Rethinking Approaches to Diversity And Inclusion
hackernoon.com
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Parallel with exclusionary hiring policies a propaganda campaign within a organization must be waged in order to brow beat members of the "over-represented" groups into accepting that such exclusionary policies are necessary and just in order to achieve some nebulous moralistic goal as defined by the "diversity" "experts" and "founders". From said propaganda the members of the "over-represented" groups must learn to accept and fulfill the role "ally" toward all members of the designated "under-represented" groups. This role can be simplified into "supporter of exclusionary policies of which I'm the target".
Mind you the "experts" and "founders" advocate for "diversity" and "inclusion" only within job roles that are typically male dominated and techincally oriented. The exclusionary hiring policies and propaganda campaigns never include increasing "diversity" within female dominated roles, e.g. HR, Recruiting, etc., or non-techincal roles, e.g. Custodial, Facilities, Security, Transportation, etc. This is so because the threat of bad PR doesn't hold much weight when certain target groups are not members of the "over-represented" group within the role.
Ultimately, I fear the current methods of addressing the "diversity" issue are counterproductive, hypocritical, and morally prescriptive in the same ways that other zeitgeist initiated crusades have been in recent history, e.g. "War on Drugs".
Regardless of whether or not such a plight is the biggest problem the overall society needs to solve.
What if societies could work on solving multiple problems at once?
Furthermore, how do you define what a "problem" is for a society? It seems "because it happened to me" is a relatively weak definition.
Thankfully, neither are the problems that society is faced with.
> Furthermore, how do you define what a "problem" is for a society? It seems "because it happened to me" is a relatively weak definition.
It turns out, you don't actually need to! Some problems are faced by a subset of a society, and often that subset are most interested in solving them.
True, yet I think we can agree that some problems are more easily solvable than others. Likewise, solving some problems will have greater positive impact on society as a whole than others. Therefore, it's probably a good idea to have some type of estimation strategy for determining the above stated properties of societal problems.
> It turns out, you don't actually need to! Some problems are faced by a subset of a society, and often that subset are most interested in solving them.
Then what you are describing is not a societial problem. I can define any individual as a subset of a society. That does not make that individual's problems societal. Expand your subset to include 0.05% of the population, their problems still are not societal. I would say there is some critical mass of people that must experience a problem before it becomes a societal problem. What that proportion is I do not know.
Furthermore, there are ways to solve problems for one subset of people by damaging another subset of people. Example, slavery. In these cases I don't think you have actually solved a societal problem. You've caused one.
I would claim this is the case for the "diversity" issue. A small set of "experts" have determined based on little to no evidence that for a certain set of job roles the proportions of people in said roles must reflect some vagued idealized ratios based upon superficial biological characteristics. In order to address the "problem" that the current propotionality of members in these job roles do not reflect their ideal a public smear campaign is unleashed in order to threaten non-compliant organizations into instituting exclusionary hiring policies and moralistic internal propaganda campaigns.
Good idea... let’s use it to evaluate diversity programs. Well, it’ll help women, which is roughly 50%. And black males (since we’ve already included women), another 6%. That’s pretty good! Does your “critical mass” include 175 million people, do you think?
That is, it reduces the number of viable teams one can form from a population. And if you have an existing team you need to grow, it can rule out some candidates.
In practice, simply “allowing” for diversity doesn’t work. The only way to reach diversity goals is to actively include people. So long as those people are qualified, I am okay if the cost is missing out on a slightly more qualified candidate. Not least of which because horing isn’t an exact science in which qualifications are completely measurable and all possible candidates are always considered.
Again, reality is messy. So a few white dudes (such as myself) might not get a job because of a quota. Big deal. If I am such hot shit that I definitely should have gotten the job, then I won’t have a problem getting a job elsewhere.
It is. You're either racist or you're not. You can sugercoat it with comfy terms such as "diversity" or "inclusion" but as soon as you positively discriminate for one race, you negatively discriminate against another and that is racism, even if it "only" affects white males.
Or stated differently, would you be for quotas if it meant a POC doesn't get the job, because there are already too many? If not, why?
If only it were this simple...
In reality, life doesn't seem to be constrained to our underdeveloped conceptual boxes, no matter how much we get attached to them.
I don't think it is so easy to answer that question off the cuff, especially without further details.
Also, I think it is very important to remember: these situations are usually _not_ zero sum. Helping one group does not mean another group has been harmed in equal magnitude.
They are not reparations. A reparation is a material compensation for a past harm. You don't take away from a group, you take away from individuals. I can't help but think of soviet farmers that were dispossessed in the name of communism.
>Helping one group does not mean another group has been harmed in equal magnitude
Again, you don't harm groups, you harm individuals. It's something different if you take taxes, where white people happen to pay more because they earn more, and use them to improve education in areas mainly inhabited by people of color. That would actually be not zero sum. But a position at a company is a limited resource. And if one person get's the position the other person can't get it. This is very much a zero sum situation.
I do welcome actions that help marginalized groups. But the way these issues are currently handled is short-sighted, ill-conceived and unethical.
That's not correct. First definition on google: "the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged." Reparations are not limited to material compensation.
> You don't take away from a group, you take away from individuals.
A group is a collection of individuals. Some things happen on the individual level. Other aspects or dynamics are only present on the group level and must be analyzed there.
> But a position at a company is a limited resource. And if one person get's the position the other person can't get it. This is very much a zero sum situation.
This is correct on the specific dimension you are looking at. But you are ignoring second order effects. That job may have a significant positive effect for the marginalized individual, and then in turn have a positive ripple effect on the marginalized community that he or she comes from. This could certainly result in a positive sum situation for society as a whole.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm totally with you that this could be taken too far, and we must proceed with caution. I also agree we should try to focus on cases where the positive sum benefits are most clear. But it is a difficult problem, and I think many instances of positive sum benefits are not fully appreciated.
What makes you say this? Doesn't this kind of assume that there aren't other reasons why such gender, racial, or cultural imbalances exist?
> So a few white dudes (such as myself) might not get a job because of a quota. Big deal.
There are large areas of the country still recovering from the recession. It's not like everyone is living in an economically prosperous area of the country. In those areas, not getting hired is a _huge_ deal.
In any area, not getting hired is a huge deal to the person not hired. It is just as huge for everyone else as it is for white men.
How come you're so confident that "that’s not how things work"? Do you have any idea about epistemic standards in social sciences? And if qualifications are not completely measurable, then how much more qualified is "slightly more qualified" and thus disposable? Lastly, on what grounds can people that promote diversity claim to have enough expertise to regulate this process of affordable exclusion?
My expertise is no greater than my expertise in selecting people to hire. I make no claim that this effort should be enforced by regulation. I enforce it through my hiring and recruitment efforts.
What is the actual objective? To me, it should be a simple case of eradicating, or compensating for, bias. No more, no less.
For example, if I hire an experienced senior dev over a junior, that's biased against the younger worker because of their lack of experience. Yet I end up with a more productive workforce. How is that bad? How do we determine which kind of biases are bad and which are good?