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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#541

Post by colechristensen »

epistasis wrote: post #484
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases. In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups". I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote sh…

> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment. Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a…

Illegal stuff happens all the time in the workplace and very frequently goes unreported, underreported, or otherwise results in nothing.

Using claims that something is illegal to discredit an argument is extremely dubious.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#542

Post by acdha »

speakfreely wrote: post #529
acdha wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.

There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.

Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#543

Post by FloorEgg »

judahmeek wrote: post #522
FloorEgg wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.

What are your sources?

The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#544

Post by acdha »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #535
acdha wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants. Try to support this with data and you run into some real messy analysis: in a few cases where testosterone matters such as sports or hand grip strength, this is true and there’s a well-understood biological explanation for it. In most other cases, however, there isn’t a known mechanism and…

> Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a geneti…

I definitely agree it’s a problem. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that it’s innate rather than social in origin. Human neuroplasticity is our species’ big defining trait so it seems far more likely that we have a complex mix of feedback loops based on socialization.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#545

Post by epicureanideal »

th wrote: post #341

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works. A relevant tweet from 2016 ( https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595 ): > Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016 Increased diversity in communities usually comes from ac…

> unusually homogenous communities

Which can be socioeconomic rather than racial..

It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#546

Post by KPGv2 »

rayiner wrote: post #500
epistasis wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment. Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a…

> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color... . But in practice, in many…

> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly

I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#547

Post by judahmeek »

array_key_first wrote: post #443
endomorphosis wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's literally not illegal. Me telling my friends they should apply to some job is not illegal.

You telling certain friends, but not others, based on characteristics named in the 1964 civil rights act, as part of your job requirements, would likely be illegal.

In your free time without occupational incentive? Sure.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#548

Post by judahmeek »

FloorEgg wrote: post #543
judahmeek wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your sources?

The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...

Then it shouldn't be hard for you to say something other than 'do your own research'

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#549

Post by lmm »

adriand wrote: post #445
anal_reactor wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started…

> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.

But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#550

Post by analog31 »

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #482
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases. In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups". I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote sh…

I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.

That's a lot of whites for a roofing company.
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