Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why • Hacker News Board

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#31

Post by batiudrami » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:09 AM UTC

toomanybeersies wrote: post #24

What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is female. That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies. Diversity needs to happen from the ground up. Affirmative action is more effective and more appropriate the…

If you want the best candidates you want to make your company look as desirable as possible. A 50% M/F workforce isn't scaring any good candidates away and might even attract a superstar who prefers a great culture over a bigger paycheque. It's just playing up a company's strengths.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#32

Post by AmericanChopper » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:14 AM UTC

gattilorenz wrote: post #29

AmericanChopper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination Diversity quotas are by their very nature institutional discrimination. You can’t jusify it by saying the people they discriminate against deserve it.

> Diversity quotas are by their very nature institutional discrimination. Sure, they are institutional discrimination in the sense that institutions recognize the differences between gender/races and the differences in the treatment they receive, which is often based on negative prejudice (the other meaning of "discrimination" [1]). Discrimination is not negative per se, as long as it's the "neutral" meaning of the w…

Picking candidates of your preferred gender/ethnicity over candidates of your non-preferred gender/ethnicity is the canonical definition of institutional discrimination. It takes a huge amount of double-think to arrive at the conclusion that this is the same as having gendered bathrooms. Any institution that prefers candidates of a particular gender/ethnicity is prejudicially discriminating against all other candidates on the basis of gender/ethnicity.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#33

Post by dnautics » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:14 AM UTC

themarkn wrote: post #6

manigandham wrote: post #5

Well said. The fact is that forcing outcomes will never lead to fairness and will instead create misery for all involved. The best plan is to make the process as fair as possible so that everyone has an opportunity if they want it, then let people do what they desire. It may not "look" like what some people want it to look like, but the whole point is that doesn't matter anyway.

I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.) What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "div…

I was going to write this as a throwaway but you know f it. I stand by my stories.

> As such I believe quotas are a good thing

You don't address the article's claim that quotas make stereotype threat worse.

This is a real, lived experience. In high school, I (an overrepresented minority) failed to get in to MIT, and my best friend (an underrepresented minority) got in, despite me looking better 'on paper'[0]. He chose not to go even though I pled with him that it would be a better life choice. Not going to MIT was disastrous because his college experience was bad, including an unjustified arrest, and dropping out. Don't worry, it all worked out - he's the CEO of a startup that's doing well now. I can't claim to know what was in his mind in high school but a part of me thinks there was real stereotype threat in play.

Second issue with quotas: In the case of Harvard with their overrepresented minority, they usually reject based on soft qualities like "no leadership potential". This really irks me, as my father in his government job was denied promotion several times because of that exact phrase, "no leadership potential". This is considerably ironic since for a brief stint he took a sabbatical and went full-time with his job in the navy, as an O-6 (captain, as in Picard, not America). During this year, the team he commanded completed the US Navy's first ever fully databased inventory system, on time and under budget, saving the navy billions of dollars. "no leadership potential" and phrases of its ilk are basically cover for discrimination, as they can be so easily issued even in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary.

[0] for example I had great scores in the AP sciences and a high-performing science fair project that placed at the international level - which are relevant skills for MIT.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#34

Post by foobarbazbat » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:15 AM UTC

eadmund wrote: post #18

> I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with diversity quotas in the first place. Are we trying to level the playing field for marginalized groups? To bring in the requisite diversity of thought that correlates so strongly with a better bottom line? Or to improve our optics so that when the press writes about our company’s diversity numbers, we look good? Honestly, I believe it's the last…

Agree. The woman has shown more consistency and is a better candidate. But if we swapped male for female in this example, I think it would change a lot of people's thinking, and they would lean towards the female dropout.

This is the problem we have today.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#35

Post by batiudrami » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:15 AM UTC

fipple wrote: post #26

"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well. Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of Jobs' time he required. "Ideas ar…

It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more easily than others.

Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#36

Post by batiudrami » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:20 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #27

d--b wrote: post #22

Quotas are tough for people right now, but they serve a longer term role. Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech. That's a fact. Some dumb-ass dudes may tell you: "oh you're here because of diversity quotas, not for your inherent quality", and it will be annoying for you. But the purpose of the quotas is that the next generation of students can look at the distribution and tell themselves: "oh, actually t…

Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of doing what they're interested in? Perhaps that's the real issue at the root of all this.

Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it.

It's not about this generation; it's the next.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#37

Post by CJefferson » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:21 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #5

Well said. The fact is that forcing outcomes will never lead to fairness and will instead create misery for all involved. The best plan is to make the process as fair as possible so that everyone has an opportunity if they want it, then let people do what they desire. It may not "look" like what some people want it to look like, but the whole point is that doesn't matter anyway.

I would agree with you if we werent starting from a place of decades of systematic bias. We have been "forcing outcomes" against many groups for long time.

It is not clear the system will automatically balance itself, and if it does it will probably take multtiple generations.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#38

Post by BadassFractal » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

Coleman Hughes brought up the point, in a recent interview, that Prop 209 in California was an example of how abolishing affirmative action led to there being more diversity in colleges, a smaller grades gap between ethnicities and many other benefits that affirmative action was meant to accomplish.

The argument being that quotas actually don't help with diversity because, in the example of high end colleges like MIT, a huge chunk of quota kids end up dropping out, or changing to non-technical majors, or stay in the bottom 10th percentile of their class. They end up feeling terrible, their classmates (who on average will be 300 SAT points above them) end up not taking them seriously, so instead of this being a positive experience for everybody, it just creates more resentment on both sides.

I suppose many people believe that throwing unqualified kids into the meatgrinder is worth it just for the diversity exposure alone, and their sacrifice is for a greater cause.

This is not to say that exposing different clusters of society to each other isn't beneficial to overall social cohesion and acceptance. Doing it through quotas, however, doesn't seem to have been proven to be an effective way of accomplishing that goal.

Race is an awfully blunt way of looking at these societal clusters. Mashing all the white people together makes no sense. The Italians, the Polish, the Irish were discriminated against heavily early in the century. Russian-Americans make 30% more on average than French-Americans. West Indian blacks make 50% more on average than American blacks. Africans who move to the states for work are about as successful as Asians or Whites, despite supposed heavy racial discrimination. Race includes none of that nuance in it.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#39

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:30 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #33

themarkn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.) What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "div…

I was going to write this as a throwaway but you know f it. I stand by my stories. > As such I believe quotas are a good thing You don't address the article's claim that quotas make stereotype threat worse. This is a real, lived experience. In high school, I (an overrepresented minority) failed to get in to MIT, and my best friend (an underrepresented minority) got in, despite me looking better 'on paper'[0]. He chos…

"No leadership potential" was in fact invented by Ivy League schools to keep the overachieving Jews out.

Re: Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

#40

Post by collyw » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 7:32 AM UTC

foobarbazbat wrote: post #28

themarkn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.) What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "div…

The problem is that institutional bias and discrimination are unmeasurable. So dropping the quotas never seems like a reality. Quotas are inherently unfair and take opportunity away from others. Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?

> Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?

James Damore suggested something like that, it didn't go down well. (Though I completely agree).