I’m impressed. It takes awesome levels of fuckuppery to achieve this: they convinced a major tech company to invest $300 million in an initiative to oppose #gamergate’s goals.
Intel’s big goal last year was to eliminate conflict minerals from its processors and supply chain, and this year it’s putting some of its money into something completely different: diversity. During its keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show today, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company plans to spend $300 million over the course of the next five years to improve diversity. That goes for both the underrepresentation of women, as well as minorities in the technology industry, something that’s become a hot button topic as technology companies try to diversity their workplaces, and increase the appeal of computer science courses.
As for why this is happening now, Krzanich cited issues faced in gaming and technology over the past year, alluding to Gamergate, which the company became embroiled in following an advertising snafu. At the time, the company said "Intel believes men and women should be treated the same. And, diversity is an integral part of our corporate strategy and vision with commitments to improve the diversity of our workforce." Today, Krzanich elaborated on that by saying Intel’s own internal goal was to reach what he referred to as a "full representation in all levels" in its workforce by 2020. That not only includes its rank and file, but at the executive level as well.
It reminds me of circumstances a few years ago when a few strident anti-feminists blew up over conferences having conduct policies…and then conferences all started having those policies as a matter of course. Only in this case, we’re talking a $300 million rebuff.
I think it’s a matter of consciousness-raising…raising the consciousness that opponents of these sorts of sensible progressive ideas are ridiculous morons.
Oh, beautiful. Now I don’t have to feel bad that the shiny laptop that I have my eyes on upgrading to has an Intel processor. Even more so if they’ve achieved last year’s goals as well… I didn’t know they’d even addressed conflict minerals… I kinda thought that was going to be a guilty cost of computing for the foreseeable future… so, so, so glad that it doesn’t have to be.
I wonder what the #gamergate response is to this? It isn’t about harassing women, you see, it’s actually about ethics in games journalism, *nod-nod* so they should be in favour… I wonder if that will prove to be the case?
That’s glorious.
The hardcore gamergaters will of course convince themselves that Intel has Drunk The Kool-Aid and been taken in (or over) by feminism/leftism/social justice warriors/political correctness/the terrible pressure of being expected to act like decent human beings. Exactly like how the hardcore slimepitters reacted to the conduct policies. We should encourage them to do this explicitly and publicly.
Fifteen thousandthree hundred million dollars/me pictures gators shouting “SAAAAAAAAARKEEEEEEEEEEESIAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNN”
With Sarkeesian on Colbert, and now $300m to diversity, it’s pretty clear at this point that Gamergate are deep-cover cultural Marxists.
Another thing that may have subtly swayed Intel was Linux developer Matthew Garrett refusing to continue work on making Intel stuff work in Linux after they pulled their ads with Gamasutra. Windows dominates on corporate desktops, but Linux basically owns the entire rest of computing. So having the quirks of Intel kit continue to be supported is actually seriously important to people wanting to use Intel kit.
Did you notice that one of Intel’s partners in this is… Feminist Frequency? That’s right, they’re working with Anita Sarkeesian! Glorious!
White dude commenters over at Ars Technica are losing their shit over this.
Oh, this is delicious….nom nom nom…mmmmm……nom nom….bigot tears are so yummy….
This is wonderful news to start the day.
Feminist Frequency logo in the background
Love it.
@Moggie, 5
I don’t spend much time over at Ars Technica, so I don’t know if you mean their commenters in general, or just a specific subset thereof but, actually, the comments I’ve just been reading over there on this are mostly pretty reasonable. Granted, the most reasonable ones seem to be the ones with the “controversial” tag, and I’ve only read about half of the first page of comments… but there seems to be a thread of getting it.
ps: Matthew Garrett confirms this is good enough for him.
Sadly, Slashdot commenters are almost uniformly opposed: “there is no problem”, “women and men are different”, “hire the best person”, “only men have the perseverance”, blah blah blah.
I have an urge to do some deer-dancing!
Gamer gate are deep-cover cultural Marxists.
Are you using “Marxist” there in the FOX News sense – as something bad and scary you know fuck all about?
@12 – “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing snarl word for anything they don’t like. Gamergate is particularly fond of the term.
