Response to "Community Post #1: Exposing Hidden Biases at Google to Improve Diversity"

It seems that racism and sexism is still present and alive but not in a direct way but more in a concealed and private way. People may say that they aren't racist or sexist but they end up judging people by their race or sex. This is not only a problem in the tech world but also in other lines of work. People who are hiring end up judging people by their names or even their looks. People don't know it but they end up being really biased to certain groups and certain sex without even knowing they did it.

Marianne Bertrand, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, did a study to see if having a really white name like Emily Baker, or Brendan Williams or a really Black name like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones affected the chances of getting hired.They found out that the authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result. (Chicago GSB)

In the tech world, men are the dominant sex in all major tech companies. Apple has 98,000 and 70% are male, in Facebook 70% out of 7,200 people are male, in Google 70% out of 48,600 are male, in Twitter 70% out of 3,300 are male, and in Yahoo 62% out 12,200 are male (The New York Times). It seems that people are basing their hiring on their sex, but that may not be the case. Maybe it just happened to be that they had the credentials they were looking for.

People end up judging people by sex and race but they don't know it because its concealed. I think that it doesn't matter if a company is mostly male, or female, just as long as they judge them by their credentials, rather than their race or sex.