I was going to make a comment mentioning how the asymmetry in what is allowed in big companies frustrates me greatly. People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right while people who vocally express support for older social structures get cancelled. Well your comment explains that asymmetry perfectly with something I had never considered: legal risk.
It is apparent to me that many people in the country still align with the old social structures, but they aren't allowed to thrive in modern corporate America. How will this affect society in the long term? What would it take for things to change?
Have you seen _any_ major tech company with close to 50% women or 40% non-hispanic white employees? In engineering roles? That's just aiming for parity with U.S. demographics, but when you consider how much of the world travels to the U.S. to work in tech, that 40% number should be much higher!
So if women and minorities are not being "hired left and right", and not all women and minorities ascribe to the viewpoint you describe, then that viewpoint cannot be being "hired left and right".
The "old social structures" may be on their way out, but their vestiges are clearly alive and well despite the moderate legal "risk" that has been added in the past few decades. The law may be an asymmetric tool, but as it stands, a tool that isn't up to the task it was designed for.
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To reframe things, some questions:
How would you define "the old social structures".
Do you think they are good/bad/benign.
Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?
Depends on what you'd consider close. Apple, for example, reports 47% white non-Hispanic employees overall and 44% in engineering. (https://www.apple.com/diversity/) From my personal experience, I've never worked on a team where white people were a majority, although in one case I think the company as a whole was.
For comparison, many of the other FAANG companies fare much worse, and many of the smaller companies I saw when consulting and doing a startup looked even less diverse than big tech.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/six-years-into-diversity-rep...
They're social and cultural beliefs that used to be accepted by corporations and the media but are now not. For example, unequal outcomes doesn't imply discrimination. Some cultures are better than others. There are widespread physical and psychological differences between men and women. These are common beliefs that are still common, but people are afraid to voice them.
> Do you think they are good/bad/benign.
Any extreme ideology is bad. Requiring strict gender roles or saying whites are superior is extremely harmful. But so is flagrant discrimination against whites or other similar things. What is bad is allowing one extreme while suppressing the other.
> Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?
I read some studies somewhere that stated that conservatism and liberalism are inate character traits that never really go away in a population. This means that changes in the visibility of such traits is largely a function of how much power one side or the other can gain. This means that in the 50's, liberalism was just as popular as now but they didn't have the power.
Now its swapped. Liberalism has the power, the corporate support, the narrative. But that doesn't mean that conservatism is any rarer than before. This power asymmetry increases the chances of conflict. See the affect of the Culture Wars on our political system.
I want to emphasize that my personal opinions don't matter much at all here. But if corporations continue asymmetric political pressure, there will be pushback. What will the repercussions of such pushback be?
Because forcing companies to not allow discriminatory practices or hostile work environments for protected classes is kind of the entire point (of the business oriented portions of those laws).
I’m having difficulty interpreting a more charitable reading of your post.
Edit: just noticed "one of". I’m morbidly curious, what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws.
No, I said it had an evil ramification. Laws can have both evil and good ramifications.
> what are the other evil ramifications of civil rights laws
I would say that the current legal environment of allowing companies to be sued successfully for "hostile environment" actions of their employees that they had nothing to do with and no foreknowledge of is another.
That concept became controversial 57 years ago with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the controversial nature of it has been strengthened over the decades since through a multitude of hostile workplace laws building on the CRA.
What those laws mean is hiring an employee, doubly so for a manager like the man in question, who has published a high profile book disparaging a protected class of people opens up the company itself to lawsuits on the basis of discrimination relating to a hostile workplace if a single member of that protected class is (or even feels) mistreated in some way because it’s evidence the company should’ve known about the potential hostile environment and did nothing to prevent it.
And so it’s clear, no this is not the same thing as cancel culture based on a tweet or forum post or even on the scale of Amazon banning Parler. It’s not the same as James Damore and Google. Those all do not necessarily meet the standard of public speech while this guy went and published a book which very clearly does. This is a half a century plus of laws and cases establishing precedent and companies acting in a way to prevent costly lawsuits.
No well run company would open themselves up to the legal risk involved in hiring or keeping on someone like this for a management role, especially after it was clearly brought to light in this manner. Apple’s HR department is almost definitely currently trying to figure out what mistake resulted in him not getting filtered out earlier in the process so they can prevent this from happening again.
"Can he do the job?" has not been the only thing that matters, and in fact the situation described in this instance has mattered, for over a half century, I’m guessing longer than you’ve been alive. Not because of woke mobs or free speech or any other recent political talking points or even really about Apple caring about sexism. It’s about avoiding clear cut legal and financial risk period.