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We've come a long way since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When it was debated, the great liberal Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey himself stood on the Senate floor d

We've come a long way since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When it was debated, the great liberal Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey himself stood on the Senate floor during debate on the measure and declared: “I will start eating the pages” of the law if anyone can find a clause that calls for quotas, preferences or racial balance in jobs or education - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-20-mn-34094-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-20-mn-34094-... Of course, there are still no quotas. Just that, if you don't meet the non-existent quotas, that is evidence for the illegal discrimination prosecution against you.

outlace 3y ago
It looks like this is just a reporting requirement and no quotas are mandated. I imagine the intent is to indirectly push companies to improve diversity through embarrassment by public numbers. However, these are private individuals funding private ventures with private money, as far as I know, so why the government should be involved at all in that process other than taxation isn't clear to me.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  I'll invoke Godwin given the obvious connection, the Jews "only" had to wear stars. Similar situations happen again, and again, and again throughout history, and those that forget history...
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    More direct comparison would be Jews were excluded from Colleges for the same reason Asians are excluded today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_and_antisemitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_and_antisemitism Fears of overrepresentation. Doing too well on the grading standards
- SenAnder 3y ago
  This is one step in a long march. If you can remember this march, the next step is obvious. The Civil Rights Act didn't directly ban using IQ tests for hiring/promotions, yet that's how the courts eventually interpreted it [1]. More recently, a test specifically made to evaluate teachers was declared racist and discriminatory [2], mostly based on disparate pass rates, but in part also on requiring some "cultural knowledge". Ironic, since imparting culture is a large part of a teacher's job - outside of STEM, nearly all knowledge is culturally biased (i.e. there is greater emphasis on US history in the US than in Poland). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220714122944/https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-latino-teachers-collecting-835-million-in-discrimination-lawsuit-11657800508 https://web.archive.org/web/20220714122944/https://www.wsj.c...
  - Spivak 3y ago
    I'm not really sure how you read those and think the shady activity is on the part of the government. You're missing the left foot of the march which is, "people discover an 'unbiased' assessment that gives them the results they want and then standardize on it." And then the right foot is the courts not being stupid and smacking it down for obvious racism. I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure that affluent white privately educated men did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Asians do better on IQ, Asians do better in college. What happened wasn't that we stopped caring about IQ or college, instead those who oppose them started treating Asians as white and saying they don't count. So it seems like the people who change like the wind here aren't those in favor of merits.
    - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
      >I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure white people did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure. Even scientists who say the black-white IQ gap is not in part due to genetic factors agree that it does measure intelligence to some extent: that is, people with higher intelligence do better on average on IQ tests, even if each IQ point is not a numeral unit adding to your intelligence 'score.' All this said, why would you assume that people using this tests only are doing so for biased reasons?
kevingadd 3y ago
If I say "your race/gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" is that a quota? Is it a quota if I say a fair coin should yield heads at least 49% of the time? What about if I demand that a six-sided die have a normal distribution and not be weighted for cheating purposes?
- pauldenton 3y ago
  The problem is selective enforcement. "your race/gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" Does this get applied to the NBA, benching the majority black teams and getting some 5'6 Asian or Hispanic males onto the court who Represent America? Generals get promoted for having more women or people of color promoted under their command. When the casualty reports come in and white men are dying on the battlefield as disproportionate rate, double their demographics do we have generals saying "your race and gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" so we aren't going to send white men on the front lines anymore, we're going to get some diverse front line soldiers until our casualty rates look like America?
- pseg134 3y ago
  Thank you! We need to be training female nurses and teachers to be truck drivers and male truck drivers to be teachers. Only then will we have a fair society.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    I'll assume you're not arguing against letting women be nurses/teachers, and are instead arguing that we need more male nurses and teachers. In which case, yeah? Gender bias in medicine has proven negative effects both for patients and physicians. If we do everything right to knock down barriers, we should eventually see more male nurses and more male teachers. Why shouldn't we? What's wrong with a man being a nurse?
- 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> there are still no quotas There are no explicit quotas. Every time someone is held out as not being diverse enough, there is a quota implied.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
scarmig 3y ago
Explicit quotas would probably be preferable to the current state of affairs. The fact that they're implicit means that, as soon as you bring them up, someone can play dumb and claim that they don't exist. It precludes having an honest discussion or even knowledge of how distorting the quotas are.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Implicit quotas are preferable; if it really matters someone can ignore them. People try strategies of "we'll force the situation to be broken and then they'll have to fix it!" every so often in politics. It often doesn't work with terrible consequences. People lack the imagination to look at a bad situation and easily come to a consensus about how to improve it. It is much better to enforce things by social expectation. Then enforcement measures can be changed piecemeal.
  - SenAnder 3y ago
    > Implicit quotas are preferable; Until you make enemies with a public prosecutor or someone politically well-connected. Then all the legal ambiguity is turned against you.
sealeck 3y ago
[flagged]
- devmunchies 3y ago
  If the startup is tiny (less than 10) then I would give the benefit of the doubt to the company. At that size, it’s mostly tapping your network and not having any full time recruiters who can prioritize things other than “I need somebody, anybody! Help!”
  - sealeck 3y ago
    Sure, but why would the founders not know any women?
- scarmig 3y ago
  Depends on the proportion of women in the hiring pool you're drawing from. If you have 5 employees and your hiring pool is 80% men, then in an entirely unbiased world, you'd still expect a third of 5-employee startups to have no women.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  While you might have a point, it seems that the bill only applies to the founding team anyway. And it's not just about race and gender, but also sexual orientation. So when you're raising investment, you need to disclose your sexual orientation to your investors. I'm sure you'll be able to "decline to say," but what kind of perverse (no pun intended) incentives will this create? Will you get more investment if you say you're gay? Will you need to prove it?
- SenAnder 3y ago
  And if your neighborhood has too few minorities, that's also fishy. Freedom of association, unless you choose wrong.
- tomp 3y ago
  Sorry but this is just unrealistic. My last job was quite diverse - I don't know the exact numbers, but there were definitely a lot of women (technical staff too! scientists etc.). However, literally all of them were in the "drug development" part of the company (lab work, biochemistry, biology, etc - I don't know the specifics of what they do because I've no idea about biology/chemistry). There were zero women in ML/tech departments. Discrimination? Clearly the company had a culture that was open to hiring women. But the fact is, women programmers (i.e. not biologists that learn programming as they need to) are simply so rare it's unrealistic to expect startups to hire them.
bubblethink 3y ago
>Of course, there are still no quotas. There are, at least in US immigration. It's just not something Americans need to deal with, so it goes under the radar.

