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> The company is working hard on Diversity & Inclusion As a foreigner, I am trying to understand this statement. You've got a bag with 100 marbles. 50 blue, 4

> The company is working hard on Diversity & Inclusion As a foreigner, I am trying to understand this statement. You've got a bag with 100 marbles. 50 blue, 40 red, 10 white. HR needs to pick 15 marbles. Does the HR try to pick all marbles equally? So 50% of whites, 10% of blues, 12.5% of reds is chosen. Doesn't seem fair to blues and reds.

Ivoirians 6y ago
The real-life goal is closer to "HR picks 7 blue, 6 red, 2 white instead of 10 blue, 5 red, 0 white".
deanCommie 6y ago
This assumes that hiring is random. It's not. If hiring was truly random, and the percentages of the population reflected the makeup of the workforce, we wouldn't have a problem. But hiring is based on subjective evaluations of the marble's merits. And it turns out that there are inherent implicit bias in how we evaluate these marbles. One other important detail is that hiring isn't a one step process - you see 100 candidates, and you pick 15. Instead it's more like you see 10,000 candidates. You pick 1000 from that based on high level non-data driven heuristics, resume reviews, gut feel, and tea leaves. You put the 1000 through an impersonal online test to whittle it down to 100. Then you actually think about who to hire. A massive Part of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives is to question how we whittle down those marbles, and if it is essentially random at the start, but with some anti-racial bias, what would happen if we gave the chance to let people who have been historically disenfranchised an opportunity to get deeper in the process. The last step would still always be ultimately entirely merit based, but up until that point there are variables to play with. But my dude, it's 2020, if you're still asking these questions it's because of deliberately willful ignorance - all this information is out there. You don't have to come in with such basic misunderstandings of how this works.
- nurettin 6y ago
  I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though.
  - so33 6y ago
    > I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though. Apparently you aren’t aware of any sort of common courtesy. Or how HR works. Edit: D&I is a deliberate, well-documented effort by many HR departments across many, many large organizations now. Any attempt to reduce this to a cutesy analogy about fractions is highly suspect at best.
erulabs 6y ago
It's important to remember if the goal is to undo "unfairness" that the prescription _cannot_ be "fair". If a scale is weighed down with 5lb on one side and 10lb on the other, adding equal weights to both sides does not create equilibrium. It's ironic and potentially hypocritical (if not acknowledged) that the solution to unfairness is by creating an _explicitly_ unfair system, just with the underdogs on top for once. Note no value judgement on any of this, it's just a paradox that has been amusing my brain a bit re: social justice. Righting wrongness almost by definition involves more wrongness. "Killing a killer" might be a good summary of the paradox.
- darkwater 6y ago
  Your last example is a reductio ad absurdum. It is really easy to say that overcompensation for a mistake is a bad thing when you are on the side who did the initial mistake. A white man in tech, or a citizen of a 1st world industrialized country which grew as an economic behemoth by polluting the world without thinking of the consequences for 50 years. People gets easily, really easily used to their good conditions and privileges, especially if their real cost is somehow hidden and at the expense of others. It is part of the human nature in the end, but that doesn't mean it is "right".
  - bawolff 6y ago
    > reductio ad absurdum How? I can see a reasonable argument that its not a fiting metaphor, but i don't see how you can say its absurd, since there clearly exist countries that use capital punishment for homocide. Edit: Also to be clear, reductio ad absurdum is a positive thing to say about someone's argument. It is not a fallacy.
    - darkwater 6y ago
      Well it's an ad absurdum in my opinion because the moral judgement applied to capital punishment it's radically different from the one used to judge overcompensation in other scenarios. Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life. Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime.
onion2k 6y ago
It depends on whether or not you believe that HR will really hire the best people regardless, or whether they'll use terms like "culture fit" to hire people who are similar to people already in the company. If the company is hiring for "culture fit" then there are subjective decisions based on non-meritorious factors being made, and that's where people's biases lead to a homogenous team. To use your analogy, in some companies there are 20 white marbles and HR recruits another white marble because "they'll fit in with the team better" even if that marble's technical skills aren't as good as the red or blue candidates.
- concordDance 6y ago
  Hmm... Might net team productivity per cost be greater with another white marble rather than a red marble due to culture fit even if the individual red marble is better?
