I’m not familiar with the example you’re referencing. Was it stated this person was only hired for their pronouns or just due to a diversity initiative?
There are people who reveal themselves to be unqualified and incompetent through all types of hiring practices all the time. That does not invalidate the methodology entirely because none is perfect. If it was doing so consistently in a way that can be documented, that’d be different. But if that were the case, for profit companies would drop it on their own without external pressure.
The problem is it doesn’t matter what you call it. Affirmative action, DEI, whatever. The people who complain about DEI will complain about that new term. I’m not sure there’s a neutral way to describe that if two candidates are about equal, you’ll pick the one from a disadvantaged/underrepresented background. Even if you said you’re looking for unique perspectives, if it’s not a white man who ends up making the mistake, some people will complain that unique perspectives are anti white and racist and hurting the country.
you’ll pick the one from a disadvantaged/underrepresented background.
So is having that policy even worth it? I would argue doing blind remote interviews without knowing the persons race and background would be almost as effective without giving ammunition to hate-mongers.
It’s not like you have roughly equal candidates for a position often in the first place. And it could also help against nepotism and other unfair practices.
The problem is the size of the gulf. If we were talking about, for instance, there only being 5% more white male executives compared to their share of the population, then compete blindness would more or less erase the problem given time.
When the gulf is large, the time period to erase that even with completely background-agnostic selection in any direction is many generations. It doesn’t sound fair to say, “OK, the racist stuff was wrong. We stopped (we didn’t totally). Your great-great-great grandchildren will see parity! Stop complaining.” You’re basically saying nobody alive will ever see something approaching equity.
Part of DEI is reassessing the metrics used to evaluate candidates. People often unconsciously will be more forgiving of shortcomings in people they identify with. So they can certainly write candidate evaluations that make one candidate seem clearly better than the other. But jobs are rarely so simple that you can list out and check boxes on every possible pro or con, and it’s easy to miss the pros if you aren’t looking for them.
Also, I will say having been on the hiring side for many positions, there are definitely plenty of cases where a couple candidates are roughly equal. That literally happened in the last position we filled. Maybe we’re outliers.
Part of the problem with the hypothetical is not everyone in one of these positions is truly hired. I mean if we completely got rid of inherited wealth so nobody could pass on their company to their kids, that’d certainly accelerate the timeline.
Background-agnostic will also still miss the knock-on effects. If someone goes to a high quality college with a name because their rich parents can afford it that leads to an attractive internship that lands them a career job, on paper they got their current job because they had good qualifications.
Or, if the company has a history of only white men in positions of power and goes background-agnostic with zero outreach to marginalized communities, you’re not going to get a lot of applicants from there. They may not even know the company exists, while every kid of those powerful white men sure do, and they know which skills are most necessary to look good in a job interview.
DEI is not just handing out roles to unqualified people because they’re not white men. It’s about access, outreach, thinking differently, being welcoming. It’s complex. It’s certainly easy to rabble rouse over because dumb people don’t want to take the time to understand complicated things. I don’t believe we should abandon nuance because some people refuse to attempt to understand it. They’ll just do that with the next thing until everything is dumb and simple.
I’m not familiar with the example you’re referencing. Was it stated this person was only hired for their pronouns or just due to a diversity initiative?
There are people who reveal themselves to be unqualified and incompetent through all types of hiring practices all the time. That does not invalidate the methodology entirely because none is perfect. If it was doing so consistently in a way that can be documented, that’d be different. But if that were the case, for profit companies would drop it on their own without external pressure.
The problem is it doesn’t matter what you call it. Affirmative action, DEI, whatever. The people who complain about DEI will complain about that new term. I’m not sure there’s a neutral way to describe that if two candidates are about equal, you’ll pick the one from a disadvantaged/underrepresented background. Even if you said you’re looking for unique perspectives, if it’s not a white man who ends up making the mistake, some people will complain that unique perspectives are anti white and racist and hurting the country.
So is having that policy even worth it? I would argue doing blind remote interviews without knowing the persons race and background would be almost as effective without giving ammunition to hate-mongers.
It’s not like you have roughly equal candidates for a position often in the first place. And it could also help against nepotism and other unfair practices.
The problem is the size of the gulf. If we were talking about, for instance, there only being 5% more white male executives compared to their share of the population, then compete blindness would more or less erase the problem given time.
When the gulf is large, the time period to erase that even with completely background-agnostic selection in any direction is many generations. It doesn’t sound fair to say, “OK, the racist stuff was wrong. We stopped (we didn’t totally). Your great-great-great grandchildren will see parity! Stop complaining.” You’re basically saying nobody alive will ever see something approaching equity.
Part of DEI is reassessing the metrics used to evaluate candidates. People often unconsciously will be more forgiving of shortcomings in people they identify with. So they can certainly write candidate evaluations that make one candidate seem clearly better than the other. But jobs are rarely so simple that you can list out and check boxes on every possible pro or con, and it’s easy to miss the pros if you aren’t looking for them.
Also, I will say having been on the hiring side for many positions, there are definitely plenty of cases where a couple candidates are roughly equal. That literally happened in the last position we filled. Maybe we’re outliers.
Why? Am I missing something? I would expect it to be completely gone in a generation, once every non-blind hire was replaced.
Part of the problem with the hypothetical is not everyone in one of these positions is truly hired. I mean if we completely got rid of inherited wealth so nobody could pass on their company to their kids, that’d certainly accelerate the timeline.
Background-agnostic will also still miss the knock-on effects. If someone goes to a high quality college with a name because their rich parents can afford it that leads to an attractive internship that lands them a career job, on paper they got their current job because they had good qualifications.
Or, if the company has a history of only white men in positions of power and goes background-agnostic with zero outreach to marginalized communities, you’re not going to get a lot of applicants from there. They may not even know the company exists, while every kid of those powerful white men sure do, and they know which skills are most necessary to look good in a job interview.
DEI is not just handing out roles to unqualified people because they’re not white men. It’s about access, outreach, thinking differently, being welcoming. It’s complex. It’s certainly easy to rabble rouse over because dumb people don’t want to take the time to understand complicated things. I don’t believe we should abandon nuance because some people refuse to attempt to understand it. They’ll just do that with the next thing until everything is dumb and simple.