Re:The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
by crazy_horse on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @04:52PM
(#28054036)
You're right it does seem like a small thing to pick on in this context.
I think it stood out to me because like you said it's not a common term. It gets used in specific communities and areas (academia) but it's a term that the group it is describing doesn't actually use, it's an outgroup indicator, and it's more negative than similar terms like poc, bipoc. It's a culture war signal, even when not intended.
Do I care about it? Not really, but it is a really small thing that would go a long ways towards inclusion as weird as that sounds.
Re:The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
by akiselev on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @06:35PM
(#28055071)
The statement as a whole is equally effective with just "white guys" since most people can draw their connotations from the context and those that can't wouldn't know the word anyway (and researching it throws them into the deep end). Reading between the lines (fairly or not), adding that descriptor implies a value judgement beyond the baseline lack of diversity. It draws attention to the individuals as the problem rather than systemic or emergent issues.
> For example, I once worked for a company that poured a lot of effort into inclusive hiring: they made an inclusion skills rubric, placed ads in “diverse” tech spaces, et cetera. Two years later, all the “diverse people” they had carefully collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost exclusively cishet white guys.
This is a paragraph directly talking about an initiative to increase diversity that ultimately had little lasting impact, but is making no judgments about either the group of "diverse people" that didn't stick around nor the group of hires that followed.
There's no thinking about either group there as individuals, nor positive or negative overall descriptions of them, just an anecdote about an HR initiative at a particular company that didn't really meet its objectives.
What's there to be offended by, asks this person who hadn't even encountered the term "cishet" before this article but falls in the group?