Minorities just can't win (although women are actually a slight majority of the population, so it's really white men who are the minority). Every now and then a woman like Marissa Maier or Carol Bartz will get a "Hail Mary" chance at the top job, and when they eventually fail, it's blamed on them being women.
Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
521–530 of 898 posts
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of the bipoc label is to exclude asians from diversity stuff.
Yellow is not a color? I always assumed that Asians are included in PoC.
Side issue, but I grew up in Sweden thinking asians have yellow skin.
After living and working with asians for decades in the Bay area, I have yet to meet a yellow one. To my eye, they're on the same white(pink)-brown-black spectrum as the rest of humanity.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The best you can offer is sympathy. > I can almost guarantee that you have not [experienced racism] - especially if you are American. My goodness! How can you honestly make such an assertion? I am American, I've visited every state and lived in a dozen of them. I am well-acquainted with many forms of racism and am fascinated that you could believe such a statement. All I can say is that you are unequivocally wrong.…
> All I can say is that you are unequivocally wrong. You, as a white person, have been a victim of racism? Edit: > finding common ground is the key to rooting out and overcoming things like racism How is refuting the experiences of a black person finding common ground?
> You, as a white person, have been a victim of racism?
Have I been told to leave somewhere because they don't want "whiteys" there? Yes. Have I been yelled at for being a "honky"? Yes. Have I been told things like, "all white people are ___"? Yes. Have I been in a group when someone said, "don't give any to the white kid" ? Yes. Have I been threatened with violence with the sole given reason being that I am white? Yes. Has a friend of mine been told not to be my friend because I'm white and we shouldn't mix? Yes.
(for reference, these occurred while living in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia)
Are these common experiences across the U.S.? I doubt it. Are they as bad as what black people have to deal with? No. Are they as widespread as racism towards black people? Almost certainly not.
> How is refuting the experiences of a black person finding common ground?
I haven't done that at all - maybe you read some other comment and thought it was mine? If so, no worries for the confusion, there's a lot of comments flying around.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea is that even if blind hiring makes for the best possible employees on an individual basis in the short term, loosening that optimization in favor of diversity is a worthwhile pursuit because the company actually will thrive more when you look at long term collaboration (conversations and opinions that draw from a larger variety of life experiences can improve user advocacy, for example) and the possi…
Thomas Sowell pointed out two problems with the "idea" in Discrimination and Disparities . First, what evidence do we have that diversity does result in a company performing better, or gaining that amazing employee? He argues that this is an unfounded assumption. Setting that aside, his second point requires deeper consideration. Disparities are often caused by upstream circumstances, like fewer children having adult…
> First, what evidence do we have that diversity does result in a company performing better, or gaining that amazing employee? He argues that this is an unfounded assumption.
It's not an assumption.
> Along all dimensions measured, the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments’ performance. For example, the success rate of acquisitions and IPOs was 11.5% lower, on average, for investments by partners with shared school backgrounds than for those by partners from different schools. The effect of shared ethnicity was even stronger, reducing an investment’s comparative success rate by 26.4% to 32.2%. [0]
> Increased diversity in the healthcare workforce helps reduce or eliminate racial health disparities, according to a 2014 meta-analysis of 25 studies. [1]
> A large-scale study of all Texas schools reveals diversity’s impact in public education systems. They find student performance most-improved when there was greater management diversity, and a closer racial match (representation) between management and student. [2]
> Most of the sixteen reviews matching inclusion criteria demonstrated positive associations between diversity, quality and financial performance. Healthcare studies showed patients generally fare better when care was provided by more diverse teams. Professional skills-focused studies generally find improvements to innovation, team communications and improved risk assessment. Financial performance also improved with increased diversity. A diversity-friendly environment was often identified as a key to avoiding frictions that come with change. [3]
> Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. These findings emerge from our largest data set so far, encompassing 15 countries and more than 1,000 large companies. By incorporating a “social listening” analysis of employee sentiment in online reviews, the report also provides new insights into how inclusion matters. It shows that companies should pay much greater attention to inclusion, even when they are relatively diverse. [4]
> Using data from the 1996 to 1997 National Organizations Survey, a national sample of for-profit business organizations, this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value-in-diversity thesis. The results support seven of these hypotheses: racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits. [5]
This is just the tip. Study after study shows diversity improves outcomes of group work, it's really hard to justify believing otherwise, in light of the overwhelming data.
[0] https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend
[1] https://www.ucdenver.edu/docs/librariesprovider68/default-do...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/15/4/615/991022
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30765101/
[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
[5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000312240907400203
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#525Interestingly enough, Pew Research ran a study[0] a few years back which found that the majority of whites, blacks, and Hispanics reject race-conscious hiring—even if it results in less diversity. I can only imagine what it would feel like to be a PoC in a company that has openly stated that their goal is to achieve a certain racial/ethnic composition regardless of standards. How would I not always have a sneaking su…
As a Hispanic man, I can say that I don't care about whether I earned my spot or lucked into it through my ancestry. Life isn't fair, and I'll gladly take whatever advantages I can scrounge up. The software interview process in particular is already so capricious that I feel absolutely no shame in tilting it in my favor in any way that I can.
Argentinian here - this 100%.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is simple, hire better minority candidates. There are minority candidates who can thrive at all levels of tech. Nobody is telling your to hire subpar candidates. That's on your company's lazy implementation of their inclusion efforts, not on DEI.
This is the classic excuse. "Bad outcomes aren't the fault of X, you're just doing X wrong" even though X always leads to the same bad outcomes. When an initiative fails, the solution is rarely to do more of it.
Except study after study shows that good outcomes result from hiring diverse candidates...
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
This ignores the rampant racist/sexist comments often made on IRC/BBS, which were a reflection of society. Anyone who spent a good amount of time in these communities know it was a problem - hence why some very small invite-only communities were formed. So yes, the idealism is there. No one knows who you identify as in a text channel unless you let them. But it does not remove the fact that these communities could of…
i'm curious how much of this was actual racism vs spouting off a specific n-word in order to anger as many people as possible via minimal effort
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Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of the bipoc label is to exclude asians from diversity stuff.
Yellow is not a color? I always assumed that Asians are included in PoC.
So are Black and Indigenous. The point is to lump Asians into "other" and only pay lip service to their inclusion.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
>TL;DR: Diversity quotas are hard Diversity quotas are wrong. If you hire the black candidate because you have a quota to fill. How is that morally different to hiring a white person just because they're white? The only situation where I can think of quotas being a 'good' is to rectify a past self sustaining imbalance. If you made the case that the police are racist, because they're all white, therefore black people…
Quotas are a straw/boogeyman. Most companies have hiring targets. The difference is that quotas must be filled (which doesn't make business or social sense) whereas hiring targets are goals (which aren't required to be attained).
Except those "targets" are often tied to things like pay and promotion. That really blurs the line between "quota" and "target". For example Intel docked people's pay unless they hit their totally-not-a-quota target of 40% women and URM hires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34679982
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#530(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…
The key thing is there needs to be a falsifiable condition whereby we agree these programs have achieved their primary goal, and that the risk of scope creep, corruption, or other externalities like the ones the OP mentions has exceeded the potential further benefits, so they should be wound down. I'm not going to state my opinion here, but if such a condition is not identified in any way, we should assume these grou…
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