> DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist We live in a sexist and racist society (and always have). One either takes no action which is passive accept

> DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist We live in a sexist and racist society (and always have). One either takes no action which is passive acceptance of the status quo or we attempt to take action which will inevitably have some racist and sexist consequences (intentional or not). There is no neutral option. Railing against DEI almost always comes across as a convenient scapegoat to justify the status quo which overwhelmingly favors men in the tech industry. I will admit I don't have the statistics, but I would expect that one would find proportionally fewer and fewer women at every rung in the organizational ladder in tech firms, which to me speaks to the challenges that women face even in this supposedly level tech space. It is one thing to get an entry level job, possibly even through a DEI initiative, but another to actually be treated as an equal after hiring. My experience at a big company made clear to me that even men who like to think of themselves as egalitarian or even feminist, often have very obvious unconscious bias. I can particularly recall a manager talking up the potential of a young man relative to his female peer even though she was more productive than him on basically every imaginable metric.