I think the extremeness of this hypothetical is throwing things off a bit.
A more realistic situation might be an industry, let’s say widget polisher, that is 3/4 male. And let’s say for argument’s sake, that after screening for all necessary qualifications and required soft skills, that in 2025 2/3 of qualified candidates are male, and 1/3 are female.
Under this scenario, if you just randomly pick who gets the positions, then it will take decades, an entire working career, before the proportion of men will even fall to 2/3. And, in the meantime, widget polishing continues to look like a job for men, so the day where you get close to 50:50 is much, much further away.
If you want to get to 2/3 quicker, and/or get more women to train and apply, you have to do something.
And IMO, I’m in favor of both supply- and demand- side initiatives.
I could potentially benefit personally from DEI in software hiring, and I’m still opposed. I wouldn’t want to be discriminated against, and I don’t think it’s fair to discriminate against men. I just want everyone to have an equal chance, and if that means the widget polishers remain mostly male for the foreseeable future, so be it. What is diversity anyway, if you expect everyone to make the same choices? In occupation, diet, lifestyle etc - all those things are going to impact your life.
And I’m even more strongly opposed when it comes to safety critical occupations like air traffic controller. For all our sakes, pick the best person, whether they look like me or an alien from Mars.
That’s the essential disagreement, which no amount of renaming is ever going to change.
Playing devil’s advocate…why does the company have to do something? Why is it not okay for the company to say “Look, we’d love to have a more diverse workforce, we know it will help our business, but we just aren’t getting more than 10% qualified female applicants for the job. If you want us to hire more women, send us more qualified women.”
This goes into the whole supply-side of the equation - why aren’t colleges/trade schools delivering more women to the widget polishing profession? → why aren’t middle schools and high schools getting girls interested in widget polishing? → why aren’t girls interested in going into widget polishing?
The pipeline can only be so big and if there aren’t a lot of a particular demographic in the pipeline for jobs, how is a company supposed to deal with that? Other than lowering the bar, which we agree is not the right approach.
I am not saying that this is what Google actually do; this is purely hypothetical. I just mean that they get a bunch of qualified applicants for some position, and some group or committee has to decide what people will actually seriously be considered for the position (maybe they already have a good reputation, etc.) and what applications go to the wastebasket. Before the final decision is made, they could not-coincidentally make sure that 1/3 or even 1/2 of the people being considered are women. This has nothing to do with the quality of candidates (poor candidates will go to the rubbish bin in any case).
If, by holding men and women to the same standard, they find that 9 men and 1 woman are qualified, but they still want to hire more than 10% women, they can either change the standard so that more women qualify, or they can reject some of the men. Either way, since the hiring decision is being based on the candidates’ sex, it’s illegal.
They certainly have, for more than 60 years.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, as amended, protects employees and job applicants from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Title VII protection covers the full spectrum of employment decisions, including recruitment, selections, terminations, and other decisions concerning terms and conditions of employment. See EEOC guidance on race/color, religion, sex, sexual harassment, pregnancy, and national origin discrimination.
It seems like we have established a nice self-perpetuating cycle then.
If we assume that the current levels of diversity are “natural” and optimized for quality then any changes would lead to a influx of underqualified hires.
That means it makes absolute sense for mentors and educators to discourage students from trying to go beyond their means.
Then we can come back to seeing the low number of qualified candidates from non-traditional demographics.
This is the sort of relationship that I swear a lot of the strong DEI advocates are missing. You simply can’t hire people that don’t exist, even if you do everything you can to reach out to what portion of the population are who you’d like more of. Similarly, the overall ratio in college is something like 60:40 women:men but we all know that isn’t the ratio in every single department. If I’m running a company in, say, material science all the biologists in the world are unlikely to be a useful hire, no matter their identities. And if the specialties I need are skewed, well, there’s absolutely nothing I can do that more of the women interested in the sciences got into biology instead of say inorganic chemistry.
It’s not a case of being qualified or not. There is not some minimum standard beyond which ability conveniently makes no difference. There will be poor candidates, average candidates, good candidates, and great candidates. If you randomly throw half the applications in the bin, you end up with worse hires, even if you eliminate the poor ones. That’s kinda what happened in the FAA hiring scandal, among other horrible decisions.
The point is this: we want the best candidates for the job. It’s in society’s best interest that we cast the net as wide as possible for all jobs.
