating against one group over another based on gender/race/etc. ....which is EXACTLY what they're doing here.
"But their INTENTIONS are noble," you say. Yeah, so were Hitler's.
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I don't blame Intel.
The idea that corporations control the government is a mostly a myth and these diversity "investments" are proof. Intel knows that an investment in diversity is insurance against the government. It's a payoff. It's protection money.
If Intel didn't have to worry that its business might be in danger from an aggressive government, they wouldn't bother making this pointless investment.
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not government they're afraid of, it's their rivals' PR teams, and powerful people in media who on a whim might decide to throw their power around.
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No, it means committed to not discriminating against the best qualified candidate if they are not a white male.
Since no one has ever been able to even fake some data showing that white males as a whole are more qualified, having a disproportionate number of white males means that qualified candidates have been overlooked.
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Or, are you sexist and believe that the 14% of women entering college are proportionally superior to 86% of the males?
Until more women become interested in tech careers expecting to see significant changes in hiring isn't going to happen (other than by failin
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the % of females graduating at top colleges with computer science degrees, it's small %. At top schools it's only 14%.
That's why they are spending so much money at the school level. If they can get that number up to 32% then naturally when selecting the best candidate 32% of the time they will be female. A company like Intel needs a lot of good talent, and when you need something that is in limited supply one of the obvious things to do is increase the supply.
This scheme will work well for Intel, because when the those women that they helped do graduate with high marks Intel will already have a relationship with them and Intel staff will be well networked at university/college level, so get the first pick of the best minds.
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A company like Intel needs a lot of good talent, and when you need something that is in limited supply one of the obvious things to do is increase the supply.
Yeah, and one of the ways to do that is to increase the demand. When intel stops hiring H1-Bs, we can take them seriously. Until then, fuckem.
This scheme will work well for Intel, because when the those women that they helped do graduate with high marks Intel will already have a relationship with them and Intel staff will be well networked at university/college level, so get the first pick of the best minds.
The ones that actually go to work in the field at all, that is.
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At those numbers, it means that a female graduate has >2x the chance of being hired at Intel than her male classmates.
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Or it means discriminating against the best qualified candidate if he's a white male and they currently have too few women hired.
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[If you remove identifying information from resumes before they get to hiring managers, diversity goes *up*]
What load of bull. Where do you come by this? Anyone hiring blindly solely based on resumes without interviewing and practical tests has no clue especially in the tech industry as resumes often means as much as politician's promises so your claim seems dubious at best but probably willingly skewed to promote your agenda.
Maybe Dr Manning's Youtube videos are right after all.
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Maybe they meant to get to the interview portion?
Remove gender and suddenly more women are being interviewed?
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just that, but as Neil de Grasse Tyson said about being black and in STEM, who was left behind? Who was told, "No don't focus on STEM, go play sports go do something else, you're black, STEM's not for you." So all of the money being invested in education is also going to mean is to try to stop the meme that, "you're a girl you shouldn't get into STEM. Go into arts or history or become a homemaker."
I work in STEM and I'm going to call bullshit here. Nobody I know would ever say something like that - be it about ethnicity, gender or any other characteristic unrelated to ability. Maybe someone is saying that to black kids or women, but they sure as hell aren't from within the STEM sector - most likely the problem exists within the minority communities themselves. I am utterly convinced that the biggest putter off for women coming into STEM, for instance, is all these feminists from outside STEM who go around pronouncing STEM to be an utterly horrible and oppressive environment for women. I saw a (male) "feminist" the other day criticising people for referring to someone as a "lady professor" yet "feminists" are precisely the people who will make a big deal out of someone's gender. The "less feminist" people I know couldn't care whether you have a penis, vagina or anything else so long as you're good at what you do. But no, feminists have to go around scaring people off by claiming that men in un-PC shirts will eat them alive if they go into STEM.
/rant over
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:4, Interesting)
Who is doing this "guidance counceling" anyway? Is guidance counceling dominated by white males (not in my experience)? Or are the people so concerned about diversity the ones doing the discouraging--to create a self-fulfilling prophesy which can only be solved by... Guess?