Errrrrrr… made it to page two… less impressed by this page. Maybe it’s more of a mixed bag than my tiny sample was originally suggesting.
Also, do people use “squishy” as a way to demean biology as a science and imply that it’s a ‘not-so-hard’ science? Because, damn, I may have to stop using that term then… I use it because of all the icky fluids and fleshbits, not because it’s somehow less of a science than physics and chemistry.
Wow. Way to go Intel. That’s pretty cool. That’s so much stronger than “pulling advertising.” That makes pulling advertising look like nothing at all.
By 2020 is pretty ambitious. That’s only five years.
It’ll be interesting to see how that goes. My cynical side is over in the corner going “no way, they’ll weasel out of it somehow”, but I’m hoping they’ll follow through.
Athywren #14
I’m curious.
Which thread is that comment really for?
All seconded.
So I checked out #gamergate because, uh… masochism. And there was this particular tweet that made me smile:
“Intel never said they opposed #GamerGate
#GamerGate never said they opposed diversity
@verge strawmanned us
Don’t take the (click) bait”
I was just like “That’s true. #gamergate wasn’t actually mentioned at all, and there’s no real reason for gamergate to address this at all.” But that last part of the tweet is hilariously false as nearly every other tweet is gamergaters ranting against diversity.
What a sad, sad tweet.
What good new to start the day with! I’m heartened by Intel putting their money into the equation.
@chigau, 17
It’s sort of aimed at the comments on this article over at Ars Technica, which I looked up because of Moggie’s comment @5, but mostly a correction of my previous comment that they seemed pretty reasonable over there, given a quick reading.
The squishiness thing was because there was mention of how, while women tend to drop out of some areas of STEM fields, they’re still fairly common in biology, which was then referred to as “the squishier of the hard sciences,” leading me to wonder if that’s intended as a denigration of the field, as there didn’t really seem to be much point to making it otherwise.
Aaaanyway, it’s probably massively off topic, so I’ll hush up now.
re Saad @7
I looked at that image and actually shed a tear. Not just Feminist Frequency, which is awesome enough, but Out and Equal, Girls who Code, Society of Women Engineers, NACME (National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering)…
Some of those organizations I’ve never heard of. That’s going to change.
Oh, didn’t you know? That was secretly devastating to Anita Sarkeesian with Colbert planning the whole show around bringing her down! Don’t believe me? Just ask this dolt – https://twitter.com/TrustedTrevor/status/535668408483078145
@doublereed, 19
Ohhh wow… look at this image from his second tweet on that thread.
Shirtgate is alive and well among the #gamergaters, apparently. Not only did The Verge strawman the ‘gaters, but they also bullied Dr Taylor, almost to the point of suicide! And any money that you send their way, either through direct payments or by viewing their adverts, is blood money!
Now, maybe I’ve missed some important news in the interim… but that’s a total fabrication, right?
So is this basically Intel recognizing that it accidentally sided with the wrong team in the ad-pulling stuff and trying to make up for it? I’m ok with this.
I think I may go to find delicious tears to drink in other parts of the web today.
Athywren, Social Justice Weretribble @24
An emasculated man shed feminine tears of frustration on national television about what those evil feminists did to him. Clearly, that’s enough to drive anyone like Captain Privilege to suicide, so the projection must be valid, since Captain Privilege is, of course, the default for all straight white men.
Word from the sandpit is that this isn’t a victory for anti-GG, because GG already won and went home. Oh and also, Intel’s decision to work with Feminist Frequency in some manner is not important because who cares about them anyway, GG has no interest in either group, even though Intel’s pulling advertising from a website opposed to GG was hailed as a major victory for GGers*. so it’s still not a win against GG. Nyer.
*The fact that the advertising was later reinstated is rarely mentioned.
I used to work at Intel. I hope they focus on fixing things internally rather than just recruitment and education.
Tech companies are not fun to work at if you’re female and Intel was the worst I experienced.
I hope they haven’t abandoned last year’s goal.
This:
I think it’s a matter of consciousness-raising…raising the consciousness that opponents of these sorts of sensible progressive ideas are ridiculous morons.
