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What's even more insane is when they ask for your race. I've been asked that by US based entities and I literally don't know what to answer because I've never b
by cypress66 4y ago
What's even more insane is when they ask for your race. I've been asked that by US based entities and I literally don't know what to answer because I've never been asked that in my country and don't actually know what "race" I am.
- ghusto 4y agoWhenever there's an "other" option, I fill in "human" :P
- pixl97 4y agoIn the US this is typically to prevent organizations from systematic racism against particular people groups.
- xigoi 4y agoHow could they be less racist if they know the race than if they don't?
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoInquiry: What do you suggest how a company would analyze if a hiring manager refuses to hire any applicants who are black?
- gambiting 4y agoInquiry - how having this data proves that they do such a thing? Maybe none of the black applicants had necessary qualifications? To answer your question - if there is such a complaint made, I'd appoint another qualified hiring manager(or HR person) to sit in on any future interviews with this person and give me their report on the situation.
- hgsgm 4y agoWhy should we trust your HR person who is allowing this happen?
- gambiting 4y agoAllowing what to happen? I don't really understand your question.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoHow could such a complaint be made?
- gambiting 4y ago....the same way any other complaint is made? If you think you have been discriminated against when interviewing you'd complain to your local department of labour or equivalent, they would then bring it up with the company and it would have to be investigated.
- mindover 4y agoIf they know your race they can limit the amount of racism allocated to you by the company /s
- cafard 4y agoThey have it on file if challenged on hiring.
- sweettea 4y agoBy engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism.
- philosopher1234 4y agoI hear people talk about this stuff as more CYA for companies than that they are actually taking meaningful antiracist action.
- Akronymus 4y agoEngaging in racism to fight racism is counterproductive. And I consider almost all "anti-rqcism" to just be racism but against groups it's permitted to. For example, asians and higher ed.
- brianwawok 4y agoSo which report makes an organization less racist: Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown Org B) 10% of applicants are brown, 0% of hires are brown Org A might be close enough to a rounding error you can call it good. Org B likely has some issues. Hard to fix what you don't measure.
- gambiting 4y agoIt's insane to me that the automatic conclusion from the above is that organisation B is racist.
- 31337Logic 4y ago...or that Org A is "less racist", as I've demonstrated. Poor analogy by the OP.
- aidenn0 4y agoYou just went from "Org B likely has some issues" to "automatic conclusion."
- gambiting 4y agoNo, I actually went off the first sentence: "So which report makes an organization less racist" So that implies that org B is more racist(because it hired zero brown people) - is that not the conclusion the author of the comment wants us to reach?
- kurthr 4y agoUnless it's 100% remote without any video conferencing, it would be a little hard not know race. The point is being forced to track it by self reporting they can't hide their racism. In this case they're asking about education status, marital status, whether you have kids and a zillion other (mostly protected) statuses. Protected ones you're not allowed to discriminate... now if you have a weird accent or bad fashion sense, likely allowed to discriminate. Not measuring something doesn't make it go away.
- pixl97 4y agoThat is a valid question if it's an online only service, but many things, for example banking applications can be online or in person.
- nogridbag 4y agoThere's all sorts of regulation around this as well. If a person walks into a bank to apply for a home loan and they do not wish to provide their race, the banking associate has to make a guess.
- MrOwnPut 4y agoYeah doesn't make much sense right? Some people think that affirmative action isn't racist. But tell me what it is when you think like: "hey we have enough asians, exclude that person, let's find a black to get our quota" Some people will defend it like a user said below: "By engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism." But what is "anti-racism"? It's being racist in the opposite direction. You think Y group is being oppressed "subconciously" so you oppress X group as much as you think you need to, to "even" it out. We should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
- wpietri 4y ago[flagged]
- MrOwnPut 4y ago> Anti-racism seeks to end that system. Explain how you apply "anti-racism" please. If you're excluding people based on their skin color or origins, that is racism, even if they are white or asian. > Everybody agrees that the US was hugely racist to start out and for centuries thereafter. Speak for yourself, not everybody. If anything we were the colony to finally collapse the system after many centuries of it being standard across the world. It's kind of a slap in the face for all those people who fought to end it.
- nine_k 4y agoIf they get inspected, accused in media, or sued, they can readily show that they actually employ some percentage of whatever minorities. I think there's no other practical reason.
- yifanl 4y agoHow would you confirm that they aren't keeping track under the covers?
- filoleg 4y agoBecause those numbers are reported to the government. And if the government sees that your company of 1000 people located in Texas has 1 hispanic person and 999 white people (among which are only 2 women), the government is going to start asking some questions. Tl;dr: it is less about the company being less racist on their own by knowing the race, it is more about the company having to report those numbers so that others could hold them accountable (in case there are any arising concerns about racism).
- nradov 4y agoThe US federal government doesn't proactively start asking such questions of employers. They only act on potential civil rights violations in response to a credible formal complaint.
