Tech Companies That Made #BlackLivesMatter Pledges Have Fewer Black Employees
After the killing of George Floyd last year prompted widespread protests, dozens of companies released public pledges to promote racial justice. However, their support of the Black community wasn’t reflected in the demographics of their workforces.
A new study of diversity in the technology industry found companies that made statements of solidarity had 20% fewer Black employees on average than those that didn’t. The finding highlights a gap between what companies say about social issues and what they do in their own workplaces, said Stephanie Lampkin, the founder and chief executive officer of Blendoor, which conducted the study set to be published Monday.
Blendoor, a startup that helps companies recruit a diverse group of candidates, crunched publicly available data on 240 of the most prominent tech companies. Despite the shortcomings of many companies that put out Black Lives Matter statements, the pledges could have a serious impact. Their financial commitments surpassed $4.6 billion, more than double the amount of pledges made in the previous six years combined, according to the report
Reviewing information released by companies over the past six years, Blendoor analyzed trends in workplace diversity, inclusion policies and human-resources programs, such as parental leave, flexible work arrangements and recruitment of underrepresented groups. It found, for example, that Pinterest Inc. had the most robust policies and programs for recruiting women; Mozilla Corp. had the best for recruiting underrepresented minorities. McKesson Corp. scored highest in Blendoor’s rating of supporting women in leadership, while HP Inc. tops the list for underrepresented minorities in leadership.
The analysis surfaced broader findings, as well, across hundreds of companies. Asian Americans have the widest gap between their representation in entry-level tech jobs and in leadership, and Asian-American women are the least likely to advance to executive roles. Women executives more commonly have C-level jobs that focus on areas such as HR, marketing or diversity, and those roles are among the least likely to be appointed to corporate boards. The analysis also found that 36% of board directors are women or people of color but that most of those are White women or Asian men.
Lampkin, who started coding as a teenager and holds degrees from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent years trying to find the right technological tools to bolster diversity efforts. She founded Blendoor in 2015 as a mobile job-matching app—swiping left and right on candidates. Then, as more employers became interested in preventing unconscious bias in hiring, the app started presenting candidates in a blind setting, without pictures or names. In 2017, Blendoor started rating companies’ overall diversity efforts, using similar methodology to the latest report.
Outside of her company, Lampkin also runs a network for Black women in tech, called Visible Figures, where members trade funding, press advice, recommendations and connections. Lampkin said she’s optimistic about the push for diversity in tech given the rate of change in the last few decades but that the industry is a long way from parity. “We need all hands on deck if this is really going to change,” Lampkin said. “It has to be a paradigm shift that I don’t think is happening yet. Right now, I think it’s a lot of preaching to choirs.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/blm-pledges-came-from-companies-with-fewer-black-employees
*******************************Female student, 29, who said 'women have vaginas' and are 'not as strong as men' faces disciplinary action by university
A student who said women were born with female genitals and claimed the difference in physical strength between men and women 'was a fact' is facing disciplinary action by her university.
Lisa Keogh, 29, who studies law at Abertay University in Dundee was reported to university chiefs by her classmates after she said that women were not as physically strong as men.
The mature student, who is in her final year, is now facing a formal investigation by the university for the 'offensive' and 'discriminatory' comments.
The mother-of-two said she had been taking part in a video seminar about gender feminism and the law when she raised concerns about trans women taking part in mixed martial arts.
After telling her classmates that a women who had testosterone in her body for 32 years would be genetically stronger than the average woman, the mature student was accused of calling women the 'weaker sex'.
She told The Times: 'I thought it was a joke. I thought there was no way that the university would pursue me for utilising my legal right to freedom of speech.'
Following the debate, in which Ms Keogh claims she was muted by her lecturer, the mature student was met with a flurry of abuse from her fellow classmates.
Ms Keogh, who is being supported by Joanna Cherry QC, the SNP MP for Edinburgh South West, continued: 'I didn't intend to be offensive but I did take part in a debate and outlined my sincerely held views.'
She added: 'I wasn't being mean, transphobic or offensive. I was stating a basic biological fact.'
