- Hey, welcome back, TechLead here.
Now, first of all,
I wanna say I did not really want
to make this video about anti-diversity
because I believe
that the intentions behind there are good.
However, I feel that we have gone too far
and I wanted to do a follow up video
on the manifesto video
that I did a few days ago about
how tech has become hostile
to certain types of people.
See after I posted that video,
I started getting some tweets from other people
and I did some more research into this
and I realized
that there's a lot more discrimination
in this field than I had thought.
And that's really disturbing to me.
And I know some people will say,
I'm one of the privileged people.
When you're privileged,
then equality feels like oppression.
No, this isn't really about me anymore.
This is about future generations.
My son, for example,
I would like him to get into tech as well.
And I'm just imagining this field
that can be very hostile to him
and other people like him as well.
So let me show you what I found
and I want you to keep an open mind about this.
Diversity, it's a very delicate subject to talk about.
It triggers a lot of people immediately
and I feel that if we can not even discuss
whether the approach is right
without somebody blowing up in your face,
then I think that's going
to lead us down a tenuous path.
And I want to preface this by saying
I support everybody get into tech.
I think that we can all learn the skill
but it should be a meritocracy.
So let's get into the first piece here.
So somebody sent me this screenshot
for an Oracle summer internship
that lists a bunch of eligibility requirements
like a GPA, computer science degree.
And then this says explicitly
that you must be African American,
Latino, Native American and/or a woman.
And that just seems pretty racist and sexist to me.
It excludes so many different types of people.
Not to mention it's also requiring you
to be a sophomore.
To me that sounds like age discrimination.
Now, regardless of moralities,
if you're to take a look
at the Civil rights Code Section 703 it says,
"It shall be unlawful employment practice
"for any employer to fail or refuse
"to hire any individual
"because of such individuals race, color,
"religion, sex or national origin".
So here's my problem with this.
The way I had to understood diversity programs was
that they would be for students
for underrepresented minorities
and they will not be in any employment capacity,
no internships, no full time jobs.
Because I believe that this is illegal by the way.
But if you wanna teach high school students
how to code,
if you wanna engage
with elementary school students
and get them more interested in STEM topics,
then that sounds perfectly good to me.
Just widen up that funnel.
But as soon as we started talking about internships,
internships, especially tech internships,
as say Facebook, Google, Oracle,
any of these tech companies,
they are so valuable.
Having an internship on your resume
is essentially a key
into a full time position.
And an opportunity like that,
especially if it is paid.
And offers you real-world work experience.
I don't believe that we should
be discriminated on that.
I believe it excludes too many people.
It's not fair.
It is not meritocracy,
and it may be illegal as well,
where the public and society have deemed
that this type of discrimination
on key opportunities simply should not be acceptable.
Now thinking in a little bit more,
I also noticed that we've got Facebook University
and Google STEP,
which is student training
in the engineering program.
But if you read the descriptions,
both of these programs,
they explicitly say
that they are internships, paid internships.
And so I find myself wondering,
well, why don't we just have internships
where we explicitly list certain races
and genders in which we'll accept
and which we won't accept.
And, I have the suspicion
that perhaps that these programs,
these diversity programs
are thinly veiled internships just
to skirt around the law of employment.
To me, it's kind of a loophole.
So when I posted about this on Twitter,
I got a bunch of responses,
but some of the responses really shocked me.
One of the responses was
from the leaders of BlackTechTwitter
and she said,
"I'm happy those are the eligibility requirements
"and all of you are mad about it
"well I don't care lol".
Someone else replies,
"Please find more of these,
"I would like to post them to my friends
"and colleagues so that they can apply".
And they justified this by saying that,
"It's illegal because up until now institutions
"were discriminating on gender and ethnicity
"and they wanted to change that".
So now, it's essentially reverse discrimination
and that was not what this movement
I thought was going to be about.
I thought it was about that firstly equality
and creating a better world for all of us.
Me and my children included,
not at our expense.
And then someone sent me this link to WomenHack
where they offer invite only events focused
on connecting top female engineers,
designers and product managers
with opportunities at diversity first companies,
you have to apply for an invitation
and you can meet a bunch of companies,
top tier tech companies like Facebook,
Oracle, Google, Lyft, Square, Asana.
And honestly once you allow discrimination,
the sword really cuts both ways.
I found this other internship
which only allows Indians,
H-1B visa Indians,
and they're only looking
for these types of people
for iOS engineering roles.
And so when I think about our children,
let's imagine someone has a white male son
and then they adopt a black daughter
and they're raising these two kids
at the same time in parallel,
these kids are not going
to have equal opportunities
and it's going to be strange.
The white male son won't be excluded
from virtually every coding curriculum,
bootcamp, internship, job fair training program,
events, conferences, parties, everything.
This white male son won't be excluded
and they may just make tech feel unwelcoming
and hostile to him,
especially when it is so unbalanced
in terms of the programs that were offered.
There's virtually no program out there
for any other type of person.
And of course there are
so many different types of people out
there in the world.
