> Listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a bigger decline than legal or general human resources jobs saw, according to findings from Textio, which helps companies create unbiased job ads. Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively.
I'm guessing these were listings Textio was paid to analyze, so there are multiple possible causes for the decline.
D/I initiatives need strong government/industry collaboration, because the benefits of success are shared by society, but the investment takes decades from filling the pipelines starting in elementary school.
looks like you gotta listen to a whole podcast here, do you mind summarizing the points? the research I've looked at mostly has been around number of graduates in certain fields which would seem to lend credence to it being a pipeline problem, at least so far down stream. would love to hear evidence on the other side. thank you.
I didn't listen to the full podcast, but as someone who has spent much of my work time in the past few years trying to hire -- it seems surprising to hear its not a pipeline problem. I advertised and solicited from as many diverse venues as I could find and still found hardly any qualified applicants. In fairness it wasn't easy to find White or Asian qualified applicants too, but still found disproportionately more.
My biggest fear is that if we try to sweep the pipeline problem under the rug, we're not going to fix it. I do have a potential solution, but I think it's a tough sell...
>I advertised and solicited from as many diverse venues as I could find and still found hardly any qualified applicants.
So if you were e.g. recruiting for SWE roles at an HBCU presumably there are hundreds of CS students there. Are you saying none were qualified? If so isn't that a problem with education/preparation?
> Are you saying none were qualified? If so isn't that a problem with education/preparation?
Yes, in other words... a pipeline problem.
When you have bars set in fields where outcomes are tangible (STEM), you cannot improve the situation by lowering the bar, you must improve the situation by improving the populace so more can get over the bar. This is a lot harder to do, and not possible to do in a way that juices the numbers, so very few people and institutions bother to do it.
The solution I hinted at is to actually double-down on standardized testing. I taught test prep to HS'ers in poor schools in California in the past and there are a couple of things I noticed:
1. For kids who cared, I could raise their score dramatically. The College Board disputes this is possible, but I could do this pretty consistently over the course of a year. There were a non-trivial number of kids who didn't care and the results didn't apply to them at all.
2. In the course of my prep I drastically increased learning. And this isn't a direct corollary to (1), and actually somewhat surprised me. The same students I taught saw their course grades go up and felt more confident in school. I think in part because I was a relentless, but effective teacher (if I say so myself).
Oddly, this is going the opposite direction from what people are proposing now and that worries me. People underestimate how well some of these students can do. It's like when they used to say Blacks didn't have the intellect to play QB. We didn't dumb down the position. But because of how important the role is, and how meritocratic sports is, Black kids figured it out. Give them a chance to figure this out, with some of the right incentives. (Side note, I do think the College Board also makes this harder and there is at least some anecdotal data that they have biased the test against underrepresented minorities -- but even with all that, I'm still optimistic).
Regarding my original comment -- it wasn't an entry level SWE role. I'd be open to hiring someone out of college, but you rarely find ones with the level of embedded systems background we needed.
An EDI advocate I talked to was of the opinion that lowering the bar was the best and only way to include more minorities in tech. When I asked her whether she felt the same about men in nursing, she said that nursing is a critical function and standards can't be lowered.
I'm pretty sure the casual racism and misogyny she displayed are par for the course among genuine believers in the EDI space, most just being better at dancing around it than she was. The idea that 'whatever those people are doing' isn't harmed by lowering the bar is probably a less obvious component of how the ideology perpetuates itself.
Yes, I have encountered this often from DEI folks as well. Thomas Sowell calls this the "soft bigotry of low expectations." It's definitely compounded by lay-people thinking that STEM disciplines are somehow less critical or dangerous than medical functions... not realizing that STEM functions often become medical (or other life-critical) functions. Someone has to design the medical technology, write software for the machines, and design the vaccines, design the medicines, all of these are STEM roles.
I think you're mixing up how people understand pipeline in this case. Generally the thinking is there aren't enough minorities, women, etc. going into STEM in the first place not that there are plenty but none meet the standards necessary to get a job.
Yes, but I appreciate it when people are so deep in their field that they innocently spout off ideas like this. It's also a little sloppy for Bloomberg to let that get by since it almost encourages something that's possibly illegal.
I think we just found where the root of the disconnect between a certain "victimized" demographic and how D&I works stems from:
As the reply above said, D&I isn't about "Don't fire minorities", it's about "If you fire 10% of your workforce, but they end up being 30% of the minorities in your workforce, question why there's a disconnect"
The idea being is the 10% actually where 10% of cuts need to happen, or is the 10% including some business unit that didn't have the right people hitting up the after work pub crawl with the founder, so no one one felt personally connected enough to have them stick.
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And I feel like the kneejerk is to assume "oh well you're just assuming founders are discriminatory"... it really doesn't have to be a discriminatory thing, it's simple human nature.
It's hard to trust someone who thinks that they won't subconsciously lean away from firing people that they've spent more time with and happen to like. They should accept that camaraderie outside of the bounds of business can subtly affect affect business sense even if you are a fair person before you can consciously override that tendency.
A large part of D&I is supposed to get people to embrace uncomfortable hidden biases without jumping to the least charitable cause: You don't have to be racist to get along better with people who are from your culture when that often means sharing interests, understanding each other better, etc. You don't have to be evil for that to end up affecting your decision making subconsciously.
I think even in context its a bit dangerous. Who counts as diverse, and who gets cut in that consideration? Imagine there are three employees, and one of them has to go due to budget cuts. One is a straight African American male, one is a white homosexual male, and one is a white straight female. All of these might be considered diverse because they are all minorities in the tech industry in some way. However, taking any of these three people's race, sexuality, or gender into consideration when making the decision might open the door to lawsuits. How do you make the decision between these three people? Is there a certain level of diversity that would ensure that they keep their job?
I apologize if I come off as ignorant...Im not sure how these things work in law. However, I can't think of any way that taking someone's personal attributes that they cannot help into consideration when laying others off would result in anything but resentment towards the company.
I was thinking of it more like, if you look at who you're planning to layoff and it is 50% white females -- and your employee population is only 20% white female... then you should probably take a look at why. Has some unintended bias crept into your decision making.
Almost everyone is fireable. People who make it through large layoffs like to tell themselves it's because of the value they produce, but in my experience having been close to the decision making process on some of these it has a lot more to do with luck of the draw than anyone would care to admit.
It reminds me of that episode in the IT Crowd where Jen gets the employee of the month award, lets it go to her head, but its revealed that the CEO literally pulled her name out of a large box
> but in my experience having been close to the decision making process on some of these it has a lot more to do with luck of the draw than anyone would care to admit.
I'm sure this happens, but it's not been my experience working for healthy companies.
Been through a few attrition rounds myself. The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.). Those at the bottom of the list need to be let go, essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.
I caveated my statement because my experience in this is obviously limited, I doubt anyone has a wide view of the industry but...
> The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.)
Strongly doubt this is done effectively in anything but smaller organizations. Imagine an organization the size of Google, doing this analysis effectively would involve consulting thousands if not 10s of thousands of managers, some of whom will be on the chopping block themselves. Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance, and looping that many people in 100% guarantees the entire process will be leaky as hell. Sure these organizations will play games with performance reviews to try to make some attempt at coming up with a more meaningful filter than a dice roll, but the accuracy is at best, questionable, and as we've seen in the recent layoffs a good performance review is a pretty weak form of protection.
Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play
> essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.
High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.
> Strongly doubt this is done effectively in anything but smaller organizations.
Larger organizations are just groups of smaller organizations. Some perform better than others. I work for a $4B corp, the small divisions I interact with generally get it right. Sure, you'll get an outlier from time to time that's mismanaged (and addressed once that's become clear). But it's usually not a systemic problem.
> Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance
Organizations don't "play around" with hiring and firing. Believe it or not, the executive team actually does care about employee morale. When you hire you need a plan to keep them, as it impacts employee morale and performance if you hire/fire on a whim. If a company treats it's people badly, it's a sign of a poorly run company, which usually doesn't end well. If you think this is your company, I recommend leaving and finding someplace better. They're out there.
Typically companies are "late" to hire until they are sure the employee is needed long term. During periods of growth, this means that companies are understaffed, and the existing employees have to working harder until its 100% clear the org simply needs more people. From my experience, it takes several months of consistent production overtime before management decides the short term spurt in orders isn't a one-off fluke and actually indicates long term business growth. Only then are new positions created, as the company reasonably believes these people are needed long term.