outlace 3y ago

It looks like this is just a reporting requirement and no quotas are mandated. I imagine the intent is to indirectly push companies to improve diversity through embarrassment by public numbers. However, these are private individuals funding private ventures with private money, as far as I know, so why the government should be involved at all in that process other than taxation isn't clear to me.

Ferret7446 3y ago
I'll invoke Godwin given the obvious connection, the Jews "only" had to wear stars. Similar situations happen again, and again, and again throughout history, and those that forget history...
- pauldenton 3y ago
  More direct comparison would be Jews were excluded from Colleges for the same reason Asians are excluded today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_and_antisemitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_and_antisemitism Fears of overrepresentation. Doing too well on the grading standards
SenAnder 3y ago
This is one step in a long march. If you can remember this march, the next step is obvious. The Civil Rights Act didn't directly ban using IQ tests for hiring/promotions, yet that's how the courts eventually interpreted it [1]. More recently, a test specifically made to evaluate teachers was declared racist and discriminatory [2], mostly based on disparate pass rates, but in part also on requiring some "cultural knowledge". Ironic, since imparting culture is a large part of a teacher's job - outside of STEM, nearly all knowledge is culturally biased (i.e. there is greater emphasis on US history in the US than in Poland). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220714122944/https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-latino-teachers-collecting-835-million-in-discrimination-lawsuit-11657800508 https://web.archive.org/web/20220714122944/https://www.wsj.c...
- Spivak 3y ago
  I'm not really sure how you read those and think the shady activity is on the part of the government. You're missing the left foot of the march which is, "people discover an 'unbiased' assessment that gives them the results they want and then standardize on it." And then the right foot is the courts not being stupid and smacking it down for obvious racism. I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure that affluent white privately educated men did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Asians do better on IQ, Asians do better in college. What happened wasn't that we stopped caring about IQ or college, instead those who oppose them started treating Asians as white and saying they don't count. So it seems like the people who change like the wind here aren't those in favor of merits.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    >I guarantee you if IQ wasn't a measure white people did well at it would have never been adopted as a measure. Even scientists who say the black-white IQ gap is not in part due to genetic factors agree that it does measure intelligence to some extent: that is, people with higher intelligence do better on average on IQ tests, even if each IQ point is not a numeral unit adding to your intelligence 'score.' All this said, why would you assume that people using this tests only are doing so for biased reasons?

