U.S. sues Oracle, alleges salary and hiring discrimination

People have been trying to hammer that distinction for a long time. For certain people, it just doesn't "stick". They believe there is a boogey man, and by golly they will make sure to get the state to punish any scenario that hints to its existence.

If anything, I'd argue that they are creating a boogey man. E.g. You push an agenda that promotes certain groups or genders above actual merit, and pretty soon I'd argue that people will develop a subconscious bias against individuals in those groups. I.e. They will compensate and they will discriminate in order to fix the bias that they are seeing unfold in front of their eyes. And they will probably apply it to everyone, just like a stereotype.

Edit. Removed stuff about types of diversity; not relevant.

Speaking personally, I found that work environments with lots of new or unamericanized immigrants had little collaboration, little in-office comraderie, and no socialization outside of work (e.g. pub nights). It was boring and I pined for a culturally American setting. Sometimes "multicultural" just means the subset of all cultures involved.

None of these business can tackle the real problems on their own, but even assuming that one "race" generally has an advantage because of educational background or some other factor that makes them more attractive hires, simply hiring them and ignoring everyone else (that isn't exceptional) only perpetuates the problem.

Therefore, attempts are made to resolve the issues in ways that an individual organization with a limited reach can: quotas, diversity hires. The problem is that the problems that create a disparity between the hires are long term, where as most of these companies have to think of the relative short term.

Because we as a society can't (or won't) tackle these issues in a holistic way, we're always going to have some hack workarounds that feel like BS to a lot of people because they are. If all public schools were well funded[1] and taught it wouldn't be such an issue (in a few decades maybe), but instead we've got a model that simply perpetuates the problem. Even if we throw money at the schools it won't fix the problem because a lot of kids growing up in poor areas have problems at home [2]. We know how to fix these problems but we can't even agree as a society that we even have a problem.

We're going to continue having this conversation for 100 years because thats how long its going to take our half-assed measures to work if they work at all. In the richest country on earth we can't agree that all public schools should be equally funded (hell, we're about to have to fight for the actual existence of public schools as all).

[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools... [2] https://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-does-poverty-influence-lea...

I think you're jumping too far to that conclusion. The only conclusion we can draw along those lines is that if there's evidence of discrimination the DOL will investigate and take action if it finds enough supporting evidence.

It's entirely possible for different companies to discriminate against several different groups in several different ways.

A major function of the DOL is to investigate discrimination claims, and they don't jump straight to a huge lawsuit because one or two people claimed discrimination. By the time they file these lawsuits they've probably had a lot of complaints, done an investigation and found supporting evidence.