On the otherside, when it's time to fire, the signs are present for a while that there's been a downturn in business. But companies don't want to fire right away (due to employee morale, reasons above). They will discuss internally at the highest levels whether or not attrition is necessary, can it be avoided etc. Is this just a temporary drop in sales, or is this part of a longer term decline? Until a decision has been made, discussing this with rank and file just creates job anxiety, as no one knows what's going to happen. Once the decision has been made, it's typically executed quickly (that's why they're called executives).
There's a reason that parents don't discuss their problems with their children. Until a decision has been made to divorce, Mom and Dad typically don't tell the kids that they're having problems and might get a divorce. It just created unnecessary anxiety.
So you only hire if you think you can keep them. And you only fire as a last resort. This means that sometimes you're short-staffed and it's necessary for people to work overtime, and other times you've got too many people and you must right size to remain profitable (stay in business).
> Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play
Sure, it's never gotten 100% right. There's randomness in everyone's day to day lives. This is why the management layer is so important, it's their job to get it right as much as possible. Every time you get it wrong you're potentially damaging the company.
We can't avoid randomness. Everyone takes a chance stepping outside their front door in the morning and driving to/from work. Companies deal with randomness as best they can, just like we do in our day to day lives. This is reality we're dealing with, not theory.
> High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.
Yes. If a company isn't making money on a product they have to cut the product. So what to do with the team?
Many times high performers are "found" positions in the company, as the company recognizes their talent is hard to come by. This is easily done when one side of the business needs people, while the other needs to be downsized.
I think you're just looking at it wrong. None of those people is diverse because no individuals are diverse; a person is only themself. A group of people can be varyingly diverse, and observations about the before/after diversity of a group of employees is a different thing from making decisions based on someone's individual group membership.
I think this upside-down view of diversity being located in individuals is really common though, which is one of the problems with tech DEI initiatives. But you get much more use out of it the other way around.
That's a bit of what I mean though...what counts as diverse? Diversity is such a vague word that anyone with some attribute outside of the norm in an industry might qualify. Do we discriminate against some forms of diversity, and not others? I think that hirings/firings should be done because of performance, as that is the only way to really make it fair in the long run. Its great to have people from different backgrounds be on the team, but that shouldn't be the sole defining decision.
> Diversity is such a vague word that anyone with some attribute outside of the norm in an industry might qualify.
Right, the term has no inherent abstract usefulness, it must be defined in each specific case. You can assess diversity of a group on a certain axis, but not generic "diversity" without defining it.
But you're still thinking of it as something possessed by an individual and that's making it hard to see the value. Adding a specific person may increase the diversity of the team on a certain axis, but that's a trait of the team not that person.
> as that is the only way to really make it fair in the long run.
I don't think this is wrong, but the way you state it makes me think there are several assumptions under it that are worth prodding at. Like, is fairness the goal? To whom? only the members of the team being discussed, or all potential candidates, or society as a whole, or what? Or, what is "performance?" and defined by whom? If a member of the team underperforms their peers on technical assessments but, for example, speaks an uncommon language that gives them access to and business-valuable insight into their users, is that performance? These are judgements that need to be made, not objective facts that can be derived from the world.
I don't know of anyone seriously proposing that "diversity" be the sole deciding factor in a hiring or firing. But that assessing the overall diversity of a team on certain axes can surely be one of several things weighed when making these decisions, along with things like tenure, performance, communication skills, morale, etc.
It's obvious, you hire 2 diversity consultants to figure it all out, and then since you only have budget for 2 employees, fire all 3 of the original ones.
N of 1, but a corporate lawyer friend told me that when their company was doing layoffs, it was made very clear that it needed to hit all racial etc categories proportionally.
The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me. The average person might thing of them as professional useless people. But as someone who lives in a somewhat corrupt country, I fear it's far more sinister.
Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector is relatively safe. When you bring in DEI positions you're just creating new opening for the politicians/activists to exert control over the private sector as well.
It’s illegal not to file your taxes but companies still hire accountants to make sure they do it, and also use strategies above and beyond the minimum prescribed by the law that benefit the company.
Seems to make sense that DEI departments could fill a similar role - make sure the company is in compliance with the law and then look for ways to go above and beyond it that benefit the company’s position in the market for talent.
The law punishes overt instances of discrimination.
I can hire all of x gender, x race, x religion, etc. for my 1000 employee work force. You won't legally be able to nail any kind of discrimination on me so long as I take care as to not leave evidence of it.
In this instance, did discrimination occur? Did the law do its job adequately?
If there is no evidence of discrimination - how do you even know that it occurred? Are you saying that we should have people who decide what is and isn't discrimination without evidence? (since those, in your example, are not there).
So you want to force outcomes according to whichever moral rubric is fashionable at the moment? How well has 'equity' worked for Asian Americans with regards to Ivy League admissions?
EEOC and the DoJ litigate even covert attempts at discriminatory employment - that's kinda their job. The bigger issue is they (and the rest of the Federal Litigation infra) are chronically underfunded due to partisan bickering from both parties.
As far as I can tell DEI is self-imposed. Those who already don't care about discriminatory facets are the ones with DEI groups. The companies without DEI groups have HR departments that handle this.
It's also illegal to steal from the company, yet companies still have internal security departments.
Sexual harassment is illegal, yet companies still do sexual harassment training and HR in theory can help protect employees from sexual harassment and take action on harassers (if only to protect the company).
What a ridiculous statement. It is of course the responsibility of people inside company to ensure that it doesn't perpetuate illegal discriminatory activities.
Even if by internal policing you think it's going to be completely removed (based on your statements here) you are overwhelmingly naive to corporate culture and are obviously responding in this way because you maintain a hard stance for such oversight regardless of actual need.
People in charge of compliance are commonplace when it comes to regulations. It's a huge part of HRs job for example. Some regulations even require a specific compliance officer, such as the GDPR. "There is a law" is a pretty weak argument for why a position shouldn't exist. If anything it's an argument for why one should.
Fair point, but workplace discrimination is already under the purview of the HR department. Before there was ever a DEI department HR covered the same stuff. In fact, in many orgs DEI is a subset of HR.
The real question is there any evidence of DEI departments effecting change beyond what was already supplied previously. Anecdotally I haven't seen it, nor have I seen any studies backing it up (please supply those if you know of them). The only thing I have seen come of it is additional training every year which can be basically summed up to "play nice with others".
You're advocating for a cure far worse than the disease and the disease isn't nearly as bad as they make it seem.
You see, what's great about the private sector is that any company that engages in discrimination only harms itself and drives potential talent to their competitors. That's why I love working for private companies, no matter who you are or where you come from if you're making them a lot of money they'll treat you like royalty. I've never seen an environment more egalitarian than a private company.
Complete and utterly false my good sir. Not only did you bring up an anecdote as an argument but you also accused me of being indifferent to the plight of others. I've personally known people who were discriminated on the basis of religion, my friend wears a headscarf, and I've been both sad for the discrimination she faced and happy when she inevitably, as a talented developer, got a much better position in the private sector. I went out of my way to encourage her to be more confident and showcase her achievements to our employer.
Corporations are not 100% efficient. I have seen so much favoritism in my short career. It's to be expected. A middle manager doesn't care about the company's bottom line, they care about maintaining/upgrading their own position. That sometimes means working towards the bottom line, but usually means working people relationships.
Those people relationships are affected by race gender etc. You really have NEVER seen someone get on a great project because they're better connected, even if they are a worse engineer than someone who doesn't fit in as well?
> Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?
This strawman. you jumping to big conclusion by asking aggressive question.
im minority person. dei things me saw at big tech massive grift. usually run by people without real skill..people who simply there for crusade if they personal social beliefs.
in one org person responsible for daily long email on trans issues. not single trans person on team or on org. so let maybe discuss ukraine..libya..palestine?
at another big tech company..small army of engineers to scan entire company code base and flag word like “whitelist”. Highly paid engineer and managers $300k+ comp to change “whitelist” to “allowlist”
Me minority. none of this nonsense helpful. it actually insult. most stuff corporate entitlement program to create fake job for people without useful skill. pandering to often white people with savior complex who seem to hate other white people.
Somethings are definitely stupid, but I don't really see what's bad about changing whitelist. White = good and black = bad is a weird concept that when using an American lens, is hard not to see implied racism.
