The Silicon Valley Diversity Shitstorm

Talk about putting the cat among the pigeons. Journo Brian S. Hall wrote a short article about diversity in Silicon Valley: specifically "There Is No Diversity Crisis In Silicon Valley". It turns out to have been slightly controversial, as you can tell when you visit the original Forbes post:

The piece previously at this URL, titled "There Is No Diversity Crisis In Silicon Valley," published on 10/5/2015 [5th October 2015 for anyone using a sane date format], was deemed to have violated our Terms of Service and was removed.

Well, that's odd. What did it say? What could have violated the ToS?

Luckily, we can now read the original article on Brian's own site. An excerpt:

Silicon Valley doesn't just create greatness, it's probably the most open, welcoming, meritocratic-based region on the planet. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that disproportionately more Chinese, Indians, and LGBQT succeed in Silicon Valley than just about any place in America. Guess what? Everyone earned their job because of their big brains and ability to contribute.

The piece, to be fair, was rather heavy on anecdote. However in the ensuing Twitter blitzkreig there was some actual data posted including an illustrative stat on student study and degree achievements in STEM subjects which showed pretty clearly that white, Hispanic and black enroll in STEM programmes at about the same rate, but that the white students are disproportionately more successful in actually obtaining a degree. Asian students - of course! - enroll at twice the rate and obtain a degree disproportionately more often. So if you view a STEM degree as somewhat important in a Silicon Valley career then it's not entirely surprising that the ethnic makeup in SV correlates with those stats.

Anecdotally, Hall's assertions on race and LGBTQ seem about right to me, though I think he's missed a few letters off the latter term. The native Californians and other white Americans are distinctly in the numerical minority, and even obvious LGBTQ engineers are relatively plentiful. I also liked Hall's dig at the humanities as a contrast to "computer programming, engineering, chemistry — hard subjects that demand hard work", remembering the geography and history students lounging around after a couple of Finals exams early in the last semester after putting in a few strenuous 10-12 hour weeks, while the maths, physics and engineering students were still sweating away with 50 hour weeks revising for a series of painfully hard and objectively marked exams right at the end of the semester.

I'd probably take some issue with Hall's assertion that "Everyone earned their job because of their big brains and ability to contribute" - the latter is more aspirational than fact, SV hiring like anywhere else still has problems trying to determine whether someone who's obviously smart can actually be productive, and screws up that assessment reasonably frequently, but the basic idea is there. A SV company that does any discrimination other than by ability to do the job is going to shut off some of its source of talent, and in a hugely competitive hiring market that's a pretty dumb play.

Hall subsequently doubled down with the tweet

Tim Cook is gay Sundar Pichai is Indian Marissa Mayer is a woman They earned these roles. Their race, gender, orientation is not relevant

— Brian S Hall (@brianshall) October 8, 2015

It's worth noting that Google CEO Pichai came from a poor family in India and rose based on brutal merit. Though he had problems with the humanities in school:

He was a brilliant student but his geography and history used to let him down so he was never top of the year.

That's probably what annoyed all the humanities graduates who piled onto Hall on Twitter... Although it's a little tricky to argue for a glass ceiling for minorities in SV given the above facts, it didn't seem to stop a lot of people from trying.

SV still has recruiting and retention problems, and I'd call out the experience of women in particular - the tendency of male engineers to act like baboons is off-putting to any women engineers who want to be something other than male engineers with a slightly different placement of genitals. But I don't find anything particularly jarring, scandalous or untrue in Hall's piece, so I wonder why exactly Forbes decided to withdraw it under pressure. If it wasn't pulled because of falsehoods, was it pulled because it was too true?