7 ms·

Diversity is good, why?

makeitdouble 4y ago
Same as not putting all your eggs in the same basket. Diversifying a team/company brings resilience and stability in many ways, new insights as well.
jawns 4y ago
Sure, I'll bite. Diversity in the abstract has no intrinsic benefits. A dozen red roses is no more or less beautiful than roses of many colors. A set of heterogenous things is not intrinsically more valuable than a set of homogenous things. BUT when it comes to diversity of representation, there is a justice angle. My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem, because it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. Maybe that reason is systemic bias, or maybe it's direct bias on the part of the company. But somewhere in the process, there's an injustice taking place. I used to work for a company that was much more white, male, and otherwise homogeneous than the city in which it was located. And the company was worse off for it. There was a lot of groupthink. There was a lot of what I'd call TDD (testosterone-driven development). And people complained about there being a monoculture. The more homogenous the company became, the harder it became to attract qualified people who didn't fit the mold.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  > My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem. The people who talk like this argued that Asians don’t deserve equal admission to Harvard or UNC because there’s “too many”. I think that kind of racism is disgusting — choosing people based on skin color is horrific.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    You’re putting words in parent’s mouth. I personally never heard someone jumping from one to the other, and don’t see the logical bind either.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      UNC and Harvard both argued before the Supreme Court in 2022 that their anti-Asian racism is for “diversity”. A lot of people are dishonest about that, but the people who crow about “diversity” consistently engage in racialized language — and discrimination based on race, such as discrimination against Asians at those universities. (You can see GP works himself around to the racial angle by the end.) I didn’t put any words in GPs mouth: I pointed out he’s using the language of modern bigots, such as those at Harvard and UNC.
      - makeitdouble 4y ago
        You are commenting on a case that is still open, and while you seem squarely in favor of SFFA, their claims are far from being validated (they’ve been rejected by lower courts up to this point) What I find interesting in particular from those lawsuits: one of the main argument was the representation of Asians being lower than “white” ethnic groups adjusted for selected academic achievements. That basically goes against your thesis, as doing that intentionally would lower diversity.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Yes, there exist people that do that. Yet, we are talking about a real barrier for many kinds of people that was suddenly lifted, and people are still making an effort to classify the people that pointed "hey, there was a barrier here" as racist. The rhetoric of this thread is amazing.
    - abduhl 4y ago
      People are not making an effort to classify the people that pointed out that there was a barrier as racist. They are making an effort to classify people that are currently saying “hey there IS STILL a barrier here and the best or only way to demolish it is by looking at a person’s skin color” as racist. And they are definitionally correct.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  > My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings... it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. No it doesn't. That's only true if all demographics have equal ability and interest in that workforce.
  - jawns 4y ago
    Would you care to share what classes of people lack ability in software engineering, which is a relatively high-paying job? Any racial or ethnic groups? Men/women? Veteran status? If you're not willing to name which purported classes of people have low ability in this area, I don't think it's worthwhile to entertain your line of argument.
    - torstenvl 4y ago
      Your omission of "and interest" is conspicuous. If you aren't going to engage honestly, don't engage at all. There's no place on HN for that kind of behavior.
      - jawns 4y ago
        Okay, which classes of people aren't interested in a relatively cushy, relatively high-paying job? Are blacks and Hispanics, underrepresented in tech, just not interested in programming, or is there maybe a chance that they have the same ability and interest, but less access? Overt discrimination does not even need to exist here, but if there are systemic factors that disadvantage some demographic groups, that can also affect access.
        torstenvl 4y ago
        African-Americans make up a little more than 1% of all CS program enrollments (13 out of 1113, or 1.17%). Not graduation - enrollment. There are some universities where enrollment in certain majors is competitive, but they are the exception, not the rule. So yes, I'm inclined to believe this is indicative of vastly different levels of interest. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Nationally-the-number-of-Computer-Science-degrees-awarded-by-race-and-gender-from-1981_fig3_317351499 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Nationally-the-number-of...
- culopatin 4y ago
  You could be blinded by bias in a non diverse group no?
- yucky 4y ago
  > when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem, because it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. Maybe that reason is systemic bias, or maybe it's direct bias on the part of the company. But somewhere in the process, there's an injustice taking place. Is this true for the workforce in professional sports?
  - kthejoker2 4y ago
    The management or the players?
    - yucky 4y ago
      Both? I mean, that's not a gotcha if you meant it to be.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Ask the question in reverse: as an extreme, if you could set the rules and material conditions to participate, could you come up with a sport that will filter out most members of specific parts of the population ?
    - yucky 4y ago
      Well anything that requires strength and speed will filter out all females, and most males. Which is what we see in professional sports that are open to all genders.
      - decafninja 4y ago
        You could argue a particular race is extremely underrepresented in professional basketball and American football. How many Asians do you see in the NBA or NFL? As an Asian myself, I have no problem admitting most Asian males simply don’t have the ideal physique to be competitive at the pro level at these sports. You might have extreme outliers like Yao Ming, but that’s exactly what he is - an extreme outlier. Far fewer - extremely fewer, Asian males are likely to have the ideal physique to be a NBA or NFL player than say, Whites or Blacks. Do I see a problem with this? Not at all.
adamhp 4y ago
From a strictly capitalist perspective: because the ability to develop solutions that eventually make a lot of money have to apply to problems that exist in global markets, and having people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds directly working on those solutions gives you a competitive advantage because of the organization's now broader understanding of those problems.
- vidarh 4y ago
  One of the things even Marx praised about capitalism (vs. feudalism and mercantilism) was exactly this notion that the needs of capital and competition means protectionist and xenophobic tendencies would eventually get pushed aside.
