Facebook’s diversity efforts show little progress after five years

&gt; When the Cambridge Analytica scandal went down, some pointed to Facebook’s overall lack of diversity as part of the problem. That’s because homogenous cultures lead to limited perspectives and potential lack of awareness of things that may be more obvious to diverse groups of people.<p>If the purpose is to gain greater perspective and awareness through less homogeneous employees, then it would be more effective to hire according to heterogeneous answers to questions about perspective and awareness, rather than by less reliable proxies like gender and ethnicity.

This is one of the comments on that article:<p>------- &gt; The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.<p>Why is that an upside? It seems utterly racist to me. Let’s try to substitute “white” with, say, Asian.<p>“The upside to this is that Asian people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”<p>Or how about the color black?<p>“The upside to this is that black people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.”<p>I wonder how that would go down? -------<p>I echo this sentiment completely. Why is anti-white racism being encouraged?

&gt; &quot;The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.&quot;<p>I am all for diversity, but this sentence upsets me. Decreasing one population in the place should not be the goal.

Techs diversity problems start early in school before college. Facebook are just the last mile.<p>The sex based targeting of childrens toys would be a good place to start , but you won&#x27;t see results for 20 years.

Can someone tell me why these tech companies even publish these numbers?<p>It seems like they always end up with egg on their face. And they have no obligation to be transparent as private (or public) entities.<p>But now they all have to have chief diversity officers and diversity councils and PR&#x2F;recruiting teams for diversity - all of which cost money and hasn&#x27;t seemed to move the needle very much.<p>And which as another poster pointed out, doesn&#x27;t fundamentally change the underlying issue about who applies to these jobs, who goes to school for computer science, etc.

And yet there doesn&#x27;t seem to be much concern that only 4% of Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations workers are female or only 25% of Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations workders are men.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;cps&#x2F;cpsaat11.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;cps&#x2F;cpsaat11.htm</a>

This is slightly off topic, but are their any numbers on what percentage of [women, black, hispanic, white, men etc] WANT to sit in front of a computer and program all day? I think we need those numbers in order truly measure diversity progress. [1]<p>If only 10% (made up number) of women are interested in software development, and 95% of that 10% are working in software, that&#x27;s good! Looking at all women and saying only 9.5% of women are working in software misrepresents all the progress has been made.<p>[1] Why these numbers would be different for each class of people is a whole different conversation involving nature&#x2F;nurture&#x2F;culture&#x2F;etc.

Looking at the graph, they seem to have the Harvard Asian problem.<p>Maybe they can solve it the same way, by hiring based on &quot;full personality assessments&quot;.

The fact is that diversity doesn&#x27;t start at companies. It needs to be part of parenting (encouraging daughters to explore STEM). Needs to be part of early education in schools, and also colleges. Until the diversity spectrum in college admissions and graduates improves, companies are going to find it hard to meet their diversity requirements if there aren&#x27;t enough diversity in skilled workers out in the market.

This Techcrunch write has a long storied history of playing identity politics some would even argue with racist undertones.<p>I recently saw a new &quot;the more you know ad&quot; on YouTubeTV and was really impressed with the message. Instead of playing identity politics and blaming &quot;patriarchal white men&quot; it encouraged women to join the engineering and science movement and become more active in technology. That&#x27;s the message we should be sending.

The serious way to boost diversity: go to poor&#x2F;minority communities in west and then developing countries in general and give young children the Raven&#x27;s Progressive Matrices test and recruit the best scorers into specialized academies.

Maybe because I&#x27;m a white dude, perhaps that means I&#x27;m not allowed to be a part of these conversations. I fail to understand what the goal of these efforts is. Why did we decide race, and sex are the important immutable factors that we&#x27;re going to measure?<p>I grew up in what is today Trump Country. My high school prepared me to work in a factory. Then the factory moved to China, and now the only jobs left in the area are retail and healthcare. I managed to move out, but the vast majority of people I went to high school with are stuck.<p>Why is economic background not a class we care about too? Shouldn&#x27;t economic mobility be a part of social justice as well?

&quot;In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.&quot;<p>No mention is made of the fraction of Asians, because their over-representation would undermine the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities. This intellectual dishonesty irks me.<p>There are industries such as education where the vast majority of workers are female. If men and women are in the workforce at about even levels, there must be some industries where men predominate.

At some point it boils down to who applies.<p>Example: Women are GENERALLY more petite, they struggle carrying firefighter gear (45-75lbs depending on your load out) and aren&#x27;t interested or can&#x27;t pass the necessary requirements to ensure their safety, they get fewer female applicants and thus more men are firefighters type of thing.<p>I imagine there are still fewer qualified female applicants than male. I imagine there are far fewer female applicants for entry-level construction jobs than male applicants too, doesn&#x27;t mean a construction company is dropping the ball or being discriminatory by default.

&quot;Anyway, worldwide, Facebook is 36 percent female, up from 31 percent in 2014.&quot;<p>This article isn&#x27;t written professionally.