- filoleg 4y agoThanks for clarifying, makes sense. Ultimately that demographic data gathered from employees helps the federal government with legitimizing those formal complaints, acting as potential supporting evidence.
- dweekly 4y agoMainly, it lets you measure how racist/sexist/etc one's system is. For instance, if you see that applicants that are otherwise equally qualified are getting rejected on recruiter screen disproportionally by race, you may have an issue with how your screening is done. And yes, this happens: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf A reasonable goal is that race, gender, and sexual orientation should have no bearing at all on how likely it is that you get hired, promoted, or fired. So these inputs are typically blinded to hiring managers but available to HR in aggregate to let them perform these kinds of analyses. I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
- MrOwnPut 4y agoIt doesn't tell you how racist/sexist the system, it tells you your demographic. There being more male construction workers doesn't make it a sexist system. There being more female teachers doesn't make it a sexist system. There being more asian doctors doesn't make it a racist system. Let people do what they want to do, you can look at demographics but stop trying to read racist tea leaves with it.
- Shared404 4y agoExcept if you know that for some hypothetical demographic A and demographic B where all applicants are equally qualified you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics. If it doesn't, you have an issue. The only way to know for sure is to measure. E: To be clear, assuming equally qualified candidates, you would want expect hiring proportions to match the same A:B ratio as you get from applications.
- annyeonghada 4y ago>you would expect the hiring to equally reflect both demographics No, I wouldn't expect this at all as I do not expect the height distribution of basketball player to reflect the height distribution of the general population. As I do not expect the personality trait distribution of pop stars to be the same of programmers, and again I do not expect the latter to be similar to the general population. Personal inclination, innate intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, and of course demographics, parenting, generational wealth all play a role.
- enragedcacti 4y agoThere is a lot of secondary information that could allow unconscious or conscious bias to slip into the hiring process, e.g. Name discrimination [1] Ideally the race information you input would only be given to HR and not shown to anyone involved in the hiring process. It would then be used to identify anomalies indicative of bias occurring. [1] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discrimination-jobs https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discriminati...
- thegrimmest 4y agoI'm not sure why it's relevant. Is there bias in hair color hiring? Is anyone tracking it? Does it matter at all? I feel similarly about skin color.
- enragedcacti 4y agoThere is an extremely long and brutal history of systemic bias against groups people who look a certain way. Pretending it must have stopped and is now no more worthy of societal introspection than blondes vs. brunettes is laughable to me.
- thegrimmest 4y agoIt's not "pretending it must have stopped" it's "stopping it by making it impolite to mention". It used to be OK to make dumb blonde jokes, or (more severely) to be openly antisemitic, or to discriminate against redheads due to perceived Irish ancestry. Yet these are considered in poor taste today. No affirmative action was undertaken on behalf of blondes or Jews or Irish people. We just realized it's in poor taste to make distinctions about people with regards to their superficial characteristics and a few generations passed. I'm just suggesting we let this same process unfold naturally. And that affirmative action, by placing emphasis on superficial differences between people, takes us in the wrong direction.
- enragedcacti 4y agoDetecting/combatting instances of racial bias and affirmative action are not the same thing, in fact it's basically the opposite in that's it's eliminating actions that disproportionately benefit one racial group over another. I don't doubt that some companies use this data to drive quotas but that isn't something inherent to collecting and analyzing race/gender info in hiring. On top of that, something being impolite to mention doesn't mean it's not driving discrimination.
- runarberg 4y agoA lot of it has to do with population statistics, for better or for worse the USA is fixated on having available data on all racial discrimination (make sense given the history of the country). I do agree that the categories them selves need some revision, however, unlike the forms here at genders.wtf, you can usually opt out of answering the racial category, which makes it infinitely better.
- version_five 4y agoI always feel ridiculous being called caucasian. I understand somehow it's come to mean some version of white. But it just makes me think of the Caucuses mountains and how little I can identify with Georgia or wherever.
- FlyingSnake 4y agoI don’t understand this measure as well. Half of Caucasus mountains are in Russia, and I’m sure most USAmericans won’t like to be identified as Russians.
- cookieswumchorr 4y agocuriously, in Russia, Caucasians is the collective term for the nations of the Caucasus, and it is often used to express Chauvinist opinions about them. Russians are usually confused when they are referred to as "Caucasian" in american paperwork
- FlyingSnake 4y agoPeople have downvoted me for saying the same thing. Perhaps they were offended by the term "US Americans"? It is a standard term used here in Germany and is not offensive.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoApparently it's something people believed at one point in history; that the Caucuses region is where Noah's arc landed and is thus the region where white people originated. As a non-Christian, the term is absolutely ridiculous.
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoAs a Christian, the term is absolutely ridiculous. I'd prefer to be called German Irish (or some other identifiable family history origin) or American. White or Caucasian isn't a nationality or race.
- mindover 4y agoMost of the time in the US race means skin color. Which is somewhat ironic for a society so attached to Martin Luther King’s Jr. values.