anecdotal1 4y ago
I find that people from different cultures have different approaches to solving problems and that's valuable for me to learn
- drewcoo 4y ago
  I find that people of the same culture tend to clump together. Which diminishes any value from culture difference.
pabs3 4y ago
Lack of diversity in your company can result in bugs in your product when unrepresented types of people use your product, presumably leading to reduced profits. https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
- blueflow 4y ago
  And a company needs black employees to be able to make products that also work for blacks?
  - millzlane 4y ago
    Why is diversity bad?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - harimau777 4y ago
    It's not so much that it is not possible to address any given issue in a different way. E.g. they could have tested the soap dispenser with different skin tones. Rather the issue is that a team is more likely to realize issues caused by interaction between a product and various groups if those groups are part of the team working on the project. It's a discoverability issue.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    A company needs employees who are likely to think about the issues, and while most of it can be learned, in practice those who try to depend on this as a means to catch these issues, or try to make it an appointed role, tend to fail. A more diverse workforce is not enough, but it very much tends to challenge assumptions that would otherwise get made without a second thought. To take a trivial example, I'm Norwegian, and over the years I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain even the most basic internationalisation requirements to English-speakers who somehow manage to even think about basic character set considerations, much less transliteration (Håkon transliterates to Haakon - å -> aa, æ -> ae, ø -> oe -, except when Scandinavians have learnt that some places they run into problems unless it's transliterated Hakon, so good luck doing a string comparison of names reliably), language differences (assuming no need to make different recordings for dates for an IVR system and you can just reuse the ordinals? except when you can't; surely there's a default, "safe", clearly dominant language for each country that you can use without pissing anyone off? and so on). And that's between similar cultures and closely related languages, and ignoring cultural expectations outside of a European heritage.
harimau777 4y ago
I can think of a number of reasons: While it may be too blunt of a tool to address the core systemic causes of issues like inequality of opportunity and discrimination, it is a relatively simple way to mitigate their effects. E.g. long term we should try to make sure that the hiring process does not discriminate against various groups, but in the short term making sure that you have at least some of each group helps mitigate any problems. Having diverse team may allow a team to develop a wider range of potential solutions to problems. Having a diverse team may help avoid unanticipated interactions between a product and different groups of people. E.g. facial recognition software that doesn't work well on people with dark skin.
- abduhl 4y ago
  You’re talking about people like they’re different types of Pokémon to collect.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    That's an excellent comparison! If you only have electric-type Pokémon, you can theoretically beat every Pokémon Gym. But it's a lot easier if you have a _diverse_ set of Pokémon with different abilities. =)
    - abduhl 4y ago
      As an electric-type Pokemon (aka a minority), I'd prefer it if people didn't tailor their demeanor towards me and their hiring/firing decisions about me based on my type but rather on my abilities. Let's not forget that Pikachu starts with a normal type ability and isn't only able to learn electric type moves. Build your team based on ability, not Pokemon type, especially when there isn’t even a good correlation between Pokemon type and ability and ability can be inspected directly. Stereotyping about a person's ability based on their skin color is similarly bigoted. And try not to use a =) when endorsing racism so openly.
      - theshrike79 4y ago
alex_duf 4y ago
Variety of point of views brings opinions you may not have, had you been uniquely surrounded by people that have been through similar experiences to you. In my experience I've seen it impacting product decisions, pricing decisions, and engineering decisions.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  I hear this often. What I see with hiring has nothing to do with diversity of opinion, it's about hiring enough of protected classes to avoid lawsuits. I would love to hear how companies can interview for deep differences in thinking. Doing that in a way that would not risk lawsuits from the interview process (asking about personal religion or neurodiversity), of course.
papandada 4y ago
The parent comment gave a number of specific examples why remote work benefits various people. Those points still stand regardless of the "diversity" label.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Yes. So the question is why they found it necessary to include it.
mmh0000 4y ago
When you live in a bubble you stagnant.
O__________O 4y ago
Most obvious reason is that ecosystems are most resilient when diversified. Supporting diversity as an aspect of culture, especially at scale, has many benefits, including: equality, alternative perspectives, economic resilience & performance, opportunity & threat awareness, geographical risk management, respect for diversity in nature, multilingual capacity, cultural awareness, etc. Why would diversity not be good?
- dijit 4y ago
  > Why would diversity not be good? (responding to this statement, and this statement only): When creating systems, using a diverse array of standards instead of just one creates problems. For example: using metric units and imperial units. Heterogeneity in standards is desired in those circumstances. When collaborating: having a diverse array of cultural norms can cause friction when people interpret phrases as pleasant vs passive aggressive. When designing corporate identity: a diverse set of art-styles would likely give a muddled or non-professional look of a company. (though in certain circumstances this can be desirable if you are going for an "indy" look).
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Agree, there clearly exceptions, though issue is that each of those situations either has a reasonable resolution or that lack of diversity just postpones cultural conflicts among cultures. Basically, if lack of inclusion issue for significant subset of a population, then it’s an issue. If there two cultures that are naturally wholly independent of each other, attempting inject diversity is clearly flawed. On the flip side, unable non-statistically significant diversity would lead to a chaotic state. Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception.
    - abduhl 4y ago
      >>Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception. China’s rise as a superpower would seem to directly contradict your statement. It seems like the truth is the opposite of what you say: a heterogenous system will always outperform a diverse/chaotic system unless there are edge cases which introduce shocks to the system.
theshrike79 4y ago
People with different backgrounds offer different solutions to problems. This is an objectively good thing. Invisible Women[0] is an excellent book on the subject with multiple anecdotes and hard statistical data on how having diverse people making decisions is good for business. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women