What about the underprivileged, poor, white and Asian males,
the Canadians, the Indonesians,
Philippines, Brazilians, Italians.
And if we're looking for diversity of thought
because we believe that diversity brings value
into the workplace.
What's to say that you can imagine some Chinese boy
who gets adopted into some black family,
he grows up with the culture
and he may have a better understanding
of the black culture
and what it can bring to modern tech society
than even say a black person who grows up
in just suburban white Kansas.
So my concern is not about
whether diversity is good or bad.
It's great, it would be great
to see more different types of people,
but it is about the approach
in which we are taking
that leaves out a lot of people,
not to mention in this day and age
where identity is so fluid,
you may have many women self identifying as males
and then they would automatically disqualify themselves
from such programs.
You may have people
who have only an ounce
of native American blood identifying themselves
as native American.
There may even be half races
where it's not really even clear anymore
and perhaps over time,
everybody's going to just get all mixed up anyways.
And I know some people will say
that I'm just another privileged Asian male
and I can't recognize that,
but I'm not really sure
what privilege you're talking about.
I grinded for 10 years applying
to Google every single year,
getting denied each time until I finally got in.
I sat in front of a computer for hours
by myself learning how to code
and then once I got into Google I hustled understanding
to code better than anybody else
until I earned the role of Technical Lead.
I was not just handed any of this stuff.
And as far as privilege goes,
research actually shows the opposite
where there's systemic bias
in favor of underrepresented minorities.
And so I think the issue we have here
as far as gender goes at least is
that the gender gap begins far before people even get
into these companies before they're applying to the jobs.
Even in high school,
only 27% of all students taking
the computer science exam were females
and then by the time they get to college,
only 18% of computer science degrees go to women.
Now this doesn't actually have anything
to do with ability.
According to research,
The Gender-Equality Paradox,
"Girls performed about as well
"or better than boys on science in most countries,
"and in almost all countries,
"girls would have been capable of college level science
"and math if they had enrolled in them".
So the researchers actually assert
that when women are empowered,
they actually go towards non-STEM degrees
because they feel they're even better in that
than computer science,
they claimed that,
"Some would say that the gender STEM gap occurs
"not because girls can't do science,
"but because they have other alternatives based
"on their strengths and verbal skills".
"In wealthy nations,
"they believe they have the freedom
"to pursue those alternatives
"and not worry so much that they pay less".
So as I see it,
if we really want to tackle this issue,
we need to be looking earlier
in the pipeline like at junior high
and high school students
and not so much at creating more internships,
creating more hiring programs
and tech conferences.
Because at that rate,
the graduation rate for women in computer science
is only 18%
and if you're trying to push it any higher than that,
then you probably do not have a meritocracy.
And that's not to mention,
I find that somewhat contradictory
that once women actually get into tech,
I've seen multiple female colleagues at Facebook and Google,
they cry and they have to quit in tears
because they plan to become a mother
and none that these companies offer chances for remote work.
These women, they wanna spend more time with their children.
There's just no way to do that
and so they find that they have
to give up their careers anyway
after all of that struggle.
So let's talk about some of the solutions
that I would recommend if we want
to pump these diversity numbers.
First of all, I would say that,
anything that is based on say your identity,
the way you are born should be excluded.
That's what I would like to see.
I would like to see this based on scale meritocracy.
If you're interested in boosting diversity numbers
because you think that diversity is a great skill to have,
then there should be a test for this such
that if you have seen Chinese Asian male
who is born into a black family,
if he can understand black culture,
black history better than a black person
then he should get the role for a diversity job
because he can bring more of these diversity perspectives,
underrepresented minority viewpoints
into a company and help represent them,
there should be a test that anybody can pass.
Secondly, personally, I would like
to see these gray zone summer internship programs
to remove the entire funding redirected
into public coding bootcamps
that are aimed at high school students
and junior high students available
to anybody who is willing and able
to code anyone who has the interest.
There's no need to discriminate on any sort
of identity politics here
and it's clear that we need more role models as well
from underrepresented and minority groups of people.
So I will launch a marketing campaign,
put the posters, YouTube videos,
showing all the types of different people
that are working in tech.
And then lastly I will look
into stronger maternity and paternity programs
that offer remote work,
part time work to help mothers
and fathers continue to raise their children
as they're continuing to do work.
The U.S is so far behind the other countries
in terms of this.
Other countries are offering one to two years
of paid leave, remote work,
part time work
and then the U.S
is only offering three months worth of leave.
It's just not enough.
And at this rate,
women who are also very interested in becoming mothers,
they may just abandon the tech field
and opt be a dentist or a doctor
where they have the ability to do part time work,
maybe hire a babysitter occasionally
and still be there for their children.
And then lastly, a bit of friendly advice.
If you're already in the system
and you believe that it is treating you unfair,
it's unwelcoming hostile to you.
(swallows)
I might recommend just self identifying
as a Native American black lesbian female,
and that should open up other doors for you.
Sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire.
So that'll do from me.
Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Let me know your thoughts on this topic.
If you liked the video,
give it a like and subscribe
and I'll see you next time.
Thanks. Bye.