5 ms·

People aren't fungible. Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discriminat

• anon291 4y ago
  No person is a problem because of theyir sex or skin color. That is what you are insinuating.
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    Your remark is ambiguous, so to be perfectly clear, I'm decidedly not insinuating that anyone is a problem because of their sex or skin color.
• dr-detroit 4y ago
  The state I live in is 85% white and the goal is to hire much less than 85% whites. So the goal is to create a diverse community that doesn't exist.
  • k__ 4y ago
    Diversity can foster innovation.
    • ElCheapo 4y ago
      Didn't know skin pigment contributed to innovation. "Diversity" is empty HR speak, please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation.
      • aliqot 4y ago
        > please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation To keep an open mind I did a thought experiment and found a few: entertainment, fusion food, music, those things I'd imagine benefit greatly from diversity.
        • ElCheapo 4y ago
          You told me human endeavors in which "diversity" (which again, means nothing) fosters innovation. But that wasn't my question. I asked what kind of diversity fosters innovation, not what kind of innovation is fostered by diversity
          • aliqot 4y ago
            To err on the side of being as polite as possible: In some grim scenarios, diversity led to certain situations that gave rise to big innovations.
            • ElCheapo 4y ago
              • aliqot 4y ago
                Im not a bot.
                • ElCheapo 4y ago
                  I already told you this is not what I asked. Your replies are all over the place and I sincerely am not understanding them. [EDIT] wow, you edited your whole long form reply and just replaced it with "I'm not a bot"? That's such a misleading and dishonest thing to do for everyone reading these posts from now onwards
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      Diversity of world view and human experience foster innovation. If you hire all of the same socioeconomic strata even if they are different races chances are you will not get a wide depth of experience and world view
      • k__ 4y ago
        True, but still better than the alternative.
      • throwaway894345 4y ago
        Often it seems tech companies (and certainly many others) almost explicitly hire people with similar viewpoints--not merely accidentally arriving at homogeneity by way of socioeconomic strata, but by strongly broadcasting ideological statements.
    • blockinator 4y ago
      The commonly held definition of 'diversity' needs more diversity - to mean more than skin color quotas.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        Maybe they should do something geographical. Let's say hire a person per country and then start again. You know building actually distributed and diverse teams.
  • notart666 4y ago
    Well Dr.Detroit. Where I'm from in the Midwest. Black people live predominately in homelessness because the white majority just refuses to hire them for jobs. As for many of them as well, they are underemployed even when they seek employment opportunities.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      I am in the midwest, live in a mid size city in the mid west. I live in a Middle Income Neighborhood in the midwest... Demographics of this city I believe are 30% minority and 70% white. Of the 10 Homes owners closest to me (and they are all home owners no rentals) 4 of them are black. My employer has a much larger than 30% black workforce. Homelessness is not a large problem here, however it is primarily white men that I see homeless. probably on the order of 70% matching demographics I am tired of the false narrative that the midwest is racist.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        • notart666 4y ago
          I'm not from the cities and am well aware of many issues of rural life and suburbia.
        • phpisthebest 4y ago
          >>isn't the midwest also a wasteland of homelessness and druggies? No, We have a big problem with drugs that is true, but I would not call it a "wasteland" AS far a homelessness, it is a problem like it is everywhere but I have never seen anything like what is seen in CA in my life. I would call that a wasteland of homelessness. We have tons and charities, and lower cost of living making our homelessness problem generally transitory, meaning a person is homeless in crisis which is largely corrected by community out reach in a few months. Long Term homelessness is much less of a problem here
  • speed_spread 4y ago
    Of course if 95% of the workforce is currently white and you aim for proportional representation the hiring goals will be to hire more non-whites for until the goal is reached.
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
      Yes, the goal would be to hire more nonwhites than the company currently employs, but the parent is arguing that his company's goal is to exceed proportional representation.
• pfisch 4y ago
  I'm not making a pro or con judgement but it does help future women/minorities for current women/minorities to break glass ceilings and get into new industries/positions. Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities.
  • aliqot 4y ago
    This falls apart because it quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes, as we see certain groups being excluded.
    • unclebucknasty 4y ago
      >quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes This is only a dilemma if you completely ignore the history that precipitated such efforts.
  • germandiago 4y ago
    What is the glass ceiling? In Norway years back they promoted a program for women to study engineering disciplines. They increased a lot. So at some point they thought they could stop doing it and percentages came back to where they were before after some time I recall. If it was a cultural thing... they would have stayed. On the way u had discrimination by sex (AFAIK men were not paid for choosing engineering and women were paid FOR choosing, a privilege under any circumstance since noone forbid them to choose that). All in all what happened is that some ppl saw a chance (incentive) in dtudying cheaper or whatever. But was the real reason to choose those degrees bc they really liked it? I really think promoting good stuff is nice. But distorting it via positive discrimination is not the solution.
    • em-bee 4y ago
      i know nothing about what happened there in norway, so what i say is pure speculation. if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back. sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture. and that includes possible ongoing discrimination against women, only that the financial support helped some women to enter engineering despite the discrimination happening. it is possible that this program was the wrong approach. (where it comes to discrimination, i believe it matters to teach everyone to change their attitude towards women in engineering) or that it simply wasn't active long enough. it takes time to change peoples attitudes. maybe after a few decades people get used to women in engineering. (that worked in china, they have a lot more women in engineering) the problem with liking it is that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the field at hand. i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture, and that alone would be enough to rather work in a job that i don't like where the people are nice than the reverse.
