Every DEI program I've ever been involved in has been 100% about selecting people _purely_ on merit. Not race, not gender, not whether or not they're trans. The DEI trainings are about completely ignoring those factors when hiring. I'm curious what they call your trainings on the matter.
My experience is that discrimination in hiring is never openly advocated for obvious reasons. Instead you get what could be called "stochastic discrimination" where there is pressure to "increase diversity" without elaboration on how that should be achieved in the face of a not so diverse pool of qualified candidates.
Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.
I'm glad you took the time to point that out, because, as we all know, in the history of the universe, they have never made a non-viz minority hire who also happens to be completely incapable of doing the job.
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When a viz-minority hire sucks, it's clearly DEI's fault, we shout from the rooftops.
Guess what happened to quality around the time all the DEI stuff started shooting up in popularity around a decade ago? Everyone sees it. Everyone experiences it. No one wanted to talk about it, until things reached a breaking point.
You're going to have to make a much better argument of connecting the dots if you're going to blame the enshittification of everything on... Black people and women.
None of you folks are ever 'afraid of talking about it', because any time this subject comes up, we see a full broadsides of tenuous, frequently mask-off racist nonsense.
Meanwhile, the champions leading the fight against the DEI boogieman have a truly amazing knack for both being, and appointing some of the most ignorant, least qualified individuals to ever hold positions of power... And are now speed-running their way through breaking everything.
I was a hiring manager and saw this happen firsthand. So much pressure to hire people with the right skin color or gender, even if they outright failed an interview. Some of the ones who were fast-tracked later struggled and then got fired. One of them even stole the company laptop.
You are either lying about hard-number racial/gender quotas or you were working for companies that were flagrantly breaking the law. Did you whistle blow?
You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existence of the firm.
When this kind of thing happens - and it absolutely does - it's never put in writing. The company training is always going to say what the law requires it to say.
But let's say that the top management in your org have made a public commitment to "increase representation of underrepresented groups". The managers in that org are then required, by company policy, to have their own goals be "aligned" with it, so they write something similar. What do you think then happens when it comes to interviews and hiring decisions?
Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups. There are also shitloads of decisions one can make that increase representation of underrepresented groups without violating Title 7.
You can have better parental leave and part-time work policies. Or you can open an office in a region with different racial demographics. Or you can send recruiters to events like Grace Hopper. The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
The manager at the bottom who has no-one to pass that bucket to does not have the power to institute "better parental leave and part-time work policies", or "open an office in a region with different racial demographics". Yet they are still held accountable for those commitments.
So what they are going to do is the only thing that they actually have the power to do, which is to favor candidates that, if hired, will check off the right boxes as far as "team diversity" goes on their upcoming mid-year review.
You'd think those who disagreed would do more than flag and move on. My original flagged post:
>Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups.
I got whiplash reading this. We were told for years by leftists that meritocracy was inherently White supremacist and racist.
>The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
I have seen this in a very small number of places and never with the idea that actual merit is racist but instead that systems that promote a shallow understanding of individual meritocracy can perpetuate inequality.
But this has nothing to do with the fact that the alternative to "meritocracy" in the corporate world is not a sort of affirmative anti-racism but is instead the old-boys club system. Moving from that system to one focused on individual merit will produce greater representation for underrepresented groups.
O'Keefe is a remarkable person to cite here, given his history.
There are cases of corporations violating Title 7. Duh. They violate it by discriminating against black people or women too. But if you want to claim that when people working at corporations hear about goals to increase representation that they just decide to violate Title 7 at scale, you've got some splaining to do.
>I have seen this in a very small number of places...
GitHub is not a small place.
>O'Keefe is a remarkable person to cite here, given his history.
Remarkable because he hasn't been debunked, and IBM's attempts to have the lawsuit thrown out of court have failed. IBM has also tried to scrub the video from YouTube it seems, the Twitter link is the only one I could find.
>But if you want to claim that when people working at corporations hear about goals to increase representation that they just decide to violate Title 7 at scale, you've got some splaining to do.
The various lawsuits, some that have gone to the Supreme Court, have shown this type of discrimination against Whites, Asians, and males has been occurring at scale.
