I work for a Fortune 500 company. One of our senior technology execs was just listed on Business Insider's "Top 100 people in AI". Our company has no products that use AI. The closest we have come to actually doing anything with AI is a tiny trial of GitHub Copilot.
15 years ago I worked with a guy on NGO projets in Africa.
The projects were either prototypes, concepts, in testing, or small scales. Plus he was honestly the type of manager that was better at talking than doing so I wouldn't say he was much involved in them apart from claiming he was doing good.
Well, it worked because he was in the top 100 people of Time magazine the year after for "saving millions of children".
It's pretty interesting to me to see these patterns of who gets credit and who doesn't. My ex-wife got off of active duty and joined the national guard to go to college nearly 20 years ago before she got back in as an officer through ROTC. While she was in the guard, she deployed with a civil affairs unit to Djibouti, which we have always maintained a permanent presence in to secure shipping lanes for oil. She was their supply sergeant and she identified a problem with the local water supply and got them all the equipment they needed to fix it, and in the process probably legitimately saved at least thousands of lives. She got a bronze star for it, but certainly no magazines will ever have heard of her.
It's even more interesting that she got branch-detailed to the field artillery when she got back in, and I'm pretty sure she became the first female to ever command a combat unit in the Army when she filled in as XO of a forward line battery and they lost their permanent commander. But you'll never see her in a history book or read about her on Wikipedia because it was still illegal at the time for women to serve in combat units at all, and officially she was on the books as part of the brigade headquarters company, only filling in because they were severely understaffed.
I try to keep her in mind when I feel like I'm being slighted at work and not getting sufficient recognition for accomplishments as I earn a salary triple what she gets as a Lieutenant Colonel now.
Every now and again, I think I'm in danger of becoming too cynical. It seems that I still have some way to go before my naïvety is properly calibrated to the real world.
I'm sure this would out your company, but if you can say, I'm curious what the blurb said about why they were included in the list. I mean, I'm sure the real reason is "a PR person with good contacts at Business Insider", but I think it would be illuminating to know what the BS reason they wrote up is.
To take one obvious example: there's massive under-performance of black men (vs. any other group) at every stage of the educational ladder up to the tertiary level. There simply aren't enough qualified candidates for engineering jobs for firms to be representative of the relative populations at a national level.
36% of white men have at least a bachelors degree; only 19% of black men do. Black college graduates choose STEM majors at only two-thirds the rate of white graduates, and one-third the rate of Asians.
I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that talking about the pipeline problem is unacceptable precisely because the powers that be do not want any of the issues you describe to be addressed.
I came to this conclusion by watching what the California government has done in the SF Bay Area over last decade or so.
They keep narrowing commuter corridors, which disproportionately impacts low income workers. They only allow high density housing to be built far from transit corridors and walkable downtowns. They explicitly keep housing scarce via zoning restrictions, then have special ghetto projects for low income families.
Public education has gone from top ten to bottom five in the country, but rich areas have excellent public schools because they let parents pay to add back educational programs that have been defunded in the poor public schools.
Oakland has a special privatized police force for its downtown commercial district area so that the businesses there don’t have to “subsidize” police coverage for the other (mostly black) parts of the city.
1. pay their taxes, so the government can fund public schools so that they can educate black kids in the inner city and poor suburbs better. That can be step one.
Also, the GP did say they can do scholarships and such, there's that. Also (shudder) consider hiring from state schools and don't filter on where you got your degree, but the quality of education, which yes is much harder to judge. Also, fucking train your own hires, don't expect them to be brill out of the gate.
There is a lot they can do that really is actually quite colorblind on the surface that will lift all boats, but will actually disproportionately lift PoC since they skew worse on the metrics, as you stated.
The solution to this seems to be dumbing down the curriculum so that more kids "succeed". With things like "anti-racist math" [0] or "equitable math" [1]
I have absolutely been pressured to "reconsider" when I marked an intern in a diversity target group as a no-hire, and said intern was then switched into a different team.
EDIT 1: The more effective mechanism that my company uses is to verify at the time of hiring a candidate that you can show you at least considered diversity target candidates (in engineering, basically women and non-Indian/Asian/white).
EDIT 2: also definitely see diversity target group employees being flagged for second-look when identifying layoffs, PIPs etc.