Plus, allowlist and denylist is simply easier to understand.
I agree that if your entire job is coming up with this kind of stuff, that's a bit ridiculous. But I don't really see anything wrong with a few engineers spending a few hours a month to push company discourse in a more egalitarian direction.
Actually listened to an interesting lecture on the ancient far east. The White = good and black = bad had originated from the people of the Levant originally, and I mean a long time ago, like before 600BC long ago.
I don't deny that there's historical things to be said about light being good and darkness being bad. That definitely has nothing to do with racism. I have nothing against yin and yang etc
But modern America has a modern lens, not a 600BC lens. Why ignore that?
Corporations are optimizing to the playing field that society creates. As long as 1st world countries can import an endless stream of credentialed migrants, there's no incentive for corporations to hire and train the economically disadvantaged (aka, in many cases minorities).
If you want to hire minorities, open an office in their community, require them to work on site, and hire completely unskilled people with no experience so you can train them. This would require actual investment, not token 'DIE' positions, so corporations don't do it.
I don't understand why anybody would be against having political commissars at their place of work. Did we not learn from Soviet Russia that those work great?
I recently read an interesting book called "Ivan's War" that is an in depth look at WW2 from the Soviet side that extensively draws on 1st hand sources. One of the things I found so interesting was that much of the Soviet framework was built upon ensuring you couldn't trust anyone, putting spies amongst military units to rat on their comrades, splitting apart units that had served together for a while, etc.
The whole point wasn't to control thought, or stamp out disloyalty it was merely to make each person feel like they were alone and isolated.
I have to wonder how much of some of these culture war issues have been brought into corporations in order to prevent the workers from organizing.
The idea that companies get special liability rules disgusts me. I think you should be able to hire whoever you want, but you get to carry the entirety of responsibility for your actions. Either the buck stops with you, or you accept conditions.
I predicted this would likely happen at the start of the year.
I don't think it was an accident that tech become one of the main industries pushing D&I over the last several years. Whatever your opinion is on D&I it's arguably not something a company would put significant investment or time into unless they had spare margin and cashflows.
This isn't a political comment, just an observation as someone who works for a company with a large D&I team, but I do hope this injects some sanity into what a reasonable emphasis on D&I looks like in the corporate structure, because I think a few tech companies have gone a little too far in recent years. The company I work for at the moment has ended up dividing the workforce by race by pushing "inclusive" policies so hard. Our corporate Yammer is worse than Twitter.
My, perhaps bitter, opinion is that D&I was pushed heavily by tech to get more workers in so that wages could be suppressed.
The layoffs happening across all tech companies (including the ones recording record profits and that have extremely large cash reserves) also strikes me as another way of depressing tech salaries.
Maybe this perspective doesn't hold much weight, because why then get rid of D&I?
Maybe because keeping the lights on is more important, or D&I has already done as much as it could do, if that was the ambition.
The reason I thought D&I teams would get cut is because I believe in a lot of companies today these departments are reducing productivity and workplace satisfaction. No one wants to work for a company where you're likelihood of being promoted is, in part, dependant on having the right immutable characteristics.
The issue is when times are good and companies are expanding it's hard to justify why you're suddenly cutting people who work in D&I roles. And you can't even freeze their hiring because even that looks bad when every other department is still growing their headcount 10% YoY.
But now for the first time in many years tech companies have an excuse to cut fat - so who are they going to cut? Well, it's not going to be the engineer who's been their for 10+ years who has built several essential tools and services. It's generally going to be teams who work on speculative innovation projects that are likely going nowhere and those from departments offering little value to the company such as D&I.
My opinion on the tech layoffs from the start has been that if you're a good engineer who's providing value, or is able to provide value elsewhere, it's unlikely you'll be impacted much. Even if you're let go.
>The reason I thought D&I teams would get cut is because I believe in a lot of companies today these departments are reducing productivity and workplace satisfaction.
Or it could simply be the standard "last in, first out" approach that most businesses take when hiring and firing going into an economic downturn.
After writing this I figured I'd check our Yammer just to see what's happen today...
The top post is someone who's upset because they believe an employee has intentionally moved all the books about feminism and race in the office library to the top shelf where they are out of sight. They also suspect the same person has likely moved a Piers Morgan book down to eye level.
After some angry words they finish their post by explaining they were only able to make this observation because they are an individual of above-average height, and apologise for this fact before ending their post with kisses.
My favorite part of the diversity sham is the race selector on the Bumble dating app. Asian has 5/6 options with all cardinal directions included. Yet White has one option. Certainly just like the South Asian is different than the North Asian you get the picture. Also the Greek European is different than the Norwegian. You get the picture.
Also the chess.com emoticon selector. If you don't pay you have to be OK with no emoticon or 2 icons which are Pro Ukraine. If you pay you have access to all emoticons.
Not quite sure exactly what the message is there, but doesn't really go well with freedom of choice. Especially when you have a platform which has a huge minor audience. I guess chess.com has bigger problems not that their site is suffering under extreme load due to poor planning.
I worry that this is just messaging to build towards 'make DEI jobs immune from layoffs'. eg the quotes from comments:
> "Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go."
> 'Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively.' So the "hard" jobs are actually facing larger layoff waves than the DEI jobs.
I don't know if we should read too much into this, it seems like the kind of thing you'd expect in any subspecialty. "Widget polishers are being hit hard by layoffs; we talked to some widget polishers, and they all told us that this is a big problem because it's important for the widgets to be polished."
> I worry that this is just messaging to build towards 'make DEI jobs immune from layoffs'
A job that's immune to layoffs, sign me up! /s
Seriously however, it seems to me that DEI positions are mainly about virtue signaling. The positions certainly don't have anything to do with a companies core competencies or products (you know, their actual business). So it's pure overhead. Wasn't this stuff traditionally handled by HR? As other's have pointed out, there are already laws on the books that must be followed, and plenty of precedent showing large $$$ payouts when the rules aren't being followed.
If/when jobs like this become mandatory, then a new bureaucracy will emerge and spread like a cancer, the overhead hanging like a millstone around a companies ability to stay competitive. You're seeing this happen on universities, where the staff/student ratio continues to grow, raising tuition and reducing the value of the education. I worry about the future competitive value American companies will bring to the global economy.
> Gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation. In our 2017 data set, we found a positive correlation between gender diversity on executive teams and both our measures of financial performance: top-quartile companies on executive-level gender diversity worldwide had a 21 percent likelihood of outperforming their fourth-quartile industry peers on EBIT margin, and they also had a 27 percent likelihood of outperforming fourth-quartile peers on longer-term value creation, as measured using an economic-profit (EP) margin (Exhibit 2).
> Top-team ethnic and cultural diversity is correlated with profitability. In our 2017 data set, we looked at racial and cultural diversity in six countries where the definition of ethnic diversity was consistent and our data were reliable.1 As in 2014, we found that companies with the most ethnically diverse executive teams—not only with respect to absolute representation but also of variety or mix of ethnicities2 —are 33 percent more likely to outperform their peers on profitability. That’s comparable to the 35 percent outperformance reported in 2014, with both figures being statistically significant (Exhibit 4).
> Inclusion programs often trigger an “us versus them” mindset.
> Although diversity and inclusion training is prevalent in corporate America, its impact is inconsistent. According to the evidence, sometimes the programs even have the opposite effect of what they intend.
> One 2016 study of 830 mandatory diversity training programs found that they often triggered a strong backlash against the ideas they promoted. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance,” wrote sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the Harvard Business Review, “and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.”
Do you believe those statistics enough to get rid of the laws that prevent discrimination? If the stats are true, then surely companies, who are known to value monetary gains above all else, would take care of the problem of lack of diversity based solely on their market performance.
How is that a strawman? What am I strawmanning? I am asking if you believe those research papers enough to actually put on the line something you believe in. I am not creating a strawman, but giving you a conclusion based on what the OP posted.
If diversity actually increases profits (and not is merely correlated with it) then that should be a no-brainer.
> Person 1 asserts proposition X.
Person 2 argues against a superficially similar proposition Y, falsely, as if an argument against Y were an argument against X.
> In the original research, using 2014 diversity data, we found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams were 15 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. In our expanded 2017 data set this number rose to 21 percent and continued to be statistically significant. For ethnic and cultural diversity, the 2014 finding was a 35 percent likelihood of outperformance, comparable to the 2017 finding of a 33 percent likelihood of outperformance on EBIT margin; both were also statistically significant (Exhibit 1).
