Part II: Speed
Tech industry needs this secret weapon Jeff Yang | August 27, 2014
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(CNN) -- A few decades ago, I remember grousing to a college friend that as an Asian American male, everyone I met assumed I was studying some kind of science or engineering -- as if the idea that I might want to pursue a career in the arts, humanities or communications was ridiculous. My friend responded that as a 6-foot-7 African American pre-med student, he would be ecstatic for someone to actually believe he had an interest in a STEM field, as opposed to, say, basketball. Back then, we laughed off the exchange as a sign of how the stereotype grass is always greener on the other side.
Well, the fact is, stereotypes aren't quite lies; they're more like distorted versions of the truth. And the diversity statistics that the tech world's biggest firms have been shamed into releasing this year have been revealing: the numbers show that there are a heckuva lot of Asians working in America's technology industry...and very few African Americans and Latinos.
According to the reports, more than four out of every 10 engineering staff in these tech companies are Asian. That includes 23% of Apple's programmers and engineers, 34% of Google's and Twitter's, 41% of Facebook's and a staggering 57% and 60% of Yahoo's and LinkedIn's respectively.
By contrast -- stark, painful contrast -- around 4% of employees at these companies altogether is Hispanic and only about 3% are black. In both cases, Apple is pulling up the numbers; without the fruit company's 7% Hispanic and 6% black engineering team, the numbers would plummet.
This is just embarrassing. To their credit, the tech companies understand this. Each of them revealed their numbers with sheepish blog posts that asserted the need to "do better" in recruiting black and Hispanic technologists.
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But these same posts have failed to celebrate (or even address) what would appear to be a singular diversity highlight: The very large percentages of Asians in the engineering workforce.
Maybe that's because these statistics aren't exactly what they seem. The numbers released for Asian engineers have lumped U.S. citizens and permanent residents together with foreign nationals working on temporary H-1B visas; over 40% of H-1B visa holders are Asian (India alone accounts for 25%), most of them employed by tech companies. Take out the H1-B visa employees, and the eye-popping numbers of Asian technologists drops by half.
There's also the reality that being an Asian technology employee can be a professional dead end. A gilded one, to be sure -- the average salary for a computer programmer is around $75,000 a year -- but the statistics on leadership-level employees show that most Asians in the tech industry hit a ceiling well before they reach management status.
The percentage of whites, blacks and Hispanics who are executives is the same as their percentage in engineering roles. Asians, meanwhile, are about half as likely to be managers as they are to be coders and hardware hackers.
"I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice underrepresentation by Asians in Silicon Valley at the executive level relative to their presence at lower levels," said James Hong, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who began his career at Hewlett-Packard and went on to co-found one of the early dot-com sensations, the portrait-rating site HotOrNot.com. Hong points out, however, that it's not clear whether this is more likely to be evidence of racial bias or a byproduct of immigrant culture.
"Were we on average trained as children to be overachieving bookworms who respect authority and avoid conflict, and do these traits inhibit our progression into the upper levels of management?" he asks. "Did strict Asian parents restrict their Asian American children from socializing with their classmates, making them incapable of leading others?"
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It's a question I sometimes wonder about every time I double-clutch before raising my hand to share an opinion, or defer to a supervisor's decisions even when I disagree. (And I'm about as rash, unruly and outspoken a child of Asian immigrants as you'll probably find, as my parents have concluded.)
The upbringing that gives you the skills you need to do well professionally doesn't necessarily provide you with the mindset you need to excel professionally. This suggests that the encouragement of diversity needs to be a priority in a person's life long before entry into the workforce.
Ensuring that we're exposed to people of different backgrounds from a very early age doesn't just encourage tolerance; it also provides us with a rich array of cultural models to follow, helping to address the soft spots we face in our individual upbringing. It certainly did for me. I'm not sure how I would've turned out if I'd lived and grown up in a monocultural environment. I imagine I'd probably be a doctor or engineer -- a mediocre and unhappy one.
The tech industry is trying to address its workforce shortcomings now, because it realizes that diversity isn't a burden, it's a secret weapon. A diverse enterprise has the wherewithal to buffer collective strengths and bridge individual weaknesses, to zig when others zag and to respond fluidly regardless of shifts in the business environment and consumer landscape.
And that's even truer for America as a whole than it is for the tech industry. If the future belongs to the United States, it won't be because we invented Facebook and Google. It will be because we're the only nation in the world where Asian journalists and black doctors and Hispanic coders live and work side by side.