• tsimionescu 4y ago
  A big problem is that work is a cultural phenomenon. Most people choose career paths early in life, and do so to a great extent based on role models and general cultural attitudes. This is before adding explicit biases in such fields (in my country at least, I have heard several older professors at university claiming that female students that got better grades than their male counterparts were probably cheating, and docking them a few points for it). If there are few women in tech, and few women professors of computer science or engineering, there will be few girls taking tech courses. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, and you need explicit action to break it. Affirmative action is one of the only known ways of doing this, as it has been at least moderately successful at integrating black people into high-status positions and jobs after the centuries of slavery. Explicit programs to encourage STEM education for girls in school are another, but less proven.
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    Affirmative action wasn't necessary to open the medical, legal, etc fields to women in the 80s and 90s (in the USA) and those fields were far more misogynistic than STEM is today. Moreover, I don't see much of a difference between your professors who say "girls are probably cheating" versus our wider society who contend that "boys are only successful because of privilege". Both seem wrong. Further, it's not clear to me that affirmative action is known to be successful. I've read several reports recently that indicate that corporate DEI initiatives (which I think is roughly revamped affirmative action) may increase discrimination because people believe that minorities are benefiting from their identity rather than their qualifications. Lastly, it's not clear to me that we need exactly 50% of a given field to be female--it seems like we need enough representation to ward off sexism and so on, which shouldn't require very much considering men don't act as a class (they don't advocate for "men's rights" and so on).
• conception 4y ago
  >Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. This line of thinking seems logical but is missing out on the human experience part of the equation. It doesn’t address why things are the way they are today. Affirmative Action, for lack of a better phrase, does a lot of things: 1) It provides representation for the future. “Mom went to college so so can I!”, “Wow, if Susan Wojcicki can run Youtube, then I can do something like that too!” Seeing people you can identify with being successful affects how you view yourself. 2) One of the reasons diverse teams are more productive is it helps stamp out the “oddball” feeling. If you are the only person in your peers that looks like you, it can have a chilling effect on how you interact with the team, how your success is measured, and your mental well being. If you don’t believe this, go to a club where no one looks like you and see how much you feel like standing out even more than just existing there. 3) It normalizes it. The only reason we are talking about it is because people in these positions are extraordinary. Normalizing it reduces implicit bias, gets other, previously discriminated against people back into the conversation and is the path towards it being a nonissue. The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal. 4) Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb. There are important reasons for these sorts of hiring decisions that have lasting consequences. And if we want to make the issue disappear we have to start at the top, not at the bottom.
  • belorn 4y ago
    Those are the general arguments in favor of Affirmative Action, but neither explain why we only apply them selectively when we feel like it. "Mom went to college so so can I" is relevant for people who lived in the 50-90s, but for those entering college today, the mother is more likely to have a college degree than the father. "Father went to college so so can I" should be the intention today if we want to fix gender inequality in college graduates. The “oddball” feeling is also very real in profession where a single gender represent over 80%. It was one of the finding in a government report in Sweden why so few men chooses to enter the education profession. With a majority of people working in profession with significant gender imbalance, universal affirmative action would help to reduce the problem of people perceiving a toxic working environment. A universal problem should be solved using universal methods. For normalizing, there is two primary strategic methods. You can treat people special as with affirmative action, or you can treat people being there as being normal by treating people as individuals. Both methods works, but they also work against each other. Treating people as special create hostility and resentment, while treating everyone as individuals has the risk being perceived as supporting statues quo. And yes, we can start at the top. Affirmative action at college applications is not the same as affirmative action at board members. Affirmative action should be universally applied using common rules, but that is sadly not how it get applied. The few times people try to make common rules for affirmative action it get abandoned quickly because the wrong group benefited from it, or it get removed based on anti-discrimination laws.
• AMerePotato 4y ago
  Discriminating in favor or certain minorities is as close as you can get to balancing the injustice. Consider how many covert ways there is for biases to systematically screw over people, and how impossible it can be to definitively prove. * The things you were exposed to as a child. Whether or not you know/see people who look like you in a certain career path. * Whether or not you feel like you fit in at certain classes in school. * The biases of your mentors and whom they choose to invest in. People favor other people who they feel are similar. This impacts who gets opportunities for further training positions. Who they write recommendations for. Who gets opportunities for internships. Each of these choices compound, as people with more opportunities look better than people with less. * The biases of your peers and coworkers. Who gets blamed when things go poorly. Who gets credit for successes. On the individual level, it's usually difficult to point out exactly where the injustice occurs to know how to address it in real time. As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others. With that in mind, it becomes much more reasonable to essentially reverse discriminate. Given two people with the same resume, with person A being from an underrepresented group and person B who is not, the best candidate is likely A who has had the additional burden of biases. Doing this at large actually will reduce the biases. As it becomes normal to see the underrepresented group in a career path: * More kids will see people like them in the career, leading to more trying it * Classes will be more diverse and welcoming so more will stick to it * Mentors are likely more diverse as well and will give opportunities to other people that look like them * When you don't stick out, it's more likely you'll be treated fairly by peers and coworkers
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    If a company gives one white person a job over a more qualified black person, that's unjust, and you can't make up for it by giving a different black person a job over a more qualified white person; rather, this doubles the amount of injustice. What this does is distribute the injustice evenly between the races, but this sort of concern about races (rather than the individuals that comprise them) strikes me as the very essence of racism: it's treating individuals within a race as unimportant and treating race itself as all-important. > As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others. We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.