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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#341

Post by gnull »

winternett wrote: post #154
systemvoltage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on…

What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success. D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations withi…

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success

There's a ton of different sources of bias. Look at lesswrong.com. What (other than politics) makes minority bias more significant than the other? And why it can't be fought with ordinary means and working on yourself?

You don't need to be the same thing as the object of your study to study it. Just like you can study Geology without being a rock, you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys without belonging to it. Nothing in principle prohibits that.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#342

Post by Manuel_D »

tylerhou wrote: post #283
Manuel_D wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are Asians doing so well? "Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization. Two main reasons that are given: Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians…

Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value m…

The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes population-wide trends and applies it on an individual level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math". That's stereotyping.

Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation. Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans, on average do spend more time on academics, and do enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates. This is an empirical observation, not the model minority myth. Similarly, there's nothing racist or white supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on academics. If someone takes this data and then judges individuals for population-wide averages, then that's stereotyping and I do not condone that.

I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph, but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But I trust that most people are able to understanding that averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by data on Latin americans' academic achievement condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me personally, thank you very much.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#343

Post by Animats »

jansan wrote: post #128

If you want racial equity, you have to start at school or even earlier. Get rid of private schools, improve the public school system. Then you can actually get good people from all kinds of backgrounds that are not looked upon as "diversity hires".

> Get rid of private schools

Finland does that.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#345

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

implements wrote: post #278
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that. This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender eq…

It could be the case that in societies where women aren’t arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them to ie “women are better actualised as women in societies where female success isn’t artificially stifled by glass ceilings”. A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded w…

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts

>“Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.

There is widespread scientific (note: among _scientists_) consensus that this is not correct. Talk to an endocrinologist or a behavioral geneticist, or an economist, or a psychologist...

As it turns out, sex differences in psychology are the biggest effects we measure. We also see concomitant differences in other species, both closely related and not. And there is every reason to expect evolution has designed us to have innate differences by sex. The tablua rasa stuff is wrong.

Ideas like the one your innner feminist wants to believe were popularized by non-scientists (don't confuse scientists with "academics"), and they were easy to make popular because they're what cliques around those academics wanted to believe. But all the evidence is against it, that's just no how nature works.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#346

Post by marcosdumay »

kardianos wrote: post #193
mikkergp wrote: post #18

Posts 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.

Intra-organization measurements are not the same as inter-oganizations measurements.

(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#347

Post by dijit »

peter422 wrote: post #321
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they are historically and factually wrong No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.

Which is why doctors and lawyers, two of the historically most highly paid and high status jobs, now graduate more women than men. Or wait a second, I guess it isn't public knowledge doctors make a lot of money.

This is overly hostile and I don't really want to engage with it because of that.

To answer the question as coldly as I can:

1) Women are graduating from nearly all University programmes more than men.[0]

2) The role of Doctor is not as highly paid or prestigious as it used to be, at least in Europe.[1]

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...

[1]: https://www.paragona.com/healthcare-jobseekers/where-would-y... ; cites a 70k average where a project manager will make an average of 99k: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-project-manager...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#348

Post by PKop »

bobkazamakis wrote: post #335
PKop wrote: post #254

Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest? After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this. The cultural brainwashing that ther…

>After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Are you afraid of not having privilege? Do you think that's a symptom of how we treat the unfortunate, or the cause?

Setting aside the connotation/framing of the word itself, tell me, is not having privilege good or bad?

One could define "privilege" as the accumulation of inheritance of ancestors, economic, culturally, biological, geopolitical, power. All coming together in "good ways" for descendants.

But back to the question, is bad to not have it and good to have it yes? Then why would anyone support not having it, willingly giving it up, expect those who take it from you to not then also abuse power against you etc etc. If bad, why choose not to keep it?

In terms of abstract ideological values, I support merit, some sort of meritocracy. But in concrete terms this will never avoid conflict of group interests. That is politics and an unavoidable aspect of human competition over resources, wealth, power, prestige. So let's stop pretending, is my point, that there is some achievable neutrality in all this. Because we all agree not being on top is bad. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. At the very least having cultural power like those implementing all these policies throughout Western corporations is a good thing to have. It is bad not to have it. What else is there to say?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#349

Post by int0x2e »

I absolutely want to work in a diverse team. I want to be challenged by different perspectives and ideas. I want to have the best team members out there, regardless of their backgrounds.

I however, think many D&I ideas fail to work when written into policies, and I think many times, higher-ups seem to write policy out of the best of intentions, yet fail to see how they can easily lead to abuse and poor results.

Two examples from a corporate job a friend shared with me -

1. A friend was interviewing senior software engineers for an open position, then got a candidate who was grossly irrelevant (I won't bore you with the details, but she has ~1 year of experience at best, and this position was targeting a minimum of 5 years, 8+ years preferred). Turns out, that specific hiring manager had recently lost a (male) top candidate because they didn't have a female candidate in that candidate's pipeline - the manager learned his lesson and now always dumps 1-2 female candidates that have no chance of making it into any senior position, just to meet the "diverse slate" requirement of their D&I policy.

2. Another example, this time not related to diversity - during the recent economic downturn, a company decided that on top of an aggressive hiring freeze, for any employee that is fired or quits, their position goes away with them, then gets re-assigned to where the higher-ups think the need is greatest. At first glance, that sounds like a good idea - kind of a CI/CD for re-orgs with minimal "slack". But of course, if you're a smart enough manager, that means your biggest hope is to remain static through this period, which means you'll never fire (or even challenge) anyone. You'll even promote mediocre folks to keep them on, then fire them afterwards.

Naturally, the most talented will still get plenty of offers and move / leave at some point, and then the slightly less talented folks get hit with all of their work and eventually move on as well, and over time the average talent level of that team will slide down considerably, and as we all know - hiring a top performer into a mediocre team is a challenge.

Nice policy in theory, but in practice - it will cause the company to lose tons of great talent, in a way that will take years to recover from.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#350

Post by ealexhudson »

Manuel_D wrote: post #277
sascha_sl wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a chance. The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by shifting the balance in favor of an already advantaged group. Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell which candidates are men or women, or which is white, Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by setting caps on ho…

Blinding an interviewer by changing pitch/modulating the voice does little to erase the actual disadvantage. Few are arguing "people that sound like women are discriminated against", they're saying that the systems are set up in such a way that there is a bias against women that encompasses the evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the topics they're interested in, the projects they've completed previously, etc. It's a systemic disadvantage, and that experiment isn't getting at the issue being claimed.

As just one example, women still do the majority of child rearing, especially babies. People who want children make that choice, but men typically take a few weeks out of their career whereas women take months or more. That's a systemic disadvantage women suffer.

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