You’d agree that if we made the test easier, the roads would be less safe, right? And that when the government progressively made the test harder, it was in order to reduce accidents? And however hard or easy you made the test, some people would pass and some would fail, because skill is continuous and some people are better drivers than others.
I find this belief so baffling. You work in a skilled profession; surely you noticed that some of your colleagues were better at doing their jobs than others, even though all were qualified enough to get the job?
Did you read the article? It wasn’t a personality quiz. It was a ‘Biographical Assessment’ with nonsensical scoring and no evidence that it showed anything useful about candidates. It was seemingly adopted for much the purpose @DPRK suggested earlier: cutting down applications arbitrarily so the shortlist would be more diverse. You can take it here:
Fine.
Lol. It’s Trump. Didn’t he say this within hours of crash, anyway?
Kimstu, parents of college aged children would have gone to university in the 1990s. I have old friends whose kids are about that age, and we were there in the early 2000s. If you believe this is a significant factor, then why not find some statistics on diversity at top US universities in the 90s, so we can look at the evidence rather than speculating?
I don’t think loan forgiveness is relevant here, since we were talking about programs that would make it possible for more minority students to attend college. Anyone who’s paying student loans has already been to college.
I agree that if we’re defining “financial aid” broadly enough to include every proposal that has a financial benefit for students, past or present, then people have indeed complained about some of them.
If you think that’s what it was, you should try taking the interactive quiz (paying attention to how each question was scored), and/or re-reading the article. It wasn’t a legitimate personality quiz, it was more like a puzzle they could use to disqualify candidates who they hadn’t given the answer key to.
No-one is talking about making the tests easier. Again, DEI is about how you choose among the qualified applicants. At the stage where you’re deciding who is a good “fit”.
I find this argument baffling. Because firstly, very obviously no-one is claiming everyone is equally good at every job. And because secondly, it concedes the point: employers set their “qualified” level such that they get a decent number of applicants and then beyond that have to select on other factors such as interview performance, and it’s not a perfect process. People who skated through the interview process may later turn out to be less good than someone that was a borderline decision. And when employers implement DEI they don’t make the qualified level easier.
As I say, I downloaded the test itself. Rather than trusting the editorializing of the article. Looks like a normal personality / scenario quiz to me.
I think the point is to cast the net as wide as possible in hopes of catching a certain spectrum of fishes, not necessarily throw back perfectly good fish because they’re the wrong species.
Also, why is it so important that something like a 2/3 vs. 3/4 imbalance be forcibly redressed? It’s not like we’re looking at 10% of the population making up 90% of whatever; we’re talking about a 9% difference. That could be accounted for by working conditions, location, etc.
To put it a different way, if your widget polishing works are all in sketchy parts of town due to the nature of the widget production business, maybe that’s why fewer women want to work there. Does that mean you have to “fix” that through DEI initiatives? Or move your factory? I would argue not.
That might be someone’s argument for DEI, but it’s not the only one and it very clearly was not the one that I was making.
The point that I was making, is that if the most potentially talented widget-polishers are distributed somewhat randomly through different ethnicities, genders etc then it’s in society’s best interest that all groups feel they can train and apply for those jobs, and that employers do not assume that it’s a job that only white cis men can do.
In theory this should happen automatically, eventually. However, “eventually” could be a looong time, given human prejudice (and I am not referring to full-blown racism here, I just mean mental association and patterns) and the low social mobility of the US.
Sure. I have neither argued for DEI in all cases, nor have I argued that DEI should have a target number (I did say it would take decades for the ratio to even out, even with equal numbers of qualified candidates, but that was working through the maths, not arguing we target 50:50).
In terms of your point about safety, here in the UK and also in Sweden (I mention those countries as I have personal experience of both) there were some safety measures specifically targeted for women, for example a taxi service for women working late.
So, I am not an expert on DEI in the US but I would be surprised if it is only about hiring policy. If that’s all it is then I think that’s a mistake because a lot can be done to make the workplace more open and inclusive beyond that.
(And FYI My first example actually was 90% gender disparity but I thought the unusualness of that example was steering us away from more real-world situations)
Suppose that my widget-polishing specialty shop with 100 widget polishers currently employs 67 Wookiees. But the planet my shop is on is 75% Wookiee. There’s no reason to expect Wookiees to be worse than Rodians or Twileks at widget polishing. That means there are Wookiees on the planet that my shop is somehow not hiring or retaining for widget polishing positions. Thus, my shop is not as productive as it could be.
Should my shop be required to fix its policies so that it’s more productive? That’s a public policy question, but it’s not unusual for governments to require more efficiency or productivity.
I don’t think we’re going to agree on this. And I do believe employers are lowering standards in some instances, but it’s hard to get evidence that’s not anecdotal, because they don’t want to talk about it. Only in a few cases where lawsuits have revealed how the sausage gets made do we have concrete evidence.
