This is backwards thinking. Companies who have 50/50 male/female management are likely smarter companies, picking up smart women who are looked over for other roles and because they are smart enough to do that they likely do other smart things. It is the effect of a well run company not the cause of it. If your company is working working the other way they are dumb.
I completely agree that you can't better a body of people by forcing it to modify its constituents into a defined range of racial/gender ratios (and it may even be the case that you will worsen it on average). However, there is another goal: To help the individuals who would not have been hired. Of course, there's an argument to be made that any harm you might do to the body would then ultimately harm the individuals you helped to be placed in it, but I tend to believe that these opposing forces balance out on the net good side for the individuals.
This might be a bias due to the fact that most companies are started by men (probably more inclined to take larger risks), and that companies need to reach a relatively successful state before the initial members of board and management have been circulated.
But do we trust these studies? We shouldn't! I've read some of them before and they usually make basic errors of logic or statistics. For instance sometimes they take the gender makeup of boards across the world, and then look at how much (absolute) money the companies make. They end up including countries like Saudi Arabia in that, and in the inverse, countries with laws that force women onto boards. So they end up concluding "companies with women on the boards make more money" but all they're really measuring is "companies in richer countries make more money than poorer countries".
It's a sexist conclusion anyway. These studies are basically arguing women are better decision makers than men. Would people so passively accept studies concluding that companies do better when women are kept out of certain roles? I bet not.
I love when people want to force something for “their own benefit”. I’m so glad you’re so concerned about my profits.
“Companies” covers a lot of territory. Market sizes, markets, local laws, etc.
The implication is that there is some innate quality in women that men lack and cannot acquire. Funny, the feminist movement spent decades fighting that myth.
I too have seen many emotional arguments for diversity programs, but it's honestly hard to believe you have "never" seen a non-emotional argument for one. Ironically, it suggests an overriding emotional negativity you have associated with diversity programs.
When a company only hires white, able-bodied males aged 25-35 (for example) from a larger population that is diverse across sex, race, ability, and age, but those attributes have no correlation with job performance, then yes, there are problems - they're called sexism, racism, ableism, and ageism.
And companies in the US do have a duty, per anti-discrimination laws.
Even if, by asking this, you expose what you believe is hypocrisy on the part of the parent post, you'd still need to have an entire conversation to establish that the hiring practices of all companies should be the same as the hiring practices of the NBA. It would be much quicker to express your concerns directly, instead of simply pointing at other, barely related analogies.
Being able to code is highly correlated with being male (or inversely, being male is correlated with being able to code). I think you mean causation rather than correlation? The correlated nature of these two attributes is a matter of statistical fact, it doesn't imply that women are worse than men at it.
So quick question: Does your same argument also apply to ageism? Should it be OK for companies to discriminate based on a candidate's age and only hire say, people below the age of 40?
Or what about candidates that might have to use a wheelchair to get around?
Here’s the non emotional reason: diversity kills the organization of labour. It’s much harder to organize a union when you look around a lunch room and subconsciously feel disconnected from your coworkers and maybe don’t even speak their language.
I had to take that program in Switzerland, designed in the USA, which was telling me how I can date my coworkers even outside the company.
It may be OK in the US, but what it was asking from me was unconstitutional in Switzerland.
Of course I didn't say anyting, as I liked the job. A coworker of mine just clicked through the training without reading any of it.
Also diversity became the main topic (without being on the official agenda) of big cross-team meetings, so I learned not to go there, which meant that I didn't know after some time what other teams are doing.
I don't understand your first sentence. You were told you were allowed to date coworkers? Not allowed? You were told the manner in which you could date them?
Think about a meeting of hundreds of people between 10 offices in the world who I will never in my life talk to/meet. They are boring for me anyways as a software engineer, as they don't discuss the engineering details, just everything on the product level. They don't help me in my job, but I would be there as a respect to other teams. But if the first 30 minutes is taken by the diversity without it being written in the official meeting agenda, that means a lack of respect from the company leadership.
Actually Larry Page himself said years ago (before the diversity trainings) that if we think that a meeting is wasting our time from being productive, we're allowed to go away from it.
For me the interesting meetings were about setting up production pipelines, fixing training-serving skew in the models (it's a huge problem for online training, when the training data is changing all the time), understanding the production setup of the deep learning pipeline, understanding the tradeoff, and planning capacity of the TPUs. But people in these meetings didn't talk about these for me hard problems.
