To be clear, Meta's "Diverse Slate Approach" was explicitly discriminatory with regards to protected class. It prohibited hiring managers from proceeding with an offer until at least one of the on-site interviews contained an "underrepresented group", meaning women and URM males. In practice this meant that white and Asian men had to wait a long time to get an offer even after they passed the interview rounds. But women and URM never had to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled because their presence caused it to be fulfilled.
To see how this is discrimination, consider a company that decides to wait 90 days before proceeding with any offer to a Catholic candidate, but no such delay if the candidate is not Catholic. Surely we see that this is discrimination. Even if we argue that the Catholic candidates are still getting their offer eventually it's still plainly discrimination. What if instead we rolled a dice and added 0 to 90 days of delay? Some Catholics have zero delay, just like non-Catholics. Is that still discrimination? Of course.
Now considering how the DSA works. Most candidates are not "diverse". If you look at the sequence of candidates with non-diverse (N) or diverse (D) candidates the sequence looks something like this:
NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND
So if we introduce the requirement that at least one interviewed candidate must be diverse, a non-diverse candidate may get lucky and the next candidate is diverse. Or maybe they'll be waiting a long time until a diverse candidate is interviewed and fulfills the DSA. But a diverse candidate never has to wait for th DSA to be fulfilled. Sounds like a familiar situation where an offer is randomly delayed on the basis of protected class, right?
It's true that the DSA never lowered standards for diverse candidates. But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.
If the pattern resembles this for a group that represents over 50% of the broader population (women and some subset of males), I'd argue that it's highly possible there are other, possibly discriminatory, factors at play.
Over 60% of the U.S. population don't have college degrees, but you obviously wouldn't expect Facebook's hiring to be proportional to that. The demographics of CS graduates is much closer to what you'd expect the hiring percentages to reflect (and they do)
So we should expect 50% men in elementary schools? How about lumberjacks? Should those be 50% women too?
A non discriminatory hiring process should reflect the demographics of the workers in the given field (other factors like geography matter too). Why would we expect, say, pediatricians (80% female) to have 50% men?
Achieving a 50/50 split between men and women in a field that's 80% one gender requires hiring one gender at 4x the rate of the other. This line of thinking is what leads companies to set up discriminatory hiring practices in pursuit of DEI goals.
> The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market.
Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.
I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!
For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.
One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.
In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.
I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.
Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.
I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.
If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?
When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.
I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.
Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.
And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.
You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.
One question we should ask ourselves is why a field would be dominated by men and not evenly split, or mostly women, etc. Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?
This question only ever seems to be asked about "desirable" fields. There doesn't seem to be as much of a push to achieve gender parity in sanitation work[1], for example.
The whole exercise feels like an effort to take attention off of the problem of income inequality by instead framing it as an issue of identity. Under this framing, "fair" means we have parity in male and female CEOs - never mind that those CEOs are still making 300x or more of what "frontline" workers make. Why not focus on pushing for higher wages in female dominated fields like teaching or nursing?
On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.
Rather than "desirable" I would maybe say something like "economically dominant". If the highest-paying and most-powerful careers in a society don't at least somewhat meaningfully reflect the demographics of that society, then, well, what does that demonstrate, and is that something we want to try to fix? Hopefully you can at least see the position where the answer to that last question is yes, even if you don't agree with it.
It may be that hire paying fields attract men who want to be able to attract mates. That women prefer men who make more than them is pretty established in research, as is is the lack of interest in what a woman makes as income. (On average in psych studies). Why wouldn’t we expect results and society to reflect this?
It's not -- "why wouldn't we expect important career X to have way more men than women, given <whatever>"
It's -- "if important career X has way more men than women, is this a good thing, at a net societal level, regardless of <whatever> that can explain why this is the case?"
Nobody is looking for complete and perfect parity in all influential careers. The intent is just to make sure that, for the highest-impact careers, we should work towards making them representative of our society, as much as possible
Because men and women have different interests. Even if you think that socialization is the cause, the law mandates that all applicants are treated equally with respect to gender. If gender discrimination is carried out in pursuit of a 50/50 gender split, that does not make it legal.
> Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?
The point of all of this stuff is to find a balance between evaluating applicants independently and objectively according to a well-defined set of critera -- equality of opportunity -- and producing an end result that is representational and fair in the societal sense -- equality of outcome.
