Facebook manager quit after being 'harassed' over views on diversity

&gt;“I want to spend my time at a place willing to push further on diversity and inclusion. One where it’s not OK to write on Workplace that white privilege doesn’t exist.”<p>As a person of color, I would be very happy if it became policy to never use the phrase “white privilege” inside a workplace.<p>First of all it is making a blanket statement about an entire group of people. Saying &lt;race&gt; &lt;attribute&gt; is problematic as a principle.<p>Second, this too close for comfort to “white supremacy” for me. Both phrases describe white people as having a superiority to other races through the virtue of their whiteness.<p>Third, the phrase alienates people and makes them defensive. Most people can agree that having an environment where everyone can achieve their best is important. However, when you use words that cast people and their families as the villains and imply that they are not as deserving of what they earned as other people, then you turn them into your enemies.<p>I understand the phrase is trying to emphasize the historic and ongoing injustices against people of color. However, I think Trevor Noah’s phrase “black tax” is much more useful. This puts the focus on removing barriers and disadvantages, rather than on trying to remove someone’s “privilege”.

Heck, I would like Facebook to start hiring some enrolled tribal members so we can stop seeing accounts closed for having fake names. Just an FYI to any Facebook employee, the last names Good Iron, Yellow Horse, Walking Eagle, and Flute Player are an actual family names. I would welcome some diversity when talking about your customers.

According to this article, Facebook is &quot;still largely white.&quot;<p>According to Facebook, in 2018 46.6% of their US staff identified as white and 41.4% identified as Asian (50.3% percent of US technical staff identify as Asian vs 42.7% who identify as white.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;careers&#x2F;diversity-report" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;careers&#x2F;diversity-report</a>

&gt; One where if I call out that our board has too many white men<p>With only 1 woman on facebook&#x27;s board of 9, men are considerably over-represented. But white people are not.<p>The board has 5 non-hispanic white people, 3 jewish, and 1 black. US demographics for those groups are 60%, 1.77%, and 12.6%.<p>This means white people are 92% represented, black 88%, and jewish 1880%.

Well, what did she write? How did she &quot;criticize the lack of diversity&quot;? I feel like it&#x27;s a non-story without detailing what she wrote and what the backlash was.

There may be lot of problems with diversity in Facebook, but you can&#x27;t really be harassed on Blind: it&#x27;s all about getting real raw opinions. If you don&#x27;t want that, don&#x27;t use Blind.

What&#x27;s the difference between going onto blind (a non-work-sponsored app as I understand) reading dumb&#x2F;offensive internet opinions and going on to 4chan and reading dumb&#x2F;offensive internet opinions?<p>Was she required to use this app for her job?

At what point is a workforce sufficiently diverse? Is it just a matter of “too many white males in this room - remove some of them, replace with politically acceptable demographics”? Feels like even in a diverse workplace there are always going to be people not happy about “not enough people like me here”. Do we set quotas and start passing over qualified candidates to hit them? I’m all for fixing real problems, but the target on this one seems exceptional fast moving and mired in destructive unintended consequences.

This headline is extremely non-specific. Wasn&#x27;t James Damore also harassed over views on diversity?

Not that anyone ought to continue at a place they feel unwelcome, but if people that fall under the diverse demographic they&#x27;re advocating for quit, aren&#x27;t they just bolstering the status-quo they wish to disrupt?<p>That said, according to the article&#x27;s statistics diversity is continually increasing at Facebook.

She is openly racist and sexist so good riddance. Let&#x27;s hope she never is in position of power again. It&#x27;s interesting that those posts are always flagged on HN. Being openly racist and claiming moral high ground is increasing cultural problem. More discussion on it could be helpful.

As somebody who&#x27;s just incapable of acknowledging group-identity diversity is a thing worth respecting (though, I find individual diversity beautiful and fascinating) This was something of a rollercoaster:<p>Oh wow, a woman headed react? That&#x27;s cool.<p>Oh wait, a trans-woman... so that&#x27;s socio-cultural diversity though not biological diversity - still born a white male.<p>Unless transgenderism isn&#x27;t a choice but part of somebody&#x27;s biological nature, then it is biological diversity, right?<p>erm, is being biologically predisposed to not liking chocolate also biological diversity? Wow, how much biological diversity goes unnoticed by diversity advocates? Maybe fb is biologically diverse after all!?<p>Isn&#x27;t it cool we&#x27;re all unique individuals with unique interests, although fb has mostly people who all share an interest in tech. True diversity would be to get people not interested in tech at fb.

What about calling for the big tech companies to move to a blind hiring system?<p>You wouldn&#x27;t see a candidate&#x27;s face, name, hear their real voice, know their educational background, what economic class they&#x27;re from.<p>You would conduct interviews over chat and voice (maybe use voice morphing software), which seems entirely plausible these days.<p>If anything, it would probably improve the hiring of qualified people. Interviewers can penalize candidates for all kinds of irrelevant things, not just sex and gender.<p>This would largely eliminate the very toxic problem of &quot;diversity hires&quot; that serve to perpetuate stereotypes. It would truly level the playing field.

Sophie was the best thing to happen to React. She lead React’s adoption at the first company outside of Facebook, and single-handedly answered almost every question about React on stackoverflow for the first two years of its existence. She was the number one github contributor to and bug-fixer for React before she joined Facebook.<p>React as we think of it today simply would not exist without Sophie. The entire front-end ecosystem would be drastically worse.<p>It’s really sad to hear she won’t be leading the react team anymore, and worse to hear how some employees of Facebook treated her.<p>She’s hands down the best engineer I’ve ever worked with, and also a wonderfully kind and caring person.<p>Her leaving Facebook is a loss for the entire tech community. I hope her next endeavours treat her with the respect she deserves.

Recently I was at a tech meetup event at a bar with about 30 people, and two elderly ladies were leaving. They came over to our tables and asked, &quot;What kind of group is this that there&#x27;s all these men and only one woman?&quot; &quot;It&#x27;s a, uh... a technology meet-up.&quot; &quot;Ah, I see!&quot;

It’s unfortunate that the more diverse an organization becomes the more drama it seems to invite.