Focusing your company on hiring people based on their race and gender, rather than their ability, seems like a horrible idea. Not to mention a great way to open yourself to law suits and massive animosity among your employees.
Positive discrimination for minorities is legal.
> animosity among your employees
My wife has seen this, being one of the hires made to fill a quota while working at EA.
White and asian men (the groups discriminated by this policy) make up about 37% of US population. So in this instance we've already reached the point where 'minority' make up the majority of the population.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm very curious how far companies go to fill quotas and how much weight is put into race/gender.
Put another way, she had no past experience, displayed no aptitude for the position, and she was hired. She was, the manager admitted to her later, also the only woman to apply.
When diversity is a qualification along with aptitude and experience, people are right to question.
A parallel discussion (and recent litigation) for college admissions is happening as well. Many black people admitted to top schools are only admitted because they are black. The stats show that black people admitted to some top schools need much lower SAT scores, while Asians need much higher (vs whites). This might not be the most polite way to phrase the situation, but it is absolutely true.
Are their grades lower? What about their post-graduation job outcomes? Do they cost the campus more money? How much money do they make the campus by playing on basketball and football teams for the university? What do the on-campus crime and harassment statistics look like if broken down by race and gender - do the diverse students cause more trouble or less?
If you're going to say something like 'they were only admitted because they are black' and then 'absolutely true' I hope you're prepared to back it up, otherwise you just sound racist - and I'm sure that's absolutely not true!
No, he's saying that they were selected over people who performed better in the interviews and other selection criteria because of the color of their skin/gender/religion/...
Now in some way that's equivalent, in the sense that they would not have been selected if not for their skin color (they would have been third or fifth on the list where the top spot gets hired), but in other ways it's not. It does not mean they don't have any ability at all, for instance. Just less than would be required if they were white males. And I'm sure if executive compensation is tied to this, that there will in fact be cases of no ability at all, but I doubt it will be the common case.
And we all know the methods executives will use to hit their targets while lying about this, for instance to make sure it looks fair, when it isn't. Going in and changing interview reports and scores after the fact to make sure they "didn't select based on skin color", except it'll be blatantly obvious for their colleagues that's exactly what happened. And in fact I bet those other team members will have to work more, harder and ... to compensate for the lower abilities.
Because that is literally what the article is about. Unless you're under the impression that they previously hired candidates based on something other than ability, I don't see how else you could read this. Companies typically try to hire the most skilled person they can afford for a position. MS is now incentivizing leaders to favor women and certain racial groups because their previous hiring methods didn't result in the desired number of them being hired.
> Are you suggesting that hiring diverse candidates makes it impossible to hire skilled workers? Why would that be so?
You're intentionally twisting words.
Availability for the position, quantity of experience, leadership skill, willingness to learn, familiarity with the problem space, quality of personal references, interpersonal skills... all that along with 'how good are you at writing code'. What is the huge negative impact of adding 'diversity' to that set of evaluation factors? Are you arguing that adding diversity would actually push the most qualified candidates to the bottom of the pile somehow? If all things are truly equal, adding diversity to the sort has no impact on the ability of qualified candidates to get hired.
All the factors you listed are equivalent to or surrogates of that fundamental requirement. Or, in the case of leadership skill, are excess to requirements unless the role involves leadership.
All races and sexes being equal on average does not mean that all candidates are equal on average. If they were, we wouldn't have interviews.
Almost always, one candidate will be better. Necessary, that candidate will be a member of one race or sex. If any of the other candidates is a member of another race or sex, and that race or sex is one which the hirer is incentivized to hire people for, a less-suitable candidate will be hired if the hirer follows his incentives.
So, if you have a quota (or a bonus) of diverse hires needed, you will either end up lowering your standards or spend a lot more money in order to fill the hiring needs.
Is the pool smaller because you primarily rely on referrals from your (already not especially diverse) workforce and applications from people off the street? Are you recruiting from universities that are predominantly white, as a result implicitly biasing your available pool of recent college graduates? Are you recruiting only from your local area, subjecting yourself to the local race balance?
If hiring diverse candidates costs more money, that can absolutely still be worth it if hiring diverse candidates provides measurable upsides. Of course, the cost matters - if it's 10x or 100x it's much harder to see a positive return. But dismissing it for being 'too hard' or 'too expensive' without actually doing an evaluation of the pros and cons is a little lazy, isn't it?