I understand why a lot of folks, especially technically-minded folks, bias for equality of opportunity exclusively. This is essentially what a meritocracy is. There's lots of good things about equality of opportunity and meritocracies, but they also have problems, and one of those problems is that, generalizing, they both tend to reflect and reinforce pre-existing biases, and in particular implicit biases. This is exactly the kind of problem that DEI initiatives are trying to address.
I don't really want to litigate the pros and cons of these two concepts, I just want to point out that they both exist, and that initiatives like DEI can have as goals improving one or the other or both.
It's fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're only interested in equality of opportunity. That's probably the position that most people who are anti-DEI would take. But I think it's also fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're interested in both equality of opportunity and outcome. Both are valid.
Using protected class as a factor in employment is prohibited nation-wide under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is no "balance" between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former is required by law. Using protected class as a factor in hiring doesn't become legal just because it's done in pursuit of equality of outcome. They are not both valid concepts, at least not unless you're willing to violate people's civil rights. One is what employers are legally required to do. The other is illegal discrimination.
What's really the difference between having a group of candidates standing on a box, and lowering the bar for those candidates? At the end of the day, whether it's standing on a box or lowering the bar the end result is the same: some candidates are considered to have met expectations despite not reaching the same heights as others.
I highly encourage you to think through whether this is a good metaphor to use to justify DEI in a workplace setting.
You are focusing on the specific details of the hiring process, and evaluating stuff like DEI in terms of a single hiring outcome. I'm trying to clarify that the relevant scope is actually much broader, for example it might be the demographics of the entire engineering org within that company, measured after this updated hiring process has been in place for a year or more.
What you're describing is not how it works. Chiefly, the hiring pipelines are not set up for a single role, but a whole family of them. They are filled ahead of need. (Or were, at a time when this would've been taking place.)
There are other inaccuracies, but suffice it to say, this comment section is full of comments by people who have never been hiring managers talking about how hiring works.
Thanks for the link. A bit of clarification: in this context Asian was not in the category of URM since Asians are overrepresented in tech roles at Meta. So URM meant Black, Latin, and American native.
i imagine they are still close enough, and perhaps she still has enough stock, that she understands he's willing to compromise his own morals for the financial benefit of the company
on a personal level, it is demoralizing to read though
This level of political engagement seems kind of out of character for him
Is he just kissing ass, or is there genuine frustration on decaying business culture? It feels like both he and Musk are idealizing some kind of past version of SV where WLB was less of a concern
An MSN repost of a Fox Business article, that lifted a specific sentence from a NYTimes article, where the source was "people familiar with the meeting".
This is likely as accurate as the game of broken telephone that kids play.
More than once it has happened where some NYT article will discuss some private meeting at the White House and attribute it to someone like, "According to a credible source at that meeting, blah blah". Later it is confirmed that that well placed source was the President, or the secretary of state, etc. Credible news organizations don't just repeat whatever some random guy claims to have heard.
So it is two articles that both ultimately source from NYT? They are not commonly flat out incorrect, and when they are tend to correct the record. So I would say your statement is hyperbole and wrong. NYT sources are likely quite a bit more trustworthy than eight year olds whispering to each other for fun.
He always has been (literally, due to the share structure of Meta and how much Zuckerberg owns), he is just trying to throw someone under the bus for the change in political winds.
Yes he's a chameleon and yes he's a turncoat and so on, but it's interesting that he's gone all in on this. There's some debate whether wokism is finished for good or if it's merely gone dormant. He seems to be betting that it's gone for good.
That's exactly what confuses me. Yes, I would expect some easing on that, but it's so 180° that I find myself wondering, what exactly is that force that defines the direction. Like, who dictates the agenda. I mean, I would always assume that any 4chan-level explanations that have an actual person making the order of how this will go are not exactly true and things must be a little more complicated than that. But how something "a little more complicated" can lead to this? Why yesterday Zuckerberg felt that he must, and today he is totally convinced he must not? Surely he has a better grasp of that than me, but how the fuck does it work? Who decides that one day we are woke, and the next day we aren't?
After all, nobody assumed that wokism is dead the last time Trump was elected. If anything, it was harsher than ever. Why today major supporters of it suddenly say "fuck that"? Please don't tell me that it has anything with Zuckerberg becoming BJJ aficionado, because I won't buy that shit.
