4 ms·

I can also attest to this, I just left a pretty well-known tech company who leaned hard into DEI in the wake of the summer 2020 protests. The exec team essentia

I can also attest to this, I just left a pretty well-known tech company who leaned hard into DEI in the wake of the summer 2020 protests. The exec team essentially set up quotas, with every race+gender group getting priority over white males. Execs were given bonuses if they increased the percentage of non-white male employees. The crazy thing was that white males were NOT over-represented in the first place. 2 years later, they are the most under-represented group, and the overall org is now more unrepresentative of the population than it ever has been. There are 3 times as many asian females as there are white males in the org, even though there are ~10x as many white males in the population at large (which is allegedly what the org cares about), which produces a representation disparity between the two groups of nearly ~30x. Most white males left the org, as they could all see that advancing at the company would be nearly impossible given the incentives put in place. For the record, I think it's perfectly fine if asians are over-represented in a tech company (i'm asian myself), I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.

gedy 4y ago
I think it would be helpful if you name the company. Nothing bad about sharing that info.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
> I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals. If someone ever believed the stated goals they are not capable of rational thinking. I know plenty of smart people who sadly go along with this BS just because it's what all "reasonable" people are doing and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The same people don't think about politics and parrot what left wing media tells them. The activists themselves are not capable of rational thinking.
eldaisfish 4y ago
comparing to the population at large isn't the most valid thing to do. Many fields are dominated by women - nursing to name just one. Even within nursing, there are a lot of latino and phillipino nurses. by your logic, the largest ethnic group of nurses in a country like the US or UK should be white women. There are many more factors at play here.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  You misread what they're talking about. They're saying that nominally, what diversity efforts care about are people being underrepresented relative to the general population. That's the bar they're using, yes, but they didn't choose it.
- FFRefresh 4y ago
  To be clear, that's not my logic, it is of my previous employer. I don't think trying to index hiring decisions to the broad population distribution is a good thing. But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020. The protests that summer sent a cultural shockwave in urban/upper-ish class society, and the social pressure ratcheted up for orgs to favor non-white male groups, particularly for one particular non-white group. The issue was that this particular non-white group was not overly abundant in the pipeline, so there wasn't as defensible of a position for the discriminatory policies the company felt they had to put in place, so they resorted to indexing to the broad US population. (which I flat out don't think is defensible myself, but I'm empathizing with the mindset that they were employing at the time)
  - bradlys 4y ago
    > But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020. Most companies are representative of their pipeline but then if you set that as the benchmark - well those DEI people would get fired and never be able to have a job or be able to start a culture war over a mostly non-existent issue.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  So are you saying DEI logic is overly simplistic and doesn't take the complexities of the real world into account?

gedy 4y ago

I think it would be helpful if you name the company. Nothing bad about sharing that info.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

> I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals. If someone ever believed the stated goals they are not capable of rational thinking. I know plenty of smart people who sadly go along with this BS just because it's what all "reasonable" people are doing and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The same people don't think about politics and parrot what left wing media tells them. The activists themselves are not capable of rational thinking.

eldaisfish 4y ago

comparing to the population at large isn't the most valid thing to do. Many fields are dominated by women - nursing to name just one. Even within nursing, there are a lot of latino and phillipino nurses. by your logic, the largest ethnic group of nurses in a country like the US or UK should be white women. There are many more factors at play here.

TulliusCicero 4y ago
You misread what they're talking about. They're saying that nominally, what diversity efforts care about are people being underrepresented relative to the general population. That's the bar they're using, yes, but they didn't choose it.
FFRefresh 4y ago
To be clear, that's not my logic, it is of my previous employer. I don't think trying to index hiring decisions to the broad population distribution is a good thing. But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020. The protests that summer sent a cultural shockwave in urban/upper-ish class society, and the social pressure ratcheted up for orgs to favor non-white male groups, particularly for one particular non-white group. The issue was that this particular non-white group was not overly abundant in the pipeline, so there wasn't as defensible of a position for the discriminatory policies the company felt they had to put in place, so they resorted to indexing to the broad US population. (which I flat out don't think is defensible myself, but I'm empathizing with the mindset that they were employing at the time)
- bradlys 4y ago
  > But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020. Most companies are representative of their pipeline but then if you set that as the benchmark - well those DEI people would get fired and never be able to have a job or be able to start a culture war over a mostly non-existent issue.
jimbokun 4y ago
So are you saying DEI logic is overly simplistic and doesn't take the complexities of the real world into account?