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Federal labor officials have decided to reverse their longtime policy and release diversity numbers for government contractors such as Oracle and Palantir Technologies in response to a lawsuit filed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Reveal submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the workplace statistics of those and other tech companies as part of a project analyzing the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. We requested the companies’ official EEO-1 reports, which show the race and gender numbers for total US employees grouped by broad job categories.
But five companies – Oracle, Palantir, Pandora Media, Gilead Sciences and Splunk – objected to the requests, claiming that the diversity data is a trade secret. In each case, the US Department of Labor initially agreed with the companies and denied Reveal’s FOIA requests.
[...] On Oct. 30, the Labor Department notified the five government contractors that it would disclose their diversity numbers over their objections. Citing the lawsuit, the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs told the companies that it has “undertaken a supplemental review” and “will initiate disclosure.” The companies had until Nov. 19 to take legal action to stop the release of the data.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday November 26 2018, @09:39PM (2 children)
Affirmative action, if done properly, is an attempt to correct for problems that exist outside of the organization doing the affirmative action. For instance, the thinking might be that somebody who grew up dirt poor in the projects or a trailer park didn't have an opportunity to get the same education as somebody who grew up in a nice upper-middle-class suburb, which means the dirt poor kid's SATs are going to be lower through no fault of their own and might not reflect accurately on their ability, so we're going to pretend they did better than they actually did when deciding who to admit to our university.
Corporate diversity initiatives can mean that. They often don't, though, and instead putting window dressing on the fact that they are often hiring and promoting based on factors that have absolutely nothing to do with ability or effort, and those sometimes show up as a marked preference for younger, whiter, and maler employees.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @10:36PM (1 child)
Affirmative action is based on things like race and gender, not class. I guess it's not being done properly. then?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 27 2018, @03:09AM
Some aspects of affirmative action are in fact done on class indicators. A really big one that all top universities use in admissions is geography: You can generally tell how rich a family is by where they live, because that's very directly tied to housing prices.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.