Intellectual fads—memeplexes, if you will—burn through populations. There’s a whole lifecycle to a memeplex taking up residence in a host, then eventually getting ejected. Once you’ve ejected a particular memeplex from your mind, it’ll probably never make it back in. You have antibodies. Repeat that for enough people and the tide can permanently turn on a memeplex. Or at least for several decades, until there is a whole new generation of hosts who don’t have immunity.
It’s seemed pretty clear to me that this would eventually happen for wokism (or whatever you want to call it). It’s simply not sustainable to tell the majority of your potential hosts that, because of their inborn, unchangeable attributes (being white and/or male), they are the problem. And people really do not like feeling physically unsafe, which they do in most coastal blue cities, and which almost all women do when there is a man in the bathroom with them.
So the difference between 2024 and 2016 is that the memeplex was just getting rolling in 2016, but today enough people have antibodies that, to any keen observer, it’s days are clearly numbered.
It would take a LOT of explaining about the context and political climate as to why this is the case. Im on mobile so I'll give a very reductive take, the political guard rails have been removed. Billionaire after billionaire, politician after politician has gone to Maralago to meet with Trump and kiss the ring, they've been making donations of millions to his inauguration fund. Trump specifically threatened Zuckerberg with prison, so he fell in line, and that is the "right" thing to do in his eyes because he stands to gain a lot by getting on his good side, he could even get tiktok. On the other hand, his other option is prison or endless harassment from the government. This is the same deal with Bill Gates and many others. It's all performative bs and these corporations have never had any convictions other than to make the most money possible and to accrue power by taking the path of least resistance.
School integration was woke. Women voting was woke. Interracial marriage was woke. Gay marriage was woke. Over the long run, progress only goes in the right direction. There's no debate, just noise. The year to year skirmishes aren't terribly important in the big picture.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/nationalistic/racial battle. Please don't create accounts to do that with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
People for some reason have an inability to separate the goals of DEI/EDI from the practice. It's possible that the goals are important and correct, but the implementation sucks. I am of this belief for many DEI programs I've seen. But I'm still pro-DEI. It just gets implemented often too simplistically and naively, enabling the creation of more controversy and also likely many poor outcomes in organizations. As for what percentage of DEI programs result in such poor outcomes, I dare not guess, I have too little data.
However, the comments that Zuckerberg is making makes me think he really thinks that the goals of DEI are themselves intrinsically bad. He seems to be leaning into the stereotypical type of thinking that causes the issues that DEI is trying to address in the first place.
I'm disappointed. I would have hoped that he'd be capable of diving into more nuance.
The goals of most DEI programs can't be achieved without discrimination on the basis of protected class. If software developers are 18% women how can a company achieve 40% women software developers without discrimination? And that was a DEI goal a previous employer used. In fact they had the same goal for electrical engineer too despite being 10% women.
Ambiguous goals like "make people feel welcome" doesn't require discrimination. But those are not the DEI goals people object to. 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at implemented DEI goals in the form of numeric thresholds, and used discrimination to achieve them. Only one carried out DEI in the innocuous manner.
I'd argue if you're looking to achieve DEI goals in the short-term rather than over decades, you're going to fail because the backlash and other consequences will destroy any progress you think you made. And I think that's what we're seeing. You can work towards DEI goals without achieving them in the short-term and still look to make good changes over the long run. But it requires a systems view of everything, including helping kids from various backgrounds to get access to the education they need and then helping them to be in an environment where they can actually successfully learn stuff. That's a multi-generational multi-decade problem, not a corporate fiscal year problem.
This is sort of no-true-scotsman argument. Sure, there is "DEI" that doesn't amount to a dog whistle for discrimination. That was the case at 1 out of the 4 companies I've worked at. But it's the exception to the norm in my experience, and in that of my peers. It sounds like Meta has reached the same conclusion.
You seem to be an example of what I'm saying. There are very few people that are able to separate the goals of DEI from the practice when doing their analysis. If we're able to do that, we'll be able to find better solutions. And the solutions can't be found by or within individual corporations IMHO. It's much more complicated than that.
It's also possible that you and I have a different idea of what the goals of DEI are and should be.
