First, one of the demographic categories into which the workforces are broken down is "White." A coarse-grained category like "White" does not reflect the ethnic diversity of many employees. For example, the engineering team at the company I work for has more than a dozen Eastern European engineers. The fact that non-American Caucasians make up a significant portion of US employees at my company should be interpreted as a clear indicator of how globally diverse our workforce is. But, this diversity is lost when all Caucasians, no matter what their ethnic background, no matter what country they hail from, are lumped together as "White."
(In my career, I have had the privilege of working with many gifted Eastern European engineers. Eastern European engineers have been a fertile source of technological innovation in the software industry. One needs to look no further than Sergey Brin, Jan Koum, and Max Levchin to grasp the significance of Eastern European computer scientists/entrepreneurs to the American software industry. It would be tragic if the next budding Eastern European computer scientist were to emigrate to the United States only to find that he was placed at a material disadvantage in getting a job or funding for his startup simply because he was “White.”)
Next, the second largest demographic category reported by Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo is "Asian" (another disgusting coarse-grained category). At Google, fully 30% of the workforce is Asian. At LinkedIn and Yahoo, the number is even higher, 38% at LinkedIn and 39% at Yahoo. These percentages are far higher than the percentage of "Asians" in the general population, which, according to the 2010 US Census, is 5.6%. The fact that there are so many members of this minority group employed at high-tech companies is another indicator of global diversity and should be a cause for genuine celebration. Instead, it is not emphasized in the various information releases at all. Apparently, when it comes to the diversity Stasi, "Asian diversity" does not count as "real diversity." (I have written about this phenomenon before; see my blog post To CNN, "Asian diversity" is not real diversity.) To the diversity Stasi, only the number of blacks and Hispanics counts towards "real diversity."
Third, the apologetic, groveling tone of the announcements is simply disgusting and reeks of political correctness and moral cowardice. Apparently, companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo are now going to kowtow to the diversity policy and start to "work" to remedy their alleged lack of diversity. For example, the Google announcement is titled "Getting to work on diversity" and states:
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Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity ... [W]e’re the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be—and that being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution.
LinkedIn's announcement states:
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Over the past few years, we’ve experienced tremendous growth and have become a truly global company, but in terms of overall diversity, we have some work to do.
White and Asian employees of high-tech companies need to ask themselves: What is my company going to do to "work" towards greater diversity? For example, if "Asians" are overrepresented now, then, presumably, one of the areas that high-tech companies will want to "work on" is bringing the percentage of those Asian employees down so that it is in line with the percentage of Asians in the general population. Does this mean that high-tech companies will introduce racial criteria and quotas into the hiring process, for example, adding points if a candidate is black or Hispanic, and subtracting points if the candidate is Asian? Such a practice is, of course, identical to the racial preferences that California Democrats recently tried to introduce into the admissions policy of the University of California through constitutional amendment SCA-5. Asian high-tech employees need to stand up and shout: "What the hell are you trying to do? We have sacrificed, studied, and worked hard to get where we are. We would like the same opportunities to be available to our children if they study and work hard, too. But now you are telling us that study and hard work are not going to be enough because we are Asian?!?" When one considers the response of the Asian community to SCA-5, it is incredible that high-tech companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo would run the risk of alienating such a significant and important portion of their workforces by implying that Asians will henceforth be placed at a material disadvantage when applying for jobs. Of course, "overrepresented" whites should be similarly outraged.
Instead of meekly acquiescing to the diversity Stasi and declaring themselves ready to institute policies that will poison their relationship with their workforces, Silicon Valley companies need to stop apologizing, stand up for themselves, and resist. The fact is: high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have some of the most globally diverse workforces in the world. Anyone who works here knows this. The fact that the percentages of blacks, Hispanics, and women in high-tech companies is lower than the corresponding percentages in the real world is not because the hiring practices of high-tech companies are somehow discriminatory. On the contrary, the fact that high-tech companies do not hesitate to go to countries as far away as India, China, and Russia to find highly qualified engineers, provides indisputable evidence of how unprejudiced they are in their search for quality engineering talent.
If society in general were producing larger numbers of black, Hispanic, and female engineers, high-tech companies would snap them up in a heartbeat. This is because high-tech companies in Silicon Valley have always sought out the best engineering talent they could find regardless of such inconsequential characteristics as gender, race, and sexual preference. If a young person from India or China or Russia has outstanding software engineering skills and is willing to work at a good wage, why should companies be discouraged from hiring him/her? This purely meritocratic approach to hiring is one of the chief virtues of the high-tech industry. If Silicon Valley were instead to allow itself to be infected by the poison of racial and gender preferences, the consequences would be dire indeed. Imagine a Silicon Valley where companies were not free to seek the best-qualified employees, but were forced instead to use racial quotas to reach acceptable "diversity goals;" now ask yourself how long it would be before such a place became nothing more than another dispenser of racial patronage, not driven by best business practices, but sclerotic and riven by special-interest-group corruption. Silicon Valley must not let this happen. It is time for the Valley to stand up for its purely meritocratic hiring policies, and to challenge other industries to achieve the kind of business success that these policies have helped to achieve.
It is also time for Silicon Valley to rethink its alignment with the Democratic Party. It is the Democratic Party that tried to push through SCA-5, which obviously would have had an enormously detrimental effect on Asian enrollment at the University of California. And it is the Democratic Party that is now pushing for racial preferences in the hiring practices in Silicon Valley. In my blog post Jesse has landed, I wrote about the recent visit to the Valley by none other than Democratic Party grandee Jesse Jackson, whose purpose was to strong arm high-tech companies into instituting a system of racial quotas. In sum, the Democratic Party is seeking nothing less than to poison our university system and our businesses here in California with racial and gender politics. It is time for executives at Silicon Valley companies to stop groveling, get some friggin' spine, and tell the Democratic Party: your racial and gender categorizing is not welcome here.
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