Ellen Pao is the gift that keeps on giving for this blog. She is part of the team at Project Include. These folks purport to tell companies how to build diversity. Some excerpts from Pao’s new site:
Research has quantified the financial benefits of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Despite this, we have yet to see significant improvement in diversity numbers. [i.e., business owners don’t want to be richer]
We want to provide our perspectives, recommendations, materials, and tools to help CEOs and their teams build meaningful inclusion. We know how hard change is from our own experiences. [Yet Pao’s husband managed to change from homosexual to heterosexual. Are there changes that happen in cubicle farms that are more difficult?]
We are focusing our efforts on CEOs and management of early to mid-stage tech startups, where we believe change is possible and can have a broad impact on the industry and beyond.
We want the girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups that we are encouraging to pursue STEM educations and future tech jobs to have real opportunities to succeed. [As noted in “Women in Science,” academic success in science may not constitute “success” using a financial or career flexibility yardstick.]
Making a few inferences from photos, names, and biographies on the site, it would seem that this is a group of people who (a) all identify as women, and (b) all but one identify as under age 50. This homogeneous group purports to be expert in achieving diversity. Yet if diversity is a guaranteed path to success, shouldn’t Project Include bring in (“include”) at least one more aged fossil (i.e., a Silicon Valley-dweller over 50)? Or some employees who identify as men? Or encourage some of their current team members to change gender ID to “male”?
[Separately, let’s look at the Project Include team to see if their biographies will inspire “girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups” to go into STEM. The wealthiest member of the group it would seem is Freada Kapor Klein. Her Wikipedia page indicates no training in STEM and all of her wealth is a result of marrying Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus. This is about as inspiring as the Harvard undergrad who said “I used to think that I wanted to be an investment banker, but then I realized that I could just marry an investment banker.” (if she had been a little more educated about U.S. family law, she might not have included the marriage part in her plan) Y-Vonne Hutchinson has done some awesome stuff, e.g., “worked with foreign governments, the U.S. Department of State, and the UN” and is affiliated with Harvard Law School. She is trained as a lawyer, however, not in STEM. Ellen Pao herself, of course, also has a law background and did not work at a technical job. Erica Joy Baker is described as “a seasoned software engineer” yet is being paid to spend “20 percent of her time at Slack advocating for diversity and inclusion, both within and outside of the company.” If she were a great programmer, why would the company want her to write code only 80-percent time?]
“Research has quantified the financial benefits of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.”
Where?
And does the quantification involve a + sign or a – sign?
Joe – basic cause-effect vs correlation error, so common these days. Successful companies can spend some effort on diversity, unsuccessful can’t – so misconstrued as diversity as cause and success as effect.
Joe, Alan: You’ve made me wonder if Ellen Pao and her new colleagues are highlighting a counterexample to their own “diversity yields profits” theory. They complain, sometimes in court, that Silicon Valley is exceptionally non-diverse (to the point where $100+ million in liability is generated by a single failure to promote a person who, at least at the time, identified as a “woman”). Yet these non-diverse companies they are hectoring and/or suing are exceptionally profitable and, indeed, are some of the most financially successful enterprises on the planet. (Silicon Valley also has some unsuccessful businesses, of course, but nobody seems to care about the composition of their workforces.)
How can the successes of Facebook, a gender discrimination defendant (see http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/03/facebook-being-sued-gender-and-racial-discrimination ) or Kleiner Perkins (Ellen Pao’s target) be consistent with this theory. If these companies had employed a rainbow coalition they would have grown to gather up 100% of Planet Earth’s wealth?
They don’t ever complain about lack of women in Alaskan salmon-fishing or the dirty side of coal mining. Only the jobs with perceived high status and good earning potential.
It’s always lawyers who complain about STEM: reason is that they need someone to feed off of. 100% STEM in an economy: growth and innovation. 100% lawyers in an economy: stagnation and over-regulation leading to death.
How is Ellen’s husband Buddy doing by the way? Are they still married?
Overall she seems to have had a pretty smooth career. Princeton EE, Harvard Law, Harvard MBA. (Do you really need an MBA after a law degree though?) Some fairly high level assignments then boom, a fine job at one of the top venture capital firms in the world (failed). Then, without much prior experience, slotted into a job as CEO of Reddit (failed). Now this, which I would categorize as a big career mistake. She’d do better to keep her head down for a few years and build some business credibility.