Fallacy aside, nobody has successfully proven that holding a few spots at Harvard each year is enough to bring the likes of American Blacks back to socioeconomic parity.
You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?
Only one company had 40% threshold, the others had 33% and 30% respectively. They also didn't always hit those thresholds. But yes, the recruiters explicitly had 40% women in tech roles as one of their OKRs at one of my previous employers.
The only company I know of that has over 40% women software developers is ThoughtWorks. But they are an Australian company and it is legal for them to discriminate against men in that country. They are transparent about their use of a strict 1:1 gender quota: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-es/insights/blog/beyond-quot...
furthermore, he is blaming the company's decision on his COO and not on himself as CEO. more than almost any other founder, he maintained control over his company and for better or worse it is clear that he alone bears the responsibility for what the company does as a result of that control. blaming one of his most trusted, respected, and successful deputies for what he now describes as a failure does not reflect well on him as a leader in my esteem.
To be clear, Meta's "Diverse Slate Approach" was explicitly discriminatory with regards to protected class. It prohibited hiring managers from proceeding with an offer until at least one of the on-site interviews contained an "underrepresented group", meaning women and URM males. In practice this meant that white and Asian men had to wait a long time to get an offer even after they passed the interview rounds. But women and URM never had to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled because their presence caused it to be fulfilled.
To see how this is discrimination, consider a company that decides to wait 90 days before proceeding with any offer to a Catholic candidate, but no such delay if the candidate is not Catholic. Surely we see that this is discrimination. Even if we argue that the Catholic candidates are still getting their offer eventually it's still plainly discrimination. What if instead we rolled a dice and added 0 to 90 days of delay? Some Catholics have zero delay, just like non-Catholics. Is that still discrimination? Of course.
Now considering how the DSA works. Most candidates are not "diverse". If you look at the sequence of candidates with non-diverse (N) or diverse (D) candidates the sequence looks something like this:
NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND
So if we introduce the requirement that at least one interviewed candidate must be diverse, a non-diverse candidate may get lucky and the next candidate is diverse. Or maybe they'll be waiting a long time until a diverse candidate is interviewed and fulfills the DSA. But a diverse candidate never has to wait for th DSA to be fulfilled. Sounds like a familiar situation where an offer is randomly delayed on the basis of protected class, right?
It's true that the DSA never lowered standards for diverse candidates. But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.
> NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND
If the pattern resembles this for a group that represents over 50% of the broader population (women and some subset of males), I'd argue that it's highly possible there are other, possibly discriminatory, factors at play.
Over 60% of the U.S. population don't have college degrees, but you obviously wouldn't expect Facebook's hiring to be proportional to that. The demographics of CS graduates is much closer to what you'd expect the hiring percentages to reflect (and they do)
So we should expect 50% men in elementary schools? How about lumberjacks? Should those be 50% women too?
A non discriminatory hiring process should reflect the demographics of the workers in the given field (other factors like geography matter too). Why would we expect, say, pediatricians (80% female) to have 50% men?
Achieving a 50/50 split between men and women in a field that's 80% one gender requires hiring one gender at 4x the rate of the other. This line of thinking is what leads companies to set up discriminatory hiring practices in pursuit of DEI goals.
The even government office of non discrimination compliance agrees: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs
> The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market.
Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.
I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!
For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.
One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.
In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.
I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.
1. https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...
Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.
I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.
If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?
When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.
I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.
Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.
And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.
You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.
One question we should ask ourselves is why a field would be dominated by men and not evenly split, or mostly women, etc. Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?
This question only ever seems to be asked about "desirable" fields. There doesn't seem to be as much of a push to achieve gender parity in sanitation work[1], for example.
The whole exercise feels like an effort to take attention off of the problem of income inequality by instead framing it as an issue of identity. Under this framing, "fair" means we have parity in male and female CEOs - never mind that those CEOs are still making 300x or more of what "frontline" workers make. Why not focus on pushing for higher wages in female dominated fields like teaching or nursing?
[1] https://www.zippia.com/sanitation-worker-jobs/demographics/
On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.
Rather than "desirable" I would maybe say something like "economically dominant". If the highest-paying and most-powerful careers in a society don't at least somewhat meaningfully reflect the demographics of that society, then, well, what does that demonstrate, and is that something we want to try to fix? Hopefully you can at least see the position where the answer to that last question is yes, even if you don't agree with it.
