The article isn't really about that at all, it's a few questions with a diversity advocate. "Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man", har-dee-har, all the usual stuff you tend to come across when reading on this issue. Not that there's anything wrong with that, people just repeat the same points over and over and it can get a bit stultifying.
Regarding the headline, it doesn't (shouldn't) mean lowering the bar, but it does mean increased effort in recruiting. Both in looking in different places than before, and in convincing candidates that your workplace is a good one. It's not going to work to say oh, everything can stay the same and we can fix diversity/inclusion at the same time.
On that point, the way diversity programs currently work doesn't fill me with confidence that they are actually going to do much to help remedy the problem. There rarely seems to be any justification or basis upon which the methods are built. It just seems like people trying shit. Which is commendable and all, but I worry that in 10 years or whatever, all this "effort" will have been expended, the numbers will look about the same as now, and the question will be- what good was all that? And there are two ways to go from there: 1) we have to change our efforts to be effective, 2) let's stop trying. I worry that 2 will win.
Well because the selection pool of women tend to be much smaller than men, you either have to work harder to recruit and retain female talent or quality will suffer.
Howeve when many firms go the extra mile to obtain the top tier female talent from a small pool, we'll be back to the problem that it becomes impossibly hard to atttact the right talent from the female pool.
Unless the pool fundamentally changes, this probably will result in a futile exercise. People of course hope that the pool will expand as a result of more aggressive hiring, but if this doesn't materialize, either we were unlucky and the right stars didn't line up, or James Damore was right, there are gender differences at work here.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 16.3 ms ] threadRegarding the headline, it doesn't (shouldn't) mean lowering the bar, but it does mean increased effort in recruiting. Both in looking in different places than before, and in convincing candidates that your workplace is a good one. It's not going to work to say oh, everything can stay the same and we can fix diversity/inclusion at the same time.
On that point, the way diversity programs currently work doesn't fill me with confidence that they are actually going to do much to help remedy the problem. There rarely seems to be any justification or basis upon which the methods are built. It just seems like people trying shit. Which is commendable and all, but I worry that in 10 years or whatever, all this "effort" will have been expended, the numbers will look about the same as now, and the question will be- what good was all that? And there are two ways to go from there: 1) we have to change our efforts to be effective, 2) let's stop trying. I worry that 2 will win.
Howeve when many firms go the extra mile to obtain the top tier female talent from a small pool, we'll be back to the problem that it becomes impossibly hard to atttact the right talent from the female pool.
Unless the pool fundamentally changes, this probably will result in a futile exercise. People of course hope that the pool will expand as a result of more aggressive hiring, but if this doesn't materialize, either we were unlucky and the right stars didn't line up, or James Damore was right, there are gender differences at work here.