  - onion2k 6y ago
    That's precisely the sort of reasoning people use. It might even be true. The problem is that when I see a company like that I don't think "Wow, that company is a well optimised for team efficiency." and instead I think "I wonder why they only hire white marbles? Probably racist."
  - regularfry 6y ago
    This is a reasonable-sounding hypothesis that has been researched and disproved. Diverse teams perform better.
    - nurettin 6y ago
      This would actually settle the whole thing. If these researches are true, companies which can afford it should diversify their teams (old, young, male, female, different nationalities, etc etc.) in order to increase efficiency and make more money. Which researches did you base this comment on?
      - 6y ago
perryizgr8 6y ago
> Doesn't seem fair to blues and reds. This is the classic "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" debate. Persons who have been disadvantaged by circumstances of their birth (color, nationality, poverty, etc.) have had their opportunities curbed as a result. How do you bring them back at par with their privileged peers? One simple way is to remove inequalities in opportunity. However this is very hard in practice and does not help those who are already in a bad position. The other solution is to ensure equality of outcome (make sure your employees are exactly 50% men and 50% women, for example) by setting hiring quotas. As is clear, this will be highly unfair to the advantaged class. I don't know what is a just solution for this.
- realusername 6y ago
  > The other solution is to ensure equality of outcome (make sure your employees are exactly 50% men and 50% women, for example) by setting hiring quotas. As is clear, this will be highly unfair to the advantaged class. The issue I have with that is that is by far the worst inequality is coming from your social class, not your skin color or your gender. Those quotas are thus trying to transform a social problem into a diversity problem. Additionally, I prefer policies which attack the source of the problem (social inequality) than the symptoms (hiring). Of course that's harder to do and it cost much more money but that's really solving the problem instead of putting some rubber band onto it.
  - tangjurine 6y ago
    What is social class to you? How can it be objectively measured? Economic class has big impact and can be objectively measured.
  - dx034 6y ago
    If you were born white and poor, there is a chance that you escape poverty and no one will ever know that you come from a poor background. If you're born black, many will assume that you likely come from a low income household, even if it's not true. You can never change that as long as social class is correlated with color of skin.
andrewaylett 6y ago
If the ability to do the job at hand is evenly distributed, but somehow only blue marbles can pass the interview, then you've got a problem: you're actually going to be picking incapable people over capable people because of your hiring bias. If we pick 20 marbles (to avoid rounding errors) then you expect to see ten blue, eight red and two white. But you actually see 17 blue, one red and two white. Your processes tell you you've found the best candidates. But statistics tells you that you could probably have done better. The blue marbles might not be happy about that: they know they're obviously more able to do the work than the red marbles, because they passed all the interviews. Bringing in "less able" red marbles feels like a bad thing. But the key here is that they're not less able to do the work, they're less able to demonstrate they can do the work.
- dx034 6y ago
  I think that's one of the best analogies I've read on this. I believe especially the unknown biases are a problem. Many companies don't know why they hire less diverse, so they either deflect it (e.g. by blaming universities) or they introduce quotas. Quotas might be the best thing in this situation but ultimately, only finding and rooting out biases can lead to a truly fair process. Especially since quotas only work in large numbers. Hiring for upper management, in niche roles or in small companies cannot be accomplished fairly with quotas.
- jkoudys 6y ago
  The difficult challenge is that the skills aren't uniformly distributed, because the discrimination goes back way earlier than the interview. I remember how aggressively hostile the general culture was towards girls focusing on "geeky" pursuits like computer hardware and software when I was a kid, and that's been amplified into self-perpetuating disparities today as those things became more important. It's obviously influenced the perception of interviewers as you've described, but education, training, representation in media, etc are all essential. Much like the other problems in the article, there's no obvious villain, and it's a long process to change a deeply flawed system.
okbuddy 6y ago
I'm also a foreigner and I know wtf they're talking about, being a foreigner isn't an excuse for being ignorant wtf.
OJFord 6y ago
https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/... It's a little exaggerated, or at least what we mostly have/want in practice is 'access to' - since in reality the dad doesn't stand on a box for the sake of it, and he probably holds his smaller child rather than place him precariously on two.

