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> The growing diversity of the workforce should be a cause for celebration. Why? What makes this inherently better than say, a monocultural group like Japan.
by thescribe 10y ago
> The growing diversity of the workforce should be a cause for celebration.
Why? What makes this inherently better than say, a monocultural group like Japan.
- jdale27 10y agoThe author addresses this in the second and third paragraphs of the article.
- x1798DE 10y agoMost of the second paragraph is devoted to the fact that the talent base is becoming more diverse. That does not make diversity itself inherently valuable, it just means that it's a disadvantage to restrict yourself to a monoculture. The part about workplaces with more female executives being more profitable is weak evidence for the inherent value of diversity because it could easily be driven by the above effect or any number of other factors.
- icegreentea 10y agoOk, maybe the second paragraph is kinda bunk, but there's still good stuff in the third paragraph. I mean, the question is 'diversity in the workplace' in western nations pretty much comes down to asking the questions of 'why should your workplace not roughly reflect your hiring pool' and 'why should your hiring pool not roughly reflect your demographics'. There can be good reasons for why either may not the case for specific instances, but unless you can give a good reason, then you're either actively screwing people over, or participating in some sort of systemic activity that's screwing people over.
- x1798DE 10y agoYes, agreed about the third paragraph. I think the question about diversity, though, often comes down to "why should you prioritize diversity over other factors", not "why should you not avoid hiring blacks/women etc". I think generally the debate now is about whether a "blind" hiring process would be better than a "diversity-aware" hiring process, where you are actively shooting for a culturally/ethnically/gender diverse team, and about how much "diversity" counts for vs. skill (i.e. person A is a better programmer than person B, but person A is white/straight/male and person B is black/gay/female - how much better than B does A have to be that his value outweighs the diversity value of hiring B).
- fatalogic 10y agoImo it's better because you have a different set of eyes and perspectives looking at a problem so you don't have issues the Kodak issue of the 70s or the recent google image search issues. A more diverse workforce may have caught these issues before they hit production. You can't see problems if you don't know they exist. http://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/heres-a-look-at-how-color-film-was-originally-biased-toward-white-people/ http://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/heres-a-look-at-how-color-fi... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/10/google-faulted-for-racial-bias-in-image-search-results-for-black-teenagers/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/1...
- bewo001 10y agoA real-world example: we were in negotiations about a big project with a vendor. We - a team of guys about the same age - had a lot of issues with the technical solution the vendor proposed. The next day they brought in a very attractive blonde engineer, and my useless straight colleagues would be gazing at her legs rather than asking tough technical questions. The vendor wouldn't have tried this if we had some women on the team.
- ManlyBread 10y agoAll this really means is that your colleagues are unprofessional and/or incompetent. There's a zero guarantee that having women on your team would prevent them from doing that.
- gjolund 10y agoIt sounds like your colleagues are just a bunch of amateurs.