That is the heart of the it and covers many other areas of conflict with the anti-rational, anti-social justice, ant-science, climate change deniers, creationists. I am personally often completely speechless when confronted with that kind of unthinking person in meat space.
It is gratifying to see that businesses see that resisting social change does not add to there bottom line and actually may cost them unnecessarily.
uncle frogy
This is good news. I remember sending Intel’s customer relation folk a message after they shafted gamasutra expressing disappointment that they were so easily lead astray. Never got a response, but it is nice that they haven’t just ignored the problem and let their huge company inertia try and carry them past it in the hopes that everyone would forget…
Every time GG scores an own goal, a female programmer gets her master’s degree in computer science.
@Azhael, #6:
Funny to see your comment, because my first thought was,
Nice to see Intel making the correct choice in which side to take.
In related news, there’s a freeware game called No Male Heroes that’s shown up on a few download sites. I don’t know if Anita Sarkeesian was directly involved in its creation, but it was at the very least influenced by her. By all reports, it’s a rather dull game (you play a guy who falls into an alternate dimension where guys don’t get to be heroes in games the way women do), but it’s been a real magnet for GGers- they just can’t seem to resist leaving reviews about it. My personal favorite was one calling it a feminazi plot to destroy video games.
When I read the first few words of this post, I misinterpreted them thinking that a large company had sided the other way with lots of money. I had already mentally lit the torch and headed off into the dark night with my rage, following the link in search of the identity of the corporation that would act so openly to express such hatred and callous disregard for basic humanity. I was involuntarily amped up and ready to mentally besiege them with my exploding thought anger.
Within seconds of landing at the linked page, I realize I had thankfully misread the post (or the small portion I had taken time to read before bursting through the link in anger). I could literally feel my brain cool down as my rage train relaxed. That actually scares me — I’ve never noticed the sensation of an actual hot head before.
So, good for Intel, and Ha Ha! Bite it, you small-minded baseless thoughtless entitled little misogynist gamergate douchebags. Whoops, sorry, that was just the leftovers. Yay for Feminist Frequency!
Given their claim about integrity in game reviews, how many of them actually took the time to pay the game before posting? Few/nobody would be my guess. So they are nothing but sheeple, bleating the same nonsense over and over by reflex. Yep, sounds right, and thanks for showing your lack of integrity in reviewing games.
Which reminds me of these (especially the last one), which I just found recently:
http://story.siz.io/post/92148351726/watch-it-in-video-follow-our-tumblr
It’s astonishing how having people you care about facing the situation provides such clarity about the problem. One thing I’ve noticed about tech companies — companies like Intel, Google, and Microsoft — is that even though the rank and file often seems to be littered with MRA-type, libertarian assholes, the official stance of the company is generally more liberal. HP and Yahoo both have or have had female CEOs, for example. I wonder if this is a real phenomenon or just my own biased observations from paying more attention to the news articles that make me less sad. Anyone care to dump a bucket of cold water on my head and disabuse me of this rosy outlook?
Damn it! This is what I get for blowing all my mod points modding down anti-AGW nitwits over there. I still may spend some time reading the comments and enjoying some whiny, entitled, nerd-boy-induced schadenfreude.
Gotta get AMD on the same boat when the calls to boycott Intel come through.
@PDX_Greg
That is an extremely valuable thing to have discovered about yourself.
Not just because it’s important to make sure you don’t make a mistake while filled with rage. That’s the commonly understood problem and quite true. It’s also possible to understand how that physiological and emotional state shapes your thoughts and the thoughts of others. In time those emotions can be fuel and understanding about others.
There’s historic irony at play here, because way back when computers were programmed with punch cards, many programmers were female. As programming went to being a less tedious process, it became male-dominated.
Which makes it so much funnier when the present crop of nerds claim that women just don’t have the same level of patience as they have, so they don’t want a job with so much frustration.
By the way, the reason I’ve seen put forward for the gender imbalance in computer science since the early days is that the personal computer, when it became ubiquitous in American homes, was considered in popular culture to be a thing for boys, not girls, and thus girls don’t get the exposure to it that boys get and don’t learn to program at the same rates. The stereotype then has been reinforced at all levels of society, ensuring that most girls who do show an interest and have access to a computer are shamed out of it by people who tell them they’re being boyish.
