That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it.
The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups.
That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota.
And you have to call Asians "white".
All of these actually happen and, to a greater or lesser extent, do help without discriminating against white applicants. How do I know? I ended up only hiring two white men in that particular round!
Not true.
> blind reviews where you can’t see the name or details of the applicant (to minimise subconscious bias).
Its been shown that doing so _increases_ the amount of non-minority candidates selected, not the other way around.
For example, you made a factually incorrect claim about blind hiring, and its considerably easier to ignore that since addressing it devastates your larger point.
Again:
> blind reviews where you can’t see the name or details of the applicant (to minimise subconscious bias).
Its been shown that doing so _increases_ the amount of non-minority candidates selected, not the other way around.
Given the current subject matter I would ask for clarification. For example, is one of your personal goals OR corporate goals within those hundreds of interviews to promote DEI?
Which involved doingwhat exactly?
Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.
Try again.
"Target candidate" = those in minority groups, yes?
> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.
Your outrage against our hiring practice is 100% performative. So no, I'm not going to engage with you any further.
The belief, whether you agree with it or not, is that diverse teams produce better results. If your natural applicant pool is all dudes then your job as a headhunter is to find a woman who you think can beat them on merit.
The other way you do it is you hire them on as juniors where everyone's resumes might as well be written on toilet paper and "most qualified applicant" is a bit of a joke and train them up.
Obviously untrue. Diverse teams result in workforces that are harder to unionize because they have less in common. They introduce language and cultural barriers that disrupt communication. They hinder innovation because the types of people that want diverse workforces are ironically never interested in diverse ideas. They produce worse results across the board, which explains enshittification in literally all areas touched by DEI and why the US is losing the tech race to China specifically.
If I'm contacted by a recruiter and encouraged to apply for a position, I would expect to at least get a phone screening if not a full interview. Are you really reaching out to minority candidates individually only to sometimes send back a message that you have decided not to proceed with them a few days later? I think that would leave a bad taste in my mouth and make me less inclined to apply or encourage anyone else to apply with your company.
Do you try to get an approximation of society with that selective net you're casting? Of the field? Or is it more according to own preference with something like an equal amount of the subsections you can think of?
That’s a very strange reading of what I said. I need to remind you that the vast majority of applicants were white men. This headhunting merely added more minority (from a European perspective) candidates into our pipeline.
I was going to be their manager, so yes, I knew the process.
The definition you want DEI to have: Extra training for DEI students, does not exist in the real world. And if it did no one is complaining about it.
> That’s a lazy and stupid approach
Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.
> Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.
No, the reason has been the refusal of people in positions of power to engage thoughtfully with the genuine criticism.
It took like five minutes for Biden to start deploying SBA loans whites weren’t eligible for and for NASDAQ to create diversity quotas for boards. Racial gerrymandering is always the ultimate goal of this stuff.
The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.
This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in poverty that there is a path to success for them.
The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.
Except that that won't actually improve hiring outcomes, if by "improve hiring outcomes" you mean "hire more individuals from historically marginalized groups".
You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's true. But every prior stage of the process, including the stage where children are too young to enroll in kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem. There is no point at which there are enough "qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse on-the-job performance.
So if we take a random assortment of preschool age children and give them all the the same resources and education we are still going to find when they come out of the other end of the pipeline as adults and ready to work those from historically marginalized groups are still going to be underrepresented unless we lower hiring standards?
This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about. It's become increasingly difficult to find out what actually happened once it's been filtered through media, social media, activists, and algorithmic propaganda.
What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is overreported, but incidents of actual racism aren't?
> slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.
Again, something a lot of people are lying or selectively reporting about. Which is why it's become toxic in the first place. You could occasionally see the same people who were complaining about Rotherham not being investigated complain when other allegations of sexual assault were being investigated ("cancel culture"). Or not investigated, such as the Met police rapist.
Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.
Just personally, in the last four years:
1) The acting Dean at my law school held a struggle session where white people declared they were “white supremacists”
2) My kids’ school adopted racially segregated affinity groups. My daughter was invited to go to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess half south Asian = quarter black in the DEI hierarchy). Following that lead, a kid tried to kick my daughter out of a group chat for her circle of friends by making it black-kids only.
3) I’ve had coworkers ask if I count as “diverse” for purposes of a client contract and have had to perform diversity jigs during client meetings.
I’m not even going to list all the alienating behaviors from overly empathetic but deeply ignorant white people—the likes of which I never encountered living in a nearly all white town in the 1990s.
For the avoidance of doubt, I 100% agree that right-wing media is telling a lot of outright lies and you pointed out some good examples. However, I have seen left-leaning criticise tokenism in companies' DEI efforts. Philosophy Tube and Unlearning Economics are 2 examples off the top of my head.
> Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.
I disagree with this because I feel it misrepresents the riots this summer as a genuine expression of rage. It was not. It was organised violence by hardcore Nazis and football hooligans bussed in from Stoke to smash up a job centre in Sunderland and attempt to murder women and children.
DEI is actual racism.
You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully. They just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.
I don't think critical thinking and thoughtfulness from the left, or lack thereof, is the issue here.
I think the issue is simple, rhetoric beats nuance, every time. Rhetoric is the rock to nuance's scissors. We need to find the paper.
I don't disagree with you, however I singled out the USA because, over the period of this article, both Obama and Biden were both president. Ultimately, the people arguing against my point can point to kernels of truth and of things that did happen. While I disagree with their diagnosis, I can't point to the fact that the issues were recognised and attempts made to address them. And, ultimately, Trump did win the presidential election partially off the back of this!
70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this. This began 20 years ago and has gotten increasingly worse.
It has nothing to do with your topic.
> 70% of the many recruiter messages I receive are like this.
You're not disputing my core point.
Said who? Maybe she wasn't a good developer or a teammate, how do you know? Did you talk to her ex-coworkers?
A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity: I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago who’d left software engineering to become a paramedic around 2012 after experiencing misogyny in the workplace. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about applying to a software engineering role. Her reaction was understandably irritated that the basic skill of reading her work history seemed missing before reaching out.
I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters. I see something similar in the UK where Labour ministers are slammed by left leaning media for taking positions to address the public’s concerns in a way that’s more thoughtful that how the Tories were handling it, as the far right in the country has toxified the issue for them.