Ivoirians 6y ago

The real-life goal is closer to "HR picks 7 blue, 6 red, 2 white instead of 10 blue, 5 red, 0 white".

deanCommie 6y ago

This assumes that hiring is random. It's not. If hiring was truly random, and the percentages of the population reflected the makeup of the workforce, we wouldn't have a problem. But hiring is based on subjective evaluations of the marble's merits. And it turns out that there are inherent implicit bias in how we evaluate these marbles. One other important detail is that hiring isn't a one step process - you see 100 candidates, and you pick 15. Instead it's more like you see 10,000 candidates. You pick 1000 from that based on high level non-data driven heuristics, resume reviews, gut feel, and tea leaves. You put the 1000 through an impersonal online test to whittle it down to 100. Then you actually think about who to hire. A massive Part of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives is to question how we whittle down those marbles, and if it is essentially random at the start, but with some anti-racial bias, what would happen if we gave the chance to let people who have been historically disenfranchised an opportunity to get deeper in the process. The last step would still always be ultimately entirely merit based, but up until that point there are variables to play with. But my dude, it's 2020, if you're still asking these questions it's because of deliberately willful ignorance - all this information is out there. You don't have to come in with such basic misunderstandings of how this works.

nurettin 6y ago
I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though.
- so33 6y ago
  > I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though. Apparently you aren’t aware of any sort of common courtesy. Or how HR works. Edit: D&I is a deliberate, well-documented effort by many HR departments across many, many large organizations now. Any attempt to reduce this to a cutesy analogy about fractions is highly suspect at best.

erulabs 6y ago

It's important to remember if the goal is to undo "unfairness" that the prescription _cannot_ be "fair". If a scale is weighed down with 5lb on one side and 10lb on the other, adding equal weights to both sides does not create equilibrium. It's ironic and potentially hypocritical (if not acknowledged) that the solution to unfairness is by creating an _explicitly_ unfair system, just with the underdogs on top for once. Note no value judgement on any of this, it's just a paradox that has been amusing my brain a bit re: social justice. Righting wrongness almost by definition involves more wrongness. "Killing a killer" might be a good summary of the paradox.

darkwater 6y ago
Your last example is a reductio ad absurdum. It is really easy to say that overcompensation for a mistake is a bad thing when you are on the side who did the initial mistake. A white man in tech, or a citizen of a 1st world industrialized country which grew as an economic behemoth by polluting the world without thinking of the consequences for 50 years. People gets easily, really easily used to their good conditions and privileges, especially if their real cost is somehow hidden and at the expense of others. It is part of the human nature in the end, but that doesn't mean it is "right".
- bawolff 6y ago
  > reductio ad absurdum How? I can see a reasonable argument that its not a fiting metaphor, but i don't see how you can say its absurd, since there clearly exist countries that use capital punishment for homocide. Edit: Also to be clear, reductio ad absurdum is a positive thing to say about someone's argument. It is not a fallacy.
  - darkwater 6y ago
    Well it's an ad absurdum in my opinion because the moral judgement applied to capital punishment it's radically different from the one used to judge overcompensation in other scenarios. Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life. Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime.

onion2k 6y ago

It depends on whether or not you believe that HR will really hire the best people regardless, or whether they'll use terms like "culture fit" to hire people who are similar to people already in the company. If the company is hiring for "culture fit" then there are subjective decisions based on non-meritorious factors being made, and that's where people's biases lead to a homogenous team. To use your analogy, in some companies there are 20 white marbles and HR recruits another white marble because "they'll fit in with the team better" even if that marble's technical skills aren't as good as the red or blue candidates.

