"Apple Diversity Stats: A Lot of White Men"

[mhendo]

@robert_columbia

LGBT isn’t really LGBT anymore, it’s LGBTQ + other letters du jour. Asexual! Polyamory! Genderqueer! I’m-not-sure-exactly-what-I-am-but-I-am-not-sexually-normal! Do people who are into B&D count as sexual minorities? Can I get hired as a “diverse” choice if I am a gentleman who doesn’t prefer blondes?

There are legitimate discussions to be had about the advisability of these sorts of diversity quotas and questionnaires in the workplace, and it’s your right to disagree with such policies, but you don’t do yourself much credit by mocking a group of people who have, over the years, suffered considerable discrimination and prejudice at the hands of society and, in many cases, their own employers.

[DrCube]

I’m at least nominally part of that group (white straight male but polyamorous), and I don’t think it helps anybody to lump vaguely defined sexual categories in with LGBT folks who are actually discriminated against every day.

[Chronos]

mhendo, it looks to me like robert_columbia is mostly mocking HR departments, which have not, to my knowledge, been the victim of significant discrimination.

[JRDelirious]

@Sam_Stone

There’s a pretty big difference between ‘accomodating LGBT individuals’ (which I am very much in favor of), and having diversity quotas that give advantages to suppliers who happen to be owned by LGBT individuals or which have a higher percentage of LGBT employees.

Hmm… it may even not be a federal thing. Not every inconvenience is foisted upon us from Washington. Th corporate client in question may have had a big contract or joint venture with, say, some major university system where you could imagine there having been established a diversity policy. Or with some other big corporation that does have diversity requirements and finds it part of corporate social responsibility to require the same of its partners.

Or, I’d find this quite credible: someone somewhere in another company had to incur much cost and pains to deal with an EEOC complaint/lawsuit, and the legal counsels for a bunch of other companies thought to themselves, *"out of an abundance of caution, just in case WE **ever *get named in an EEOC complaint, let’s preemptively create a thorough paper trail that shows we’re trying, to shut them up."

While at it, the whole issue of “how diverse is the high tech sector” has been around for a while and sometimes it gets brought up in the context of when some IT execs or corporate boards side with “progressive” policies, other people may try to use it to play the hypocrite card. Those management figures, conversely, may loathe to have their workforce be used by “bellcurvers” as an example of their theories and seek to avoid falling into that mold.

It’s an interesting bit when you live and work around here in Puerto Rico where by US standards there should be no problem with diversity… except that of course as mentioned before, we may be 95% Latino but how about diversity by social stratum (came from the gated community? from the middle class 'burbs? from the projects?), by urban v. rural, by gender identity, immigration status, religion, etc.? Towards whom do *we *direct “making up for past oppression”?

[jsc1953]

@mhendo

There is some interesting discussion to be had about the issue of meritocracy and the number of Asians in the University of California system…[snip]

Further muddying the waters is the policy of the University of California system regarding in-state vs out-of-state applicants. The UC system was founded with the stated goal of educating the best and brightest of the youth of California, and so it made sense make it affordable to residents, and to jack out-of-state tuition high. But then money started getting tight, and – gee, can you blame them for opening the doors to out-of-state students? And if those students come from Asia…well, there you go.

[LinusK]

@mhendo

There is some interesting discussion to be had about the issue of meritocracy and the number of Asians in the University of California system.

Affirmative action in California, as in much of the rest of the country, has become a subject of considerable controversy, especially when it comes to the increasingly competitive task of college admissions. There have been a considerable number of Californians arguing against affirmative action, and arguing that college admissions for the state system should be based on merit, and specifically on things like SAT scores and high school GPA.

The problem is that, when people think of the term “affirmative action,” and of the idea that criteria other than grades should be considered, they often focus their attention on African Americans and Latinos. Whites, in particular, have become hostile to affirmative action because they believe that it privileges blacks and Latinos at the expense of whites. Those who feel this way often argue in favor of an academic meritocracy, arguing that using test scores alone is a more fair method of admitting people to college than using nebulous criteria like leadership, or community service, or racial and ethnic background.

But some studies have found that, when confronted with the numerical over-representation of Asians within the UC system, many white Californians—surprise, surprise—suddenly find that maybe simply relying on test scores isn’t such a good idea after all.

As this summary notes:What do we want?

ACADEMIC MERITOCRACY

When do we want it?

WHENEVER WE DON’T HAVE TO COMPETE AGAINST ASIANS!

Asians are the big losers when it comes to affirmative action, at least at places like Berkley. For Berkley to look like America, they’d have to more than double the number of whites, while cutting Asians by about 7/8ths.