5 ms·

> "We are clear that the law prohibits us from discriminating on the basis of race," the firm's lawyer Dev Stahlkopf blogged. Pardon my ignorance... But I thou

• cyberlurker 6y ago
  Hire from historically black schools could be one legal method.
  • umvi 6y ago
    Discriminating which schools you hire from based on racial demographics of said schools just seems like racial discrimination by proxy
    • lallysingh 6y ago
      Dude that's a rabbit hole as deep as American history.
      • awakeasleep 6y ago
        I think discrimination happened even before America was founded!
• marcinzm 6y ago
  >How can you achieve affirmative action if you can't discriminate on the basis of race? Interview training to minimize implicit bias in the interview process. Interview training to minimize acts that make certain groups uncomfortable. Removing employees from the interview pool who show a racial bias. Resume review that omits names and other racial indicators. Etc.
  • emodendroket 6y ago
    > Interview training to minimize implicit bias in the interview process. Interview training to minimize acts that make certain groups uncomfortable. I would like to see some evidence that this actually achieves the desired outcome.
  • one2know 6y ago
    Interview training does nothing. The people who are pushing affirmative action are doing it on purpose because of their political ideology. These people think that if they have more women, LGBTQ, and minorities in the company, those people will support them politically and they will have more power. There is no way you can train away that. Second, you can't remove employees when their bias is in support of the managers and the company board members. Managers are selectively choosing interviewers because of their racial bias. At a previous job managers would have new hire LGBTQ or minority junior employees conduct interviews instead of senior employees who had been at the company for years. Activist board members set CEO bonus goals that scale with race and gender quotas as well. Resume doesn't matter because they recruit through special minority, women, or LGBTQ invite only recruiting events where SWM's are not even allowed in.
• PureParadigm 6y ago
  I think the idea is that you can achieve the diversity goal while still hiring the most qualified people by broadening the recruiting pool. This way you're not discriminating based on race because you are still hiring the most qualified people. To do this, you might increase recruiting at other colleges that didn't have recruiting before (especially if those colleges have different demographics than the colleges you already recruit from), or similar measures.
• tashoecraft 6y ago
  Let’s say you have hiring events at colleges with say 10% black population. You start focused on colleges with higher percentages, this you should have more black candidates. You can change your recruiting strategies to target a more diverse range of candidates without discriminating on the basis of race.
  • wang_li 6y ago
    If you are recruiting at colleges you’re going to have a hard time getting many black candidates, since only 7% of STEM majors are black. Which is an under representation based on their proportion of al college students. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-majors/ https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-majo...
  • GreenHeuristics 6y ago
    If discriminating on the basis of race is morally incorrect then discriminating (collages) on the basis of race is also morally incorrect.
• athenot 6y ago
  I used to wonder the same, until it hit me that current status quo is actually NOT the meritocracy it pretends to be. There are many individuals with both talent and potential who are currently getting passed over simply because of unacknowledged negative bias. So it's not about picking someone less talented to make numbers on diversity, it's about revisiting the criteria that make us overlook talented individuals who happen to not fit the stereotype, and broaden our approach to considering candidates.
  • gautamdivgi 6y ago
    I think you put it very succinctly. In reality this could be as simple as diversifying the people interviewing candidates and getting down to objective hiring criteria. Negative bias is hard to spot and harder to acknowledge. Making an effort to minimize and eliminate negative bias doesn't mean reducing standards.
• xvector 6y ago
  Affirmative action needs to die. As an Asian, I hate that I have to work harder just to get the same opportunities. Affirmative action is simply racism against minorities that “don’t matter” to the public narrative in favor of minorities that “do matter.” Imagine telling an Asian child that they have to work way harder because of their race. While their friends get to go out and play, they have to sit down and study because of a condition they were born with. It’s abhorrent. Now this same racism is carrying into the job market. No thanks.
  • wheresmycraisin 6y ago
    Don't worry, lower-achieving Asian children will still be able to get into top universities through legacy admissions.
    • xvector 6y ago
      Ah, another example of casual racism against Asians. You’re assuming that Asian kids have parents that went to top universities, and to hell with the ones that don’t have an opportunity like that - tough luck. Affirmative action needs to go, legacy admissions need to go. Make the changes you want by providing resources to the under-privileged regardless of race, before admissions. Don’t thrust the burden of your societal failures onto innocent children. Asian kids are not the wastebasket for society’s mistakes.
  • thatfrenchguy 6y ago
    Fascinating how this discourse is always done by upper-middle-class people, who already have all the opportunities in the world in the United States.
    • andrewstuart2 6y ago
      "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
      • xvector 6y ago
• eplanit 6y ago
  I guess the best way to defeat perceived "systemic racism" is to institute actual systemic racism. Moral failure.
• tzs 6y ago
  Look at how Caltech went from 15% women undergraduates when I was a student there in the '80s to 45% now without discriminating on the basis of gender in admission. Rather than making gender a factor in admissions, they concentrated on getting more qualified women to apply. They would contact high school women who were very good in STEM subjects and their parents, and send someone to visit them and try to convince them that Caltech was the place to be. Once they applied, gender wasn't a factor in deciding whether or not to admit them. The top tech companies could do something similar for both race and gender. They have the resources to draw from the entire country. It wouldn't work so well for companies that only have the resources to recruit locally.
  • throwawaysea 6y ago
    Caltech, like other private schools such as Harvard, absolutely does discriminate in the admissions process. They are a fervent advocate of “holistic admissions”, which is modern activist speak for “process involving discrimination, most often against Asian races”. Take a look at http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/apply/first-year-freshman-applicants/holistic-review http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/apply/first-year-freshman-..., which says “We have always reviewed students within the context of the opportunities available to them, and we will hold true to that practice.” Unlike Caltech, public schools in California are not permitted to discriminate and have different student demographics from private schools for this reason. Prop 209 from 1996, which banned affirmative action in CA, is unfortunately on the current ballot for a potential repeal as part of Prop 16.
    • tzs 6y ago
      Caltech undergraduates are around 40% Asian, which is about the same as UC Berkeley or UCLA. Whites are about 30% at Caltech.