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Studies, data, conversation, and thoughtfulness around these issues are welcome and needed but this news article is, frankly, junk. I always like to look at data from the source, so I downloaded the original report, which The Guadian couldn't be bothered to link to. Let's start with the title of the article: > Black and Latino representation in Silicon Valley has declined, study shows However the report is about Asian representation, and although it includes some data on other groups it states: > Although we include the figures for black and Hispanic men and women, we do not use them for comparative purposes because EPI figures for those cohorts are highly sensitive to small changes. This is right in the executive summary. The next problem is that the article represents the study as being of "Silicon Valley" and the "tech industry", but the study is of just five companies: Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. These are all large corporations and there is no evidence given to suggest that this is a "Silicon Valley" problem and not a "Corporate America" problem. That's not to say that you can't draw conclusions from studying these companies, but you can't make sweeping statements about the tech industry based on them. Especially when so much of Silicon Valley is made up of startups. The valley is a dynamic place: two of those corporations no longer exist. Obviously problems exist, but I see no reason here to single out the tech industry for special blame, especially when no attempt is made to compare tech with other industries and "tech" is taken to mean a handful of large corporations. Worse still, by misrepresenting the nature and origins of these problems, we set ourselves up to fail when we try to address them. Uber's appalling culture, for example is firmly rooted in that of finance, why don't we talk about that? What do the finance industry's diversity statistics look like? |
I posted a top level comment that links to a study and another link to an article which links to several studies and got downvoted to oblivion. I don't think this sort of thing is _actually_ welcome here.