Correlation does not imply causality, as you know. Possibly the more successful companies face more social pressure to improve their DEI numbers, whereas no social justice advocates push on the ones who are struggling. Sampling matters.
McKinsey is merely picking some data that supports their case. If you actually want to show something, do a longitudinal study: first of all, pick cohorts that match up in most other respects, then compare their relative performance within the cohort after increasing their DEI numbers. Or not doing so.
> If you actually want to show something, do a longitudinal study: first of all, pick cohorts that match up in most other respects, then compare their relative performance within the cohort after increasing their DEI numbers. Or not doing so.
I agree these study parameters would yield much better data. The construction of such a study would probably prove challenging.
I mean honestly, you can't possibly think that just adding people of other gender / skin colors just magically improves profitability. There's clearly some lurking variables here that McKinsey purposefully ignored in order to draw this specific conclusion.
It does not necessarily follow that diversity of immutable characteristics creates viewpoint diversity. Ironically, most companies seem to actively stamp out viewpoint diversity as part of their corporate culture (both as part of and distinct from any DEI initiatives they may have).
1. What's the timeline look like for most companies? Were they successful before, after, or all during diversity efforts? At some point it became the socially desired thing to do, so timing matters.
2. Which countries were surveyed? What are the current diversity/cultural influences there?
3. This seems specific to executive teams - is there any more data on regular staff?
4. The data seems a little old, is there newer data?
5. Were the diversity efforts intentional or organic? Meaning: did the company realize it needed more diversity or just by nature of hiring did the successful companies become diverse?
It's important to understand the nuance in studies like this, and the linked article doesn't seem to provide that.
Do these studies ever determine causation or do they purely study correlation? I could imagine e.g. that a company with more female executives absent mandates would have a culture of better work-life balance.
In a situation like that, would mandating more female executives push the culture towards more worklife balance or preferentially promote women who care less than average about worklife balance? Absent hard data my money would be on the latter.
I know no one will read the study but if they do they will find that this is entirely backwards looking--companies that did well in the prior years have more People of Diversity. Which makes sense, if you've done well recently you have more money to blow on affirmative action sinecures that provide political cover and give everyone a warm and tingly feeling.
If it actually increased profitability then we wouldn't need these programs and social coercion, shaming, etc. Companies would be scrambling to hire the magic People of Diversity that bring in the profits.
I'd be curious whether DEI efforts can actually reproduce this, or whether this is just cargo cult wishful thinking.
For instance, maybe companies with a really relatable mission or an open mind at the executive level also tend to attract diverse candidates. Those former factors would explain both the success and the diversity.
If there were a study looking at companies with poor performance metrics who turned things around by pumping their diversity numbers, I'd be really interested in seeing that (since it'd show a nice casual link.)
Without that, it seems plausible that successful companies are the ones able to engage in DEI efforts, even if they don't improve performance, or that minority candidates prefer working at successful companies.
Once again, it is necessary to point out the difference between correlation and causation. Is it possible that simply bringing in people of different ethnicities into your company leadership somehow leads to more profitability? Yes.
But it seems far more likely the reverse is true. In a world where corporations want to demonstrate they are diverse and inclusive, and systemic forces are limiting the number of minorities who make it up the career ladders into leadership positions, minority leadership becomes a scarce commodity. The more profitable and successful a company, the more attractive the company and the more money they have to offer the limited number of minority executives for compensation, increasing the likelihood said executives join their teams.
My previous company got rid of DEI stuff a couple years back, when the previous CEO left. Only one or two people even noticed, and one had the nerve to complain on an all hands.
The CEO said 'listen, we don't have the time or money for stuff like that right now. We're not profitable. Let's turn this ship around and we'll revisit.'
This gave me the sense that it's just seen as a frivolous expense to most companies, and pretty big respect to the CEO for admitting as much.
I've always taken a lot of the D&I stuff as a rainbow capitalism and liability thing.
The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training.
Whereas that stuff is very rarely perpetrated by the rank and final, it's usually the execs that need the training. Why is DIE any different, after all if it was really important to the execs there would be easy ways to make it happen, shoving everyone in trainings seems like performative work.
> The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training.
Which makes perfect sense as these are the people who making hiring decisions and are in places to take bribes and blackmail others for sexual favors; the CEO of a large org isn't doing interviews for rank and file.
DEI departments and projects have a fervor to them that is near religious: the core tenets are faith based and impossible to challenge scientifically. Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out.
The thing is DEI efforts oftentimes mask comical understanding of history and blindingly gross racism.
Personal anecdote: How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics. Or how do you explain indentured servitude, wars and famine have been commonplace all through history.
> Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out.
The one that continually upsets me (as someone who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic community, is married to a Hispanic person, has Hispanic children, and speaks Spanish as a fluent second language and in the home) is the use of the term "LatinX" which has spread through the DEI community and now general HR. I, a white man, despite my involvement in Latin culture cannot push back against this offensive term, which is quite literally colonialistic with white people from other countries (mostly Americans) telling Latin PoC globally what the appropriate term is to self-identify with. I've attempted to do so, and it's gotten me in trouble, despite the truth and cultural basis of my arguments.
DEI would be questionable but not objectionable if it only pushed actual factual truth, but because it's mostly subjective ideological zealotry, it's incredibly objectionable, and actually racist, more racist than those who are in opposition to it, but seems to have been granted a monopoly on determining what is and isn't racist or unacceptable by the Western elites.
That's because the idea there is not to "be inclusive". The idea is to create a complicated set of rules that can be used to promote people you like and demote people you don't like.
This is what happened in many colleges.
1. Certain job listings mandate adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles.
2. Candidates with the strongest understanding of DEI typically come from privileged backgrounds, such as private K-12 schools and Ivy League universities, and tend to be white.
3. These applicants are able to "out-perform" other applicants in terms of DEI understanding.
4. As a result, the faculty continues to be predominantly white and wealthy.
I don't, though. And I see no point in any such gamesmanship. I'm a white man with Turkish and Scottish heritages, born in middle US, and am not Latino or Hispanic by birth, only by association in later life. While I participate in the culture, I am not of the culture, and would never claim to be. I have my own culture, which I also participate in and claim.
This, in fact, is one of the major difficulties with DEI. My identity has no bearing on the truth or falsity of my words, my observations, or my statements. It is simply the truth that "LatinX" does not work in the Spanish language, it's effectively unpronounceable, and it is directly targeting a language feature from the perspective of English speakers as applied to a another language, which means that in so many ways it is insulting, offensive, and colonialistic. It should not require one to identify as Hispanic or Latino to say this (or to be aware of it). It feels intentionally racist, because anyone who purports to be representing the ideal of helping this community should surely be aware of such basic things about Hispanic culture and the Spanish language.
It's worse in minority languages, where the whole movement has been co-opted by well-meaning learners, who happen to share the nationality of the group who speaks the language natively and has kept it alive, calling native speakers bigots for stating their language doesn't work like English and to quit trying to translate English into it directly.
Not to mention all the other classism issues that said natives face at the hands of non-native learners/speakers, including accent discrimination when the others literally only use English phonemes.
And I'm not part of that language's native speaker group, I just recognise they should probably be included in stuff said about it, and try to respect what native speakers say, even if it's not how English works.
It's sad how many Americans don't realize how many white people live in Latin America - they've lived all their lives in Latin America and their families have been in Latin America for centuries. We definitely have a stereotype for those living in Latin America. That and not everybody in Latin America speaks Spanish, either. But hey, I'm a white guy! What do I know about other people and cultures?!
I have an Argentinian friend. Brilliant guy with a lovely family. He has a senior level big tech job. Vacations around the world with his family. Drives fancy cars. Currently building a beautiful new home.
He is also fair skinned, blonde and blue eyed - as is his family. He objectively looks "white". Why does it matter? Because in the current DEI world, he and his children can mark "Hispanic" or "Latino" on all forms (I may be wrong here on whether it is both).
His children will therefore benefit from many advantages granted by DEI benefactors. Lost in this crazy DEI calculus is that this is a wealthy family.
Everyone who doesn't align with the "stereotypes" assigned to each group by the DEI bible gets affected disproportionally in really weird ways.
Your friend is one of those cases. I am not blaming him or his kids for utilizing the current situation to their advantage, and I don't feel particularly bad about someone getting a lucky hand and playing it well either. Good for him and his kids.
