But that's the whole issue. Policy versus practice.

I'm usually hard pressed to find people who disagree with the thought of "we should try to hire people other than white men in a white men dominated profession".

The issue comes when the unspoken (OP's "off the record") enforcement of this is willful hate towards those people.

I disagree that the existing diversity in tech is best described as "white". Tech has a lot of diversity. It's that some groups, especially women, are still underrepresented.

18% of computer science majors in the US are women. 20% of the computer science jobs are held by women. How is that underrepresenting women?

* - https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

These people believe that men and women are identical (except for socialisation), and so any less than 51% representation is under-representation and evidence of sexism.

There's zero reason why in computer science and tech women and men should have so drastically different ratios. Even back in the day programming was seen as a women's job.

Zero reason?? More opportunity in other traditionally male jobs like doctors, nurse pay has increased, tech jobs require longer hours than they used to, the opening of various CS-parallel fields like UX/UI design that don't count as computer science, more economic freedom for top earning families to not require 2 incomes. There are literally dozens of reasons why women's interest in CS might decrease.

* - https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2020/05/for-nati...

> more economic freedom for top earning families to not require 2 incomes

Isn't this not actually true? More families are unable to avoid needing two incomes.

Nah. Do you know nurses? Their hours are pretty damn long and much more stressful. So longer hours does not sound like a valid reason why someone would choose one profession over another.

What ratio "should" they have then? What is the right ratio based on non-social causes, from which any deviation is evidence of bias or cultural sexism?

Pick whatever gender and/or race you like. That's just the most commonly used example.

My point is just as in there have been and are people that are willfully malicious and ONLY hire white men/women, it seems we have a hard time accepting there will be some willfully malicious enforcement of a policy such as "we need to make an effort to hire more outside of a gender or race group".

Indeed. It's very easy for people to say, "I'm sorry there's systemic discrimination against you, but it's your problem. Any solution that might affect me -- or somebody like me -- is discrimination against me, and that's unacceptable."

That doesn't make quotas the right solution. More creativity is required, and varies by situation. Which is why I always bristle at the outright rejection of calls for hiring a more diverse group of people without even pretending propose alternatives. Reinforcing the status quo means perpetuating the racism, sexism, etc.

But these people are the only racists you will find in general hiring, so here discrimination would make sense.

How about "we should try to hire more asian men in black women dominated fields"?

Equivalencies do exist. There’s a large push to have more men in fields such as nursing and child care.

I'm not to say there's no such push at all, but by no means I would call it large.

I mean I'm not even a nurse/not in childcare and I know about it, so it's certainly not fringe.

So. I've just googled "hire more men". In a private tab with a naive hope that google will get me out of whatever bubble it put me into.

This is the first page:

- why employers favor men

- women outnumber men in the paid workforce

- why employers favor men

- women rehired less than men

- if there is a real gender pay gap, why do firms hire men

(I will spare the readers from remaining five links, but trust me, nothing groundbreaking was there)

Again, this is not to say there's no push to hire men. It's just somewhere "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"."

So I also googled "hire more men" and I got on the first page 'should schools be trying to hire more men' and the first return was 'small companies hire more men to avoid maternity burden'.

So I don't know how this proves anything either way.

Honest question I could probably google or something, but what are some "black women dominated fields"?

I would argue that beauty products catered specifically to kinky/extremely curly hair and deeper skin tend to be dominated by black women. (Issues to address: Ashiness of skin, undertone colors for foundation/concealer, hair needing to be well-moisturized)

At least on my recent memory, when Fenty Beauty first came on the scene it blew up extremely fast, as it was one of the first major makeup companies specifically catering to non-beige skin colors... the company was founded by the artist Rihanna, who identifies as black.

Of course there is an issue when people miss the point and do stupid shit. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to improve representation in one of if not the most fast growing, wealth-providing career fields. I’m utterly baffled by this argument that a case of one company missing the point means IBM shouldn’t even try.

IBM should try, everyone should try.

But on the same side people just can't believe that the middle management and/or line level people responsible for some of these decisions are being malicious.

It's fine to call out malicious behavior I'm just confused by the argument that a stupid decision from company A means that company B shouldn't try to make a good decision. I'm even more confused by the concept that company A making a stupid decision means that every push to make a non-stupid decision must be suspected to be malicious.

I do disagree with that. If white men happen to be there for some reason or another, it doesn't really matter. The likelihood that it is because of racism is minuscule.

Sorry, I'm not getting how "hire less white men" is different from "hire more non-white men"?

The "Drink milk" campaign in my elementary school would be a good example. You should drink more milk, doesn't mean you should drink less water, or juice or whatever. It just means drink more milk.

Assuming that you can drink an infinite amount of liquid, yes.

But in practice "drink more milk" means "drink less soda".

>Assuming that you can drink an infinite amount of liquid, yes.

You would also assume that people drink their "max quota" of drinks a day, thus being forced to eliminate something to make room. There's always room for milk my friend.

Those things are identical in practice.

The request is to hire non-whites and/or non-men.

The clearest way to enforce it is just to specify exactly that - it achieves the stated aims with no cognitive dissonance.