I think you can be for DEI as a concept and as a corporate or school policy, but against the performative act of writing it out as some kind of weird "pledge of allegiance" in a job application.
I hasten to restate that is my understanding of the premise, in the spirit of collectively untangling the causal chain here. This is incendiary stuff on HN!
I (and a lot of us I think) follow you up to this point, but then you lose us here.
How does a written statement, the expected content of which is clearly known, give any understanding of the individual's position? This type of approach to education seems to me that it actively harms the ability to sway people's opinions.
I have this issue with a lot of discussions of DEI, there are a lot of arguments that support the DEI goal and a dearth of arguments that support the methods being used to achieve that goal.
ChatGPT, please write me a DEI statement for this job interview.
As per Dang’s guidelines above (specifically for this thread), this should not have been allowed on HN.
Now I wonder: Why is it here?
The internet gods bestowed two* of these on us today. The other one is Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267639. I posted an answer there to someone who asked more or less the same question, just about the other topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862. But the principles are the same. If you're willing to read it mutatis mutandis and maybe take a look at some of the other posts I linked to, you should find what you're looking for.
* (No, that's not a trend—just random fluctuation)
I'm very skeptical that there is any threat to our survival here, or that DEI is any kind of response capable of resolving it. DEI is about "justice", a set of ethical principles, not about some utilitarian calculation about social survival or prosperity.
It seems facially implausible to me, given that America became prosperous when these inequalities were much worse. Why do we accept this premise as a given?
As someone who is pro DEI and participated in DEI related activities and brainstorms during hiring: I very much doubt that.
No one thinks inequality is desirable. The opposition you speak of think it's unavoidable. And bad public policy will have effects that make the situation worse for everyone.
I suggest that's an extraordinarily naive statement.
No True Scotsman detected.
I suggest that categorical statement that, universally, everyone is against inequality, needs some justification. Historically it's certainly not true AT ALL.
“ As an imprecise working definition (not for all times and places but for the United States today), “far right” is used here to mean political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, ”
In a world with limited resources I think it makes sense to allocate more resources towards people who perform acts for society which require rare skill sets, talent, etc. That might mean more money, it might mean land, it might mean status, or anything else really.
The idea being that those rewards both serve as motivation and also help those people to focus on the good work that they are doing.
You can apply this to basically anything - I think that a more beautiful person, all else being equal, should recieve favourable treatment over an ugly one.
The main downside of such an approach seems to be that, to put it simply, losers get less than winners and to some people that seems unfair. But it's only unfair if the rewards allocated aren't proportional to merit.
I don't really consider this to be controversial to be honest - I think someone who is twice as good as me as a programmer, or contributes twice as much value to the business, or hell, is twice as good at football as me - should receive at least twice as much. That's unequal, but it's also sane and right.
A society in which the children of successful people are prioritised over the children of unsuccessful people is almost certain to lead to better outcomes for exactly the same reasons.
I came from an underprivileged background myself, if I were investing money with an aim to generating a return, I'd far sooner give it to a banker's son than someone from the estate I grew up on. I was the exception, not the rule, and the older I get the more I figure I must just be some sort of genetic freak, since the overwhelming opinion seems to be that our fate is predestined, nowadays.
But I thought we were talking merit and opportunity? No, being a banker's son doesn't predestine you to being more skillful. You should already have enough counterexamples to demonstrate that fact.
Your comment is borderline bewildering. It's like corruption and nepotism don't exist.
I think this needs to be backed up with evidence rather than merely asserted. I've been reading through a number of books by Thomas Sowell lately and he presents enough statistical evidence to explain disparities without any hint of racism, sexism, etc. Regardless of if you agree with him or not, the mere fact that alternate theories exist that explain why society looks as it does today should be enough to question the foundational problem that DEI claims to address.
Take as an example the gender pay gap which is presented as women earning 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. While statistically true in aggregate, DEI tends to treat this axiomatically as a sign of sexism. If you dig into the statistics the vast majority of this difference is due to the fact that many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children.