concordDance 6y ago
Hmm... Might net team productivity per cost be greater with another white marble rather than a red marble due to culture fit even if the individual red marble is better?
- onion2k 6y ago
  That's precisely the sort of reasoning people use. It might even be true. The problem is that when I see a company like that I don't think "Wow, that company is a well optimised for team efficiency." and instead I think "I wonder why they only hire white marbles? Probably racist."
- regularfry 6y ago
  This is a reasonable-sounding hypothesis that has been researched and disproved. Diverse teams perform better.
  - nurettin 6y ago
    This would actually settle the whole thing. If these researches are true, companies which can afford it should diversify their teams (old, young, male, female, different nationalities, etc etc.) in order to increase efficiency and make more money. Which researches did you base this comment on?
    - 6y ago

perryizgr8 6y ago

> Doesn't seem fair to blues and reds. This is the classic "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" debate. Persons who have been disadvantaged by circumstances of their birth (color, nationality, poverty, etc.) have had their opportunities curbed as a result. How do you bring them back at par with their privileged peers? One simple way is to remove inequalities in opportunity. However this is very hard in practice and does not help those who are already in a bad position. The other solution is to ensure equality of outcome (make sure your employees are exactly 50% men and 50% women, for example) by setting hiring quotas. As is clear, this will be highly unfair to the advantaged class. I don't know what is a just solution for this.

realusername 6y ago
> The other solution is to ensure equality of outcome (make sure your employees are exactly 50% men and 50% women, for example) by setting hiring quotas. As is clear, this will be highly unfair to the advantaged class. The issue I have with that is that is by far the worst inequality is coming from your social class, not your skin color or your gender. Those quotas are thus trying to transform a social problem into a diversity problem. Additionally, I prefer policies which attack the source of the problem (social inequality) than the symptoms (hiring). Of course that's harder to do and it cost much more money but that's really solving the problem instead of putting some rubber band onto it.
- tangjurine 6y ago
  What is social class to you? How can it be objectively measured? Economic class has big impact and can be objectively measured.
- dx034 6y ago
  If you were born white and poor, there is a chance that you escape poverty and no one will ever know that you come from a poor background. If you're born black, many will assume that you likely come from a low income household, even if it's not true. You can never change that as long as social class is correlated with color of skin.

andrewaylett 6y ago

If the ability to do the job at hand is evenly distributed, but somehow only blue marbles can pass the interview, then you've got a problem: you're actually going to be picking incapable people over capable people because of your hiring bias. If we pick 20 marbles (to avoid rounding errors) then you expect to see ten blue, eight red and two white. But you actually see 17 blue, one red and two white. Your processes tell you you've found the best candidates. But statistics tells you that you could probably have done better. The blue marbles might not be happy about that: they know they're obviously more able to do the work than the red marbles, because they passed all the interviews. Bringing in "less able" red marbles feels like a bad thing. But the key here is that they're not less able to do the work, they're less able to demonstrate they can do the work.

dx034 6y ago
I think that's one of the best analogies I've read on this. I believe especially the unknown biases are a problem. Many companies don't know why they hire less diverse, so they either deflect it (e.g. by blaming universities) or they introduce quotas. Quotas might be the best thing in this situation but ultimately, only finding and rooting out biases can lead to a truly fair process. Especially since quotas only work in large numbers. Hiring for upper management, in niche roles or in small companies cannot be accomplished fairly with quotas.
jkoudys 6y ago
The difficult challenge is that the skills aren't uniformly distributed, because the discrimination goes back way earlier than the interview. I remember how aggressively hostile the general culture was towards girls focusing on "geeky" pursuits like computer hardware and software when I was a kid, and that's been amplified into self-perpetuating disparities today as those things became more important. It's obviously influenced the perception of interviewers as you've described, but education, training, representation in media, etc are all essential. Much like the other problems in the article, there's no obvious villain, and it's a long process to change a deeply flawed system.

okbuddy 6y ago

I'm also a foreigner and I know wtf they're talking about, being a foreigner isn't an excuse for being ignorant wtf.

OJFord 6y ago

https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/... It's a little exaggerated, or at least what we mostly have/want in practice is 'access to' - since in reality the dad doesn't stand on a box for the sake of it, and he probably holds his smaller child rather than place him precariously on two.