Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

That's not really DEI, though, that's equal opportunity. DEI is about putting your thumb on the scale for groups higher on the progressive stack, to redress the lack of social capital they've had due to systemic oppression and/or because if you just select for talent, experience, and drive, in certain fields like tech the candidate pool will just skew white/Asian anyway because of the established good ole boy networks.

I'd really rather it stop at equal opportunity also but the world of finance -- where it really counts -- is all in on DEI, and companies demonstrating insufficient virtue will get clobbered on their ESG scores and hence, stock valuations.

If you're dissatisfied with this stuff, I wouldn't talk to management to solve this, but instead I'd work on communicating with ESG funds and ask them to change their guidelines for their DEI initiatives. Let me explain.

The corporation you work for is just trying to get a better ESG score. The DEI initiative and programs were probably handed down in some quasi-government fashion from Blackrock and other ESG funds who chose investments and even board votes based on that. Your company's HR department might have had all this mandated from Blackrock who has a ton of control on the boards of publicly traded companies. Corporations have to regularly report their DEI initiatives to Blackrock and other ESG funds.

"Last week, BlackRock released its 2021 proxy voting guidelines for the U.S. and other major markets ... These updated materials demonstrate how BlackRock intends to pair higher expectations for corporate responsiveness across a number of topics, including diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental risk, with a greater willingness to vote against management where these expectations are not met."

"In 2021, BlackRock will expect disclosure of workforce demographics, such as gender, race, and ethnicity in line with the EEO-1 Survey, along with steps being taken to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. Where BlackRock believes disclosures or practices fall short of market or peer practice, it may vote against members of the appropriate committee or support related shareholder proposals*."

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/01/12/blackrocks-2021-p...

If you look throughout Blackrock's governance documents they talk about "Stakeholder Capitalism" which is a world economic forum program[1] to bring all sorts of influences into the running of companies besides shareholder value. Thus, the bottom line isn't always the goal and often there are other reasons for all of this, so appeals to corporate profitability aren't even going to work here.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stakeholdercapitalism

> creating townhall meetings and parading your black/brown employees around like show ponies is nothing short of corporate virtue signaling.

That is the point of DEI for companies. Pretty much all HR initiatives are just virtue signaling.

Yeah I look at it from a top level. Say that in the tech industry, 20% (totally made up number BTW) of your workers are black. It would be possible for some companies to have >20% of their workforce be black, but if you look at the top employers (GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, AAPL, etc), there would be physically impossible for them to hire >20% black workers because there are simply not enough of them out there in the broader workforce.

The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field, in order to raise that 20% figure that would then get reflected among tech companies. This is something that an individual company cannot solve, even at Google or Apple scale, it would have to be at the government level and even that is a complete crapshoot.

TL;DR: Diversity quotas are hard.

No, it was decided to chastise the downtrodden minority class.