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Who cares about diversity?

fakenous.substack.com

71–80 of 536 posts

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#71
I care about diversity. I've been a women in stem nearly my entire life (thanks dad!).

However diversity quotas, esg scores, and all the manipulation in "diversity" and "woke" today is more about incompetent children of the rich who need fake jobs that make a lot of money. I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece.

It's just an unbelievable amount of pressure, now all resumes are pre-screened before they even get to me by a third party hiring group so corporate has plausible deniability about their schemes.

It's become far more about "elite" signalling and nepotism these days.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article might have a point but it's also written to be flamebait.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The article is an essay that starts by citing Supreme Court case law

Wrong. First 3 sentences:

> All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to explicitly ask you about, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics.

It primes the reader with subjective and emotionally driven flamebait.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#74

I think these institutions believe that more diversity ----> more inclusivity and less racism. How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist? How would an asian supremacist laotian increase the workplace's acceptance? If you want a place of tolerance then it should be populated by tolerant people. Throwing together males and females with a random sample of skin c…

> How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist? To be fair, there are many people from traditionally chauvinistic groups who despise the very chauvinism they live in. Many of them may be intelligent and productive people. Dismissing each and every individual because of the group is the root of discrimination. Some attempts at diversity may go too far - toleratin…

You can't meaningfully enforce open-mindedness or tolerance. The very idea is an oxymoron. The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#75
It's been very, uh, interesting (perhaps in the "may you live in interesting times" fashion) watching the Diversity concept leap toward an unquestioned, uncritically accepted value in and of itself.

Take The Parable of the Polygons, from 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714441) ... it is hard to come away from this with anything other than "choice of neighborhood leads to segregation and lack of diversity, and that's bad." But what of Robert Putnam's widely critiqued 2007 study? Imagine, just for a bit, where diversity causes a loss of a sense of community, and therefore diversity would not be an uncritical good. What if humans like to be around other humans superficially like them, not unlike other social mammals?

Step back and look at the various "spaces" striven for on behalf of some minorities (and women, who are not a minority but get that badge), both in Universities, in women-only workspaces featured here, and in places like Curves. Good, apparently for the goose, but not so much for that troublesome gander. These are simply non-diverse spaces when close up, pixelated. Only by putting a bunch of them together and pulling back do they look diverse.

Certainly, some of the methods used to achieve diversity are questionable, and we have various people, from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal, masquerading as minorities to acquire ... well, people seek to acquire power and status, so it is hard to argue against that people like Dolezal and Warren didn't want some additional blessing by identifying as groups they do not belong to, and also therefore hard to argue against that those group identifications aren't in some areas (especially academia) positive status and power. We've watched colleges and some corporations come under fire for enrollment and hiring practices which select strongly against (we used to call that "discrimation") certain groups, like the unruly Asians, who are square pegs, refusing to fit into the minority/poverty hole.

A serious re-evaluation is due, one where people's careers aren't threatened by doing so.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#76
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rhetoric has shifted in recent years from “equality of opportunity” to “equity”, which is more about equality of outcome. > Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/eq…

Do any companies subscribe to equity of outcome? I didn't think that was the intent of the word "equity". If that were the case, we wouldn't get promoted or bonuses based on our work, it would just be a timed schedule. I don't think that is what's going on.

Thanks to ESG scores, yes they do.

I've been under extreme pressure to get my team up to 40% women/nonbinary/lgbt even if their skills are subpar. It's coming from the top down. However, I do get some leeway from HR on their paper education profile and paper experience. I say "paper", because we already fired several people for basically lying on their resume.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#78
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the hiring task SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates WHERE DIVERSE = 1 ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC or SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC There could be valid reasons to employ either strategy, but I suspect most firms are trying to apply the second and your disbelief that the first query returns zero rows is more a mismatch with the firms' hiring st…

I am not suggesting they have to employee 1st or 2nd strategy. But if you do go with the 2nd don't go down the path of by-weekly employee diversity trainings and diversity being the corner stone of your "values" and communication strategy.

IMO, diversity contributes to, but does not define (the high-order bit of) Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#79
post #6

Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.

Years and breadth/depth of experience is far from everything, but it's also far from nothing. I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.

That doesn't make sense in the global marketplace. A ton of american companies have Indian ceos these days.
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