The mother-of-two now fears her ambitions of becoming a lawyer may be jeopardised by the disciplinary action by her university.
MailOnline has contacted Abertay University for comment.
The incident comes just a year after economics lecturer Dr Eva Poen was accused of transphobia by feminist and LGBT students over a tweet in which she said 'only female people menstruate'.
Furious undergraduates at the University of Exeter condemned the lecturer accusing her of 'openly singling out trans people' in the posts.
The row erupted when Dr Poen responded to a tweet by a Twitter user which read: 'Not everyone who menstruates is female. Not everyone who is female menstruates. Let's shift our language.'
The lecturer, who strongly denied accusations of transphobia, wrote back: 'Only female people menstruate. Only female people go through menopause.'
In 2018, student lecturer Angelos Sofocleous, who was assistant editor at Durham University's philosophy journal 'Critique', was fired in a transphobia row after he tweeted that 'women don't have penises'.
Mr Sofocleous was sacked from his post after just three days for writing a tweet deemed 'transphobic' by fellow students.
The student lecturer re-tweeted an article by The Spectator on his Twitter titled 'Is it a crime to say women don't have penises?', with the comment: 'RT if women don't have penises'.
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The Vital Signs of American Christianity: Critical but Not Terminal?
When I visit my family physician, he starts by checking my vitals. It’s amazing how critical are simple things like blood pressure, temperature, and pulse.
We social scientists know that vital signs matter in organized religion, too. There are a lot of details we can look at, but basics such as how many people identify with churches, whether they attend services regularly, or apply their faith to their daily lives, are awful important. Here is what we know: the vital signs of American Christianity are in serious decline.
Recently, I compared crucial vital signs for Americans aged 18 to 44, surveyed in the respected National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). I compared the data released in 2013 to the same survey released just six years later, in 2019. Here’s what the data show:
For both males and females, membership in Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, and historically Black Protestant churches declined a lot. Meanwhile, those professing no religious faith — called “Nones” in sociological circles — rose sharply: from 26% to 38% among males, and from 22% to 28% among females. Within each of these three divisions of Protestantism, the percentages of both males and females who reported attending church every week or more declined quite a bit, while those who attended rarely or never increased. The percentages of both males and females who claimed that their faith is “very important” in their daily lives also sank in each of these Protestant groups.
Mainline Protestantism, especially, is on life support. In this survey and age group, the numbers went down one-fifth, and were only 12% in the latest NSFG. Among mainliners, only 20% of males and 28% of females went to church every week, 28% of males and 18% of females said they that they never go to church, and only 28% of males and 40% of females considered their faith to be very important. Optimistically, this means that less than 5% of Americans from 18-to-44 are actively committed to a Mainline Protestant church.
This is a double decline whammy. The numbers are dropping, and the commitment of those who remain is also falling among our young and early middle-aged adults. The future of American Protestantism is in steep decline.
What about Catholics? Their percentages have declined for males but not females, and they are holding at a little under one quarter of those 18 to 44. However, their church attendance levels edged downward for both males and females. In the last NSFG, less than one in five Catholic males, and a little over one in three females, attended Mass weekly. Those never or rarely going to Mass increased. And while the percentage of Catholic women in this age group who consider their faith “very important” has held steady at about half, males have declined somewhat in this category and are now down to less than one in three.
So, every major wing of American Christianity declined just in this latest six-year period. To make matters worse, these were the alarming vital signs well before the COVID-19 tsunami. By all accounts, church involvement has plummeted enormously since Spring 2020, and will struggle to revive to even close to these dismal 2019 levels. The only question is how much steeper the ongoing decline will be because of the pandemic, not whether there will be one.
This is not a problem that will only impact the survival of churches representing most of American Christianity. Committed religious faith has long been associated with numerous goods in American life, such as higher marriage and fertility rates, lower divorce, more charitable giving, and the vitality of religious organizations serving their local communities.
This is a loss for all of us.
The patient is gravely ill, but she is not dead. Many of us know, and are even part of, flourishing churches. Most of us are not “Nones” yet, and most of us who are not are professing Christians.
