12 ms·

DEI wasn't demonized because it tried to fight bigotry. It demonized itself because it routinely became a dishonest two-faced movement that public denied to be

DEI wasn't demonized because it tried to fight bigotry. It demonized itself because it routinely became a dishonest two-faced movement that public denied to be discriminatory, but then privately implemented policies that explicitly discriminated on the basis of sex and gender. When your leaders publicly condemn the idea that your company is discriminating on the basis of sex, but then privately institutes a system of reserving headcount for women, that'll make most people real cynical about DEI.

mullingitover 5mo ago
Can you cite any companies which violated federal labor law in this way?
- Manuel_D 5mo ago
  Three out of the four companies I've worked at, for one. YouTube was sued for directing one of its recruiters to exclusively advance diverse candidates for a period of time, and eventually settled with the recruiter [1]. Intel [2] and Microsoft [3] both tied specific percentage quotas to executive's compensation. If saying "reach this racial and gender quota or I'll penalize you financially" isn't discrimination, I'm not sure what is. Perkins-Coie explicitly excluded applicants from its diversity fellowship program if they didn't meet certain racial, sexual orientation, or other requirements [4]. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positions-excluded-white-and-asian-males-lawsuit-says-1519948013 https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio... 2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... 3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft-to-tie-executive-bonuses-to-company-diversity-goals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft... 4. https://www.reuters.com/legal/second-major-us-law-firm-changes-diversity-fellowship-after-lawsuit-2023-10-06/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/second-major-us-law-firm-chang...
  - mullingitover 5mo ago
    YouTube was never found guilty of anything, they just paid to make the argument go away. In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas. These companies wanted more diversity in their staff, which is a valid and laudable goal, and they were willing to pay extra if that was achieved. Would you like to try again? edit: your later addition of Perkins Coie also was settled/dismissed and never adjudicated, and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1]. The real takeaway is that a lot of people are very mad about what they imagine DEI to be. [1] https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-granting-perkins-coies-motion-for-summary-judgment-in-entirety https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-...
    - Manuel_D 5mo ago
      They settled out of court, YouTube didn't prevail in court. The evidence speaks for itself. Did you not read the emails that plaintiff's manager sent, explicitly telling him to cancel all non-diverse applicants' interviews? You can read the complaint itself: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups. > We are still pre-Goodburger roll out, so that means the only candidates that need pre-allocation are L3s. And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. Engage with the evidence of the lawsuit before proclaiming that it's meritless because YouTube settled with the plaintiff, rather than going to court and losing. If these emails were fabricated YouTube would have a slam-dunk case against the plaintiff. But they chose to settle. > In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas The incentives were implemented in the form of quotas. You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things, when they're not. "Your salary is $110,000. If you don't meet a quota of 40% women, I'm docking our pay by $10,000 as a penalty for failing to meet this quota." "Your salary is $100,000. Because we want to make the company more diverse, we're giving a $10,000 bonus for reaching an inclusion milestone of 40% women." This is exactly what Intel did, from the Atlantic article: > But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas. > Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities. > Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.
hilariously 5mo ago
And those in power who went out of their way to demonize DEI, is that why they didn't like it? I would argue strongly that no, they had their priors already set, and anything help black people or poor people (the new proxy for hating black people) was bad and they'd lie through their teeth about the impact to get anyone on their side.
- Manuel_D 5mo ago
  Yes, they did dislike it because it was discriminatory, not because it helped poor and Black people. I don't know the views of people you've met, but in my circles the opponents of DEI are mostly tech workers in SF and Seattle - not exactly a conservative demographic. I can't count a single Republican between us. The course of our relationship with DEI was pretty similar: in university we earnestly believed that women were discriminated against in tech hiring. One of us even built a prototype anonymous interviewing platform. Once we entered the workforce, there was pretty big whiplash when we started getting visibility into our own companies' hiring pipelines. Many of us - including myself - found ourselves actively carrying out discrimination on the basis of sex and race. Mostly sex, though - while our DEI advocates often invoked racial disparities to emphasize the need for these discriminatory policies, the actual beneficiaries of these policies were mostly white and Asian women. Does this make me any less likely to support better school funding, and other public benefits that help poor people and Black people? I don't think so. The discriminatory practices of tech company hiring is pretty far removed from these issues in my view. Why would should an underserved school not receive better funding because some tech companies preferentially hired an Asian female over an Asian male? I see no connection between these two.

mullingitover 5mo ago

Can you cite any companies which violated federal labor law in this way?

