Caveat: Trade Secrets

Apparently, five Silicon Valley giants (Google, Apple, Oracle, Applied Materials, Yahoo) have managed to convince a judge that being required to release statistics about the race and gender of their employees would reveal too much of their business strategy to competitors.  I saw this in an article inthe Mercury News.  In other words, the race and gender breakdown of their employees is some kind of trade secret.  This seems creepy, to me.

What would such statistics reveal?  That their employees include a preponderance of immigrants from Russia and India?  That they're whiter than the general population?  That there are almost no Mexicans?   That they are mostly male?  These are my personal speculations, based on experience in the IT industry.  But how could this kind of information reveal business strategy?  What weird facts would studying the statistics reveal?

These companies (well, except for Applied Materials, which I know nothing about) kind of creep me out even on good days – kind of the tech equivalents of the "banks too big to fail," perhaps.   But this is disturbing, especially in light of the fact that some other large Silicon Valley companies (including Intel, Cisco, and Sun [which has now been swallowed up by Oracle]) had no problem disclosing the same sorts of statistics.

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