Ah yes, I'm going to whistle blow and ruin my career over something "illegal" that every university has been doing for the past 50 years. Im perplexed that you find this surprising at all. This stuff happened openly in all hands with pie charts of the existing gender and racial makeup, and the target makeup with struggle session-like questions of why our engineering department doesn't have 50% woman. None of this is inconsistent if the decision makers at the company think that any deviation in demographics is a sign of institutional racism.
University admittance and workplace hiring are different issues under the law. It sounds like you are purposefully conflating the issue to avoid acknowledging the logical flaws in your original claims.
The gaslighting here post-Trump is insane. I’m not going to pretend that “no white or Asian males” wasn’t standard policy during the DEI hysteria. Pretending DEI was “just all about merit!” is so absurdly revisionist. Pleaseeee
Remember with the SEC tried (and failed after Trump’s win) to mandate every board have at least 2 “diverse” (no white dudes) members? Not a lot of merit there!
> The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period!
That's an absurd lie. People convicted of sex crimes shouldn't have jobs with children. Foreign nationals shouldn't have top security or intelligence jobs. People with a record of substance abuse shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And so on an so forth... I'm boring myself with how obvious this all is.
And maybe, just maybe, extremely powerful jobs that have an outsized influence on our society shouldn't only be offered to straight white men. It's clearly not as obvious of an argument as my previous examples, but it's not absurd either.
It’s not that jobs only go to white men. It’s that you don’t deny a job to a white man (or any other identity group) because they are a white man.
Harvard denied access to Jews for “personality flaws” in the early 1900s, and similarly denied Asians for “personality” reasons up until a couple years ago when the Supreme Court finally declared that illegal.
Racism is still racism, even if you claim to be “correcting” some imagined harm through your racism
Why are you assuming that non-white people cannot have the necessary qualifications? If I didn't know any better, I'd conclude that reasoning is... racist.
The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them.
So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird. How did that happen?
The elephant in the room here is that white men are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to be hired due to the color of their skin. Look at Trump's current admin - full of white men who aren't qualified, who are alcoholics, who are patently stupid, and on and on. But if you look at research, too, just having a white name is enough to increase your chance of being hired by 50%.
What’s weird is obsessing over the minute racial details of every person like it’s the antebellum south. The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period! Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!
> Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!
It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then.
What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people were hired because they're qualified.
If you live in a society that mandates DEI, it’s assumed that anyone getting a job via affirmative action is not the most qualified.
If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups (unless you are so racist as to believe they can’t compete on merit)
The way in which "society mandates DEI" in the US is via Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, which expressly prohibits hiring decisions being made based on race or gender (or sexuality, through Bostock).
Where are these mandatory affirmative action policies anywhere?
DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.
> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups
I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.
Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.
It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.
Every large company I have ever worked for has had noticeably lower standards for women and minorities (except for Asians of course because fuck them in particular). They will never say it in the trainings because they know it's illegal. They will never tell anyone anything except for "don't discriminate" but then they will incentivize discrimination by things like "diversity goals" (quotas) and setting recruiter bonuses higher when they bring in favored "victim" groups. Of course if they set higher bonuses for hiring white people the courts would immediately smack them down for discrimination, but it's apparently "legal" as long as - 1. it's implicit, 2. you deny it exists, and 3. it favors a group that the liberals approve of.
> Of course if they set higher bonuses for hiring white people
Are you saying that (straight) (white) (men) have not had (nor continue to enjoy) unfair advantages in our society? And is that not an injustice?
Saying "racism is bad" is correct but only the first step. Step two is recognizing the accumulated results of long-standing historical (and continuing, frankly) discrimination against minority groups and working to right that injustice.
How is any of that relevant? Our civil rights laws ban racial discrimination. If you think that racial discrimination should be permitted in one direction then argue that our civil rights laws should be amended to allow it. But don't argue that it is legal now or that it isn't happening.
IF they are so into selecting people based on merit, why do they want to know who/what am I having sex with, what do I think I am, what race I am, did my parents went to college, etc? Have you tried to apply for a job online in the last 10 years?
I have applied for jobs online in the last 10 years. I was never asked who/what I was having sex with, what do I think I am (??), or where my parents went to college. I was asked about my race, presumably to comply with anti-discrimination laws. I always had the option of refusing to disclose.
It sounds like you actually haven't applied to jobs in the last 10 years or have been applying to some seriously messed up places.