Same as not putting all your eggs in the same basket. Diversifying a team/company brings resilience and stability in many ways, new insights as well.

jawns 4y ago

Sure, I'll bite. Diversity in the abstract has no intrinsic benefits. A dozen red roses is no more or less beautiful than roses of many colors. A set of heterogenous things is not intrinsically more valuable than a set of homogenous things. BUT when it comes to diversity of representation, there is a justice angle. My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem, because it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. Maybe that reason is systemic bias, or maybe it's direct bias on the part of the company. But somewhere in the process, there's an injustice taking place. I used to work for a company that was much more white, male, and otherwise homogeneous than the city in which it was located. And the company was worse off for it. There was a lot of groupthink. There was a lot of what I'd call TDD (testosterone-driven development). And people complained about there being a monoculture. The more homogenous the company became, the harder it became to attract qualified people who didn't fit the mold.

zmgsabst 4y ago
> My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem. The people who talk like this argued that Asians don’t deserve equal admission to Harvard or UNC because there’s “too many”. I think that kind of racism is disgusting — choosing people based on skin color is horrific.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  You’re putting words in parent’s mouth. I personally never heard someone jumping from one to the other, and don’t see the logical bind either.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    UNC and Harvard both argued before the Supreme Court in 2022 that their anti-Asian racism is for “diversity”. A lot of people are dishonest about that, but the people who crow about “diversity” consistently engage in racialized language — and discrimination based on race, such as discrimination against Asians at those universities. (You can see GP works himself around to the racial angle by the end.) I didn’t put any words in GPs mouth: I pointed out he’s using the language of modern bigots, such as those at Harvard and UNC.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      You are commenting on a case that is still open, and while you seem squarely in favor of SFFA, their claims are far from being validated (they’ve been rejected by lower courts up to this point) What I find interesting in particular from those lawsuits: one of the main argument was the representation of Asians being lower than “white” ethnic groups adjusted for selected academic achievements. That basically goes against your thesis, as doing that intentionally would lower diversity.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Yes, there exist people that do that. Yet, we are talking about a real barrier for many kinds of people that was suddenly lifted, and people are still making an effort to classify the people that pointed "hey, there was a barrier here" as racist. The rhetoric of this thread is amazing.
  - abduhl 4y ago
    People are not making an effort to classify the people that pointed out that there was a barrier as racist. They are making an effort to classify people that are currently saying “hey there IS STILL a barrier here and the best or only way to demolish it is by looking at a person’s skin color” as racist. And they are definitionally correct.
torstenvl 4y ago
> My guiding principle is that when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings... it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. No it doesn't. That's only true if all demographics have equal ability and interest in that workforce.
- jawns 4y ago
  Would you care to share what classes of people lack ability in software engineering, which is a relatively high-paying job? Any racial or ethnic groups? Men/women? Veteran status? If you're not willing to name which purported classes of people have low ability in this area, I don't think it's worthwhile to entertain your line of argument.
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    Your omission of "and interest" is conspicuous. If you aren't going to engage honestly, don't engage at all. There's no place on HN for that kind of behavior.
    - jawns 4y ago
      Okay, which classes of people aren't interested in a relatively cushy, relatively high-paying job? Are blacks and Hispanics, underrepresented in tech, just not interested in programming, or is there maybe a chance that they have the same ability and interest, but less access? Overt discrimination does not even need to exist here, but if there are systemic factors that disadvantage some demographic groups, that can also affect access.
      - torstenvl 4y ago
        African-Americans make up a little more than 1% of all CS program enrollments (13 out of 1113, or 1.17%). Not graduation - enrollment. There are some universities where enrollment in certain majors is competitive, but they are the exception, not the rule. So yes, I'm inclined to believe this is indicative of vastly different levels of interest. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Nationally-the-number-of-Computer-Science-degrees-awarded-by-race-and-gender-from-1981_fig3_317351499 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Nationally-the-number-of...