It may be that hire paying fields attract men who want to be able to attract mates. That women prefer men who make more than them is pretty established in research, as is is the lack of interest in what a woman makes as income. (On average in psych studies). Why wouldn’t we expect results and society to reflect this?
It's not -- "why wouldn't we expect important career X to have way more men than women, given <whatever>"
It's -- "if important career X has way more men than women, is this a good thing, at a net societal level, regardless of <whatever> that can explain why this is the case?"
Nobody is looking for complete and perfect parity in all influential careers. The intent is just to make sure that, for the highest-impact careers, we should work towards making them representative of our society, as much as possible
What should the split be?
Take a step back on the supply side. CS education isn't a requirement, though only 20% of CS undergrads are female.[0]
I'm curious what your stance is on the swathe of asians who got negatively handicapped for checking "asian" on their college applications.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few...
Because men and women have different interests. Even if you think that socialization is the cause, the law mandates that all applicants are treated equally with respect to gender. If gender discrimination is carried out in pursuit of a 50/50 gender split, that does not make it legal.
> Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?
What people feel is hard to quantify. But what we can quantify is the call back rates of male and female applicants. Tech companies are more likely to call back women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
The point of all of this stuff is to find a balance between evaluating applicants independently and objectively according to a well-defined set of critera -- equality of opportunity -- and producing an end result that is representational and fair in the societal sense -- equality of outcome.
A good illustration of this concept is the "equality vs. equity" cartoon, with people of different heights trying to look over a fence. https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...
I understand why a lot of folks, especially technically-minded folks, bias for equality of opportunity exclusively. This is essentially what a meritocracy is. There's lots of good things about equality of opportunity and meritocracies, but they also have problems, and one of those problems is that, generalizing, they both tend to reflect and reinforce pre-existing biases, and in particular implicit biases. This is exactly the kind of problem that DEI initiatives are trying to address.
I don't really want to litigate the pros and cons of these two concepts, I just want to point out that they both exist, and that initiatives like DEI can have as goals improving one or the other or both.
It's fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're only interested in equality of opportunity. That's probably the position that most people who are anti-DEI would take. But I think it's also fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're interested in both equality of opportunity and outcome. Both are valid.
Using protected class as a factor in employment is prohibited nation-wide under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is no "balance" between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former is required by law. Using protected class as a factor in hiring doesn't become legal just because it's done in pursuit of equality of outcome. They are not both valid concepts, at least not unless you're willing to violate people's civil rights. One is what employers are legally required to do. The other is illegal discrimination.
Also, think through the implications of this photo in the context of hiring: https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...
What's really the difference between having a group of candidates standing on a box, and lowering the bar for those candidates? At the end of the day, whether it's standing on a box or lowering the bar the end result is the same: some candidates are considered to have met expectations despite not reaching the same heights as others.
I highly encourage you to think through whether this is a good metaphor to use to justify DEI in a workplace setting.
You are focusing on the specific details of the hiring process, and evaluating stuff like DEI in terms of a single hiring outcome. I'm trying to clarify that the relevant scope is actually much broader, for example it might be the demographics of the entire engineering org within that company, measured after this updated hiring process has been in place for a year or more.
What you're describing is not how it works. Chiefly, the hiring pipelines are not set up for a single role, but a whole family of them. They are filled ahead of need. (Or were, at a time when this would've been taking place.)
There are other inaccuracies, but suffice it to say, this comment section is full of comments by people who have never been hiring managers talking about how hiring works.
Had to look up URM
https://diversity.ucsf.edu/programs-resources/urm-definition
Thanks for the link. A bit of clarification: in this context Asian was not in the category of URM since Asians are overrepresented in tech roles at Meta. So URM meant Black, Latin, and American native.
Can’t wait for other physical characteristics like height and weight to join the fray, or other markers of attractiveness/power.
i imagine they are still close enough, and perhaps she still has enough stock, that she understands he's willing to compromise his own morals for the financial benefit of the company
on a personal level, it is demoralizing to read though
Probably super easy to launch a Facebook or Instagram competitor app right now. All you have to be is the anti-Zuck and you get free marketing.
It's the perfect window of opportunity. Launch, get traction, get funding, scale. It's all teed up.
Literally every social network launched in the last decade was outspokenly anti-Zuck, all of them failed or are struggling. People don't care.
