You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender, irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character. You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.

There is no "ideal diverse workforce". By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity. You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.

This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.

> You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender

I didn't make the definition. The company leadership makes it based on internal feedback, advice and general societal beliefs in what "diversity" means.

> irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character

I agree - everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. However, it is difficult to judge someone's character alone from a CV.

> You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.

Every person I'd hire deserves to be hired. There are no bones thrown to fill a quota (which doesn't exist). However, to help achieve the goal of a "diverse workplace" a systemic method needs to be incorporated to ensure that a diverse set of candidates were given an opportunity to join the interview pool. With a large enough pool we can reasonably assure that every hire is hired on merit alone as they will be competing with other people that have different immutable physical characteristics. This also means if the hires tend to all look a certain way I can reference the systemic method used to ensure that in fact we actually removed bias from the selection process by ensuring certain attributes were included in the overall pool.

> There is no "ideal diverse workforce".

Ask 1000 people and you'll get 1000 answers.

> By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity.

No, you are creating a pool that is defensible in terms of who you end up hiring. No one is guaranteed a job because they are in the candidate pool. They will compete with their cohort on equal grounds.

> You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.

See, this is where you're making a mistake. The specific heuristic across the group includes everyone. It doesn't say "not white males in their 20's" - in fact 9 out of 12 candidates could be just that so long as the other 3 candidates somehow cover every other enumeration of attributes. But with a large enough pool you can ensure that each characteristic the company determines is "diverse" is somehow included in the candidate pool without diluting it in terms of merit. This doesn't mean the outcome looks anything like the candidate pool.

> This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.

Fair enough - I don't know your thoughts but it could be from the point of view you're looking at if from. To me, you sound like someone who thinks a systematic method of candidate pool selection sounds like exclusion of certain people. And it would be if we excluded certain candidates because they didn't possess an arbitrary diversity attribute. However, this process is inclusive because it demands that each enumeration of each diversity attribute be included at least once. And with a large enough candidate pool (this is key - you need to do the work here interviewing enough people) this means there are still very many seats for the dominate attribute enumeration - white guys that are youngish as it happens to be.

However, it would be an illegitimate candidate pool if there wasn't a white person in it, or a male in it, or a young person in it as well! That would be exclusionary.

This is a pragmatic approach to fulfilling a diversity goal (regardless of if my personal beliefs are different) while ensuring that there is no exclusion, that the quality of hires remains at the level desired and most importantly that nobody who is hired or anyone they work with has any reason to believe they only got the job because they won diversity bingo.

Regardless of who made the definition, that's the definition you're following.

We're going in circles here as long as you fundamentally believe diversity of physical and biological details is important. If that's what you want to enforce in your workforce, even though it is meaningless to the job, then you're designing for an outcome, and not opportunity. Inclusive does not exist in a vacuum; to include some means to exclude others.

Not the parent commenter, but for what it's worth, I appreciate you taking the time to write your responses in this thread. I am honestly baffled (and a little alarmed) that more people don't understand the points you are making.

Please explain why?

From my perspective what makes sense is we have large groups of people that believe diversity as defined by certain attributes is important. We also have large groups of people that don't. And both groups have some good and some poor reasons for their beliefs. Both "sides" are legit. So how do we reconcile this?

To me, the most agreeable aspect of each side is that:

1) We live in a diverse society whether we like it or not, which has a history of certain exclusion and we should try and improve on that to make all of our lives more peaceful.

2) Not everyone has an advantage or disadvantage because of certain immutable attributes and we should be conscious of this as well. Social engineering is less engineering than politics.

The idealist approach is to optimize one way or the other; mainly for political reasons which results in resentment and bitterness. The pragmatic approach is to try and create a system that is defensible one way or another - even if it is flawed in both regards. The perfect system is impossible anyhow and a matter of opinion.

So, you design a system that takes into account both points above. You ensure you interview across certain enumerative attributes generally agreed upon as important. But you don't optimize across it as it can turn into an exclusionary system in its own right with awful side effects such as legit resentment, meritless and simply political. You don't exclude any of the apparent important diversity attributes - they all are important. You also create a reasonable metric around what this means. This ensures you, in some way, have at least given the opportunity to a vast range of of people. It doesn't mean you've given an outcome to anyone.

