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It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it

It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more easily than others. Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.

chii 8y ago
> diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  Financial performance does not indicate that the company's actions are ethical. To the contrary, it is often the opposite because one of the prime motivators for unethical behavior is the promise of financial gain.
ramblerman 8y ago
> affirmative action is the best we have I think the problem with affirmative action in the gender space is that there is some evidence to suggest that a purely unbiased world would not be one where every industry had a perfect 50/50 split. So when you approach the problem from the 'outcome' end, it's hard to know what outcome you should be aiming for.
belorn 8y ago
If affirmative action is the best tool, why not make it into a general rule or law. At minimum why doesn't the government who love to talk about diversity implement it as a generally policy for their own hiring? A simple "if a government job title has less than X% compared to existing proportion of the population, then any new hiring must apply affirmative action to correct it". One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and higher gender segregation. To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere where the ratio is worse than 60/40. If affirmative action was only used to address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.
- qqengineer 8y ago
  It is law bro - just it's only law for federal contractors or subcontractors with more than 50 people and at a certain revenue level that haven't met the 4/5ths rule. #doyourresearch is becoming a common theme in this thread...

chii 8y ago

> diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.

TheCoelacanth 8y ago
Financial performance does not indicate that the company's actions are ethical. To the contrary, it is often the opposite because one of the prime motivators for unethical behavior is the promise of financial gain.

ramblerman 8y ago

> affirmative action is the best we have I think the problem with affirmative action in the gender space is that there is some evidence to suggest that a purely unbiased world would not be one where every industry had a perfect 50/50 split. So when you approach the problem from the 'outcome' end, it's hard to know what outcome you should be aiming for.

belorn 8y ago

If affirmative action is the best tool, why not make it into a general rule or law. At minimum why doesn't the government who love to talk about diversity implement it as a generally policy for their own hiring? A simple "if a government job title has less than X% compared to existing proportion of the population, then any new hiring must apply affirmative action to correct it". One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and higher gender segregation. To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere where the ratio is worse than 60/40. If affirmative action was only used to address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.

qqengineer 8y ago
It is law bro - just it's only law for federal contractors or subcontractors with more than 50 people and at a certain revenue level that haven't met the 4/5ths rule. #doyourresearch is becoming a common theme in this thread...