[datawander]

I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not helpful at all to the "average" reader.

>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.

Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?

1/14 ~=7.14..%

I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank goodness for HN :)

[jcizzle]

Because the average reader may be inclined to think the numbers are reasonable, and then they'd be less likely to spark an outrage, and then this newspaper wouldn't get as many ad impressions.

[alukima]

I'm confused, black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population but 7.14% of tech workers and that seems reasonable?

What am I missing here?

[jcizzle]

Yes, it does. The number that matters is number of available black and hispanic tech workers versus the number of employed black and hispanic tech workers. If there was a large discrepancy between unemployment rates for technology workers along racial lines, then we could claim discrimination by companies.

Instead, what you and this article are talking about is that perhaps not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry. In which case, the failure would be on a lot of variables: community, family, schools, socioeconomic status, etc.

Blaming a company for not hiring non-existent people is sure great for Jesse Jackson's business model, though.

[DerpDerpDerp]

It's also possible that there is a legitimate reason (from a business perspective) they'd preferentially hired white tech workers, such as socioeconomic class leading to better training. (We see this effect in other places.)

I highly doubt that many of the confounding variables (age; exposure over time; socioeconomic status; etc) have been ruled out to come up with that statistic.

Not that I don't think there's a problem, just saying, the businesses might not be racist so much as minorities underperform (relative to their potential) because of socioeconomic factors. If that's truly what's happening, I'd argue that the place to combat that is the economics of the situation, and not attacking businesses for making prudent decisions.

[alukima]

I never, ever blamed the companies, I agree that " not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry".

[Edmond]

It could just be the particular writer's style, I doubt it is meant to misrepresent the facts, since there's no need to do so in this case, the facts by themselves are damning enough.

7%, when there should be about 30% means only 23% towards fair representation, that is still pretty bad. Of course there's the issue of the education pipeline.

You should don a hazmat suit before descending into internet comment sections, especially when it is about race.

[gretful]

does it necessarily have to be equal representation?