No, not necessarily. What if there were 67 Wookiees who applied for the positions, and you hired them all?
Or, one step further: what if there were 200 applicants total, and you hired every one of the 67 Wookiees who applied, but only 20% of the non-Wookiees who applied?
Any analysis of the demographics of your workforce has to take the demographics of your applicant pool into account.
“But Ms2001,” you might ask, “Shouldn’t there be 75 Wookiee applicants? Doesn’t that gap between 67 and 75 imply that my shop is discouraging Wookiees somehow?”
Again, no, not necessarily. What are those 8 Wookiees who didn’t apply for a job at your shop doing instead? Are they sitting at home unemployed, or are they off co-piloting starships and having their careers immortalized in a documentary film series? Where do they want to work? These are important questions.
Some might be, I could concede that. No policy is perfect, especially if we’re talking about something with unclear guidelines being rolled out across dozens of industries.
However, the horror of DEI is clearly something that is being used as a political tool; to divide and anger people, and also to get people to sit idly and watch as Musk et al tear apart the state (Constitution be damned). So that’s why I am particularly pushing back against the rhetoric.
A sensible discussion of “What can we do to make the workplace accessible to all demographics, without lowering hiring standards?” would be great. That’s not what’s happening in 2025.
The other motivation is that here in the UK we’ve had the equivalent of “anti-woke” used to sell newspapers for decades. So, as a rule, skepticism first, outrage later.
AND (here’s the part people are missing) the diversity of thought processes and experiences she brings to the table adds more to the discussions than yet another man
There have been studies that when the same application and resumes are turned in, one with a man’s name and one with a woman’s name, the men will move on to the next round at a significantly higher rate.
See above. The standard often used is what sex you are … not actual knowledge, experience or ability.
Diversity can often come at a cost of productivity and communication issues.
It’s like saying the Beatles would have been better if they had added Barbra Streisand or Stevie Wonder as members. Yes they are very talented. But is there enough of a common bond there to make great art, or is it a hodgepodge of different ideas that don’t add up to anything.
Same when a new CEO takes over they bring in new people. Some of the old people may be very talented. But the CEO has a vision of what they want to do. They don’t want to spend time arguing with people who have a different vision. So the old people go. They may be very talented. But they want people to be able to communicate and be on the same team. Diversity isn’t necessarily going to lead to that.
Yes, and these apply to Rodians and Twileks as well. But for my widget-polishing business, what matters is that I’m not getting the expected number of Wookiees, which means my workforce isn’t as productive as expected.
I think what gets people upset is thinking that a proportionate workforce is the only goal rather than a metric. Having a proportionate workforce doesn’t mean you have the best workers, but a disproportionate one surely means you don’t.
It’s not a company’s role to fix all of society’s problems, but it is their role to have a productive workforce. And having a disproportionate workforce means the company is either not considering all the best people, or it’s not retaining them. Those are both problems an individual business can try to address.
They’ve moved on to using waste and corruption (where both mean ‘spending money on things Musk disapproves of’) as excuses now. I’ve never seen anyone apply ‘move fast and break things’ to the apparatus of government before; it’s like watching a car crash and wondering who’s going to get hit.
But I think it was mostly actual DEI that has divided and angered people. There was always a certain amount of affirmative action in the US; it’s been mandated for decades in the public sector and in any firm that deals with the Federal Government. But after 2020 it spread to private businesses and was turned up to 11. Poorly conceived and heavy-handed trainings made DEI unpopular, and the reasonably justified belief they were experiencing discrimination caused resentment in many young white men. Certainly no one on the left was interested in having that sensible discussion you suggested.
This board is mostly boomers, and it’s all very well for them to say they are happy to give up something to help underprivileged minorities - they benefited from earlier pro-white male discrimination, and are retired or secure in their jobs. It’s young men at the start of their careers who are expected to pay for the sins of their fathers. Combine that with the Dems offering specific policies to help every demographic group except white men, and you alienate a lot of people. Contrary to stereotypes about young people being further left, Trump won 56% of young men (ages 18-29) in 2024.
There have been other studies showing the reverse, or that it depends on profession:
Why do you assume the 8 Wookiees who didn’t apply would be better at polishing widgets than the 8 non-Wookiees who you ended up hiring instead?
Might there be a correlation between an individual’s widget-polishing performance and whether or not that individual applies for a widget-polishing job?
Or they aren’t applying because there are other jobs they’d rather be doing. For example, it could be that Wookiees are especially good at co-piloting starships, due to some combination of their cultural heritage and their furry paw-like hands, and the Rebel Alliance is paying more for co-pilots than you are for widget polishers.
You can’t assume that the most representative workforce will also be the most productive for any given job.