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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
191–200 of 972 posts
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to be free of bias. That's not what bias means. What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen. If more applicants are available that happen to be from a…
I think your statement is the issue. If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen. I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#193Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diver…
> Reactionary, anti-intellectual.
"The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti- then too.
Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
"Hiring the best people invariably leads to hiring a very diverse team." Only the diversity may go along the lines that the contemporary DEI philosophy does not like or even accept. E.g. a Ukrainian refugee, a kid of poor Korean shopkeepers, an ex-Muslim atheist who does not even want to pretend that he is still Muslim.
+1
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is also possible that those companies will be suffocated by the fact that banks won't extend credit to them (ESG) or angry Twitter will pressure potential customers not to do business with them. I think that would only be an issue if they made a big deal in public about rejecting DEI. Such a statement might also attract a bunch of obnoxious, oppositely-polarized people you don't want either. Probably the best st…
The University of Central Florida has bought an email address I own from some spammers and they're now occasionally asking me to enroll in some program where I can prove my commitment to diversity and inclusion and eventually become a certified supplier to them. "Positive statements" will not be what you need, you'll need to show that you actually have the numbers, and if you don't, you will not be considered.
IIRC, the US government's contracting rules are so byzantine that it gets shut results and wastes all kinds of money on incompetent contractors whose primary skill is compliance with the government's byzantine process.
If you want to ignore requirements like that (or similar DEI requirements), you're going to have to forgo those kinds of customers.
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#196No post body was provided.
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#197> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…
How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?
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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#198> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…
How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?
I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#199Most of the top comments are literally recapitulating all the received unexamined "common sense meritocracy" talking points which are systematically examined and dismantled as the first order of business in such training.
Depressing, but not suprising.
Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
#200Affirmative Action is always going to be a very controversial topic. Personally I'm for it, but I understand why people dislike it.
I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become millionaires than black or hispanic Americas (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/). I think there's a TONNE of reasons for race and gender based inequality, but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this. It wasn't long ago that racism and sexism were much, much worse than they are today (and there's still lots of conscious and unconscious bias today), so white families are a lot wealthier today than minority families, and that propagates to the next generation, and the one after that, etc. Slavery wasn't abolished in America until 1865, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (ending racial segregation of schools) came in 1954, Rosa Parks was 1955, Jim Crow laws weren't really sweepingly overturned until 1965. If you're a black American in their 40s today, your parents were probably born in the Jim Crow era, where the impediments to their financial success were immense.
If, as a society, we don't try to actively help non white males reach an equal footing in terms of opportunity, it'll be really, really hard to close these "momentum" gaps. I view Affirmative Action as a temporary approach to narrowing these gaps. It's realizing that it's too hard to succeed financially as a minority in America, and temporarily giving minorities a leg up on hiring and promotions to help even the wealth/opportunity gap. Once the gap more or less goes away, you remove the Affirmative Action policies, but that'll take time. If you hire based purely on qualifications, education, experience, etc., the gap isn't going away for an extremely long time, because white families are a lot wealthier than minority families today, so a disproportionate number of kids from those families are going to have those advantages, and the gap persists.