The trick becomes in keeping it honest - that you don't assume that a certain set of attributes is more important than another. Where a lot of similar systems get it wrong is they define that a certain subset of attributes must be included. They should demand that over the entire pool all attributes must be included. And only to a limit and after that it's fair game.

I'm only saying that we should at least try and ensure we speak with everyone in terms of various individual attributes that are generally accepted, albeit arbitrary, when opening an opportunity. And that's it. What is alarming about this? How is this not pragmatic? Who is this stealing from? How is this bad for anyone?

First, and most importantly, thank you for the friendly reply.

Regarding your questions, I can't think of a clearer explanation that the comment that I initially replied to. Fundamentally, the core argument is that the moment you start using immutable characteristics as part of your heuristic, you've already lost- there will be resentment, because now, by definition, you've given something to someone that they did nothing to earn, and that position is coming from someone else.

That these exact things happened in the past, and happen now, doesn't mean that reversing the arrow makes things better- it just breeds a new generation of the same thing.

In terms of how do we move forward as a society, and speaking strictly as just my own opinion: we need to focus on what our commonalities are, not our differences, and go from there.

I had the great luck of growing up as the child of a diplomat, and thus getting to see a much wider variety of countries and ways of life than most people do. One of the most important lessons I took from the experience is that people are far more alike than different, even in areas that have had little previous cultural exchange. It takes some time to find out how to translate across different givens, but once you understand the shared local model of how things work, people's decisions make sense.

The catch is that if you don't agree with some of the base assumptions, then some decisions will seem utterly abhorrent, and the same is true in reverse. Some are mutually exclusive, in that there is no such thing as a middle ground. That is the problem of diversity, and it is a very real one.

So, moving forward- these schisms exist because the world used to be far more closed off from itself than it is today. I'm only in my mid-40's, and yet when I was a child, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip. Now I can hop on any of a dozen free webcams if I felt so inclined and look at who is walking down the street where I used to live. All we can do is start talking to those now so close, find out what we can agree on, and try to forge something we can all live with.

(I realize this is a bit further afield than the original subject of applying for jobs, but I think a friendly reply deserves an honest answer.)

I've repeated it several times. Your presented idea of diversity is about physical characteristics. Things we cannot change and yet define us forever. Diversity defined by how you look is not diversity that matters in any sense, and people who believe it does (which is a loud minority) are either ignorant or willingly malicious.

Inclusion and exclusion are two sides of the same thing. If you forcefully include group X, then you are by definition excluding group Y as a reaction. Therefore, the only truly fair design is to not preference anyone by any physical attribute, and in this case only judge for positions based on competence and merit.

Many of us understand, but disagree with the points.

Disagree I'm fine with- hashing things out together is how we all move forward. What concerns me is how quickly a full moral judgement appears to have been passed on what is a sticky, thorny issue.

> What concerns me is how quickly a full moral judgement appears to have been passed on what is a sticky, thorny issue.

I think this is quite valid. Especially from the progressive side I guess I'd say, there's a certain moral altruism that has no regard for other ideas or even the questioning of certain ideas and ideals. And to me, a lot of it is certainly a feeling of moral superiority that self legitimizes certain values from the authority of a middle and upper middle class socioeconomic position with complete disregard for the working and lower classes. The classes which served the progressive side so well until they became inconvenient.

My points are only trying to find a balance such that we can still live in a world with merit; where we can compromise a bit by ensuring there is a measurable opportunity available but yet the outcome is up to the individual.

To be frank, my dissenters here are people I probably agree with more from an idealist vantage. But I also understand that when working in a larger social system we need to be considerate of other points of view and to create systems that the reasonable people on "both sides" can live with. It's when we play to the unreasonable that extremism gains foothold.

I think your first paragraph in particular really nails one of the big problems of the modern left in the US. If you haven't, yet, I recommend reading I Can Tolerate Anything but the Outgroup:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

It raises, I think, some very interesting points. Not so much in the way you may agree with it or not, but in terms of how to frame the problem itself.

Thanks for the link - well written and thoughtful and full of truth. And I agree with the conclusions quite a bit.