8 ms·

A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and just for political points. But these policies did change the corporate landscape and affect hiring

• linotype 2y ago
  So it was racist?
  • thfuran 2y ago
    Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems almost certain to be an overcorrection.
    • eapressoandcats 2y ago
      The way it’s calculated is just based on the net change, so it doesn’t really match overall hiring practices. At the end of it all high status jobs were still disproportionately held by White people and Asian people.
      • dev1ycan 2y ago
        What does that matter when all your newcomers are not white? eventually you'll end up with the polar opposite. You should hire based on skill not race or any other thing you have no control over.
        • eapressoandcats 2y ago
          Right but part of that is asking why your workforce isn’t representative of the available workers. If you’re disproportionately hiring some types of people you probably are hiring on race and not skill. And yes, some of this is not solvable at the end of the funnel when hiring but as a society leaving a full class of people in less productive jobs due to race (or caste or whatever) is a waste of human potential.
          • dijit 2y ago
            > why your workforce isn’t representative of the available workers. It’s good you mention workers, because most people focus on the demographics of the population, which is bunk.. Available workers includes factors such as qualification, motivation, aptitude and smaller factors like “did they even apply”. If your workforce demographics skew significantly from qualified applicants then there’s a problem. If you intentionally want to skew applicants then marketing to them or investing in their training and education is the way, not whatever the hell we seem to be doing. And a dearth of leadership of a certain ethnicity will change over time, demographics shift over the course of a generation of workers, not in a quarter of a decade like I’ve seen people expect.
            • jerojero 2y ago
              This point is very important particularly when it comes to gender disparities. Although women do make about half of the population they do not make for half of the applicants in tech fields, in reality, a lot of women don't even get to the stage of studying STEM careers. There's some interesting studies when it comes to girls own perceived perceptions on how well they will do in math. With girls perceiving they will not do as well in math subjects as their male peers (even though in assessments they're pretty much equal). This perception often comes from home and it's a significant factor in why girls don't eventually become STEM women. I think there's probably similar factors at play when it comes to different ethnicities and putting an effort into changing these perspectives has led to some of these DEI measures. Not to mention the fact that a degree of diversity is an asset when it comes to decision making, as groups with too similar backgrounds tend to fall into conventional thinking (the version of it that's applicable to their respective fields). So some diversity in teams leads to more dynamics dialogue between people which is key for creative problem solving. I'm not sure, given that a lot of the data available seems to be poorly constructed, that DEI efforts have been too much. Certainly there's a conservative backlash but that doesn't really tell us if these DEI measures have been effective or not at achieving their objectives. Fundamentally, I think there are some people out there who don't really value diversity so they're against the objectives sought by DEI measures to begin with and these voices seem to quite loud lately. I don't think these are the kind of people who would change their minds if shown data and research anyway.
        • neltnerb 2y ago
          Or it will reach a new stable equilibrium based on modern demographics, as things that add to 100% tend to do.
        • freejazz 2y ago
          Sorry do you actually think that 94% of new software engineering hires at fortune 500 companies during 2021 were black? It's statistical nonsense.
  • throwawayq3423 2y ago
    I dont think the people of color that got their foot in the door in tech would agree with you.
• miles 2y ago
  > Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash: 75.3% White alone 13.7% Black alone 1.3% American Indian and Alaska Native alone 6.4% Asian alone 0.3% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone 3.1% Two or More Races 19.5% Hispanic or Latino 58.4% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224
  • grahamj 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • programjames 2y ago
      How are the people without the jobs doing the tilting?
      • grahamj 2y ago
        They aren't, but it's unfair from them to benefit from the tilt.
        • programjames 2y ago
          Who is benefiting from the tilt? Are they the same people getting thumbed in your proposed solution? EDIT, I'd also like to add: Why do you believe this tilt exists? I find it plausible to exist (especially because lots of people seem to make a lot of money talking about it), but where is the evidence for it? What I'm asking for isn't evidence that one group of people are doing better than another, I'm asking for evidence that a group of people are being discriminated against. E.g., if you took the exact same person and switched out their profile photo to showcase a Hispanic woman instead of an Asian man, they would end up with far fewer job offers. The thing is, people have tried doing exactly this, and every time it goes the other way! The exact same application, minus a name and photo change, has the reverse effect from what you would expect if the basis behind DEI initiatives was true.
• wbl 2y ago
  That data cannot support the conclusion drawn. You don't know what the turnover rate was.
  • dahinds 2y ago
    Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically, that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S. population is shrinking).
    • Spooky23 2y ago
      Thats true, and enhanced in places that reward that characteristic. Hispanic origin is tied to lineage, nationality, or country of birth for an individual or ancestors. It’s a vague definition that is impossible to verify. Spain itself is a multicultural and multiethnic state. How do you prove that I don’t have deep affiliation with my basque ancestor who settled in Ireland after a shipwreck?
      • whimsicalism 2y ago
        affirmative action for hispanic people has always been uniquely absurd and exploited by effectively white europeans for as long as it has existed. my college counselor told me to mark "hispanic" on my college applications because I'm of Iberian descent, which I refused to do - but I know of multiple others who did and went to Harvard/MIT.
• cmdli 2y ago
  Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional" degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%" figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same roles. Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs had a larger impact.