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This level of political engagement seems kind of out of character for him
Is he just kissing ass, or is there genuine frustration on decaying business culture? It feels like both he and Musk are idealizing some kind of past version of SV where WLB was less of a concern
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1xolsJ
Returning to his value roots I see.
An MSN repost of a Fox Business article, that lifted a specific sentence from a NYTimes article, where the source was "people familiar with the meeting".
This is likely as accurate as the game of broken telephone that kids play.
More than once it has happened where some NYT article will discuss some private meeting at the White House and attribute it to someone like, "According to a credible source at that meeting, blah blah". Later it is confirmed that that well placed source was the President, or the secretary of state, etc. Credible news organizations don't just repeat whatever some random guy claims to have heard.
>Credible news organizations don't just repeat whatever some random guy claims to have heard.
cough Steele Dossier cough
What about it? IIRC Buzzfeed published it after it had well-leaked McCain had fowarded it to FBI?
The NYTimes has a history of fabricating and outright lying to serve their own corporate or affiliated agendas. See for eg:
https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica...
The New York Times is probably the most trusted, and trustable, publication in all of journalism.
"Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low"
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
And from the NYTimes themselves:
"‘Trust’ in the News Media Has Come to Mean Affirmation"
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/11/why-has-tru...
So it is two articles that both ultimately source from NYT? They are not commonly flat out incorrect, and when they are tend to correct the record. So I would say your statement is hyperbole and wrong. NYT sources are likely quite a bit more trustworthy than eight year olds whispering to each other for fun.
The NYTimes has a history of fabricating and outright lying to serve their own corporate or affiliated agendas. See for eg:
https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica...
The New York Times is probably the most trusted, and trustable, publication in all of journalism.
"Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low"
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
And from the NYTimes themselves:
"‘Trust’ in the News Media Has Come to Mean Affirmation"
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/11/why-has-tru...
Fingered again
Wow. Who was the boss? This is contemptible stuff.
He always has been (literally, due to the share structure of Meta and how much Zuckerberg owns), he is just trying to throw someone under the bus for the change in political winds.
Yes he's a chameleon and yes he's a turncoat and so on, but it's interesting that he's gone all in on this. There's some debate whether wokism is finished for good or if it's merely gone dormant. He seems to be betting that it's gone for good.
That's exactly what confuses me. Yes, I would expect some easing on that, but it's so 180° that I find myself wondering, what exactly is that force that defines the direction. Like, who dictates the agenda. I mean, I would always assume that any 4chan-level explanations that have an actual person making the order of how this will go are not exactly true and things must be a little more complicated than that. But how something "a little more complicated" can lead to this? Why yesterday Zuckerberg felt that he must, and today he is totally convinced he must not? Surely he has a better grasp of that than me, but how the fuck does it work? Who decides that one day we are woke, and the next day we aren't?
After all, nobody assumed that wokism is dead the last time Trump was elected. If anything, it was harsher than ever. Why today major supporters of it suddenly say "fuck that"? Please don't tell me that it has anything with Zuckerberg becoming BJJ aficionado, because I won't buy that shit.
Intellectual fads—memeplexes, if you will—burn through populations. There’s a whole lifecycle to a memeplex taking up residence in a host, then eventually getting ejected. Once you’ve ejected a particular memeplex from your mind, it’ll probably never make it back in. You have antibodies. Repeat that for enough people and the tide can permanently turn on a memeplex. Or at least for several decades, until there is a whole new generation of hosts who don’t have immunity.
It’s seemed pretty clear to me that this would eventually happen for wokism (or whatever you want to call it). It’s simply not sustainable to tell the majority of your potential hosts that, because of their inborn, unchangeable attributes (being white and/or male), they are the problem. And people really do not like feeling physically unsafe, which they do in most coastal blue cities, and which almost all women do when there is a man in the bathroom with them.
So the difference between 2024 and 2016 is that the memeplex was just getting rolling in 2016, but today enough people have antibodies that, to any keen observer, it’s days are clearly numbered.