But on the flipside, imagine being an asian-american kid coming from a poor family. Not only you get disadvantaged by the financial situation in your household, you then get screwed over by the DEI initiatives on top of that. Too bad, kid, shoulda aligned with the "stereotypes" assigned to your group by DEI better and had well-earning and educated parents. And given how DEI policy supporters often use the "it is for the greater good as a society" argument, it feels doubly dirty and insulting to those individuals.
Even the factual outcomes and effects of such policies aside, officially assigning those "economic stereotypes" to various ethnic groups and treating individual people in those groups based on those "stereotypes" (derived from the aggregate data for that group) just feels icky.
I don't think it's just people from the states with these assumptions about South American racial heritage. Anyway, it is by and large non-white, even if there is much more purely-Spanish Euro etc descent ancestry there than people assume.
As a Hispanic PoC person, I agree 100% with you about LatinX. It's the result of white people with a high school understanding of Spanish trying to fix a language they really don't understand. The Spanish language is not broken and does not need to be fixed.
I don't know any Latinos who actually use the term "Latinx." Spanish is an inherently gendered language; using the term "Latinx" is perceived by most as an attack on their culture.
If LGBTQ+ people want to use the term Latinx to refer to themselves, that's fine. But they don't get to make that decision for the 98% who are fine with "Latino" or "Latina."
The objection I've heard from friends and family is less about any desire to protect the gendered expression of words in Spanish, and more about the fact that LatinX is explicitly and obtusely violating language rules and is effectively unpronounceable. It uses English-specific visual and pronunciation expectations and applies them to another language.
There is already an established way to make this term non-gendered, either drop the gender suffix entirely Latin, or make it explicit by using Latine. Both are which are existing words in Spanish with an established meaning. Rather than use this, activists in the US decided to demand 640 million people change their language to appease those who don't even understand their language.
There is still quite a bit of controversy around the inclusive non-gendered form, because it is non-standard and not approved by the Real Academia Española (rae.es). In Spain, where I come from, the most common non-gendered form is to use the suffix -e, instead of -a or -o. However, in practice, this is mostly use by the LGBTQ+ community and not the general public. It will take a while (if ever) to spread around society.
IMO, genders on objects without a sex are just non sensical and a legacy product of Roman Latin evolution. A simple -e suffix could potentially fix this, but it's incredibly hard to change without a generational change, cause language and habits are sticky. However if you are triggered by a table being female gendered or a car being male gendered, maybe you are overthinking it.
When it comes to human related words, another potential approach is to always use the female form, because you refer to the word person (la persona) and not the particular gender of the individual in question. This applies to groups too, the rule in Spanish is that if a group has females and males, you should use the "male" plural form. Why not just use the female form and everyone is happy?
Just remark that this is a hot topic and conservative and older people usually oppose this aggressively and openly. New generations understand the arbitrary split of society in two based on the presence of a penis more intrinsically though.
> "Latinx organizations share hopes for Futuro Latino Fund"
> The grant is meant for nonprofits and organizations that help support Latinx communities.
> Garcia said Latinx people understanding their history is important for community development.
> "As Chicanos, as we grew up understanding that America, the United States of America, era nuestra casa, we became interested and connected to American history," he said.
> How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics.
That sounds pretty bigoted, so make a complaint to HR. Putting on a 49ers jersey doesn't make me a true fan.
I always found the idea of DEI positions underwhelming. It's as if company had a VP of Tech Debt, or a Chief Accessibility Officer. My conclusion would be that code quality and accessibility aren't actually that important to such a company.
While there are 100% are issues and abuses of power due to how DEI is managed in the private sector, I find it annoying how these threads in HN always throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There are successful diversity hiring programs and proactive management, but you don't hear about those as much because outrage sells. Hell, people from my background were underrepresented when I was working on the Hill and I wished there was more DEI in staffer hiring.
The bigger issue in my honest opinion is how companies treat HR as an amaphorous cost center. It's the same as non-tech companies that underinvest and treat IT like shit because they don't understand the function.
The lack of mutual respect across different domains and roles here on HN is jarring and honestly very toxic. This is sophmoric commentary that I honestly could simulate with a Naive Bayes language model (not even ChatGPT).
Once the numbers (quotas, designated equity proportions, etc.) are reached, are DEI administrators then thinned out ? I'm talking a future, theoretical situation. In order to answer 'what happens when the goals are met' we first need to establish what are the goals and then see if they are transparent from the outset or loose and forever adapting. If not then the risk is a future self-important bureaucratic arm that exists for its own sake.
The answer can't possibly be, "they will forever be needed due to the racist and sexist nature of society" because now we're saying something interesting and possibly self-contradictory about our natures (we're not supposed to have natures, we're products of society/class/culture, is the foundational belief of the DEI ideas as they must be).
I agree, but this will never ever happen, which is one of the many reasons these programs are unethical money pits that only benefit people who make a career out of DEI.
If you're head of DEI at a fortune 500, you're likely getting at least $500k a year in total compensation; more at some companies. Given that reality, it's only human nature to convince yourself that doing that particular job in perpetuity is massively important.
Here's what will happen instead. If they start to hit their initial goals, they'll just move the goalposts. Mostly likely these will be in the form of slicing and dicing workers into ever smaller groups - you can always find a group within a group.
Let's say that the DEI group at $BIG_CORP gets it so that workers from group X are represented at the company in a way that matches the proportion of the overall population they comprise. The folks in DEI will just say, "Oh no, we've made great progress with group X, but we don't have enough people in group X from the LGBTQ community; more work must be done, more money must be spent!" So, they get the LBGTQ numbers up for group X. "Oh, No!", they say, "We don't have enough people from group X who are disabled; more work must be done, more money must be spent!".
The point is not, and never was, to accomplish a goal. It's to make it appear that progress toward a vaguely-state goal of diversity is continuously being made, while also making sure never to actually accomplish the goal; less the make-work jobs and juicy consulting contracts dry up.
And honestly, I can't blame these folks. If I had a half million dollar a year job, I'd also find a way to keep it as long as I possibly could.
157 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadSo the "hard" jobs are actually facing larger layoff waves than the DEI jobs.
> Listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a bigger decline than legal or general human resources jobs saw, according to findings from Textio, which helps companies create unbiased job ads. Only software engineering and data science jobs saw larger declines, at 24% and 27%, respectively.
I'm guessing these were listings Textio was paid to analyze, so there are multiple possible causes for the decline.
My biggest fear is that if we try to sweep the pipeline problem under the rug, we're not going to fix it. I do have a potential solution, but I think it's a tough sell...
So if you were e.g. recruiting for SWE roles at an HBCU presumably there are hundreds of CS students there. Are you saying none were qualified? If so isn't that a problem with education/preparation?
Yes, in other words... a pipeline problem.
When you have bars set in fields where outcomes are tangible (STEM), you cannot improve the situation by lowering the bar, you must improve the situation by improving the populace so more can get over the bar. This is a lot harder to do, and not possible to do in a way that juices the numbers, so very few people and institutions bother to do it.
The solution I hinted at is to actually double-down on standardized testing. I taught test prep to HS'ers in poor schools in California in the past and there are a couple of things I noticed:
1. For kids who cared, I could raise their score dramatically. The College Board disputes this is possible, but I could do this pretty consistently over the course of a year. There were a non-trivial number of kids who didn't care and the results didn't apply to them at all.
2. In the course of my prep I drastically increased learning. And this isn't a direct corollary to (1), and actually somewhat surprised me. The same students I taught saw their course grades go up and felt more confident in school. I think in part because I was a relentless, but effective teacher (if I say so myself).
Oddly, this is going the opposite direction from what people are proposing now and that worries me. People underestimate how well some of these students can do. It's like when they used to say Blacks didn't have the intellect to play QB. We didn't dumb down the position. But because of how important the role is, and how meritocratic sports is, Black kids figured it out. Give them a chance to figure this out, with some of the right incentives. (Side note, I do think the College Board also makes this harder and there is at least some anecdotal data that they have biased the test against underrepresented minorities -- but even with all that, I'm still optimistic).
Regarding my original comment -- it wasn't an entry level SWE role. I'd be open to hiring someone out of college, but you rarely find ones with the level of embedded systems background we needed.
