Farhad’s and Mike’s Week in Tech: Betting on … Diverse Work Forces – The New York Times

More on lack of diversity in tech, this time with respect to Snapchat and its obliviousness to diversity:

Farhad: Finally, Snapchat put out a racist picture filter — again. This week the photo-messaging app unveiled a feature that lets you turn your face into that of an anime character. At least, that was what it said it intended. What it ended up with was “yellowface” — a filter that turns your face into a crude racial caricature of Asian people. This is bad enough on its own, but it’s made worse by the fact that it isn’t the first time this happened. Snapchat released a blackface filter in April.

The company has taken the filter down, but what’s the deal? Should we read something more into the fact that the company has recently put out two obviously overtly racist products?

Mike: So it’s pretty mind-boggling that both of these things got through the organization and into the app. It brings up a few questions.

What do the ranks of the organization look like in order to make something like this O.K. in the eyes of at least a number of people in the company? Questions of diversity obviously spring to mind — which Snapchat has never really addressed or divulged numbers on publicly — and I imagine a more diverse staff might have at least caused some people to question their choices in putting these filters out.

If there were indeed people inside of Snapchat that found these filters objectionable — and I certainly hope there were — what does the organization structure look like and how does it function in a way that allows these decisions to go unchecked and ultimately carried out? Are those people who would object able to make their voices heard internally? And if not, why not?

I doubt we’ll get a ton of transparency from Snapchat on the issue, since they’re quite a secretive company anyway.

Farhad: katie zhu, a Chinese-American engineer and product manager who works at Medium (and who prefers that her name be rendered in lowercase), published a really insightful post on this incident. She urged people to delete Snapchat.

 “They’ve repeatedly demonstrated their blasé attitude towards issues of diversity, inclusion and representation,” she wrote.

She pointed out that Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s chief executive, was unwilling to disclose how diverse his company is during an interview at the Code Conference last year. Spiegel also seemed uncomfortable with the notion that the tech industry has had a particular problem hiring a diverse work force (which seems obvious according to the numbers).

“I think I’m saying that diversity is a challenge everywhere, including tech — and that’s kind of that,” Spiegel told the interviewer, Walt Mossberg. When Mossberg pressed him, Spiegel still seemed hesitant. “There are so many things that feed into diversity and inequality that unpacking them on the stage is probably not the best use of time,” he said.

Mike: I was at that conference. It was super awkward.

Farhad: Snapchat says it recently hired a recruiter to focus on hiring underrepresented minorities, so perhaps Spiegel’s view has changed.

To me, these two incidents do underscore the importance of a diverse work force: Tech companies are usually small groups of homogeneous people who are trying to make products that satisfy the entire planet. At the very least, a diverse work force can help guard against them making choices that offend large swaths of their potential userbase. Even more than that, a diverse work force can help them come up with new ideas that may not have occurred to 20-something Stanford bros.

Mike: That’s why I applaud companies that make it a goal of theirs to strive for diversity at the outset, something that, unless you’ve really made it a point to think about these issues, an entrepreneur may not have even thought of. Perhaps it is also on the venture capitalists and mentors to remind young entrepreneurs that aiming for diversity is, in fact, a strength, and something to be considered when growing the company.

One would hope this doesn’t happen again, but this is tech: anything goes, however terrible.

Source: Farhad’s and Mike’s Week in Tech: Betting on Jet and Diverse Work Forces – The New York Times