7 ms·
How could they be less racist if they know the race than if they don't?
by xigoi 4y ago
How 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.