I find it fascinating that this new wave of post-modernist "equalism" demands segmenting and dissecting every group into ever smaller minorities. Black, Asian, Latino, Gay Asian, Lesbian Latino, Hetero Black Woman, etc.<p>Ignoring for a minute that post-modernism is an absurd philosophy based on the denial of empirical science, how is this in any way productive? Would it not make more sense to focus on an employee's skills and experience, rather than their genetic and ethnic backgrounds?<p>It is increasingly obvious due to the irrationality of these initiatives that this is indeed a form of political posturing, and nothing more.<p>Ironically, a community of entrepreneurs such as HN would pay the highest price for ignoring empirical evidence in favor of political posturing. Small companies can't trade political posturing for special treatment by the government. That practice is firmly reserved for established monopolies such as Amazon.
(<a href="http://gasstationwithoutpumps.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/percent-bachelors-degrees-women-usa.png?w=873&h=907" rel="nofollow">http://gasstationwithoutpumps.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/pe...</a>)
Shows that < 20% of CS & Engineering Degrees go to females in the US<p>Google employs 30% females (<a href="http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html</a>)
Facebook employs 31% (<a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-facebook/" rel="nofollow">http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-...</a>)
Amazon employs 37% (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=10080092011" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=10080092...</a>)
LinkedIn employs 39% (<a href="http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-diversity/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...</a>)<p>Obviously these companies need to hire employees to do non-engineering tasks and in an effort to seem "diverse"
They likely hire only females for these jobs. It would make sense that the company had 20%/80% doing actual engineering work as there is no reason females cannot do just as good a job with the same experience. That means that half the females hired at these companies are doing non-engineering work which pays lower. This would account for the pay gap. When people ask for further diversity at these companies and equal pay what they are asking is to give an unfair advantage to the less qualified.<p>I am aware this is an unpopular opinion but I felt I needed to post it as I saw someone else posted it and then took it down after being harassed.
I am being completely serious with this question - how is caring about "race diversity" not racist? It always strikes me as such - if you care about race diversity that means you perceive race as having a meaning, while in reality it doesn't have any. Am I the only person with such an opinion?
This has less information than the numbers Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn released. There manager vs non manager breakdowns but what about tech vs not tech? I'm fairly disappointed to see so little information from Amazon.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html</a><p><a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-facebook/" rel="nofollow">http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-...</a><p><a href="http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-diversity/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...</a>
Note: The two donut charts for "Race and Ethnicity" are visually misleading. The color assigned to each race or ethnicity is not consistent between the two charts, so a visual comparison of the two is much less useful. ("White" is represented by blue on both charts, but green is "Black" on the overall chart and "Asian" on the Managers chart.)
I wonder if these numbers are actually just their full time employees or if they're including their migrant workers that they employee part time at fulfillment centers.<p>Harper's ran a great article on Amazon's elderly migrant workforce back in August (paywalled): <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/the-end-of-retirement/" rel="nofollow">http://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/the-end-of-retirement/</a>
"We're Amazon. Our global workforce is incredibly diverse, but the working conditions and real take home pay for our rank-and-file fulfillment workers are uniformly miserable."[1]<p>[1] Type "amazon workplace conditions" in any search engine.