Report for Congress on military: "Too many white men dying in combat"

Of course, it doesn't exactly say that ...

Report says too many whites, men leading military
Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

Two decades ago, when the military was at the height of its prestige during the first Gulf War, 7% (I believe) of the generals in the U.S. Army were black. The #1 and #3 generals in the Gulf War (Colin Powell and Calvin Waller) were black. 

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military's leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Efforts over the years to develop a more equal opportunity military have increased the number of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of leadership. But, the report said, "despite undeniable successes ... the armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as diverse as the nation they serve."

"This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change," said the report from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission ...

Indeed.

Having military brass that better mirrors the nation can inspire future recruits and help create trust among the general population, the commission said.

An interesting question that the press has strenuously not interested itself in is: Who has been dying in recent wars? You used to hear all the times that minorities are more likely to get killed in America's wars, but now you never hear anything about the subject. 

When I checked on the Iraq War in 2007, American whites, relative to their share of the young population, were getting killed in combat at 1.86 times the rate of nonwhites. 

In Afghanistan through 2009, whites were dying at a rate 2.47 times their share of the population of 20-24 year olds.

I asked then:

How could this statistic be spun so it's "appropriate" for the mainstream media? Here's a feasible headline:

Minorities Discriminated Against at VA Cemeteries
Whites Get More Free Burials

The AP article continues:

Because they are technically attached to, but not assigned to, combat units, [women] don't get credit for being in combat arms, something important for promotion to the most senior ranks.

Through 2006, U.S. women had suffered 2% of the fatalities in Iraq.

The most interesting part of the AP article is this exercise in reading between the lines:

Lyles said the commission consulted a panel of enlisted women on the issue. "I didn't hear, `Rah, rah, we want to be in combat,'" Lyles said. "But I also didn't hear, `We don't want to be in combat.' 

In other words, enlisted women don't want to be in combat. The only women who do are the most promotion-crazed female officers, and the enlisted women aren't excited about getting themselves killed to help get these officers promoted.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Silicon Valley Segregation

With Silicon Valley Fever mounting again, it's worth looking at the trendiest companies in America. From the San Jose Mercury News a year ago, a story that go so little attention that I didn't even see it back then:

Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies

By Mike Swift

mswift@mercurynews.com

Posted: 02/13/2010 04:00:00 PM PST

Updated: 05/27/2010 04:42:07 PM PDT

The unique diversity of Silicon Valley is not reflected in the region's tech workplaces — and the disparity is only growing worse.

Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley's computer workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data shows ...

The rest of the article shows that these statements are also true for whites as well, but who cares about them?

Women in computer-related occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even smaller proportion of the work force here. The trend is striking in a region where Hispanics are nearly one-quarter of the working-age population — five times their percentage of the computer work force — and when dual-career couples and female MBAs are increasingly the norm.

It is also evident in the work forces of the region's major companies. An analysis by the Mercury News of the combined work force of 10 of the valley's largest companies — including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay and AMD — shows that while the collective work force of those 10 companies grew by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.

The share of women at those 10 companies declined to 33 percent in 2005, from 37 percent in 1999. There was also a decline in the share of management-level jobs held by women.

... With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000, Asians were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in computer-related occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they hold only about one in six of the nation's computer-related jobs. 

In 2008, the share of computer workers living in Silicon Valley who are black or Latino was 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively — shares that had declined since 2000.

This isn't broken out in the article, but looking at the accompanying graph, you can see that the white share of computer worker employment ("programmers, software engineers, research scientists, network and database administrators and related occupations") in Silicon Valley shrank from 47.1% in 2000 to 37.6% in 2006-2008, according to the Census Bureau. That's a drop of 20.3%.

But, that's not news.

Nationally, blacks and Latinos were 7.1 percent and 5.3 percent of computer workers, respectively, shares that were up since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Of the 5,907 top managers and officials in the Silicon Valley offices of the 10 large companies in 2005, 296 were black or Hispanic, a 20 percent decline from 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor work-force data obtained by the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request.

So, Non-Asian Minorities make up on average only 5% of the top 591 employees in each of ten big Silicon Valley firms. That doesn't seem terribly in proportion to the NAM percentages in California.

You mean, Richard Florida's whole Vibrant Diversity shtick isn't completely based on hard statistical data?!? I thought diversity was strength! ( Next, you'll be trying to tell me that Dr. Florida's gays and performance artists are less important to the economic success of Silicon Valley than pocket protector nerds!) 

Maybe somebody should have looked into this before vastly increasing the percentage of NAMs in California and the whole country.

At these ten big Silicon Valley firms, the share of whites among top managers at top firms shrank only from 66% to 64% from 1999 to 2005. That seems pretty typical: white people at the top do well for themselves and are less buffeted by demographic trends than average people.

The share of managers and top officials who are female at those 10 big Silicon Valley firms slipped to 26 percent in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000.