culopatin 4y ago
You could be blinded by bias in a non diverse group no?
yucky 4y ago
> when the diversity of a workforce does not match the diversity of its surroundings, that is a problem, because it suggests that people are being filtered out for some reason other than their relevant abilities. Maybe that reason is systemic bias, or maybe it's direct bias on the part of the company. But somewhere in the process, there's an injustice taking place. Is this true for the workforce in professional sports?
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  The management or the players?
  - yucky 4y ago
    Both? I mean, that's not a gotcha if you meant it to be.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Ask the question in reverse: as an extreme, if you could set the rules and material conditions to participate, could you come up with a sport that will filter out most members of specific parts of the population ?
  - yucky 4y ago
    Well anything that requires strength and speed will filter out all females, and most males. Which is what we see in professional sports that are open to all genders.
    - decafninja 4y ago
      You could argue a particular race is extremely underrepresented in professional basketball and American football. How many Asians do you see in the NBA or NFL? As an Asian myself, I have no problem admitting most Asian males simply don’t have the ideal physique to be competitive at the pro level at these sports. You might have extreme outliers like Yao Ming, but that’s exactly what he is - an extreme outlier. Far fewer - extremely fewer, Asian males are likely to have the ideal physique to be a NBA or NFL player than say, Whites or Blacks. Do I see a problem with this? Not at all.

adamhp 4y ago

From a strictly capitalist perspective: because the ability to develop solutions that eventually make a lot of money have to apply to problems that exist in global markets, and having people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds directly working on those solutions gives you a competitive advantage because of the organization's now broader understanding of those problems.

vidarh 4y ago
One of the things even Marx praised about capitalism (vs. feudalism and mercantilism) was exactly this notion that the needs of capital and competition means protectionist and xenophobic tendencies would eventually get pushed aside.

anecdotal1 4y ago

I find that people from different cultures have different approaches to solving problems and that's valuable for me to learn

drewcoo 4y ago
I find that people of the same culture tend to clump together. Which diminishes any value from culture difference.

pabs3 4y ago

Lack of diversity in your company can result in bugs in your product when unrepresented types of people use your product, presumably leading to reduced profits. https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...

blueflow 4y ago
And a company needs black employees to be able to make products that also work for blacks?
- millzlane 4y ago
  Why is diversity bad?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- harimau777 4y ago
  It's not so much that it is not possible to address any given issue in a different way. E.g. they could have tested the soap dispenser with different skin tones. Rather the issue is that a team is more likely to realize issues caused by interaction between a product and various groups if those groups are part of the team working on the project. It's a discoverability issue.
- vidarh 4y ago
  A company needs employees who are likely to think about the issues, and while most of it can be learned, in practice those who try to depend on this as a means to catch these issues, or try to make it an appointed role, tend to fail. A more diverse workforce is not enough, but it very much tends to challenge assumptions that would otherwise get made without a second thought. To take a trivial example, I'm Norwegian, and over the years I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain even the most basic internationalisation requirements to English-speakers who somehow manage to even think about basic character set considerations, much less transliteration (Håkon transliterates to Haakon - å -> aa, æ -> ae, ø -> oe -, except when Scandinavians have learnt that some places they run into problems unless it's transliterated Hakon, so good luck doing a string comparison of names reliably), language differences (assuming no need to make different recordings for dates for an IVR system and you can just reuse the ordinals? except when you can't; surely there's a default, "safe", clearly dominant language for each country that you can use without pissing anyone off? and so on). And that's between similar cultures and closely related languages, and ignoring cultural expectations outside of a European heritage.

