The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.

Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.

For the sake of the argument, assume that X, Y, and Z all have ~100% equal preference for positions A, B, and C at a given company or organization, and assume that it is merely “historical/institutional discrimination” that has led to X, Y, and Z percentages of A, B, and C failing to match X, Y, and Z population percentages at any given company or organization.

If both of these suppositions were 100% verifiably true, then it would stand to reason that, due to historical/institutional reasons, there would not be equal percentages of X, Y, and Z people who are competent at A, B, and C positions, relative to X, Y, and Z population percentages—because competency at a given position at a given company/organization is not generally something you are born with, but a set of skills/proficiencies that were honed over a period of time.

Therefore, the solution in this scenario should be to solely focus on education/training A, B, and C skills/proficiencies for whichever X, Y, and Z populations are “underrepresented”—plus also, presumably, some sort of oversight that ensures that a given person of equal competency/proficiency is given equal consideration for a given position at a given company/organization, regardless of whether they are X, Y, or Z.

But this would necessarily mean that, for some period of time until sufficient “correction” could occur, X, Y, and Z percentages for positions A, B, and C would continue to fail to match X, Y, and Z population percentages… because one doesn't simply become proficient at A, B, or C overnight, in the vast majority of cases.

However, the “DEI” proponents wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to claim that not only are the preceding assumptions regarding equal population group preferences completely, verifiably, absolutely true—but also, that this problem should be solvable essentially overnight, such that, in short order, one could casually glance at a given slice of employees/members of a given company/organization and see a distribution of individuals that maps ~1:1 with the breakdown of the population.

Any systems-thinking person could (and did) rather easily realize that this is just not how systems like these work—you cannot “refactor” society so easily, such that the “tests” (output) continue to “pass”, simply by tweaking surface-level parameters (“reverse” hiring discrimination). If the problems are indeed as dire as claimed, then instead, proper steps must be taken to solve the root causes of the perceived disparities—and also, proper steps must be taken to ensure that the base assumptions you started with (~100% equal career preference between population groups) were indeed correct to begin with.

This is not to say that things were and are perfect, or as close to perfect as we can get—nor that attempts to improve things and reduce and remove bias and discrimination as much as possible are anything but noble goals.

But if you want to solve a problem, you have to do so correctly, and that is quite clearly not what has been done—therefore, perhaps it's time to take a few steps back and reconsider things somewhat.

What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to being short staffed. Rather, it’s more likely they are understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible and eager people in order to meet race quotas.

It’s hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss it as just another instance of crazy Republican screeching.

Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.