... The Mercury News originally sought federal employment data for the valley's 15 largest companies through the Freedom of Information Act in early 2008. Following an appeals process that stretched over nearly two years, five of those companies — Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials — convinced federal officials to block public disclosure. Data from 2005 was the most current available when the Mercury News made the request. ...

It would be fun to compare the proportion of NAMS in advertisements for these five stonewalling companies to the proportion in their executive ranks, if anyone could ever find out the numbers.

At a time when eBay was headed by one of the few high-profile female CEOs in Silicon Valley, Meg Whitman, the share of the company's managers and top officials who were female declined to 30 percent in 2005, from 36 percent five years earlier, according to federal employment data. ... In Silicon Valley companies, men and women in technical careers are equally likely to hold mid-level jobs, but men are 2.7 times more likely than women to be promoted to a high-ranking tech jobs such as vice president of engineering, or senior engineering manager, Simard and Henderson found in a 2009 study.

The researchers found a series of clues from the water cooler to the living room. Men are more likely to develop informal professional networks, like taking coffee breaks with colleagues — networks that often lead to career opportunities.

The valley's married male tech employees are more likely to follow the traditional model of having a man working full time, with a woman who stays home with the kids, than are male professionals nationally, perhaps because of the high salaries paid in tech. By contrast, tech women are overwhelmingly in dual-career couples, and many face an either-or choice — parenthood or career advancement.

"We expected a difference," Simard told the glum-looking students at Stanford, "but this is kind of like the 1950s." ...

The horror, the horror that any employees anywhere in America are still making enough money to support a family on one income. Better double those H-1B visa quotas right away to put an end to that.

Some critics blame the government for allowing powerful Silicon Valley companies to rely so heavily on foreign-born workers on H-1B visas, which they contend has boosted the numbers of Asians in the tech workforce at the expense of other groups.

"The reason Silicon Valley is different is that those standards have traditionally been enforced in other industries," said John Templeton, whose "Silicon Ceiling" report details the lack of blacks and Latinos in Silicon Valley. "If you go to a bank IT department, or a cable television IT department, it reflects the community around it. But somewhere, government dropped the ball."

What role does H-1B play in these trends? Anybody know?

Seriously, perhaps an overall better way to look at employment than by race would be employment by U.S. citizens v. non-citizens. But that's not mentioned in this article, and I don't know if it's even aggregated anywhere. The 2010 Census refused to collect citizenship information, so I doubt if we'll ever hear much about it.

It sure doesn't come up much. From an Ibn Khaldunian perspective, perhaps that's inevitable: America has been on top of the world so long that our asabiyah is all frittered away. We now mostly just squabble amongst ourselves, minorities v. whites and whites v. whites over who cares about whites least. So these kind of divisions are pretty easy for the Larry Ellisons to manipulate to add a few billions to their net worth.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

SWPLs' favorite companies aren't diverse

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Minority leaders protest hiring practices at Silicon Valley tech companies

By Mike Swift mswift@mercurynews.com
2/11/2011

Saying the Silicon Valley tech industry needs to do a better job of hiring native-born blacks, Latinos and some other minority groups, minority leaders picketed Google's Mountain View headquarters Tuesday, asking the Internet giant and other large valley companies to disclose their workplace diversity data.

... The leaders called on the federal government to review the H-1B work visa program that tech companies use to hire engineers from abroad, unless the companies comply.

Good point.

The groups are filing a complaint with the federal government, saying of 34 Silicon Valley tech companies from which they requested workforce data, just 12 agreed to share it. The groups are asking the government to force the companies to disclose their data. They said they singled out Google for Thursday's protest because of its growth and visiblity.

"Google can google anything, but if you google Google, you can't get anything," said Faith Bautista, of the Asian coalition.

I like that line.

A report in the Mercury News last year, based on workforce data that Silicon Valley's largest companies had filed with the federal government, found that the Bay Area's unique diversity is not reflected in the region's tech workplaces.

Hispanics and blacks, the newspaper found, made up a smaller share of the valley's computer workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, even as their share grew across the nation. There was also a decline in the share of management-level jobs held by women between 1999 and 2005. Five companies -- Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials -- refused to release their data, saying it would cause "commercial harm" by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. The original story is available at http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14383730.

I looked up what's going on. The government collects diversity data on all big companies, but the Mercury News' Freedom of Information request for the numbers on 15 big Silicon Valley employers was successfully fought by five of them: Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials.

In a written statement, Google said it strongly values diversity, pointing to its support of internships and scholarships with groups such as Historically Black Colleges & Universities.

"Our philosophy has always been that a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures means better products for our users. That's why we have an inclusive work environment and constantly promote diversity at Google, through scholarship programs, internship opportunities and partnerships with organizations working to educate the next generation of engineers and professionals," the company said.

But not through hiring more than the government-mandated minimum of blacks and Mexicans. Google draws the line there.

I call for a boycott by all pro-diversity people everywhere. No more buying any and all products and services from Apple until Apple stops hiding its diversity data.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer