This retracted article is proof that there is a diversity crisis in Silicon Valley.
Forbes has removed a contributor piece titled “There Is No Diversity Crisis in Silicon Valley” after being hit with a barrage of criticism from readers, including many leading the tech industry’s movement to hire more women, Hispanics and African-Americans. The article, authored by journalist Brian S. Hall, argued that the healthy revenue streams and stock prices of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook were proof that the tech industry is doing well and has no reason to go out of its way to include more women or underrepresented minorities.
There is no crisis at all in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is doing absolutely gangbusters!Hall wrote, according to a cached version of the post.This is not a crisis. Silicon Valley is swimming in money and in success.
It’s interesting, in a pathological sort of way. If you define Silicon Valley as the successful companies and rich people living in an area on the south side of San Francisco, then yes, the rich people are rich. If you include all the people who live there, though, then the story gets more complicated, and there are all these people there and around the country who are not rich. But Brian S. Hall simply defined them out of the story. Convenient!
One could also argue that stock prices are a peculiar and narrow index of success. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never regarded the size of my bank account as a measure of success — if I did, I’d be very depressed right now, and I’d never have chosen to go into biology and academe. If Brian S. Hall used a different metric — say, whether they made the world a better place, or how happy the lowest level employees were — he might have gotten a completely different answer.
Another measure might be the ethical standards of a company. I hesitate to mention that one, because over and over it seems that the most unethical, exploitive, harmful companies thrive (see Nike, Uber). I suppose you could argue that virtue is a totally inappropriate concept to apply to Silicon Valley.
But another problem is typical of American economics: it’s entirely short-sighted. Silicon Valley is making money hand over fist right now, but will it be doing so in ten years, fifty years, a century? I know, the moneyed class doesn’t care. When the Morris Renaissance arrives in a couple of decades, and Silicon Valley crumbles while the upper Midwest becomes the new hotbed of innovation and profit-making, they’ll just flap their black wings and rise from the rubble of California and fly avariciously to descend on the riches of Minnesota. There will still be people left behind in the wreckage.
But they don’t count in the Brian S. Hall scheme of things.
I will just point out, though, that institutions that do think ahead are concerned. The US is undergoing a demographic shift, and while you may think that your company can do just dandy if you only hire white guys who graduated from Stanford right now, that’s not always going to be true. That’s a shrinking pool of talent, and if you’re only tapping the best people from a tiny subset of the workforce, you’re going to be left behind by the competitor who taps the best people from the entire workforce. I don’t follow major American companies, but the American scientific community is already gearing up for the changes coming: NIH, NSF, and HHMI all care very much that we expand our diversity now, because it takes 25-30 years to raise up a scientist. You can’t notice declining scientific output and then start hiring women and minority scientists, unless you have a time machine, because the time to put initiatives in place to encourage more education and enthusiasm for the discipline was decades before.
But you can’t build the time machine, because the black woman physicist who would have invented it never got the opportunity to go to Stanford, and all the white men in physics were inspired by Brian S. Hall and are making research decisions based on stock options.
I’ve lived and worked in Silicon Valley for over thirty years, and one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is the notion that “we’re in business to make money.” No you’re not, you’re in business to provide goods and services that satisfy your customers; money is the score of the game, not the object of the game (but I repeat myself).
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago.
The second best time is today.
“Everything is fine because i’m loaded” plus “you only need to care for women, POC, etc, if it there’s any chance that doing so will make you richer, otherwise fuck them”. Not a sick mentality at all….
Dreaming:
Or rather, “Everything is fine because I, along with my other white, male colleagues, are loaded.”
The idea that “if it’s making money, it’s ok” was used by gangster Al Capone.
Shouldn’t we assume, as a rule of thumb, that the exact opposite is true – if it’s making money hand over fist then it’s probably exploitative in some non-trivial way and at the very least could be doing a lot more to make the world a better place than it currently is?
#6 – Maybe if you amend your statement to say that if a company isn’t doing anything dramatically different than its competitors but is still making money hand over fist – or more accurately is getting bigger profit margins than its peers. I mean, innovation does sometimes happen…
But good Lord, the thesis of that article was “Why, there’s no moral crisis with slavery – my plantation’s making record revenues!”
The usual expression for that (at least where I’m from) is “I’m alright, Jack!”
Just like Donald Trump. He answers most questions by pointing to his poll numbers.
If his poll numbers are high, he must be right about those Mexican rapists.
cartomancer @6,
That seems like a solid rule. At the very least, it suggests that they’re almost certainly paying little or no tax, and thus freeloading on the rest of society. Tech companies/people seem particularly loath to acknowledge the existence and indeed necessity of social institutions: especially ironic for those graduating from land-grant (MIT) or tax-exempt (Stanford) schools.
I’ve worked in Silicon Valley for 35 years. In 1980, engineers were white guys, plus a handful of white women, and managers and higher were white guys, period.
Today, engineers are white guys and Asian guys, plus a handful of Asian women. Hardly any white women at all. Managers and higher are white guys, plus a handful of Asian guys. The Hispanics who live here only interact with SV companies as janitors and groundskeepers, and as bussers at the restuarants. African Americans basically aren’t allowed to leave the east bay.
If Brian S. Hall is unaware of these facts, he is utter crap at being a journalist.
I don’t know about the cartomancer rule: seems like it’s reasonable to make money hand over fist if you make something new that improves the lives of a lot of people.