Churches should certainly be doing outreach, but more than that, we need to do a lot more “in-reach.” That is, we need to aggressively reach out to those who claim to be part of our church families but lack commitment, to gather with the church week by week, and to live consistently with the faith we profess. If our commitment is lackluster, how can our churches recapture the Nones? Why would they even want to join us?
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Men Give Birth. America Was Founded in 1619. And Israel Is the Aggressor
Dennis Prager
When you meditate for a moment on what the left expects honest and decent people to believe, you confront the world of absurdities and lies in which we live.
The left demands we believe and announce that men menstruate and give birth, and that it’s in no way unfair to girls and women when biological men compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
In tens of thousands of American schools, students are brainwashed to believe that America wasn’t founded in 1776 but in 1619, the year the first Africans were brought to North America as indentured servants or slaves. This is the “1619 Project” lie: It was labeled a lie by almost every leading historian of early America, many of whom are Democrats and liberals who supported the impeachment of former President Donald Trump.
And now, with Hamas—a totalitarian theocratic Islamist terror group—unleashing thousands of rockets on Israel’s civilian population and Israel responding to this latest of repeated attempts at mass murder, the world’s left demands that we believe Israel is the villain and Hamas is the victim.
The left’s condemnation of Israel and sympathy for Hamas is just another example of the morally inverted world the left has constructed.
We live in a world in which the mass media and academia—all nothing more than mouthpieces of the left—repeatedly tell the world that America fought the Revolutionary War in order to preserve slavery, that men menstruate, and that Hamas is a victim of Israeli aggression.
How such gargantuan lies have become mainstream truths is a question for another column. Suffice it to say they are all as absurd as they are mendacious.
The reason there is a war right now between Israel and Hamas is that Israel exists. It has nothing to do with anything Israel has actually done. Hamas and its backers in Iran don’t have disputes with Israel. They have a dispute with Israel’s existence.
There is, therefore, nothing Israel can do that would satisfy its enemies except agree to destroy itself as the one Jewish state in the world.
For most (not all) Muslims and for most (not all) Muslim states and for the left, there is room in the world for 22 Arab countries and for more than 50 Muslim countries, but there is no room for one Jewish state, even one the size of New Jersey and smaller than El Salvador.
Hamas and its supporters in Iran regularly announce they seek Israel’s destruction. There is no parallel to this in the world. No groups or nations seek the obliteration of any other nation in the world. This is in keeping with the history of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not just another ethnic or racial bigotry. I wish it were. Anti-Semitism, unlike every other form of racism or ethnic bigotry, is exterminationist. Jew-haters don’t merely hate Jews; they want Jews dead.
That’s one of the many reasons that every honest person understands that anti-Zionism is merely the latest expression of anti-Semitism. The anti-Zionist claim is that Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is illegitimate.
Why do those on the left (again, as I always point out, leftists; not liberals) deny this?
Because the left hates the good and often supports the enemies of the good. Leftism is a moral sickness in the human condition. As I have previously written, it is not even an issue of the left having a broken moral compass. A broken moral compass is occasionally accurate. The left’s moral compass always shows north as south and east as west.
That is why the left hates America. Precisely because it has been, in Abraham Lincoln’s incomparable words, “the last best hope of earth.” And that is why the left hates Israel. With all its flaws, Israel, too, has been a moral beacon. Israel’s prime minister has just tweeted out a video made by Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, released by PragerU shortly after the last Israel-Hamas war in 2014. The title of the video says it all: “Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army.”
In Kemp’s words: “I was the commander of British forces in Afghanistan. I have fought in combat zones around the world, including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Iraq. I was also present throughout the conflict in Gaza in 2014.
“Based on my experience and on my observations, the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”
Which is why the left hates Israel. It’s morally better than its neighbors, not to mention its enemies. Just as America has been. But if you believe America was founded in 1619 and that men give birth, you will also believe Israel is the villain in its war with Hamas.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
1 comment:
So men menstruated and women have penises. Right, so it follows that there should be only one bathroom, locker room, maternity wards should be on the main medical ward, everyone should be assigned a partner at birth by lottery. Everyone should think and believe the same and people who don’t should be eliminated. THX 1138 is here
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