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Source: CNN Opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/27/opinion/yang-tech-diversity/index.html?hpt=op_bn7
Screenshot courtesy of Outlook/Photo illustration by Slate
Don’t Email Me ——One professor banned students from emailing her. The results were great. Carl Straumsheim
This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.
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A Salem College faculty member last semester took an uncompromising approach to curbing syllabus and inbox bloat: Why not ban most student emails?
“For years, student emails have been an assault on professors, sometimes with inappropriate informality, sometimes just simply not understanding that professors should not have to respond immediately,” Spring-Serenity Duvall, assistant professor of communications at Salem College, wrote in a blog post last week. “In a fit of self-preservation, I decided: no more. This is where I make my stand!”
Duvall’s frustration is shared by many in academe—or anyone with an email account—from faculty members beset by questions they have answered both in class and in writing to students inundated by university email blasts. This spring, when Duvall taught at the University of South Carolina–Aiken, she adopted a new email policy to cut down on emails from students telling her they would be late, or would miss class, or would have to leave early, or any of the countless others that could be handled face to face.
Instead of wasting class time on walking her students through an increasingly complicated flowchart diagram of when they could and could not email her, Duvall stopped the problem at its core: no emails—unless you’re scheduling an in-person meeting.
“I suffer from syllabus creep as bad as the next teacher—where the syllabus just gets longer and longer and you try to account for everything—and I was laboring over the section on email policy, because that section of my syllabi for all my classes had just ballooned.” Duvall said in an interview. “What I realized, in my frustration, is what I was really trying to tell them is ‘don’t email me.’ ”
The policy (seen below) was not meant to make her less accessible to students in her senior-level gender and media studies course, nor did it come from an “antiquated, anti-new-media perspective,” Duvall said. Its purpose was twofold: teaching students to be more self-reliant by making them read assignments and the syllabus more closely, and freeing up time for conversations in the classroom and during office hours.
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E-mail: You should only use email as a tool to set up a one-on-one meeting with me if office hours conflict with your schedule. Use the subject line “Meeting request.” Your message should include at least two times when you would like to meet and a brief (one-two sentence) description of the reason for the meeting. Emails sent for any other reason will not be considered or acknowledged. I strongly encourage you to ask questions about the syllabus and assignments during class time. For more in-depth discussions (such as guidance on assignments) please plan to meet in person or call my office. Our conversations should take place in person or over the phone rather than via email, thus allowing us to get to know each other better and fostering a more collegial learning atmosphere.
“I did think ‘this is ridiculous—I’ll never get away with it,’ ” Duvall said. But with approval from her department head—and a promise to herself that she could always scrap the policy halfway through the semester—she piloted it.
This is not the first policy battle Duvall has fought. Years ago she tried to take a stand against smartphones, tablets, and laptops in the classroom, but settled for a compromise that allowed such devices to be used as long as they didn’t distract anyone else. The difference between that policy and her sticking with the email ban, however, is that the former may have been more “antagonistic” in nature
“The more I talk to people about this, the more I find myself thinking that this whole teaching endeavor is not a zero-sum game,” Duvall said. “I think it’s important for any policy that it be the best thing for that class and those students and even the professor, and not [used] haphazardly.”
After one semester, Duvall said, the email policy has been an “unqualified success.” She reported spending less time filtering through “hundreds of brief, inconsequential emails,” and noticed that students came to class better prepared and wrote better papers. She allowed one exception to the rule—students emailing her content relevant to the course. During her decade-long career as a college instructor, Duvall said, she has never received more phone calls and more student visits during her office hours.
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Students, in turn, gave the course better evaluations than previous cohorts, and rated Duvall’s concern for their progress and efforts to make herself accessible as “excellent.” Only one student out of 48 had something to say about the email policy—a quibble about not being able to ask simple yes-no questions—but even that student endorsed Duvall’s preference for in-person meetings.
“There was a little part of me that was afraid that maybe they were keeping their thoughts to themselves, and they would slam me on the evaluations on how much they hated the policy,” Duvall said.
Now at Salem, a small women’s college in North Carolina, Duvall said her policy will likely be an even better fit. This semester, which started this week, students in all her classes—from the sophomores and juniors in her gender and new media course to the freshmen in Public Speaking 101—will have to adapt to the policy.
“This is really not as radical as it felt or as people think it is,” Duvall said. “We all try things with our teaching and then learn from that. I’m always re-evaluating and updating, and if it fails miserably here, I’ll rethink it next time. But for now, I’ll try it.”
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Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2014/08/salem_college_professor_spring_serenity_duvall_banned_students_from_emailing.html
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