Now, the obvious retort is that we get the best candidate by making it a strict meritocracy. The issue with that though, is, as I say, if a work environment looks like it’s just for white men, if society’s mental image of the best widget polisher is a white man, you just don’t get as many other groups coming through, and those that do face negative discrimination. Plus the white male cohort may disproportionately have advantages like hereditary places in ivy league unis.
So society just tries to hurry things along a bit, and we all benefit.
For example, take science. For centuries women were essentially not allowed to operate professionally as scientists. Then, there was still a great deal of prejudice, inside and outside of the field, that meant that women were still vastly outnumbered for decades.
Now, many of the greatest scientists are women, despite still being outnumbered about 2:1. Can we credit advances like CRISPR to initiatives to increase the number of women in STEM fields? And would there be more developments if today the proportion were closer to 1:1?
In many countries it’s in their best interest to be seen as a diverse company, that somewhat reflects the society in which they operate. Beyond that, it’s up to governments to provide sufficient incentives and support.
Of course in the US this has all gone backwards: diversity drives are toxic, and the government is fascist and wants the workplace to look like the 1950s again.
The thing is there are people trying to work on all of the steps of the pipeline. And there are people fighting them over every step.
There aren’t enough qualified applicants from minority groups for professional positions? Then the first group says we need to improve minority access to higher education. And the second group complains that this would lower standards for colleges and universities.
Preferences for children of alumni don’t benefit white men (or people) as a group. They only benefit children of alumni. But regardless, maybe you could convince me some DEI programs are worthwhile. It doesn’t change the point that this a real disagreement on policy, which can’t be handwaved away by giving it a new name, or writing out the words rather than using an acronym.
Of course, I don’t claim that the answers are easy or that optimal solutions have already been found. I am just stating my position but also explaining why much of the current rhetoric in the US, of DEI = hiring people who aren’t qualified, is in most cases false.
But when alumni have historically been members of privileged demographic groups, legacy admissions (i.e., alumni kid preferences) have the effect of reinforcing and perpetuating that privilege.
If everybody up through the class of 1978 at super-elite Prestige University was a white Protestant, for example, then current legacy admissions to Prestige U are going to be disproportionately white Protestant.
And if a Prestige U degree opens doors to a lot of high-status influence, wealth and connections, then the disproportionately white Protestant demographics of Prestige U graduates are going to help perpetuate “society’s mental image”, as Mijin says, of high-status wealthy influential people as white Protestants. In effect, Prestige U “alumni-brat” status is acting to some extent as a proxy for race.
It’s the so-called coattails effect. Even if the preference is officially being given to a group that’s not defined by race, the fact that the group happens to be dominated by people in a privileged racial category means that in practice, the preference is helping perpetuate that racial privilege.
(It works the other way around too, of course. For example, if financial aid is given to students on the basis of financial need, and if nonwhite students disproportionately tend to be poorer than white ones, then financial need is to some extent acting as a proxy for race. In practice, financial aid is functioning as an inclusion initiative for nonwhite students.)
First, I wouldn’t necessarily make that assumption. There could very well be discrimination happening at some companies. But if [some group] makes up X% of applicants and also X% of hires, and no one has found evidence of discrimination in the company’s hiring process, we should be open to the conclusion that the hiring process is fair and doesn’t need to be changed.
But even if you do make that assumption: no, not all changes. Just changes to the hiring process. If there aren’t enough qualified applicants to get the representation you want, the solution is to get more qualified applicants into the pipeline, not to hack the hiring process. It takes patience, persuasiveness, and a willingness to accept that you still might not end up with the results you’re hoping for, but that’s the only way to do it without shooting yourself in the foot.
I don’t follow. What do you mean by “beyond their means”?
Why would it make sense to discourage students from underrepresented groups from going into a field that you already think doesn’t have enough of them? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to encourage them, since that would directly increase representation?
Just as there are good and bad ways to address suspected bias in the hiring process, there are good and bad ways to address suspected bias in higher education.
You can increase minority access to higher education by (say) ensuring a fair admissions process and giving financial aid to anyone who needs it, or you can do it by putting a thumb on the scale and tweaking the admissions process to give the demographic outcomes you want. The latter can be tempting, because it gives immediate, guaranteed results, but institutions that do it are rightly criticized for it.
If you have an example in mind of people objecting to efforts to increase minority representation through non-discriminatory means, then I’ll be right there with you denouncing them.
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone complain about need-based financial aid that’s equally available to everyone who needs it, even if it happens to disproportionately benefit minority students. We can’t assume that the people receiving financial aid will always be perfectly representative of the population, any more than we can assume it about college applicants or job candidates.