I'm pretty sure the casual racism and misogyny she displayed are par for the course among genuine believers in the EDI space, most just being better at dancing around it than she was. The idea that 'whatever those people are doing' isn't harmed by lowering the bar is probably a less obvious component of how the ideology perpetuates itself.
Opinion piece by leftist Karen
Former editor at Woman's Day
All pronouns welcome[0]
"Here's your chance to nominate queer women and non binary people who are making an impact"[1]
Every time. It's all so tiresome.
[0] https://twitter.com/KathleenEDavis
[1] https://twitter.com/KathleenEDavis/status/161362741211319911...
I understand what this meant in the context of the article, but without context, this seems like a potentially dangerous statement.
As the reply above said, D&I isn't about "Don't fire minorities", it's about "If you fire 10% of your workforce, but they end up being 30% of the minorities in your workforce, question why there's a disconnect"
The idea being is the 10% actually where 10% of cuts need to happen, or is the 10% including some business unit that didn't have the right people hitting up the after work pub crawl with the founder, so no one one felt personally connected enough to have them stick.
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And I feel like the kneejerk is to assume "oh well you're just assuming founders are discriminatory"... it really doesn't have to be a discriminatory thing, it's simple human nature.
It's hard to trust someone who thinks that they won't subconsciously lean away from firing people that they've spent more time with and happen to like. They should accept that camaraderie outside of the bounds of business can subtly affect affect business sense even if you are a fair person before you can consciously override that tendency.
Similarly even though they're not sexist, they're not a T-1000 and are subject to things like same-gender preferences that have been replicated time and time again: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0186...
A large part of D&I is supposed to get people to embrace uncomfortable hidden biases without jumping to the least charitable cause: You don't have to be racist to get along better with people who are from your culture when that often means sharing interests, understanding each other better, etc. You don't have to be evil for that to end up affecting your decision making subconsciously.
Is it both legal and ethical to prioritise specific groups when hiring, with the aim to improve diversity?
Is it therefore both legal and ethical to use the same metrics when conducting layoffs?
Though this is not my field, it somehow seems more unfair in the latter case?
I apologize if I come off as ignorant...Im not sure how these things work in law. However, I can't think of any way that taking someone's personal attributes that they cannot help into consideration when laying others off would result in anything but resentment towards the company.
I'm sure this happens, but it's not been my experience working for healthy companies.
Been through a few attrition rounds myself. The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.). Those at the bottom of the list need to be let go, essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.
> The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.)
Strongly doubt this is done effectively in anything but smaller organizations. Imagine an organization the size of Google, doing this analysis effectively would involve consulting thousands if not 10s of thousands of managers, some of whom will be on the chopping block themselves. Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance, and looping that many people in 100% guarantees the entire process will be leaky as hell. Sure these organizations will play games with performance reviews to try to make some attempt at coming up with a more meaningful filter than a dice roll, but the accuracy is at best, questionable, and as we've seen in the recent layoffs a good performance review is a pretty weak form of protection.
Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play
> essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.
High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.
Larger organizations are just groups of smaller organizations. Some perform better than others. I work for a $4B corp, the small divisions I interact with generally get it right. Sure, you'll get an outlier from time to time that's mismanaged (and addressed once that's become clear). But it's usually not a systemic problem.
> Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance
Organizations don't "play around" with hiring and firing. Believe it or not, the executive team actually does care about employee morale. When you hire you need a plan to keep them, as it impacts employee morale and performance if you hire/fire on a whim. If a company treats it's people badly, it's a sign of a poorly run company, which usually doesn't end well. If you think this is your company, I recommend leaving and finding someplace better. They're out there.
Typically companies are "late" to hire until they are sure the employee is needed long term. During periods of growth, this means that companies are understaffed, and the existing employees have to working harder until its 100% clear the org simply needs more people. From my experience, it takes several months of consistent production overtime before management decides the short term spurt in orders isn't a one-off fluke and actually indicates long term business growth. Only then are new positions created, as the company reasonably believes these people are needed long term.
On the otherside, when it's time to fire, the signs are present for a while that there's been a downturn in business. But companies don't want to fire right away (due to employee morale, reasons above). They will discuss internally at the highest levels whether or not attrition is necessary, can it be avoided etc. Is this just a temporary drop in sales, or is this part of a longer term decline? Until a decision has been made, discussing this with rank and file just creates job anxiety, as no one knows what's going to happen. Once the decision has been made, it's typically executed quickly (that's why they're called executives).
There's a reason that parents don't discuss their problems with their children. Until a decision has been made to divorce, Mom and Dad typically don't tell the kids that they're having problems and might get a divorce. It just created unnecessary anxiety.
So you only hire if you think you can keep them. And you only fire as a last resort. This means that sometimes you're short-staffed and it's necessary for people to work overtime, and other times you've got too many people and you must right size to remain profitable (stay in business).
> Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play
Sure, it's never gotten 100% right. There's randomness in everyone's day to day lives. This is why the management layer is so important, it's their job to get it right as much as possible. Every time you get it wrong you're potentially damaging the company.
We can't avoid randomness. Everyone takes a chance stepping outside their front door in the morning and driving to/from work. Companies deal with randomness as best they can, just like we do in our day to day lives. This is reality we're dealing with, not theory.
> High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.
Yes. If a company isn't making money on a product they have to cut the product. So what to do with the team?
Many times high performers are "found" positions in the company, as the company recognizes their talent is hard to come by. This is easily done when one side of the business needs people, while the other needs to be downsized.
But if the company is...
I think this upside-down view of diversity being located in individuals is really common though, which is one of the problems with tech DEI initiatives. But you get much more use out of it the other way around.
Right, the term has no inherent abstract usefulness, it must be defined in each specific case. You can assess diversity of a group on a certain axis, but not generic "diversity" without defining it.
But you're still thinking of it as something possessed by an individual and that's making it hard to see the value. Adding a specific person may increase the diversity of the team on a certain axis, but that's a trait of the team not that person.
> as that is the only way to really make it fair in the long run.
I don't think this is wrong, but the way you state it makes me think there are several assumptions under it that are worth prodding at. Like, is fairness the goal? To whom? only the members of the team being discussed, or all potential candidates, or society as a whole, or what? Or, what is "performance?" and defined by whom? If a member of the team underperforms their peers on technical assessments but, for example, speaks an uncommon language that gives them access to and business-valuable insight into their users, is that performance? These are judgements that need to be made, not objective facts that can be derived from the world.
I don't know of anyone seriously proposing that "diversity" be the sole deciding factor in a hiring or firing. But that assessing the overall diversity of a team on certain axes can surely be one of several things weighed when making these decisions, along with things like tenure, performance, communication skills, morale, etc.
To be honest, the context doesn't really help much.
Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector is relatively safe. When you bring in DEI positions you're just creating new opening for the politicians/activists to exert control over the private sector as well.
But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc?
Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?
Seems to make sense that DEI departments could fill a similar role - make sure the company is in compliance with the law and then look for ways to go above and beyond it that benefit the company’s position in the market for talent.
I can hire all of x gender, x race, x religion, etc. for my 1000 employee work force. You won't legally be able to nail any kind of discrimination on me so long as I take care as to not leave evidence of it.
In this instance, did discrimination occur? Did the law do its job adequately?
Sexual harassment is illegal, yet companies still do sexual harassment training and HR in theory can help protect employees from sexual harassment and take action on harassers (if only to protect the company).
What a ridiculous statement. It is of course the responsibility of people inside company to ensure that it doesn't perpetuate illegal discriminatory activities.
The real question is there any evidence of DEI departments effecting change beyond what was already supplied previously. Anecdotally I haven't seen it, nor have I seen any studies backing it up (please supply those if you know of them). The only thing I have seen come of it is additional training every year which can be basically summed up to "play nice with others".
You see, what's great about the private sector is that any company that engages in discrimination only harms itself and drives potential talent to their competitors. That's why I love working for private companies, no matter who you are or where you come from if you're making them a lot of money they'll treat you like royalty. I've never seen an environment more egalitarian than a private company.
Those people relationships are affected by race gender etc. You really have NEVER seen someone get on a great project because they're better connected, even if they are a worse engineer than someone who doesn't fit in as well?