That and they get “called out” as faek gamer girls
Good job, Intel.
Now, about that sweatshop labour…
@CaitieCat #45: I’m hoping this one is addressed sooner rather than later; if we can drive the cost of hardware back up to where it really should be without all of the exploitation and extrenalities built into the fabrication/assembly processes, maybe we’ll see more reasonable development cycles and decent legacy support, people won’t be pushed to upgrade hardware every six months, and we can stop killing the planet just a little bit. For similar reasons, I really hope we drop oil subsidies soon and gas jumps to over $10 a gallon.
Oh hey, here’s an interesting parallel to this story. A webcomic called Scenes From A Multiverse has been getting in on the GG-mockery lately, and thanks to their moronic counter-arguments and shitty behaviour, their retweets have catapulted the author into a much wider audience than usual, handing him increased views and patreon supporters. A similar (if smaller scale) own goal by GG idiots YAY!
Here are the comics in question in order:
http://amultiverse.com/comic/2014/12/29/last-date-2/
http://amultiverse.com/comic/2015/01/05/its-about-ethics/
http://amultiverse.com/comic/2015/01/07/same-difference/
The first in particular is pure win.
Believe it or not, in the early days there WAS no imbalance. It took a lot of educating girls that computers were toys for the boys to get them out of our playground… /s
(Actually, I had a great article in my bookmarks on how our industry got to the crappy state it’s in today and the history behind it, but I’ve lost it, which makes me a little sad).
I’ve seen three responses: “OMG WTH LETS BRING INTEL DOWN!!!!”, “Oh great. Now everyone’s going to accuse us of attacking intel (DIE, intel, DIE!!)” and “That’s great, but we’ll NEVER FORGIVE YOU for working with ANITA!” Coherency and cohesion are not common traits within GG’s ranks.
John Horstman
Fuck the poor working class! We’ve got a planet to save, planeteers!
I’d say instead of giving those subsidies directly to the oil companies, they are given out to the people based on their income and need. I think that would be better and would have more people on your side.
The other day on twootle I asked at the GG hashtag about real, verifiable GG “victories”. After a coupla tumbleweeds, some “anti-GG are the real harassers” and other self-serving bullshit, I saw this story.
And I smiled quietly to myself.
throwaway@49:
John Horstman never said that rising oil prices should not be accompanied by poverty-reduction measures and subsidised alternative energy sources. I mean, really, you can use this think-of-the-poor argument to derail *any* attempt to make the world a better place, including measures that directly benefit poor people. Increase the minimum wage? No, because that will raise prices at Walmart and think of all the poor people who can only afford to shop there. Cut lead from petrol? No, think of all the poor people with old engines who will be can’t afford to replace their cars! (I can remember this argument being used for real when Australia banned lead-based petrol.)
i hate the computers as “toys for boys” thing – I’m a woman who’s good with computers (and good at math) and IMO it’s really just one of those things that you are simply good at or not. People are different – I have two brothers and a sister, I fix all of their computers for them because no one else is particularly good with computers. We have some pretty damn similar genetics, so if being male made you somehow *inherently* good at something like computers, you’d think at least one of my brothers would be capable of something more complex than playing a video game, but we’re nearing our forties and it hasn’t happened yet, so I’m thinking that gender has VERY LITTLE to do with it.
chrislawson @51
You’re right. He also didn’t say that it shouldn’t be accompanied by an extravagently embroidered diamond saddle for everyone’s new ponies. But I tend to focus on what was said. I was admonishing the privileged type of thinking which allows ecologically minded people (I count myself amongst them) to make these comments without thought of the other immediate human impact their proposals have.
Now if they can follow through on it, it’ll be a lot of help.
As for the dudebros of GamergateLand: There is a nice deep hole under the Corvette museum they can go jump down.
I generally use Intel hardware since it works well with Linux, so I’m happy that Intel is doing this. The gamergaters/idiots that are opposed to these diversity initiatives can eat shit.
unless Intel uses that money for scholarships for women and minorities in the tech field i don’t see how this will help.