kevingadd 3y ago

If I say "your race/gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" is that a quota? Is it a quota if I say a fair coin should yield heads at least 49% of the time? What about if I demand that a six-sided die have a normal distribution and not be weighted for cheating purposes?

pauldenton 3y ago
The problem is selective enforcement. "your race/gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" Does this get applied to the NBA, benching the majority black teams and getting some 5'6 Asian or Hispanic males onto the court who Represent America? Generals get promoted for having more women or people of color promoted under their command. When the casualty reports come in and white men are dying on the battlefield as disproportionate rate, double their demographics do we have generals saying "your race and gender distribution should at least vaguely resemble that of the general population" so we aren't going to send white men on the front lines anymore, we're going to get some diverse front line soldiers until our casualty rates look like America?
pseg134 3y ago
Thank you! We need to be training female nurses and teachers to be truck drivers and male truck drivers to be teachers. Only then will we have a fair society.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kevingadd 3y ago
  I'll assume you're not arguing against letting women be nurses/teachers, and are instead arguing that we need more male nurses and teachers. In which case, yeah? Gender bias in medicine has proven negative effects both for patients and physicians. If we do everything right to knock down barriers, we should eventually see more male nurses and more male teachers. Why shouldn't we? What's wrong with a man being a nurse?
3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> there are still no quotas There are no explicit quotas. Every time someone is held out as not being diverse enough, there is a quota implied.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

scarmig 3y ago

Explicit quotas would probably be preferable to the current state of affairs. The fact that they're implicit means that, as soon as you bring them up, someone can play dumb and claim that they don't exist. It precludes having an honest discussion or even knowledge of how distorting the quotas are.

roenxi 3y ago
Implicit quotas are preferable; if it really matters someone can ignore them. People try strategies of "we'll force the situation to be broken and then they'll have to fix it!" every so often in politics. It often doesn't work with terrible consequences. People lack the imagination to look at a bad situation and easily come to a consensus about how to improve it. It is much better to enforce things by social expectation. Then enforcement measures can be changed piecemeal.
- SenAnder 3y ago
  > Implicit quotas are preferable; Until you make enemies with a public prosecutor or someone politically well-connected. Then all the legal ambiguity is turned against you.

sealeck 3y ago

[flagged]

devmunchies 3y ago
If the startup is tiny (less than 10) then I would give the benefit of the doubt to the company. At that size, it’s mostly tapping your network and not having any full time recruiters who can prioritize things other than “I need somebody, anybody! Help!”
- sealeck 3y ago
  Sure, but why would the founders not know any women?
scarmig 3y ago
Depends on the proportion of women in the hiring pool you're drawing from. If you have 5 employees and your hiring pool is 80% men, then in an entirely unbiased world, you'd still expect a third of 5-employee startups to have no women.
chatmasta 3y ago
While you might have a point, it seems that the bill only applies to the founding team anyway. And it's not just about race and gender, but also sexual orientation. So when you're raising investment, you need to disclose your sexual orientation to your investors. I'm sure you'll be able to "decline to say," but what kind of perverse (no pun intended) incentives will this create? Will you get more investment if you say you're gay? Will you need to prove it?
SenAnder 3y ago
And if your neighborhood has too few minorities, that's also fishy. Freedom of association, unless you choose wrong.
tomp 3y ago
Sorry but this is just unrealistic. My last job was quite diverse - I don't know the exact numbers, but there were definitely a lot of women (technical staff too! scientists etc.). However, literally all of them were in the "drug development" part of the company (lab work, biochemistry, biology, etc - I don't know the specifics of what they do because I've no idea about biology/chemistry). There were zero women in ML/tech departments. Discrimination? Clearly the company had a culture that was open to hiring women. But the fact is, women programmers (i.e. not biologists that learn programming as they need to) are simply so rare it's unrealistic to expect startups to hire them.

bubblethink 3y ago

>Of course, there are still no quotas. There are, at least in US immigration. It's just not something Americans need to deal with, so it goes under the radar.