This strawman. you jumping to big conclusion by asking aggressive question.
im minority person. dei things me saw at big tech massive grift. usually run by people without real skill..people who simply there for crusade if they personal social beliefs.
in one org person responsible for daily long email on trans issues. not single trans person on team or on org. so let maybe discuss ukraine..libya..palestine?
at another big tech company..small army of engineers to scan entire company code base and flag word like “whitelist”. Highly paid engineer and managers $300k+ comp to change “whitelist” to “allowlist”
Me minority. none of this nonsense helpful. it actually insult. most stuff corporate entitlement program to create fake job for people without useful skill. pandering to often white people with savior complex who seem to hate other white people.
Plus, allowlist and denylist is simply easier to understand.
I agree that if your entire job is coming up with this kind of stuff, that's a bit ridiculous. But I don't really see anything wrong with a few engineers spending a few hours a month to push company discourse in a more egalitarian direction.
But modern America has a modern lens, not a 600BC lens. Why ignore that?
If you want to hire minorities, open an office in their community, require them to work on site, and hire completely unskilled people with no experience so you can train them. This would require actual investment, not token 'DIE' positions, so corporations don't do it.
The whole point wasn't to control thought, or stamp out disloyalty it was merely to make each person feel like they were alone and isolated.
I have to wonder how much of some of these culture war issues have been brought into corporations in order to prevent the workers from organizing.
I don't think it was an accident that tech become one of the main industries pushing D&I over the last several years. Whatever your opinion is on D&I it's arguably not something a company would put significant investment or time into unless they had spare margin and cashflows.
This isn't a political comment, just an observation as someone who works for a company with a large D&I team, but I do hope this injects some sanity into what a reasonable emphasis on D&I looks like in the corporate structure, because I think a few tech companies have gone a little too far in recent years. The company I work for at the moment has ended up dividing the workforce by race by pushing "inclusive" policies so hard. Our corporate Yammer is worse than Twitter.
The layoffs happening across all tech companies (including the ones recording record profits and that have extremely large cash reserves) also strikes me as another way of depressing tech salaries.
Maybe this perspective doesn't hold much weight, because why then get rid of D&I?
Maybe because keeping the lights on is more important, or D&I has already done as much as it could do, if that was the ambition.
The issue is when times are good and companies are expanding it's hard to justify why you're suddenly cutting people who work in D&I roles. And you can't even freeze their hiring because even that looks bad when every other department is still growing their headcount 10% YoY.
But now for the first time in many years tech companies have an excuse to cut fat - so who are they going to cut? Well, it's not going to be the engineer who's been their for 10+ years who has built several essential tools and services. It's generally going to be teams who work on speculative innovation projects that are likely going nowhere and those from departments offering little value to the company such as D&I.
My opinion on the tech layoffs from the start has been that if you're a good engineer who's providing value, or is able to provide value elsewhere, it's unlikely you'll be impacted much. Even if you're let go.
Or it could simply be the standard "last in, first out" approach that most businesses take when hiring and firing going into an economic downturn.
The top post is someone who's upset because they believe an employee has intentionally moved all the books about feminism and race in the office library to the top shelf where they are out of sight. They also suspect the same person has likely moved a Piers Morgan book down to eye level.
After some angry words they finish their post by explaining they were only able to make this observation because they are an individual of above-average height, and apologise for this fact before ending their post with kisses.
For their next trick, objecting to clapping emojis in Slack.
Also the chess.com emoticon selector. If you don't pay you have to be OK with no emoticon or 2 icons which are Pro Ukraine. If you pay you have access to all emoticons.
Not quite sure exactly what the message is there, but doesn't really go well with freedom of choice. Especially when you have a platform which has a huge minor audience. I guess chess.com has bigger problems not that their site is suffering under extreme load due to poor planning.
A job that's immune to layoffs, sign me up! /s
Seriously however, it seems to me that DEI positions are mainly about virtue signaling. The positions certainly don't have anything to do with a companies core competencies or products (you know, their actual business). So it's pure overhead. Wasn't this stuff traditionally handled by HR? As other's have pointed out, there are already laws on the books that must be followed, and plenty of precedent showing large $$$ payouts when the rules aren't being followed.
If/when jobs like this become mandatory, then a new bureaucracy will emerge and spread like a cancer, the overhead hanging like a millstone around a companies ability to stay competitive. You're seeing this happen on universities, where the staff/student ratio continues to grow, raising tuition and reducing the value of the education. I worry about the future competitive value American companies will bring to the global economy.
> Gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation. In our 2017 data set, we found a positive correlation between gender diversity on executive teams and both our measures of financial performance: top-quartile companies on executive-level gender diversity worldwide had a 21 percent likelihood of outperforming their fourth-quartile industry peers on EBIT margin, and they also had a 27 percent likelihood of outperforming fourth-quartile peers on longer-term value creation, as measured using an economic-profit (EP) margin (Exhibit 2).
> Top-team ethnic and cultural diversity is correlated with profitability. In our 2017 data set, we looked at racial and cultural diversity in six countries where the definition of ethnic diversity was consistent and our data were reliable.1 As in 2014, we found that companies with the most ethnically diverse executive teams—not only with respect to absolute representation but also of variety or mix of ethnicities2 —are 33 percent more likely to outperform their peers on profitability. That’s comparable to the 35 percent outperformance reported in 2014, with both figures being statistically significant (Exhibit 4).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
Not saying its true, not saying its not.
> Inclusion programs often trigger an “us versus them” mindset.
> Although diversity and inclusion training is prevalent in corporate America, its impact is inconsistent. According to the evidence, sometimes the programs even have the opposite effect of what they intend.
> One 2016 study of 830 mandatory diversity training programs found that they often triggered a strong backlash against the ideas they promoted. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance,” wrote sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the Harvard Business Review, “and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.”
If diversity actually increases profits (and not is merely correlated with it) then that should be a no-brainer.
1. Companies are not known to value monetary gains above all else.
2. Even those that do often concentrate and very short term gains over things that would make them more money in the long run.
Correlation does not imply causality, as you know. Possibly the more successful companies face more social pressure to improve their DEI numbers, whereas no social justice advocates push on the ones who are struggling. Sampling matters.
McKinsey is merely picking some data that supports their case. If you actually want to show something, do a longitudinal study: first of all, pick cohorts that match up in most other respects, then compare their relative performance within the cohort after increasing their DEI numbers. Or not doing so.
I agree these study parameters would yield much better data. The construction of such a study would probably prove challenging.
Not off to a great start, so a few questions:
1. What's the timeline look like for most companies? Were they successful before, after, or all during diversity efforts? At some point it became the socially desired thing to do, so timing matters.
2. Which countries were surveyed? What are the current diversity/cultural influences there?
3. This seems specific to executive teams - is there any more data on regular staff?
4. The data seems a little old, is there newer data?
5. Were the diversity efforts intentional or organic? Meaning: did the company realize it needed more diversity or just by nature of hiring did the successful companies become diverse?
It's important to understand the nuance in studies like this, and the linked article doesn't seem to provide that.
In a situation like that, would mandating more female executives push the culture towards more worklife balance or preferentially promote women who care less than average about worklife balance? Absent hard data my money would be on the latter.
If it actually increased profitability then we wouldn't need these programs and social coercion, shaming, etc. Companies would be scrambling to hire the magic People of Diversity that bring in the profits.
For instance, maybe companies with a really relatable mission or an open mind at the executive level also tend to attract diverse candidates. Those former factors would explain both the success and the diversity.
If there were a study looking at companies with poor performance metrics who turned things around by pumping their diversity numbers, I'd be really interested in seeing that (since it'd show a nice casual link.)
Without that, it seems plausible that successful companies are the ones able to engage in DEI efforts, even if they don't improve performance, or that minority candidates prefer working at successful companies.
But it seems far more likely the reverse is true. In a world where corporations want to demonstrate they are diverse and inclusive, and systemic forces are limiting the number of minorities who make it up the career ladders into leadership positions, minority leadership becomes a scarce commodity. The more profitable and successful a company, the more attractive the company and the more money they have to offer the limited number of minority executives for compensation, increasing the likelihood said executives join their teams.
> minority leadership becomes a scarce commodity
... one capable of attracting very good offers. An unsuccessful company is unlikely to be able to hire them.
The CEO said 'listen, we don't have the time or money for stuff like that right now. We're not profitable. Let's turn this ship around and we'll revisit.'
This gave me the sense that it's just seen as a frivolous expense to most companies, and pretty big respect to the CEO for admitting as much.
The problem with a lot of the DIE stuff that I've seen is that it is usually targeted at the ICs and first level managers, just like the ethics training, and the sexual harassment training.