Manuel_D 5mo ago
Three out of the four companies I've worked at, for one. YouTube was sued for directing one of its recruiters to exclusively advance diverse candidates for a period of time, and eventually settled with the recruiter [1]. Intel [2] and Microsoft [3] both tied specific percentage quotas to executive's compensation. If saying "reach this racial and gender quota or I'll penalize you financially" isn't discrimination, I'm not sure what is. Perkins-Coie explicitly excluded applicants from its diversity fellowship program if they didn't meet certain racial, sexual orientation, or other requirements [4]. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positions-excluded-white-and-asian-males-lawsuit-says-1519948013 https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio... 2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... 3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft-to-tie-executive-bonuses-to-company-diversity-goals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft... 4. https://www.reuters.com/legal/second-major-us-law-firm-changes-diversity-fellowship-after-lawsuit-2023-10-06/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/second-major-us-law-firm-chang...
- mullingitover 5mo ago
  YouTube was never found guilty of anything, they just paid to make the argument go away. In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas. These companies wanted more diversity in their staff, which is a valid and laudable goal, and they were willing to pay extra if that was achieved. Would you like to try again? edit: your later addition of Perkins Coie also was settled/dismissed and never adjudicated, and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1]. The real takeaway is that a lot of people are very mad about what they imagine DEI to be. [1] https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-granting-perkins-coies-motion-for-summary-judgment-in-entirety https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-...
  - Manuel_D 5mo ago
    They settled out of court, YouTube didn't prevail in court. The evidence speaks for itself. Did you not read the emails that plaintiff's manager sent, explicitly telling him to cancel all non-diverse applicants' interviews? You can read the complaint itself: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups. > We are still pre-Goodburger roll out, so that means the only candidates that need pre-allocation are L3s. And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. Engage with the evidence of the lawsuit before proclaiming that it's meritless because YouTube settled with the plaintiff, rather than going to court and losing. If these emails were fabricated YouTube would have a slam-dunk case against the plaintiff. But they chose to settle. > In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas The incentives were implemented in the form of quotas. You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things, when they're not. "Your salary is $110,000. If you don't meet a quota of 40% women, I'm docking our pay by $10,000 as a penalty for failing to meet this quota." "Your salary is $100,000. Because we want to make the company more diverse, we're giving a $10,000 bonus for reaching an inclusion milestone of 40% women." This is exactly what Intel did, from the Atlantic article: > But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas. > Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities. > Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.

hilariously 5mo ago

And those in power who went out of their way to demonize DEI, is that why they didn't like it? I would argue strongly that no, they had their priors already set, and anything help black people or poor people (the new proxy for hating black people) was bad and they'd lie through their teeth about the impact to get anyone on their side.

Manuel_D 5mo ago
Yes, they did dislike it because it was discriminatory, not because it helped poor and Black people. I don't know the views of people you've met, but in my circles the opponents of DEI are mostly tech workers in SF and Seattle - not exactly a conservative demographic. I can't count a single Republican between us. The course of our relationship with DEI was pretty similar: in university we earnestly believed that women were discriminated against in tech hiring. One of us even built a prototype anonymous interviewing platform. Once we entered the workforce, there was pretty big whiplash when we started getting visibility into our own companies' hiring pipelines. Many of us - including myself - found ourselves actively carrying out discrimination on the basis of sex and race. Mostly sex, though - while our DEI advocates often invoked racial disparities to emphasize the need for these discriminatory policies, the actual beneficiaries of these policies were mostly white and Asian women. Does this make me any less likely to support better school funding, and other public benefits that help poor people and Black people? I don't think so. The discriminatory practices of tech company hiring is pretty far removed from these issues in my view. Why would should an underserved school not receive better funding because some tech companies preferentially hired an Asian female over an Asian male? I see no connection between these two.