  • derektank 2y ago
    If only 25% of people hired for roles requiring professional degrees were white, that's still a remarkable number, given 2/3rds of people receiving professional degrees in 2021 where white, without even considering the total population of professional degree holders https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
    • cmdli 2y ago
      The most imbalanced group in hiring were Asians, representing around 5% of the population but around 40% of the chart in that article. From my anecdotal experience with DEI programs, they generally don't target or encourage hiring Asians over black/Hispanic people. If we are purely talking about discrimination against white people, it's much more likely that an Indian or Chinese person is replacing a white person, not a "DEI hire" black person.
    • whimsicalism 2y ago
      no it’s because the study is measuring net changes and most retiring professional degree workers are white
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      but Whites with a professional degree are much more likely to already be employed, or be able to retire (creating opening for new hires)
• enragedcacti 2y ago
  From my understanding that analysis is complete junk. From the Daily Wire of all people: > But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs. > A telltale sign that Bloomberg’s “percentage of the net increase” methodology is flawed, VerBruggen explained, is that, if the departures of whites had been just a little higher, the net change in whites would have been negative instead of the actual small growth of 20,000. Bloomberg’s methodology would then assert that whites took a negative percentage of the new 320,000 jobs, a mathematic impossibility. > The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of companies’ existing workforces. That’s to be expected given demographic changes in the United States since the time that the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered the workforce. https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bomb...
• freejazz 2y ago
  In no way it is at all believable that 94% of all fortune 500 hiring during 2021 went to minorities. This is statistical mumbo-jumbo. Do you even work at a company like this? This statistic has to be misrepresentative of the conclusion you are suggesting because it is easily debunked by standing at the entrance to any midtown manhattan building during the morning rush hour.
  • sterlind 2y ago
    I think the flaw works like this: 1. Acme Inc. has 40,000 white employees and 10,000 employees of color on payroll. The statistic would be 20%, if Acme were hiring at a constant rate by the same demographics. 2. However, suppose Acme hired the bulk of its employees during its growth phase 10 years ago. Acme's hiring back then was proportional, but the population has changed. Now only 60% of applicants are white, compared to 80% back then. 3. Acme lays off 5,000 staff (at random), and hires 1,000 (proportionally.) So they've laid off 4,000 white people and 1,000 people of color. And they've hired 400 people of color and 600 white people. I'm too lazy to do the math but I think that works out as hiring a negative % of white people, even though it's just representative of demographic shifts.
• dsajames 2y ago
  So this is an example of what not to do. 1. Violate the law more blatantly than anyone else. 94% of new jobs went to POC? So what, 50% of the population shared 6% of the jobs? This sounds like apartheid era South Africa. 2. Create a backlash where the largest population and richest segment is so angry, it uses all its resources to absolutely destroy this. Nice going.
  • wholinator2 2y ago
    1) it sounds crazy because it's actual statistical malpractice. See the many other comments explaining how it's bullshit 2) the significantly backlash is interesting, primarily because it centers around the bullshit statistics that companies pat themselves with. The hiring process is so nebulous and unknowable to the potential hiree that no person can really know whether they were denied a job due to dei policies. Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI, which really just undervalues the nonwhite population, as if they truly deserved none of the jobs, wouldn't have gotten any without the help. This combined into the rage that certain people feel about what really appears to be a back pat circle around naming a git branch and changing security terminology.
    • buzzerbetrayed 2y ago
      > Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI Add that to the list of why DEI is harmful. There will always be a potential asterisk next to minority hires as long as DEI is a thing. It’s unavoidable.
• typon 2y ago
  In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.
    • kragen 2y ago
      As a white software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I only ever worked with one black software engineer. He was Nigerian. I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture; usually this was implicit racism (I only recall ever hearing one overtly racist remark against black people). I also worked with very few Hispanic people. But I worked with lots of Indian and Chinese people, plus Arabs, Pakistanis, etc. Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship before entering the work force? It's still pretty effective — there were lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
      • RestlessMind 2y ago
        > I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese. > Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then? > lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss. Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
• throw12398 2y ago
  [flagged]
• pixxel 2y ago
  Are you presenting this as a positive?
• groby_b 2y ago
  I recommend reading the WaPo article that goes along with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/28/minorities-are-delivering-all-the-us-labor-supply-growth/4c099b5a-5dee-11ee-b961-94e18b27be28_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/28/minoritie... Bloomberg's choosing to misrepresent the data here - this is not about jobs added, it's about changes in the employment composition. Simple example: Company X has 950 white and 50 POC employes. 10% leave over the year (95 white, 5 POC). They hire 200 more at an even split (50% white, 50% POC). They now have 1100 people, 955 white, 145 POC. So they've gained net 100 folks - and the net change is +5 white, +95 POC. Voila, 95% people of color hired. It's still a pretty stunning change with a large ramp up in hiring of POC, but it's much less an indicator of preferential hiring than the Bloomberg framing makes it sound.
  • bloqs 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • groby_b 2y ago
      OK, thanks for sharing.
• ksec 2y ago
  I would not be surprised while the OP were sending applications to DEI programmes, most of them went to Asians. Which I assume this still fits the PoC PoV of DEI.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  But most of those new hires were the lowest level employees -- service workers, etc. Also, in the US Asians, overall, are not economically disadvantaged like most Blacks and Latinos. So I don't think you can really put them together in this particular context. Notice that the largest group of Professionals were Asian (lots of engineers/programmers from India/China as usual). (Also at the Executive job level, Whites still very on top.)
• purplethinking 2y ago
  Wow
• empath75 2y ago
  This is true, but that was a one or two year phenomenon, driven by BLM protests, and at the end of it, ended with white people still having a disproportionate share of senior and management positions.