Whereas that stuff is very rarely perpetrated by the rank and final, it's usually the execs that need the training. Why is DIE any different, after all if it was really important to the execs there would be easy ways to make it happen, shoving everyone in trainings seems like performative work.
Which makes perfect sense as these are the people who making hiring decisions and are in places to take bribes and blackmail others for sexual favors; the CEO of a large org isn't doing interviews for rank and file.
The thing is DEI efforts oftentimes mask comical understanding of history and blindingly gross racism.
Personal anecdote: How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics. Or how do you explain indentured servitude, wars and famine have been commonplace all through history.
The one that continually upsets me (as someone who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic community, is married to a Hispanic person, has Hispanic children, and speaks Spanish as a fluent second language and in the home) is the use of the term "LatinX" which has spread through the DEI community and now general HR. I, a white man, despite my involvement in Latin culture cannot push back against this offensive term, which is quite literally colonialistic with white people from other countries (mostly Americans) telling Latin PoC globally what the appropriate term is to self-identify with. I've attempted to do so, and it's gotten me in trouble, despite the truth and cultural basis of my arguments.
DEI would be questionable but not objectionable if it only pushed actual factual truth, but because it's mostly subjective ideological zealotry, it's incredibly objectionable, and actually racist, more racist than those who are in opposition to it, but seems to have been granted a monopoly on determining what is and isn't racist or unacceptable by the Western elites.
This is what happened in many colleges.
1. Certain job listings mandate adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles.
2. Candidates with the strongest understanding of DEI typically come from privileged backgrounds, such as private K-12 schools and Ivy League universities, and tend to be white.
3. These applicants are able to "out-perform" other applicants in terms of DEI understanding.
4. As a result, the faculty continues to be predominantly white and wealthy.
5. Profit.
This, in fact, is one of the major difficulties with DEI. My identity has no bearing on the truth or falsity of my words, my observations, or my statements. It is simply the truth that "LatinX" does not work in the Spanish language, it's effectively unpronounceable, and it is directly targeting a language feature from the perspective of English speakers as applied to a another language, which means that in so many ways it is insulting, offensive, and colonialistic. It should not require one to identify as Hispanic or Latino to say this (or to be aware of it). It feels intentionally racist, because anyone who purports to be representing the ideal of helping this community should surely be aware of such basic things about Hispanic culture and the Spanish language.
Not to mention all the other classism issues that said natives face at the hands of non-native learners/speakers, including accent discrimination when the others literally only use English phonemes.
And I'm not part of that language's native speaker group, I just recognise they should probably be included in stuff said about it, and try to respect what native speakers say, even if it's not how English works.
He is also fair skinned, blonde and blue eyed - as is his family. He objectively looks "white". Why does it matter? Because in the current DEI world, he and his children can mark "Hispanic" or "Latino" on all forms (I may be wrong here on whether it is both).
His children will therefore benefit from many advantages granted by DEI benefactors. Lost in this crazy DEI calculus is that this is a wealthy family.
Your friend is one of those cases. I am not blaming him or his kids for utilizing the current situation to their advantage, and I don't feel particularly bad about someone getting a lucky hand and playing it well either. Good for him and his kids.
But on the flipside, imagine being an asian-american kid coming from a poor family. Not only you get disadvantaged by the financial situation in your household, you then get screwed over by the DEI initiatives on top of that. Too bad, kid, shoulda aligned with the "stereotypes" assigned to your group by DEI better and had well-earning and educated parents. And given how DEI policy supporters often use the "it is for the greater good as a society" argument, it feels doubly dirty and insulting to those individuals.
Even the factual outcomes and effects of such policies aside, officially assigning those "economic stereotypes" to various ethnic groups and treating individual people in those groups based on those "stereotypes" (derived from the aggregate data for that group) just feels icky.
Seriously, I would be surprised if there is not a broken spoken language.
English is completely messed up. I don't know how anyone learns it.
Why do you think they may have adopted it?
> The Spanish language is not broken and does not need to be fixed.
Latinx is an English word. English words are not necesarily gendered, and English linguistic culture has evolved away from gendered nouns.
"Latine" is better for English, though.
https://theconversation.com/stop-using-latinx-if-you-really-...
If LGBTQ+ people want to use the term Latinx to refer to themselves, that's fine. But they don't get to make that decision for the 98% who are fine with "Latino" or "Latina."
There is already an established way to make this term non-gendered, either drop the gender suffix entirely Latin, or make it explicit by using Latine. Both are which are existing words in Spanish with an established meaning. Rather than use this, activists in the US decided to demand 640 million people change their language to appease those who don't even understand their language.
IMO, genders on objects without a sex are just non sensical and a legacy product of Roman Latin evolution. A simple -e suffix could potentially fix this, but it's incredibly hard to change without a generational change, cause language and habits are sticky. However if you are triggered by a table being female gendered or a car being male gendered, maybe you are overthinking it.
When it comes to human related words, another potential approach is to always use the female form, because you refer to the word person (la persona) and not the particular gender of the individual in question. This applies to groups too, the rule in Spanish is that if a group has females and males, you should use the "male" plural form. Why not just use the female form and everyone is happy?
Just remark that this is a hot topic and conservative and older people usually oppose this aggressively and openly. New generations understand the arbitrary split of society in two based on the presence of a penis more intrinsically though.
> "Latinx organizations share hopes for Futuro Latino Fund"
> The grant is meant for nonprofits and organizations that help support Latinx communities.
> Garcia said Latinx people understanding their history is important for community development.
> "As Chicanos, as we grew up understanding that America, the United States of America, era nuestra casa, we became interested and connected to American history," he said.
> A lot of Latinos would love to be baseball,
That sounds pretty bigoted, so make a complaint to HR. Putting on a 49ers jersey doesn't make me a true fan.
Wait til you find out how promotions work. It’s one heck of an affair!
There are successful diversity hiring programs and proactive management, but you don't hear about those as much because outrage sells. Hell, people from my background were underrepresented when I was working on the Hill and I wished there was more DEI in staffer hiring.
The bigger issue in my honest opinion is how companies treat HR as an amaphorous cost center. It's the same as non-tech companies that underinvest and treat IT like shit because they don't understand the function.
The lack of mutual respect across different domains and roles here on HN is jarring and honestly very toxic. This is sophmoric commentary that I honestly could simulate with a Naive Bayes language model (not even ChatGPT).
Hell, I'm not even denying that hiring abuses under the guise of DEI occur, but to downvote a call for constructive discussion is just ridiculous
Once the numbers (quotas, designated equity proportions, etc.) are reached, are DEI administrators then thinned out ? I'm talking a future, theoretical situation. In order to answer 'what happens when the goals are met' we first need to establish what are the goals and then see if they are transparent from the outset or loose and forever adapting. If not then the risk is a future self-important bureaucratic arm that exists for its own sake.
The answer can't possibly be, "they will forever be needed due to the racist and sexist nature of society" because now we're saying something interesting and possibly self-contradictory about our natures (we're not supposed to have natures, we're products of society/class/culture, is the foundational belief of the DEI ideas as they must be).
Therefore an end goal is a must-have.
I agree, but this will never ever happen, which is one of the many reasons these programs are unethical money pits that only benefit people who make a career out of DEI.
If you're head of DEI at a fortune 500, you're likely getting at least $500k a year in total compensation; more at some companies. Given that reality, it's only human nature to convince yourself that doing that particular job in perpetuity is massively important.
Here's what will happen instead. If they start to hit their initial goals, they'll just move the goalposts. Mostly likely these will be in the form of slicing and dicing workers into ever smaller groups - you can always find a group within a group.
Let's say that the DEI group at $BIG_CORP gets it so that workers from group X are represented at the company in a way that matches the proportion of the overall population they comprise. The folks in DEI will just say, "Oh no, we've made great progress with group X, but we don't have enough people in group X from the LGBTQ community; more work must be done, more money must be spent!" So, they get the LBGTQ numbers up for group X. "Oh, No!", they say, "We don't have enough people from group X who are disabled; more work must be done, more money must be spent!".
The point is not, and never was, to accomplish a goal. It's to make it appear that progress toward a vaguely-state goal of diversity is continuously being made, while also making sure never to actually accomplish the goal; less the make-work jobs and juicy consulting contracts dry up.
And honestly, I can't blame these folks. If I had a half million dollar a year job, I'd also find a way to keep it as long as I possibly could.