Tech's DEI backlash is here

Even though some people would call me that, I've always hated that term/ideology. I wish companies would shift their mindset to, "a candidate that adds to our diversity". E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio so it's more representative of the source population. We haven't done as well with regard to racial and age non-discrimination. As we do better in either of those two categories, the definition of "a candidate that adds to our diversity" will change.

> We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman

This is both true and legal (though I wish it included NBs as well). The more candidates you select from a given demographic, the probability increases that your organization is participating in a discriminatory system. If it makes it more palatable, reword it in your head by tacking on at the end, "... so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."

> Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman

Studies have shown even women evaluate women more harshly than they evaluate men. Extra justification is warranteed when gender is known or implied and the reviewer is likely to have unconscious bias. That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. (That said, there are a lot of gender implications on many applications, so it can be tough to hide gender completely).

> The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things

Alternatively, guaranteed job placement into one's chosen profession would help everyone indiscriminately. Trying to ban anti-discrimination efforts serves only status quo biases.

> too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high

I agree this is a risk. Surely there are some people who "bring this up" in a bigoted way and are rightfully fired, but I suspect there's a number of people who, with a gentle reframing, can see how their views are problematic and can learn the knowledge gaps that caused them to come to the wrong conclusion. From the company's perspective, they're doing anti-discrimination work, and an employee objection sounds like they're pro-discrimination. It's a bilateral failure to communicate in an at-will employment relationship.

> if you pull out a random man and a random woman, you have about a 77% chance the man will be taller

> you’d have about a 2% advantage over sheer random chance if you bet on the man to be more invested in achieving

I have no doubt that math is correct, but that's not the point. A small difference in the means becomes a big difference at the tails. And Google does select for the tail.

This response did the math: https://medium.com/@ryanbaldini/worth-noting-small-differenc...

> This is both true and legal

Absolutely not. Using any protected class (race, gender, religion, disability, etc.) in hiring decisions is illegal unless this is a bona fide occupational qualification [1]. You can deliberately hire a Black person to play Frederick Douglass in a move. You cannot deliberately hire or favor someone on the basis of race or gender for software development jobs. This example above is textbook illegal discrimination: "I don't want to select $protected_class_X, it'd be best of the next one was $protected_class_Y". The fact that the previous hire belonged to $protected_class_X does not in any way make it legal to discriminate on the next hire.

Companies do this, but they're breaking the law and hoping they aren't going to be held accountable. And as per TFA, now that they're realizing that people aren't as supportive of racial and gender discrimination as they thought these policies are being rolled back.

> That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor.

Interestingly, all the DEI staff I've encountered have resoundingly shut down calls to anonymize applications. It puzzled me at first until I attended a career fair and recruiters instructed us to mark female URM candidates with two stars, non-URM women and URM men with one star, and Asian men with "ND". Which I later learned stood for "negative diversity". I poked around the onboarding docs recruiters had, and they linked to census data on majority-female and majority-URM names. Recruiters were being given specific percentage quotas for women and URM hires. Of course they don't want anonymization. It all makes sense when you realize DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination.

> E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man

This really struck me as an odd thing to say. You admit that women are overrepresented, and elsewhere in your comment you seem to think that discrimination favoring women is legal. Yet you assume that the overrepresentation of women is evidence that your company isn't discriminatory.

Imagine someone wrote this: "Our company is good at avoiding anti-male discrimination, so we're well above industry average in our men:women ratio." And now imagine that the same person writes that refusing to hire a woman for an internship is legal if the previous intern hire was a woman. Do you think this person's company is non-discriminatory?

The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men [2], so maybe don't assume that your company's overrepresentation of women is because other companies are discriminating against women and yours is non-biased.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...

2. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484