If you don’t use that money to effect further improvement, though, then you should pay it out in tax so that others can.
how does that analysis differ from “let them eat cake”?
uncle frogy
billgascoyne@1, I have also worked in the industry for about three decades, albeit I left the Silicon Valley area about two decades ago. I concur with the confusion about “making money”, and recently had yet another run-in with that mindset: The company I now work for, Big Dumbie Co, recent shuffled the deckchairs around for the usual reasons (I presume you’ve heard them, “to improve communication”, “increase efficiency”, “decrease overheads”, “remove unnecessary bureaucracy”, and so on), with the emphasis this time around on the first one (communication). So naturally, I asked the executive what the metric was for measuring whether or not communication had improved. The answer was “increased profits”. Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s like counting the number of people eaten by sharks to determine how much cheese to produce.
This feels like damning by faint praise from someone who has to deal with this kind of bullshit argument all the time.
I kind of agree: there’s a claim by libertarians that companies that discriminate are at a competitive disadvantage, so they’ll get wiped out by fair employment practices. Therefore we should allow freedom to discriminate. Hall’s observation shows that the argument falls flat.
I bet he’s focusing on the word as only applicable to stock value trends (so therefore SV is not in crisis), while totally disregarding the “diversity” word in the title.
Clearly ignoring the long term version of “crisis”
the exact phrasing may not be accurate but failure is likely it is the time frame and the process of failure that are really at question. Markets do not seem to correct very precisely or gently more like indiscriminately and brutally.
The reason that rational control measures in the form of regulations are adopted is to mitigate or avoid the brutal correction and other problems that results from the laissez-faire practices we observe from the past.
for people who think so much about business and it’s related investment they seem to be prone to ignoring history which has what may be called data. They do sound like they think rather similar to creationists.
uncle frogy
re @15 quoted:
— emphasis added
I expect Aubrey to realize that publishing it, for it to later be used as a “teaching moment”, in “an example of wrong” form, does more harm than good. Too many people will see its distribution as endorsing the opinions, while never getting to see the rebuttal.
There’s certainly an industry that sells Diversity(TM) which deserves a ton of criticism. (Remember this debacle). One could also argue whether any sort of diversity initiative actually increases corporate profits. It’s kind of silly to say, however, that high profits among relatively non-diverse companies with diversity initiatives say anything about the need for or potential effect of diversity.
That said, I have to admit I’m completely lost by PZ’s critique. Would changing the demographics of the Silicon Valley ultra-rich lessen the harmful effects of concentrated wealth? If Silicon Valley is a negative force, shouldn’t we want it to fail by not recruiting ” the best people from the entire workforce? A world in which successful companies are more demographically representative of the country as a whole does nothing for the people whose communities are devastated by those companies.
I love the Reference #2: the “Chemical Free Chemistry Set”
It made beer come out of my nose!
@ #20 Oops, that got posted to the wrong thread.
unclefrogy@17: my point is that discriminatory hiring practices and a poor work environment don’t cause major financial problems for companies in and of themselves. Do you claim that they do, but slowly? If so, please provide evidence of such.
Easy, search “diversity versus profitability”.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090331091252.htm
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/23/the-growing-case-for-diversity-as-a-profit-creator.html
http://www.management-issues.com/news/3503/more-diversity-brings-increased-profitability/
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/is_there_a_payoff_from_top-team_diversity
Just a selection from page 1
“Why do we need them, anyway?”
Could anyone demonstrate better than this guy what the problem is? Business, technology, gainful employment, fulfillment, wealth: these things belong to us white guys. And why should we share what’s ours by right with a bunch of thems?
first the companies are not the technologies they are just the organization instituted to develop and market the technologies to their customers, the public or the government. we could wait and let “the market” fix the any problems that takes some time and often is very disruptive to society.
As referenced above there is a direct positive effect from changing. There is also the long term effects on society in general. There can not be any stability in a society where large numbers of the population are “locked out” of the benefits that are generated by that society. All companies and individuals exist within and are dependent on society and its stability to flourish or just to survive. When the balance shifts too far in favor the few over the many, the many have the habit of complaining and changing things often in a very messy way, it happens
uncle frogy
I attended a technology conference put on by my company yesterday. I’d say the men outnumbered the women by about 100 to 1. As a woman, I’m used to being in the minority at such events, but the demographics were so skewed at this one, it felt odd and uncomfortable even to me.
There’s a positive effect on profitability, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to problems if you don’t do it. Corporations are often dysfunctional in many ways, pissing enormous amounts of money on nonsense (e.g. on the upper management). Yet they do pretty well for themselves.
But really, I suspect we’re in violent agreement.
it seems to me that it is becoming clear that the question is one that society needs to answer since companies and the traditional leaders of society (white men) are reluctant.
How much diversity do we want and how do we want to do get it.. Why should we as a society tolerate such imbalances when the failure to do anything appears to have dire consequences fro society long term?
uncle frogy
They seem like a good index of sociopathy to me.
billgascoyne @ 1:
Sorry, I’m gonna have to disagree with you there.
If a company provided no value to anyone, and benefited utterly no-one but their stock holders, but still made pots of money (like many of the corporate raiders of yesteryear), they be a successful company.
If a company made all of its customers very happy with the highest quality goods and services and consistently lost money, they’d fail as a company.
The purpose of a company is to make money – how you get there varies, but that’s the goal. I’m not making a value judgement about this, mind you, but Wal*Mart isn’t an unsuccessful company because they treat their workers, customers, and supply chain like crap.
It’s one of the reasons that business-people aren’t as good at running government as they typically think they will be. Efficiency in government means doing as much as possible for people while taking in as little money as possible. Efficiency in business means the precise opposite.
But that’s what business exists for. A pyramid scheme is the perfect business: all profit, no product. That is the reason the public has to keep pushing regulations and restrictions to coerce, goad, cajole and bribe corporations into actually providing products and services worth a damn.
Tsk, tsk. Where were the trigger warnings for libertarians?