No one should be telling kids what they should do or be interested in anyway. And if the kids are so weak of self respect and awareness that they need someone to tell them what to do, this is a profound endictment of the entire public school system. It simply needs to be abolished.
Guidance councelors should only be providing kids with the honest truth about what needs to be done to accomplish what the kids say they want to do. The only exception might be to show an objective comparison of effort vs. probability of payoff for special cases of very hard to enter fields, such as movie star or NFL player. But even still, if someone wants to be an NFL player and falls short, maybe they can leverage their extensive training experience into a career in physical education, research, etc.
Failures rarely have to be total.
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What social justice warriors get wrong is that they say that diversity is the ultimate goal, and everything else must bow to that. They think that diversity is an aim and not a symptom. But what does "improving" diversity mean? There might as well be people who argue that less diversity is an improvement. So SJW have already pre-decided what the "best" outcome without using any form of metric other than the ratio of men to women.
Re:Somethig wrong with that (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree, and I totally support blinding of resumes, and as much blinding as possible in general. But there's one thing you overlook, which leaves your argument vulnerable:
It's possible that hiring the best and the brightest is not the wisest move. It's possible that it's a good idea to hire those who are similar to us. I don't think so, but it's possible, we don't know.
To take a concrete example, take the study that showed lab assistants were rated more poorly with a female name on the resume. That's solid proof of gender prejudice. But playing the devil's advocate here, we don't know that it's unjustified prejudice. Perhaps the people evaluating the resumes have had tons of lab assistants of both genders, and found a clear tendency that the women performed worse than their resumes suggested, and the men performed better.
Thing is, even if that were true, I'd advocate for blinding. It's not for efficiency's sake that we should end discrimination, but for justice's sake: You didn't choose to be born a woman, you deserve to be judged on individual merits. Even if women on average were awful at this job, that information should be off-limits to use in hiring decisions, because using it would be a great injustice to those who are not awful.
This is of course even more salient in the case of race and ethnicity. Because while it is highly implausible that women should be worse lab assistants, we do have crime statistics, and if people were allowed to discriminate based on those, it's quite possible that a shop owner could "reasonably" deny Roma entrance to his shop, for instance. It will probably reduce shoplifting! But it's also a horrible injustice to those Roma who do not shoplift. It doesn't matter if that is 90%, or 10%. It doesn't matter if there's just one honest Roma in the whole country. No individual should answer for the statistical proclivities of a category he didn't choose to be in and can't even escape.
But this also shows why blinding yourself to information about race and gender can't just be a "best practice". That asshole shop owner who denies Roma entrance to his shop, he's doing a great injustice, but he might well a comparative advantage over more fair shop owners. Being just can be costly, and because of that, it's important that we demand sharing that burden fairly. We can hope that when we do, we find that it isn't so costly after all, maybe it's even a net benefit. But we must never base our demand for justice on such hopes. Justice first, then profit.
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Replying to undo accidental moderation. This is a great post.
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Oblig. XKCD: http://xkcd.com/385/ [xkcd.com]
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Stop making people like things they don't like (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is so totally beyond belief stupid. First, if Putin cracks, who's to say he won't push the button to start TNWW1 (Thermo-Nuclear World War One)? After all, the Israelis have the same policy if they believe that they are about to be defeated - launch all the nukes and make sure that if they go down, so do their enemies.
Second, why would anyone take on the responsibility for hundreds of millions of people with a failed economy? Because you don't just get the land and slaughter everyone.
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Because you don't just get the land and slaughter everyone.
Someone should tell the US government that.
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Could anybody who supports the drive for more women in tech, explain to us why equality in THIS field is so important? [...] No strawmen please, no avoiding the question or posting platitudes, just a straight up answer please?
Equality in every field is important. You are whining because some people are trying to make improvements in their field. We're not following improvements in those fields, because this is slashdot. HTH, HAND. Stop fucking whining.
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You win the thread.
Basically that is the right answer. Also, what the hell had Intel got to do with nursing and teaching?