Perhaps the real lesson is Ellen Pao got promoted too quickly too far beyond her competence to succeed and should have taken the scenic route instead.
Maybe she is providing the latest in “diversity training” for young corporations who have not yet seriousl thought about their defense if/when a lawsuit based on these issues hits them. “Well we hired these prominent diversity consultants and we had our people go through the materials so they could get religion. What else could we do?” I would think that this can help limit company liability since most large firms have been doing exactly the same thing to satisfy their lawyers for decades.
Browsing linkedin it seems that only one of the staff are actual hard core STEM (tracy chou, software developer) although three have backgrounds in the peripheral area of systems admin.
@Tom “She’d do better to keep her head down for a few years”
Ellen Pao would have done a whole lot better keeping her head down with some of those rich silicon valley guys she met then spitting into a cervical cap. Sky’s the limit on California child support.
Charlie Sheen Asks Court to Reduce $55,000-a-Month Child Support Payment
I was just alerted about a few terrible examples of gender inequality in our more enlightened neighbor, Canada. I am sure it’s worse in the USA. It’s time we asked bricklayers’ unions about their plans for meaningful inclusion (Thanks, Ellen Pao!)
Top 10 Most Male-Dominated Canadian Occupations9
Occupation Total Employees Women’s Share of Total Employees
Heavy-Duty Equipment Mechanics 42,985 1.1%
Bricklayers 18,775 1.4%
Automotive Service Technicians, Truck and Bus Mechanics, and Mechanical Repairers 137,535 1.6%
Steamfitters, Pipefitters, and Sprinkler System Installers 20,305 1.6%
Electrical Power Line and Cable Workers 11,365 1.7%
Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Mechanics 23,940 1.7%
Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Gas Fitters 74,030 1.7%
Automotive Service Technicians 166,100 1.8%
Electricians (Except Industrial and Power System) 86,080 1.9
STEM is for fools of whatever gender and good career advice for women is choose a field where you can meet rich guys to marry or get prego with. Maybe sad but certainly true is highest and best use of a young American woman is spreading her legs for cash.
I’m wondering what corporation would even contract with this company? There have got to be lots of companies that offer diversity training less the “Pao” baggage.
It’s the patriarchy keepin’ her down, man!
RG – you have a lot to learn about protection rackets. Ellen Pao’s sales approach: “Nice little company you’ve got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
I assume Erica Joy Baker asked to spend “20%” goofing off on her “inclusion” social media passion project – or is this something companies are now doing to inoculate themselves against Paos?
@phil – Kleiner Perkins probably the most diverse of any big VC, Doerr wanting to help resolve it opened him to attack. Lack of diversity is a giant problem and it needs to be fixed, but like parenting, legal rewards mostly go to leeches not those intended to receive or needing help. Pao just shiny marketing object now. Sorry, my cynicism meter nowhere near most of this sites participants.
a few questions: do you think diversity is desirable or not? Should companies/schools/society/anyone be doing anything to promote it? If so, who should be responsible for doing so? If not, should we instead discourage diversity if it in fact makes industries less profitable, as you are arguing here, and slows economic growth.
Second question: With the comment regarding Erica Joy Baker–can you elaborate on the logic of “If she were a great programmer, why would the company want her to write code only 80-percent time?”. That doesn’t make sense to me. Why is “Because the remaining 20% of time she is doing something that is also valuable to the company, for which she is also highly qualified” not an acceptable answer?
Related to that, but separate: If I spend a few hours of my time, for which y work is paying me, talking to university students about my job in the hopes of encouraging them to apply, instead of doing my technical job, does that signify to my coworkers that I have bad technical skills and should be fired?
do you think diversity is desirable?
I like MLK’s idea – that we should be judged by the content of our character (and in the case of work, by our job performance and/or capabilities) rather than by the color of our skin or what gender we identify with this week. It seems to me that these are extraneous traits that should be completely irrelevant to hiring and promotion decisions. Is it desirable that employees have a diverse range of preferred sports teams or of favorite cuisines? Not particularly – it’s really irrelevant to their ability to do their jobs. If it is really true that women make 74% of what men make and that they are just as capable, then employers are missing one hell of an opportunity to save on payroll. Since businesses generally are concerned with maximizing their profits already (because the CEO’s bonus depends on it) they don’t need Ellen Pao or the government to give them unsolicited “profit maximizing” advice, which I suspect wouldn’t really work because Ellen Pao doesn’t actually give a damn about how much profit my company makes and isn’t really interested in “helping” me.