- wpietri 4y ago[flagged]
- edhowzerblack 4y ago[flagged]
- gitrog 4y ago[flagged]
- spiderice 4y agoI don't know that I agree with everything you're trying to get at, but shouldn't it just be called "racism". The term reverse-racism seems nonsensical. The term itself seems racist, implying that you can't be racist toward certain races. You can only be "reverse-racist".
- delecti 4y ago"Racism" can mean interpersonal ("I don't like black people") or it can mean systemic ("society disadvantages black people"), and lots of people in social studies focus on the latter. Because there's not really any systemic disadvantage to being white, that focus on the latter effectively defines racism against white people as non-existent (there's not systemic racism against white people, so there's not "racism" against white people). Given that, "racism against white people" is definitionally not "racism", hence "reverse racism". Of course there are multiple steps in there which can be criticized, but within the set of terms they've defined, it makes the language less ambiguous. It's like how astronomy often defines "metals" as "anything bigger than helium". The terms have a useful meaning in the proper context.
- shadowgovt 4y agoFor US employment, collection of gender and race information is implied necessary by the Civil Rights Act (because if someone files a discrimination / wrongful termination suit, one of the first questions that will come up is "Well, what are the demographics of the organization in the first place" and if the organization doesn't know, that's an automatic bad sign.) Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
- nostromo 4y agoNo, the Civil Rights Act does not compel collection of this data. It's not an "automatic bad sign" if a company doesn't collect it. In fact, it can work against you in the case of a lawsuit. You are correct that the government has started asking contractors and large employers for some of this data. But it is only a requirement for the business itself, not for their customers.
- shadowgovt 4y agoCompel, no [edit: correction: compel yes for over 100 employees]. Heavily incentivize, yes. "Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid." "Does the defense have a counter-argument?" "Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..." ETA: More importantly, I had forgotten about the EEO-1 report. Any company with over 100 employees is required to track and report this demographic data. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/shouldemployerscollectdemodataonappsandemployees.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
- nostromo 4y agoIn court it's better to not know since it's harder to prove intent.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
- aidenn0 4y agoThe US requires employers provide "Equal Opportunity" across races. Legal departments have interpreted this to mean "we will ask everyone about their race to collect data to prove we aren't racist" Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example: > An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs. Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
- snerbles 4y agoIt's better now, but it was quite common for forms to permit only one selection and have no "Other". Having to repeated explain the existence of multiracial people to admins and H.R. types was...tiresome.
- chrismcb 4y agoI've been claiming "prefer not to say"on those forms for like 40 years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- goatlover 4y agoThe US seems to be obsessed with race.
- plusfive 4y agoNot the US. Just the far left of the spectrum that bought into Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi's brand of racism. There is a large majority of the US that would like for nothing better than to stop talking about it but the left is really loud.
- verdverm 4y agoIt's in part due to the diversity of people in the US, which has historically had 30% of the population who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given everyone is at least a little racist at some point, the US encounters issues more often than the more homogeneous demographic countries.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoThis is very strange to me too. Election exit polls are broken up by race, as well as most other statistics. It's such a ubiquitous case of institutional racism no one in the US even thinks of it as such, apparently.
- hgsgm 4y agoThis is the paradox of racism. Is it racist to study races? Is it racist to ignore races and let racism sneak unchecked?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoWell, it's interesting that this is such a ubiquitous thing in the US, and so uncommon elsewhere. It's not an uncommon view in sociology that this can be self-perpetuating, though I could go both ways on this myself. This preoccupation with race as a demographic discriminant is pretty uncommon in Europe.
- jjeaff 4y agoI would think more people on HN would understand the importance of data. Its pretty hard to change something that you aren't tracking. Perhaps Europe would benefit from more data in this regard?
- mikrotikker 4y agoIt just seems like a horrible practice to me because the fact that 1930s Germany tracked Jewish people and allowed them to kill so many. If we could guarantee that another genocidal dictator won't come to power then I might be OK with it. Couple that tracking with the surveillance and one might be able to ensure few slip through the cracks.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoI'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You want to change race, that's why you track it? Or you want to change how racial "groups" vote? The logic makes sense in some contexts, but not all, and not the one I was referring to anyway.
- pkulak 4y agoWe need to track it in the US now because we _used_ to track it. If you spend 400 years tracking ethnicity to use for systematized oppression, you have to continue to record it for at least the next few generations just to measure your progress away from that system.
- garaetjjte 4y agoRelated story: https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/earth/mongrel.html https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/earth/mongrel.html
- 79a6ed87 4y agoOr Hispanic/Latin being considered a separate race from White. Doesn't make any sense
- escapedmoose 4y agoGenerally Hispanic/Latin is a second question, so you can choose White and also Hispanic.
- mmcnl 4y agoThis is a typical US thing. Very weird.
- type0 4y agoI usually answer that I'm of human race
- chrismcb 4y agoJust say you don't want to disclose it