I've seen quite a few people angrily push back on statements like 'pipeline problem' and I don't understand why. Obviously there's more to it than that, but it's also that (with hard numbers to back it up).
I think it’s because focusing on the pipeline problem focuses on the parts of hiring that a company doesn’t have control over. Those decisions often happen in high school and tech companies don’t have direct influence in these decisions.
Instead, companies are better off focusing on making the later parts of the pipeline less leaky. Minorities tend to leave tech at a higher rate than average due to factors the company has some control over.
I generally agree. However, they should be addressing both.
They should have outreach programs in high schools, partner with schools to offer intro to coding, or even help sponsor some students for after school coding classes. Sure, these won't necessarily convert these individuals into employees. But it would be part of being a good corporate citizen even if those students end up going to other companies. So there are things they can do. They aren't completely powerless.
> They should have outreach programs in high schools, partner with schools to offer intro to coding, or even help sponsor some students for after school coding classes.
Here's the thing: by the time students reach high school, a lot of weeding out has already happened. I recall such a program where where they had something like 7% black students. All but one were children of wealthy Nigerian immigrants. The rest of the class was actually more Asian and White than the district.
To take one obvious example: there's massive under-performance of black men (vs. any other group) at every stage of the educational ladder up to the tertiary level. There simply aren't enough qualified candidates for engineering jobs for firms to be representative of the relative populations at a national level.
36% of white men have at least a bachelors degree; only 19% of black men do. Black college graduates choose STEM majors at only two-thirds the rate of white graduates, and one-third the rate of Asians.
I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that talking about the pipeline problem is unacceptable precisely because the powers that be do not want any of the issues you describe to be addressed.
I came to this conclusion by watching what the California government has done in the SF Bay Area over last decade or so.
They keep narrowing commuter corridors, which disproportionately impacts low income workers. They only allow high density housing to be built far from transit corridors and walkable downtowns. They explicitly keep housing scarce via zoning restrictions, then have special ghetto projects for low income families.
Public education has gone from top ten to bottom five in the country, but rich areas have excellent public schools because they let parents pay to add back educational programs that have been defunded in the poor public schools.
Oakland has a special privatized police force for its downtown commercial district area so that the businesses there don’t have to “subsidize” police coverage for the other (mostly black) parts of the city.
1. pay their taxes, so the government can fund public schools so that they can educate black kids in the inner city and poor suburbs better. That can be step one.
Also, the GP did say they can do scholarships and such, there's that. Also (shudder) consider hiring from state schools and don't filter on where you got your degree, but the quality of education, which yes is much harder to judge. Also, fucking train your own hires, don't expect them to be brill out of the gate.
There is a lot they can do that really is actually quite colorblind on the surface that will lift all boats, but will actually disproportionately lift PoC since they skew worse on the metrics, as you stated.
The solution to this seems to be dumbing down the curriculum so that more kids "succeed". With things like "anti-racist math" [0] or "equitable math" [1]