Five years implies they will be promoting within. The problem isn’t that women aren’t interested, but the misogynists drive them out. The solution is simple. Fire the misogynists asses, then there is nothing to prevent women from moving up.
Though unrelated, I now feel that somehow my many confrontations with MRA-supporters and their enablers on YouTube and other social media venues has not been in vain. Not that it has led to this decision by Intel, but that I have sowed the doubt in their little heads that now is being consolidated by excellent actions like this.
This is very good for my sanity.
@Nerd of Redhead, 37
Yeah, for all their rabbiting about ethics, integrity, and honest reviews… well… check out the reviews for Depression Quest on Steam. (And a few others, but nothing else is coming to mind at the moment.) Not that it really matters too much – reviews on steam are worth pretty much nothing – but it’s certainly a sign of how much they value honest reviews.
Also, while I hear a lot about women in tech, I hear significantly less about African-Americans in tech. And I’m pretty sure they’re actually more underrepresented than women (can anyone provide stats?).
I liked how it seemed to be about general diversity and trying to achieve parity in several dimensions.
I was SO RELIEVED to see this. Because I work at Intel. And I was one of a small group arguing on the company internal fora that pulling the Gamasutra ad was the wrong thing to do. That decision was explained pretty much as “When the monkeys are flinging poo at each other we don’t want to be in the middle of it.” The discussion went on for days after that, and pretty soon the line changed from “We see now that pulling the ad sent an unintended message of support–we’re planning a response that will remedy that.” This seems to be the response, and I find it plenty adequate.
Those within the company who believed that Leigh Alexander et al were conspiring to declare gamers dead, well, now I know who they are. And my fellow SJWs who were arguing against them have begun to network now. Mwahahaaa!
Also, doublereed @60 found the worst point of all in our diversity numbers. I don’t have formal stats, but I have gone to our biggest internal technical conference and counted faces. I always found African Americans to be represented in single digits (in a conference of around 500 attendees) and women to be 4-5x more numerous.
And CaitieCat, could you expand about sweatshop labor? Most of the manufacturing I’m aware of is done at our own in house facilities, and the ones I’ve been to (including in the PRC) were pretty good. The one outsource manufacturer I visited in Shanghai was not as nice, but the employees definitely weren’t being ridden very hard by management and I didn’t hear unhappy sounding people (and my Mandarin is adequate to that task).
African americans are represented as well in the engineering workforce as they are in the engineering student body (~5% for both vs ~12% of the total population and ~15% of the undergrad population). What is far more interesting is that while the Male:Female ratio for engineering as a whole skews heavily towards the dudes, with Africian Americans there are almost twice as many females as males in every degree category.
http://www.nacme.org/…briefs/NACMEAfricanAmericansinEngineering.pdf
@doublereed,
here’s one group trying to change that: http://www.blackgirlscode.com/
Good news everyone. Intel is doing well considering what that “snafu” entailed. For those not in the know, Intel retracted advertising from a gaming news web site due to pressure from the Gaters. It became clear later on that they just assumed the Gaters actually had a point, and completely misunderstood. It was about as textbook a case of “knee jerk reaction”, some executive not doing enough research and just telling their ad execs to “get ahead of this thing”, as I can think of. It is good to see that they later did enough research to find out the truth.
What gets me is that as a company they could have merely rejected the Gaters, said they made a mistake and “they support an inclusive world” without actually doing anything of actual substance. Intel has done what most companies who give lip service to “support” fail to do. To be fair, Intel is doing VERY well these days, basically dominating the x86 space entirely (I haven’t heard any serious techies recommend an AMD processor in a good long while), and they’re starting to get into pocket mobile spaces too, so they’ve got time to spend on these issues. It should still be applauded though, hoping other companies who frankly should easily be able to afford it follow suite. Those companies? Apple, for one. Their pricing model is “make it cheap, charge about 3 times what the same parts in any other computer would normally sell for”. It works well enough, and their OS is pretty solid, but that also means they’ve got little excuse for not spending the same sort of money on such initiatives.