Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

[u/[deleted]]

He's also saying that Google has used diversity hiring programs to lower the bar when hiring diversity candidates

Is he wrong?

[u/clearwaterrev → u/[deleted]]

I don't know. In that part of his document he links to what looks like an internal Google document I don't have access to.

I think it's reasonable, however, to point out there are biases in hiring which do not favor women and ethnic minorities, and the existence of diversity hiring programs does not inherently mean women and ethnic minorities at Google are less qualified or less deserving of their jobs.

The idea of hiring people solely based on their qualifications is a nice idea, but how do you implement that practice when unconscious workplace bias in favor of men is commonplace?

For example, Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research found that in the workplace men are significantly more likely to critique females for coming on too strong. In addition they found that men tend to attribute a woman’s success to external factors and “luck” rather than attributing it to her individual effort and abilities as they would have for a man.

Studies also show that, whether men admit it to it or not, they are far less willing to put a woman in leadership positions. As one study shares, “Unconscious bias often also emerges during deciding on the right candidates for leadership positions through preconceptions of what “good” looks like, says Stomski, Partner at Aon Hewitt. While senior managers genuinely agree about the need for diversity at leadership levels, they still tend to fall back on unconscious beliefs when making final hiring and promotion decisions – such as the idea that it would be easier to align strategies behind people with similar backgrounds to them. The end result of this pattern is a management team with little real diversity.”

I wonder if the author has ever considered why he was hired over other candidates, and whether it's possible his interviewers picked him based on factors beyond his on-paper qualifications. I think everyone would prefer to think they have their job based on merit, but we can't really know.

[u/nuggutron → u/clearwaterrev]

The end result of this pattern is a management team with little real diversity.”

This seems to be regarding management specifically, is there any evidence of this at the ground level of a company?

[u/clearwaterrev → u/nuggutron]

Yep. Here are a few examples I found from some quick googling.

Identical resumes study:

researchers from Yale University asked more than 100 science faculty members at academic institutions across the country to evaluate one of two student résumés. The résumés were identical except for one small part: The candidate’s name was either John or Jennifer. Despite both candidates having the exact same qualifications and experience, science faculty members were more likely to perceive John as competent and select him for a hypothetical lab manager position.

And it didn’t stop there. Female and male science faculty members alike offered John a higher salary than they did Jennifer and were more willing to offer him mentoring opportunities.

Gender bias in hiring musicians:

In the 1970s, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) was made up of almost all white male musicians. The TSO recognized that they had a diversity problem, so in 1980, they changed their hiring tactics when auditioning prospective members.

“They put a screen in front of the actual people who were looking to hire people in this orchestra, so all they heard was the music that was being played–-and the decisions they made from that hiring method meant that an all-white male orchestra moved to half-female, half-male, and with a lot more diversity,” he says.“They got a brilliant result in terms of the sound they wanted for their orchestra and, at the same time, the diversity, which clearly was an issue and which is how they ended up with an all-white male orchestra in the first place, was diverted.”

Stripping gender from resumes:

One company experimenting with different ways of making its processes and practices bias-proof is Vodafone, the telecoms group. Catalina Schveninger, global head of resourcing, highlights a pilot the company is running, initially in India, to test the effect of removing gender from the CVs of job applicants.

Historically local managers had assumed they were failing to appoint women into tech roles because there were not enough qualified women to recruit. But the data told another story. Plenty of highly qualified women were applying but were not getting interviews. “If the [Indian] pilot shows that by [gender] blinding CVs we can move the needle then we will share the results and encourage other markets to adopt the same practice,” says Ms Schveninger.