Oh wow. That sucks. That’s the kind of thing I was thinking of, though I wouldn’t have imagined it could go wrong quite so badly.
Any top-down culture initiative fundamentally has an element of coercion, and corporate initiatives are usually committee-designed, tin-eared, and hamfisted. That is definitely not a good context for presenting thorny topics like “be aware of your white privilege”.
Nevertheless, somehow we’ve got to figure out how to do it right, in spite of the fact that some people are always going to find some bone to pick with it.
It’s true. Psychology experiments show that people favor others with which they have something in common, and that can be a shared birthdate, eye color, first name, etc. Undoubtedly, that spills over into race and gender as well, and I’m not at all sure how we’re going to get past what seems to be human nature.
You prod big corporations, that normally have a pretty wide field of qualified candidates to choose from, to just slightly better reflect the diversity of the population. The prodding can be government carrots, advice / assistance or generally society voting with their wallets.
Once people are more familiar with, say, people with disabilities being seen working for a big bank then it shifts perceptions and smaller employers start to follow suit.
It’s been done all over Europe as well as the US, and wasn’t a problem before it got weaponized (initially for the benefit of the far right) as “hiring people who aren’t qualified”.
One of our DEI initiatives was to stop referring to the annual company meeting as the Christmas Meeting and start calling it the Holiday Meeting. We received several emails from employees who were pissed off we did that. This last year we went back to calling it the Christmas Meeting. We’re in the process of rebranding our DEI plans as well. While we never referred to them as DEI in company communications, I’m sure they sound too woke to a lot of people.
Trouble is, this breaks down when the pool of applicants is unrepresentative of the population. When those companies are hiring for positions where 80% of candidates are from a group that only makes up 50% of the population, there isn’t much they can do to make their workforce reflect the population’s demographics without changing their hiring standards and/or breaking the law (see: Google).
A solution would be for the ones doing the prodding to use the applicant pool as the basis for comparison, rather than the population, but when I’ve seen that objection raised, it’s been dismissed as “blaming the pipeline”. A lot of people don’t want to concede that individual companies are limited in how much they can affect this on their own.
I’d largely agree, but I don’t think you need to look at the candidate pool necessarily.
I think it’s sufficient to have incentives for moving towards being better representative. I think it’s mad to say that 50% of new hires need to be women for example, but if there’s a role that right now is only 10% female then it’s good if efforts are made to increase that number. And of course it can stay the same, or even decrease, if there really haven’t been any qualified applicants.
Which, as I understand it, is the extent of DEI in the US. But I don’t claim to know a huge amount about how DEI has been rolled out in all public and private institutions.
I can provide one example at our public school district. I know it’s caused some consternation, even from liberal-minded people.
Our district is largely white, with a moderate Asian minority, and a smaller Black minority. As part of our equity initiatives they have started tracking admission into the gifted program by race, with goals to increase representation to match the student population.
On the one hand, tracking this information and addressing issues in the screening process that might lead to minorities being underrepresented (bias in teacher evaluation, bias in testing procedures, etc) should be uncontroversial and praised. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine a more “quota-like” system being used where the standards are set differently for different student populations. And that is extremely controversial, particular for parents who suspect (but almost certainly do not know) that their students would be eligible under the relaxed guidelines that they suspect (but do not know) are being used for minority students.
And then when questions are asked about whether modified standards are being used, the district tends to get very mealy-mouthed and fall back on the buzzwords rather than explicitly answering the question. These are the types of DEI initiatives that, IMO, torpedo the whole thing, even if there is an argument that they are the right thing to do.
OK…but what’s happening in your district isn’t an example of such an initiative, right? They haven’t set any quotas, nor plan to, as far as you know.
I mean, if your point is that even trivial, uncontroversial steps towards improving representation can cause people to worry about the slippery slope, egged on by political rhetoric that wants to weaponize these issues, I absolutely agree.
And that’s the real issue here.
We can say that we should avoid the DEI label because it’s toxic now and gets misconstrued, but whatever we replace it with will become likewise toxic. Because MAGA media is equal parts opportunists, that have found this rhetoric has been politically very successful, and genuine facists like Musk and Trump, who think some ethnicities are inherently inferior, so want to reduce representation.
It’s only good if the qualified candidates are more than 10% female, right? If qualified women applying for that position are outnumbered 9-to-1 by men, then I think there are only two ways to increase that number past 10%: they can either impose different hiring standards on male vs. female candidates (lower the hiring bar for women, or raise the hiring bar for men), or compete with other companies in the industry to hire the same limited set of female candidates (thus increasing their own number by lowering everyone else’s).
When someone is convinced that the way you’re evaluating candidates is biased, it can be hard to make the case that there aren’t any more qualified candidates.
Take Google’s hiring process described earlier: interviewers write subjective feedback, and committees make subjective hiring decisions based on that feedback. That subjectivity gives critics who think the number is too low a way to claim the hiring process is biased, and it gives the company an easy way to appease those critics by injecting bias in the opposite direction. If they’re incentivized to increase the number, no matter what the number should be (based on the pool of applicants), then that’s what they’ll do.
No, that doesn’t follow.
Let’s say that 10 candidates are qualified, and 1 of those is a woman. Then we might choose to hire the woman. We’ve increased our proportion of women in the workforce and we didn’t lower our standard.
And of course this is an extreme example.
I think it is preferable if the applications can be blind in the first pass and then only take into account diversity once the pool of comparable candidates has been selected.
In the meantime though, I am not going to assume that there is significant bias to lower standards until I see data indicative of that.
I don’t think you’ll see eye to eye with DEI opponents unless you assume that the reason under represented groups are hard to find is that they are by nature unqualified. They see you trying to fix something unfixable and in in fact something that is wrong to fix .
I don’t see how that changes it… if, say, Google is looking to hire all the qualified software engineers they can get, and this week they find 10 qualified candidates (9 men, 1 woman), then how can they hire any more than 10% women without holding male and female candidates to different standards or making hiring decisions based on sex?
I don’t think you have to assume that. Even if everyone is equally qualified, when some group is underrepresented among job candidates, they’ll tend to be underrepresented among new hires also. And the candidates for many jobs are unrepresentative of the population in one way or another; even the college majors feeding into those jobs are unrepresentative (e.g. the gender skew among veterinarians mirrors the one among veterinary students).
If only 10% of their candidates are women, and those women fall into the same range of abilities as the men, then whatever your cut off in qualifications/ability, there are likely to be 9 men above it for every one woman. So the only way to get this shortlist with 50% women is to discriminate in their favour, which will also lower the quality of candidates on the list by some amount.