harimau777 4y ago

I can think of a number of reasons: While it may be too blunt of a tool to address the core systemic causes of issues like inequality of opportunity and discrimination, it is a relatively simple way to mitigate their effects. E.g. long term we should try to make sure that the hiring process does not discriminate against various groups, but in the short term making sure that you have at least some of each group helps mitigate any problems. Having diverse team may allow a team to develop a wider range of potential solutions to problems. Having a diverse team may help avoid unanticipated interactions between a product and different groups of people. E.g. facial recognition software that doesn't work well on people with dark skin.

abduhl 4y ago
You’re talking about people like they’re different types of Pokémon to collect.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  That's an excellent comparison! If you only have electric-type Pokémon, you can theoretically beat every Pokémon Gym. But it's a lot easier if you have a _diverse_ set of Pokémon with different abilities. =)
  - abduhl 4y ago
    As an electric-type Pokemon (aka a minority), I'd prefer it if people didn't tailor their demeanor towards me and their hiring/firing decisions about me based on my type but rather on my abilities. Let's not forget that Pikachu starts with a normal type ability and isn't only able to learn electric type moves. Build your team based on ability, not Pokemon type, especially when there isn’t even a good correlation between Pokemon type and ability and ability can be inspected directly. Stereotyping about a person's ability based on their skin color is similarly bigoted. And try not to use a =) when endorsing racism so openly.
    - theshrike79 4y ago

alex_duf 4y ago

Variety of point of views brings opinions you may not have, had you been uniquely surrounded by people that have been through similar experiences to you. In my experience I've seen it impacting product decisions, pricing decisions, and engineering decisions.

drewcoo 4y ago
I hear this often. What I see with hiring has nothing to do with diversity of opinion, it's about hiring enough of protected classes to avoid lawsuits. I would love to hear how companies can interview for deep differences in thinking. Doing that in a way that would not risk lawsuits from the interview process (asking about personal religion or neurodiversity), of course.

papandada 4y ago

The parent comment gave a number of specific examples why remote work benefits various people. Those points still stand regardless of the "diversity" label.

blueflow 4y ago
Yes. So the question is why they found it necessary to include it.

mmh0000 4y ago

When you live in a bubble you stagnant.

O__________O 4y ago

Most obvious reason is that ecosystems are most resilient when diversified. Supporting diversity as an aspect of culture, especially at scale, has many benefits, including: equality, alternative perspectives, economic resilience & performance, opportunity & threat awareness, geographical risk management, respect for diversity in nature, multilingual capacity, cultural awareness, etc. Why would diversity not be good?

dijit 4y ago
> Why would diversity not be good? (responding to this statement, and this statement only): When creating systems, using a diverse array of standards instead of just one creates problems. For example: using metric units and imperial units. Heterogeneity in standards is desired in those circumstances. When collaborating: having a diverse array of cultural norms can cause friction when people interpret phrases as pleasant vs passive aggressive. When designing corporate identity: a diverse set of art-styles would likely give a muddled or non-professional look of a company. (though in certain circumstances this can be desirable if you are going for an "indy" look).
- O__________O 4y ago
  Agree, there clearly exceptions, though issue is that each of those situations either has a reasonable resolution or that lack of diversity just postpones cultural conflicts among cultures. Basically, if lack of inclusion issue for significant subset of a population, then it’s an issue. If there two cultures that are naturally wholly independent of each other, attempting inject diversity is clearly flawed. On the flip side, unable non-statistically significant diversity would lead to a chaotic state. Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception.
  - abduhl 4y ago
    >>Basically, there’s no optimal state, but a diverse system will always outperform a heterogeneous or chaotic system on average, only edge cases that are the exception. China’s rise as a superpower would seem to directly contradict your statement. It seems like the truth is the opposite of what you say: a heterogenous system will always outperform a diverse/chaotic system unless there are edge cases which introduce shocks to the system.

theshrike79 4y ago

People with different backgrounds offer different solutions to problems. This is an objectively good thing. Invisible Women[0] is an excellent book on the subject with multiple anecdotes and hard statistical data on how having diverse people making decisions is good for business. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women