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Comment by wireprotocol | Hacker News Reader

They should lead with their business successes (even if not profitable, they can talk about customer satisfaction, compelling use cases, differentiation, and growth), and follow up with "and we are also a great place for women to work, and we think other businesses can be, too".

If you choose business as a battleground, then you are implicitly setting up the success criteria as business success. So leaving that out and just focusing on hiring ratios and employee happiness feels incomplete.

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It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other. There was an excellent segment that talked about almost this exact thing on Reply All a few weeks ago. If you skip to the second half, I'd recommend listening to it. They talk about how businesses benefit from diversity, how diverse groups perform better and get better results than groups chosen just on "qualifications", and they also address the annoyance at the fact that "success" and "diversity" are seen as competing goals, in stark rejection of evidence. They also talk about how things that don't seem like a big deal can really wear minority employees down:

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/

"It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other."

Offensive? We're not even allowed to disagree with you about meta-level issues now? Nobody is being insulted or harassed, no one is being subjected to prejudicial remarks about any facet of their being -- and yet it's still, somehow, offensive?

By saying, "Pushing to get more even representation is at odds with business success or product quality," which is often outright stated and even more often pretty directly implied, people are basically saying, "Those 'diverse' people are inherently poorer workers with worse quality output." That's the subtext, and that's what I think is kind of offensive about that line of argument.

I didn't say or imply anywhere that they were at odds, nor do I think they are in general.

Rather, the business success part of the narrative was missing in this particular case, leaving an inconclusive feeling.

I recommend that you give others the benefit of the doubt and make a real effort to understand what they are trying to say, rather than assuming they are wrong merely because the comment triggers a politically-incorrect reflex. You're comment leads to an environment where people are afraid to contribute new ideas to the discussion.

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