Fewer women in the Engineering workforce. Which stems from fewer women in College engineering programs. Which stems from (and I'm firmly in the "IMO" stage here) girls being encouraged to play with dolls and boys with legos.
Of course, engineering isn't the only occupation where there is an obvious gender bias, check out the book publishing industry. 90% white females, last I heard.
> Do you have data to support this?
The college numbers are broadly available, as are the employment records.
> citing any data here or personal experience working in HR or recruiting
Mostly from my attempts to hire someone for a number of positions - every time I get the candidate pool narrowed down to qualified individuals, they are all white males in their late 20's or early 30's. Is there an unconscious bias? Perhaps, but I'm narrowing based on their work experience, not their name, website or talking to them on the phone by this point.
> if hiring diverse candidates provides measurable upsides
It's very hard to quantify the benefit of a diverse work team. You know the benefits when you see them, but putting a dollar amount to it? "We made 20 fewer boneheaded decisions this year, resulting in a savings of $30,000." I'd love to see it, but I doubt I will.
Are there examples of business staffed by diverse staff that outperform boring white/asian male companies?
What exactly do you estimate has been happening when your current field of diversity is landlocked at some 90% or more?
Fluke?
What's the solution to the small pipeline? If there's a well-understood solution, why isn't it fixed yet? This has been a known problem for a while. Is it too expensive?
It doesn't, but you can't weight in favor of candidates which aren't there. If I have 10 positions to fill, 30 qualified white males, and 1 qualified female, is it better to go out and spend more money attracting females, or fill the jobs with the best candidates and move on?
> What's the solution to the small pipeline?
As with my other response to you, I believe it's cultural. You can't force women who are interested in writing novels or nursing to go into engineering. Find where the cultural issues are, accept that you'll never get to a clean split between the races and genders (for any position), and the symptoms of few diverse candidates will clear itself up.
Edited to add: If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate a comment as to why in the interest of communication. Given the amount of discussion that still goes on around these topics, it's far from a settled issue. Understanding how others think about them is important to figuring out some kind of agreement or acceptable solution. If the solution is obvious to you, please share, as it's not obvious to me.
In general, no, unless there is some specific reason why a role needs to consider those qualities, which you alluded to.
> Can race and gender be proxies for adding additional perspective?
I should think so, but at the same time I find it a bit insulting to suggest that they're primary indicators for perspective. For example, a wealthy British black man and a wealthy American white woman have significantly more in common than a poor black man and the same wealthy black man. Using race as primary indicators is actually a bit racist.
Agreed all around. Add to that is how to properly measure how a given employee will work out with for a company. Determining the best measures of ability and that oft-discussed ever-elusive "fit" are not easy tasks for some jobs, and something companies are continually trying to improve.
Hiring for diversity is itself a proxy of sorts, isn't it? I doubt Microsoft is hiring for diversity for diversity's sake. There are inequalities in society as a whole that appear to break to some extent along racial and gender lines. You bring two others with respect to nationality and income or economic class. (I mention all of these without making a moral judgement.) There's a lot of different ideas as to why these inequalities exist.
I'm speculating, but one reason Microsoft may be hiring for diversity is that they see that the demographic make up of their employee base is significantly different from the make up of society as a whole. Is there a merit/ability reason why this should be? If there isn't, should the company take steps to change the disparity?
This gets into questions of the role of the company in society. Does/can/should a company have responsibilities beyond short term profit? Are people good at making decisions that affect the long-term? Do the effects of pure capitalism affect societal change at a rate that maximizes societal good (for some measure) on scales comparable to the average human life? Should we be concerned about these things? Throw up our hands? Try to figure out solutions outside pure meritocracy?
I'm just riffing now in a pretty non-structured way. I'd be happy for others to push against them and see how quickly they fall over. I also recognize that not everybody is interested in these questions. The HN forums are a good place to get exposed to other ideas from different perspectives. I'm pretty sure we're not going to figure all of this out in this thread, but it is good stuff to think about overall.
i.e. https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
On the other hand there have definitely been studies showing negative outcomes from diversity programs, so there's an interesting conflict there.