Expect there is evidence to suggest that women that earn a higher income are less likely to leave the workforce, which is further influenced by access to affordable childcare and dual incomes.
The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.
That can't possibly be true, because in a market economy, the more-expensive workers (men) would be laid off and replaced by less-expensive, equally-capable "same title and responsibilities" workers (women). This doesn't seem to be the case on a grand scale, which means it's more deep/complex than the "men get paid more than women" headline we're all used to seeing.
So you've done more search than everyone else putting out data? Maybe you can share all your hard-earned discoveries on the subject, since so you're so confidently well-informed.
Men account for 13% of nurses, but average $90k vs $76k for women.
https://blog.carlow.edu/2022/12/29/how-the-gender-pay-gap-im...
Female lawyers under 35 make 90% of their male counterparts, but the gap increases to 76% by middle age.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers...
The trend continues for doctors, police, and even teachers.
> lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs
If you think "know-how" is the problem, you're ill equipped for this conversation.
Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:
> Male nurses also reported working more hours per week, at an average 39 hours plus five hours of overtime, while female nurses reported working an average of 37 hours plus four hours of overtime.
I agree that if you just count the W-2s and ignore hours worked, subfields, travel, etc. then men make more than women. My whole point is that this kind of comparison is naive.
Likewise your study on lawyers grouped a hugely varied profession all into the same category. As an analogue, take doctors. Yes male and female doctor have different average incomes even for the same level of experience. But that doesn't capture the fact that over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite. This one will have an income disparity even when men and women are equally paid for the same work. It's a similarly naive analysis to lump together all lawyers into one category.
It's a fantasy world to believe that people operate purely on rational and logical long-term thinking. What's your rationale for slavery? Why couldn't women vote until recently? What's your rationale for why American women couldn't go to bars unattended as late as the 1970s? There's literally no shortage of examples showing the mistreatment of women, yet it's hard to believe that pay discrepancy remains till this day?
The entire premise if flawed if your operating under the assumption that people think in market and game theory. Prejudices and biases easily overcome rational thinking.
> Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:
The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay.
> over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite
Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at. Until then, the research and data that's in supports only one of our positions.
Slavery existed because preindustrial societies were heavily labor intensive and the returns on more skilled labor was marginal. The industrial revolution changed this, which is why abolition movements largely coincided with industrialization.
Restrictions of women's liberties stem from thousands of years of family dynamics where child mortality rates meant that women had to spend most of their fertile years bearing and caring for children. The replacement rate in preindustrial societies was something like 5-6 births per woman due to such high infant mortality rates.
> The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay
It actually does, men work 2 more normal hours and 1 more overtime hour on average. Assuming overtime is paid at 2x normal wages this is about a 10% disparity in paid hours. And again, there's more than just hours worked there's travel nursing, different metro areas, and more.
> Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at.
You're asking me to prove a negative. I don't doubt you can find individual instances of discrimination against women (and against men), my point is that the large disparities between men's and women's average wages overwhelmingly stem from differences in men and women's behavior rather than discrimination.
It's not "widely spread", it's widely researched. Show me a study that explains the pay gap as owing to mostly to behavior.
You've provided post-hoc academic rationale, rather than something the average person would have been operating under. People simply do not make decisions the way you seem to be under the impression of. I'm sure the average slave owner used your explanation rather than believing that subset of the population was sub-human chattel.
An example of a behavioral difference is salary negotiation, where assertive women are viewed negatively while a man chest-thumping is viewed positively. Tell that woman who took a lower salary because of cultural stigmas and traditions your rationale and see how far that goes. I've been in the room when a man waved off a woman because of such behavior.
> You're asking me to prove a negative.
I'm asking you to back up your claim with evidence, which you have thusly been unable to do. What you have done is nitpick specific details like that's a gotcha, rather than owing to statistics and population sampling.
And yes, when you account for experience, field, location, etc. the pay disparity effectively disappears (less than 1%)
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/08/01/are-wome...
There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo.
Maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe it’s asking for a virtue signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this requirement had adverse effects (evidently it has.)
But there is a through-line of coherent logic, and the total failure here may be cause for alarm.