[gridaphobe]

Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)?

What she did say is that it's not surprising that Google search produces biased results, given that minorities are underrepresented and topics like ethics are barely discussed in engineering schools.

It sounds to me like she is attempting to raise awareness of a systemic issue in the tech industry, which requires no qualifications other than knowledge of the issue.

[spc476]

> This is no surprise when black women are not employed in any significant numbers at Google. Not only are African Americans underemployed at Google, Facebook, Snapchat and other popular technology companies as computer programmers, but also jobs that could employ the expertise of people who understand the ramifications of racist and sexist stereotyping and misrepresentation and that require undergraduate and advanced degrees in ethnic, Black/African American, women and gender, American Indian, or Asian American studies do not exist.

> We need people designing technologies for society to have training and an education on the histories of marginalized people, at a minimum, and we need them working alongside people with rigorous training and preparation from the social sciences and humanities. To design technology for people, without a detailed and rigorous study of people and communities, makes for the many kinds of egregious tech designs we see that come at the expense of people of color and women.

So perhaps not a direct call to hire minorities, but a direct call to hire people versed in identity politics and various non-white studies.

[btilly]

Right.

- The company is bad because it doesn't hire enough black women.

- The company needs to hire people versed in identity politics to critique what they are doing.

- Programmers should be required to take the kind of course that she teaches.

- Programmers should be only allowed to work alongside the people versed in identity politics who can tell them what they are doing wrong.

In short, this is a power grab. "They done wrong, so people like me need to be given authority to make sure that they don't continue doing it."

That may seem like an extreme example, but it is along a natural progression for people whose profession is figuring out what should be complained about. Everyone wants to believe that what they do is important. That they should be given more power and authority. What that means in practice varies by profession. But that is always the tendency.