BTW, women are already slightly more than 1/2 the workforce. Do you think that we need to encourage “diversity” by for example hiring more male elementary school teachers, or more white NBA players, or is this a one way street? Will Ellen Pao be asking for more women to be hired as electrical linemen and sewer diggers or does she only want more “diversity” in pleasant office jobs?
Saw this on another blog…
Trump’s had 3 wives.
1st wife: 14 years
2nd wife: 4 years
3rd wife: 11 years and counting.
Guess which wife was American.
Guess which wife was American.
Immigrants – doing the Trumps that Americans won’t do.
Ok so if I understand correctly, diversity is an acceptable feature of a workforce, but essentially irrelevant. The only thing that’s not irrelevant is maximizing profit. Does it matter if this is long-term or short-term profit?
In many companies, people work in teams, and effective communication between people is often necessary in order to create a profit. So communication between team members is important in addition to their individual contributions. Should it be fine for an employee whose job performance equals or exceeds that of other employees to be fired because his or her teammates dislike working with him/her because of some”diverse” characteristic, since perhaps making an entire team work with someone who all but one of the team doesn’t like might make the team less productive?
How could your job performance be good if your co-workers all detest you? Ask Ted Cruz. In my experience, Americans are not really racist or sexist (and in yuppie type places its a badge of honor to say “some of my best friends are black”) so if your co-workers all hate you, it’s not because of your diverseness but because of they way that you are acting which certainly goes to your job performance.
If on the other hand , the other workers are really racists/sexists and mistreating a co-worker, that goes to THEIR job performance and they need to be retrained and/or disciplined. But many minorities have such exquisitely tuned anti-racism/anti-sexism radar that they pick up imaginary “micro-agressions”, so you have to proceed cautiously to be sure that there is really something there.
In my experience Americans are not really racist or sexist either. I’ve heard plenty of people say that girls are bad at math, but of course they’re joking (right?). And plenty of people ask my husband if he is less of a man because I have a more advanced degree than him, but of course they are just trolling (right?)
That is just my experience. My experience is affected by where I grew up, where I went to school, what I studied, and where I work. It seems kind of obvious to say that “Different people have different experiences”, and I think it’s dangerous for me to form opinions about the United States as a whole, and what our laws should be, based exclusively on my personal experience.
If you are an employee working some job, one thing that might be of interest to you is keeping the barrier to entry to your profession high, so that you face less competition. If you can convince all the gatekeepers to exclude some people from your profession, you will benefit from this in the form of reduced competition. Racism and sexism are really useful tools for this. In order for someone to be disciplined for being racist or sexist, the company as a whole needs to consider racism or sexism to be a problem.
In my thought experiment, the person isn’t fired for being hated, they’re fired (or not hired) for being a woman or being black or whatever. Not so long ago, this sort of thing was commonplace (e.g. Emmy Noether wasn’t allowed to teach math at University of Göttingen, and lectured there under David Hilbert’s name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether). We don’t hear about these things happening as much today, which I think is largely due to laws that make them illegal (there are “protected classes” against whom discrimination is illegal). Diversity groups like the ones discussed in this blog post likely helped put some of these laws in place. Do we want these laws to go away?
Not so long ago, this sort of thing was commonplace..
Emmy Noether died 80 years ago. To me that WAS long ago. The impression that I have is that nowadays university departments are dying to recruit female faculty and given two candidates equally qualified the scale would tip in favor of the woman 10 times out of 10.
From what I can gather, no one wants to roll back the anti-discrimination laws. As best I can tell, “diversity” is the new euphemism for “affirmative action” which in turn is euphemism for “positive discrimination” – rather than drawing a line and saying from now on we will be race/gender blind, we make up for what poor Emmy suffered by discriminating against white men for the foreseeable future.
As for girls being bad at math, 49 out of the last 50 Fields medal winners have been men, but that was probably all due to sexism.
“From what I can gather, no one wants to roll back the anti-discrimination laws.”
I don’t think it’s true that no one wants to roll back anti-discrimination laws. I think there are people who would like to get rid of anti-discrimnation laws, they are just not as loud on some corners of the internet as people who are advocating for more diversity.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/24/471700323/north-carolina-passes-law-blocking-measures-to-protect-lgbt-people
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/07/11/2288171/rand-paul-zero-tolerance-discrimination/
Maybe anti-discrimnation laws are bad because they limit what private companies can do, and maybe we should get rid of them.