It would take a LOT of explaining about the context and political climate as to why this is the case. Im on mobile so I'll give a very reductive take, the political guard rails have been removed. Billionaire after billionaire, politician after politician has gone to Maralago to meet with Trump and kiss the ring, they've been making donations of millions to his inauguration fund. Trump specifically threatened Zuckerberg with prison, so he fell in line, and that is the "right" thing to do in his eyes because he stands to gain a lot by getting on his good side, he could even get tiktok. On the other hand, his other option is prison or endless harassment from the government. This is the same deal with Bill Gates and many others. It's all performative bs and these corporations have never had any convictions other than to make the most money possible and to accrue power by taking the path of least resistance.
School integration was woke. Women voting was woke. Interracial marriage was woke. Gay marriage was woke. Over the long run, progress only goes in the right direction. There's no debate, just noise. The year to year skirmishes aren't terribly important in the big picture.
Moving away from color and race blind hiring to discriminatory hiring was not woke, by your definition.
You think hiring was previously not discriminatory? Wanna explain this one: https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
Do you really want to get into this?
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We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/nationalistic/racial battle. Please don't create accounts to do that with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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yet another story pushed down the pipeline to push a culture war and divide us.
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People for some reason have an inability to separate the goals of DEI/EDI from the practice. It's possible that the goals are important and correct, but the implementation sucks. I am of this belief for many DEI programs I've seen. But I'm still pro-DEI. It just gets implemented often too simplistically and naively, enabling the creation of more controversy and also likely many poor outcomes in organizations. As for what percentage of DEI programs result in such poor outcomes, I dare not guess, I have too little data.
However, the comments that Zuckerberg is making makes me think he really thinks that the goals of DEI are themselves intrinsically bad. He seems to be leaning into the stereotypical type of thinking that causes the issues that DEI is trying to address in the first place.
I'm disappointed. I would have hoped that he'd be capable of diving into more nuance.
The goals of most DEI programs can't be achieved without discrimination on the basis of protected class. If software developers are 18% women how can a company achieve 40% women software developers without discrimination? And that was a DEI goal a previous employer used. In fact they had the same goal for electrical engineer too despite being 10% women.
Ambiguous goals like "make people feel welcome" doesn't require discrimination. But those are not the DEI goals people object to. 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at implemented DEI goals in the form of numeric thresholds, and used discrimination to achieve them. Only one carried out DEI in the innocuous manner.
I'd argue if you're looking to achieve DEI goals in the short-term rather than over decades, you're going to fail because the backlash and other consequences will destroy any progress you think you made. And I think that's what we're seeing. You can work towards DEI goals without achieving them in the short-term and still look to make good changes over the long run. But it requires a systems view of everything, including helping kids from various backgrounds to get access to the education they need and then helping them to be in an environment where they can actually successfully learn stuff. That's a multi-generational multi-decade problem, not a corporate fiscal year problem.
This is sort of no-true-scotsman argument. Sure, there is "DEI" that doesn't amount to a dog whistle for discrimination. That was the case at 1 out of the 4 companies I've worked at. But it's the exception to the norm in my experience, and in that of my peers. It sounds like Meta has reached the same conclusion.
You seem to be an example of what I'm saying. There are very few people that are able to separate the goals of DEI from the practice when doing their analysis. If we're able to do that, we'll be able to find better solutions. And the solutions can't be found by or within individual corporations IMHO. It's much more complicated than that.
It's also possible that you and I have a different idea of what the goals of DEI are and should be.
Fallacy aside, nobody has successfully proven that holding a few spots at Harvard each year is enough to bring the likes of American Blacks back to socioeconomic parity.
It's a flawed means to an end.
You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?
Only one company had 40% threshold, the others had 33% and 30% respectively. They also didn't always hit those thresholds. But yes, the recruiters explicitly had 40% women in tech roles as one of their OKRs at one of my previous employers.
The only company I know of that has over 40% women software developers is ThoughtWorks. But they are an Australian company and it is legal for them to discriminate against men in that country. They are transparent about their use of a strict 1:1 gender quota: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-es/insights/blog/beyond-quot...
furthermore, he is blaming the company's decision on his COO and not on himself as CEO. more than almost any other founder, he maintained control over his company and for better or worse it is clear that he alone bears the responsibility for what the company does as a result of that control. blaming one of his most trusted, respected, and successful deputies for what he now describes as a failure does not reflect well on him as a leader in my esteem.
I think he did her dirty. Don't think he is where he is today without her being by his side back then. She was and remains a fantastic operator.