The board is made up of about 25 experts, among them Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"; Maria Ressa, a co-founder of the Filipino independent news site Rappler; Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights nonprofit Color of Change; Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; Reed Galen, a co-founder of the conservative anti-Trump super PAC The Lincoln Project; Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University; Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician who is international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center; Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia; Safiya Noble, an associate professor of information studies and African American studies at UCLA; Damian Collins, a member of the British Parliament; tech investor Roger McNamee, a frequent Facebook critic; and ex-CIA officer Yael Eisenstat, former head of election integrity operations for political ads at Facebook.
Marc Benioff is one of Paul Ryan's big donors.... maybe he should start paying taxes with action instead of talking about it in self serving press interviews
Source? I found an article from 2012 saying that he donated a measly $10,000 before Ryan was fully revealed to most as the craven monster we know him as today. Not saying you're wrong, just curious to know exact details.
chief diversity officers will make a corporation more diverse - that is their job. companies that do PR around their diversity are not doing it right - D&I is an industry competitive advantage. The most diverse organizations in the Fortune 1000 outperform their industry median financial returns by 35%. I agree the 'covert' manner works but the role of chief diversity officers is critical to the macroeconomic impact of globalizing and increasing market representation in our modern workforces.
Correlation isn't causation. I'm not saying that diversity is bad, but if the most diverse of the fortune 500 did outperform others, diversity as a direct cause of this is what I'd like to see evidence of. Many other factors might have contributed to their better performance, one could attribute one of those to be the cause?
Even further to that, what do these companies DO. I doubt that BHP Billiton - or many petro-chemical companies - have a lot of diversity. I bet Wallmart does - especially minority hires.
And what even is diversity? Google employs a lot of Indians - both in India and the USA - and that helps diversity along all lines - racial, gender as India doesn't have the same gender tech bias as the west. Is that AMERICAN diversity? Using BS numbers, if US born employees are 90-10 men to women, but overall it is 70-30, then the best means of increasing diversity could be more foreign hires. Does that benefit who people are hoping it does?
I'm not for or against any position here, it is just that the history of measures like this is to use euphemistic "statistics", aka "lying with numbers". If companies can find a way to manipulate the numbers - consultants instead of employees, inhousing female dominated positions etc - then this will be easily doable. In fact, I think I might start a consultancy in just that :)
I find it more plausible that a diverse workforce and market success are both effects of a good company culture, good hiring practices etc. than suggesting that diversity somehow causes success.
Not least because seeing diversity as a causal factor seems to imply that a person's skillset is somehow linked to their gender/race (or whichever diversity criteria is in play), and hence that a diverse workforce leads to a broader skillset.
I think it is curious that CDOs exist as distinct from the Head of HR position. How does that work on the org chart, are they peers or who reports to who?
Chief Diversity Officers (CDO) might make corporations superficially diverse, in a purely demographic sense.
But I'd argue that it's not so easy to make a company truly diverse--in the sense that people are friendly (or at least congenial on a professional level), equally respectful of each other, and able to hold and tolerate varying/conflicting perspectives without respectfully, without animosity.
That makes for a truly enjoyable place to work, if you can find a company with such a culture. But it's much more rare than one might hope. It's just not human nature to treat each other that well, in general, by default.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it takes truly gifted/talented/experienced leaders, and they must cultivate a culture like that from the top down. It just isn't likely to evolve organically, without guidance.
Sad, but true, I think.
Anyway, companies that do succeed in that regard tend to be extraordinarily successful.
I once had a really incredibly great boss. He went to Georgetown, was very sharp and was an exceedingly shrewd business tactician, so that certainly helped. But this company succeeded in a way that seemed so effortless, in comparison with other less pleasant places I've worked.
It was a team effort; we had several developers who were very good at their jobs, so I certainly wouldn't attribute our success to anyone person. But I do really believe the way this guy treated us and motivated us the critical factor.
Yes - I have an hour every Saturday I put aside for a weekly mentoring meeting. I have a lot of people reach out to me for advice, but as a founder I don't have time to meet every request. Instead, I have my Saturday afternoon hold each week for a call or coffee with people who reach out for guidance on hiring engineers, fundraising, starting a startup so there is a controlled time slot for mentoring meetings. Being a founder is really hard, we're a startup that is post revenue, post seed venture, post product market fit - but everything just seems more complex as we get bigger and there are more failures all the time with bigger consequences. These mentor meetings with founders just starting out give me a healthy pause to realize how far we've come and I feel better knowing I can help other new founders not feel so alone in the early stage process.
Will hacker news ever be able to stamp out misogyny in this community? I really hope so. Whenever an article gets posted about my startup (we're a women led team) the comments section get's real sexist really quickly - look forward to the day that finally changes.