>Also diversity became the main topic (without being on the official agenda) of big cross-team meetings, so I learned not to go there
Did you omit something here? Surely if you feel a topic is taking more time at meetings than you think it deserves, the answer is not to stop attending cross-team meetings.
It's interesting that the article blame Google not wanting to upset conservatives, because as far as I can tell the most recent public controversy involving Google's diversity and inclusion exercises around implicit bias was this, which had nothing to do with conservatives at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935706 (Actually, that might even be the only public controversy about them. The Damore stuff was more about recruitment if I remember rightly.)
I attended one program and I found it amusing that it assumed that I had a deep-seated biases simple because my skin had a particular hue while apparently other people with different hues didn't have biases.
This sounds like a pretty dramatic exaggeration. I absolutely believe you felt that way, which is worth a lot. But I think the vast majority of diversity programs do not state "you (yes you, individually, benjohnson) have deep-seated biases, and it is because of your skin tone. Also, nobody with skin tones other than yours have biases."
"Sojourn, a comprehensive racial justice program created for employees to learn about implicit bias"
I doubt this course dwelled on implicit bias of black people against whites/asians.
"Two other diversity training programs at Google, DEI for Managers, a primer to build skills around navigating issues of race on their teams, and Allyship 101, a program to learn about different types of oppressed groups and ways of supporting them"
I doubt these courses spent time on the oppression of white/asian men.
"... a speaker event hosted by Google on the topic of how white people can better navigate conversations about racism and privilege in the workplace"
"There was a meme going around that said white fragility shuts down discussions of white fragility"
"Three current employees said they felt the newer programs introduced from outside vendors lack the framework that previous training programs had to help orient white people to conversations about racial justice"
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 86.2 ms ] threadA company has no need to represent society as a whole, or worse, a duty to equalize societies inequalities.
Any attempt to do so inherently harms as many people as it helps, it just moved the harm to groups unprotected by emotional arguments
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-08/more-women-means-more...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/why-companies-with-female-ma...
It's a sexist conclusion anyway. These studies are basically arguing women are better decision makers than men. Would people so passively accept studies concluding that companies do better when women are kept out of certain roles? I bet not.
I love when people want to force something for “their own benefit”. I’m so glad you’re so concerned about my profits.
“Companies” covers a lot of territory. Market sizes, markets, local laws, etc.
The implication is that there is some innate quality in women that men lack and cannot acquire. Funny, the feminist movement spent decades fighting that myth.
And companies in the US do have a duty, per anti-discrimination laws.
>but those attributes have no correlation with job performance
Or what about candidates that might have to use a wheelchair to get around?
It may be OK in the US, but what it was asking from me was unconstitutional in Switzerland.
Of course I didn't say anyting, as I liked the job. A coworker of mine just clicked through the training without reading any of it.
Also diversity became the main topic (without being on the official agenda) of big cross-team meetings, so I learned not to go there, which meant that I didn't know after some time what other teams are doing.
Actually Larry Page himself said years ago (before the diversity trainings) that if we think that a meeting is wasting our time from being productive, we're allowed to go away from it.
For me the interesting meetings were about setting up production pipelines, fixing training-serving skew in the models (it's a huge problem for online training, when the training data is changing all the time), understanding the production setup of the deep learning pipeline, understanding the tradeoff, and planning capacity of the TPUs. But people in these meetings didn't talk about these for me hard problems.
Did you omit something here? Surely if you feel a topic is taking more time at meetings than you think it deserves, the answer is not to stop attending cross-team meetings.
Every person has the right to privacy in their private and family life and in their home, and in relation to their mail and telecommunications.
"Sojourn, a comprehensive racial justice program created for employees to learn about implicit bias"
I doubt this course dwelled on implicit bias of black people against whites/asians.
"Two other diversity training programs at Google, DEI for Managers, a primer to build skills around navigating issues of race on their teams, and Allyship 101, a program to learn about different types of oppressed groups and ways of supporting them"
I doubt these courses spent time on the oppression of white/asian men.
"... a speaker event hosted by Google on the topic of how white people can better navigate conversations about racism and privilege in the workplace"
"There was a meme going around that said white fragility shuts down discussions of white fragility"
"Three current employees said they felt the newer programs introduced from outside vendors lack the framework that previous training programs had to help orient white people to conversations about racial justice"