This is — and I can’t stress this enough — total poppycock

A kind of needlessly combative article but one which makes a critical point. Race awareness advocates tend to lose perspective, seem to lack awareness of context and almost never wish to engage with the trade-off implications that arise from their recommended solutions. From Cognitive Dissonance and Tech ‘Diversity’ by Sonny Bunch.

Bunch is reporting on an analysis of the ethnicity of Yahoo's workforce. The results of that analysis are here.

The original report in CNET by Richard Nieva, to which Brunch takes exception, states that

Yahoo on Tuesday released statistics about its workforce, and the employee makeup is — like many of the other tech firms that have disclosed data — mostly male and mostly white.

Brunch is outraged that this is misleading and that just how misleading can be confirmed simply by looking at the above graphic accompanying the report. It is not as if the author and magazine are even trying to make it hard to catch them out.

And it’s remarkably misleading, at least when it comes to race. (Sex is another matter, though I’m shocked, shocked that tech firms are mostly dudes.)

[snip]

Yahoo’s workforce is half-white. That’s not “mostly,” unless you take “mostly” to mean “the highest single percentage.”* But that’s a semantic point: the headline/lede are misleading because they want you to think that Yahoo has an abnormally or disproportionately high number of white employees. This is—and I can’t stress this enough—total poppycock. Indeed, if we look at the population as a whole, whites are actually underrepresented at Yahoo. Massively so. Non-hispanic whites make up 63 percent of the American population, well more than the 50 percent at Yahoo. Asians, meanwhile, make up about five percent of the general population but 39 percent of Yahoo’s workforce.

Brunch is too charitable. This is a classic example of ideology driven reporting. The ideology is that there is a massive and systemic discrimination by white males in Silicon Valley against women and minorities and these figures are offered up, out of context, to prove that belief.

But is that what the chart reveals? Of course not.

It shows that there are about as many women working at Yahoo as there are in the overall labor force. Yahoo's global workforce is 37% female. In the OECD females constitute close to 44% of the labor force. So women are slightly underrepresented at Yahoo than a simple comparison to the OECD would indicate, even without taking into account the actual countries in which Yahoo operates and what their actual female labor force participation rates might be.

The apparent moderate dearth of women in this technology company is likely explained by the fact that it is a technology company. Women earn approximately 17% of technology degrees (computer science and engineering) and they are 15% of Yahoo's tech employees, so no obvious cause for alarm there. If women are underrepresented in Yahoo's main field of endeavor (technology) in which most of their employees are involved, then obviously, the female percentage of the overall company is going to be low.

Similarly, Yahoo has 23% of their executive leadership being female. I don't know what it is in the high technology field but in most professions and fields of endeavor, (law, accounting, medicine, consulting, writing, music, etc.) women are between 15-30% of the top tier performers. So again, Yahoo doesn't appear out of line with what you would expect.

So on the gender side of things, there is no there there, despite what Neiva might be trying to imply.

Likewise, and more egregiously, on the ethnicity side of things. This is what really sends Bunch over the wall.

Yahoo is 50% white (in the US) whereas non-Hispanic whites are 63% of the population. Asians are 39% of Yahoo's employee base but only 5% of the US population.

So Neiva and CNET are trying to tell a story of a majority male, majority white company discriminating against women and non-whites when in fact the numbers with which they are working indicate that Yahoo pretty much has the employee gender breakdown you would expect in a country where relatively few women choose to take technology degrees.

Just as bad or worse, Neiva and CNET try to make a case for racial discrimination where there is no case to be made. They mangle the language to make 50% mean the majority, omit the fact that 50% of the employee base being white is well below the 63% you would expect.

If there is no male misogyny and no white racial discrimination, then who exactly are the racial bad guys? According to Neiva and CNET, its those Asians who are taking all the technology jobs from whites, blacks and Hispanics.

The vileness of the racial mindset and ideology are on full display.

And the absurdity and mindless maliciousness. Implied in the headline is that there are too many white employees. The implication is that this is a problem. Naturally the intended inference is that whites should be fired and replaced by blacks and Hispanics to make Yahoo statistically representative of the population at large. The racism underpinning that proposition only becomes readily apparent when you deal with the numbers as they are rather than the numbers as Neiva and CNET wish them to be.

If blacks, whites, and Hispanics are underrepresented, as they clearly are, are CNET and Neiva equally willing to make the recommendation that Yahoo fire Asian employees to beef up the white, black and Hispanic numbers?

And if they are not, and I believe they should not make such a racist recommendation, then why is it appropriate to do so when they thought it was whites that were going to suffer the loss of jobs?

Aggh! Just trying to follow their mental gymnastics leaves me feeling polluted.