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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, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 27 2018, @01:50AM (1 child)
Hasn't anyone confronted with this issue defended their companies by calling attention to the fact that engineering has a huge gender diversity problem, and Computer Science has the dubious distinction of being the worst of all? Seriously, engineering as a whole is on the order of 2/3 men and 1/3 women, if not worse, and CS has at times been a whopping 90% male. Been all kinds of speculating about why that is, but people still don't really know.
Don't know how much racial imbalance there is, but there's probably plenty of that too.
It's a shame. Seems CS ought to have a number of advantages that appeal to the disadvantaged and women in particular, such as, more telecommuting possibilities, and a low barrier of entry. You don't even have to own a computer, though with things like the $10 Raspberry Pi, and $99 laptops, there's not much excuse not to have a computer, certainly not the expense. No need to run up massive debt to buy expensive software either, not with Gnu/Linux, FreeBSD, and tons of killer apps such as web browsers, office suites, compilers, and more all freely available and of excellent quality, often better than proprietary offerings. A great deal of knowledge is also freely available online, and included with the operating system in electronic forms such as man and info pages.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @04:37AM
Man and info pages for noobs? They would have to successfully install Linux or a similar OS first...?
We should work on making sure we have a censorship-free search engine, so that the freely available online knowledge can be found. We need a new Google where I as an average person can stumble upon torrents, and alternative operating systems and new ideas.