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Comment by Aqua | Hacker News Reader

To me the notion of a need for diversity in a workplace is absurd. Seriously, whats the point? There are and always have been professions dominated by men and those dominated by women. From the perspective of an employer, gender, skin colour or political views should be completely irrelevant when it comes to making a hire/no hire decision. By introducing rules that aim to achieve a 50/50 distribution of e.g. each gender in any field, you're forming up an artificial construct that ultimately results in poorer overall performance (since you had to reject a number of candidates that likely were more qualified for the position in order to reach your equal distribution goals).

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>There are and always have been professions dominated by men and those dominated by women. From the perspective of an employer, gender, skin colour or political views should be completely irrelevant when it comes to making a hire/no hire decision.

What you're missing is that many employers don't have the perspective whereby gender, skin color or political views are irrelevant. Biases against gender, race and religion are part of the reason that many professions have been dominated by certain races, genders and religions (although laws have attempted to counteract this effect.)

The point of diversity in the workplace is to force an implicitly prejudiced employment market to be less prejudiced than it otherwise might be, just as the point of labor laws and the minimum wage are to force companies to care more about their employees' welfare than they otherwise would.

>What you're missing is that many employers don't have the perspective whereby gender, skin color or political views are irrelevant. Biases against gender, race and religion are part of the reason that many professions have been dominated by certain races, genders and religions (although laws have attempted to counteract this effect.)

Yes, but you can mitigate those biases with gender/race-blind hiring practices. This seems like a much fairer and more reasonable option than enforcing quotas.

Blind hiring techniques don't do much, for several reasons.

- They only work at the screening stages. Most hiring pipelines conclude with an in-person interview, and that can't be blind.

- People are very good at reading between the lines and can often infer race and gender from education and work history alone (or at least, infer deviations from their preferred norms).

- It doesn't address the problem of industry pipelines filtering against diversity before the applications ever get to you.

- A manager who doesn't want to hire women can just treat a blindly-hired woman badly until she leaves.

- It implies to the company that diversity is something that must be hidden rather than something that should be tolerated or celebrated.

- It implies to applicants that you have intolerant managers who need to be tricked.

There are certainly problems with this approach and it definitely isn't a foolproof way of stopping discrimination, but I'd argue there is a longer and more concerning list of issues with hiring based on quotas.

All I know is gender/race-blind hiring works fantastically for things like music auditions. For technology-based jobs where most of the interview process can be done in writing, over the phone, or over a shared virtual whiteboard or document (for coding or drawing diagrams), there's no reason why everything up to the in-person interview can't be as age, gender, and race blind as possible.

It may not have much value in a coal mine, but I suspect it is highly valuable even from a purely commercial/competitive perspective in industries and workplaces that are creating/maintaining products or services for a large or broad audience.

> you're forming up an artificial construct that ultimately results in poorer overall performance (since you had to reject a number of candidates that likely were more qualified for the position in order to reach your equal distribution goals).

That's precisely where I disagree. Again, in a coal mine you might just want to hire for simple traits that can be easily evaluated per individual (like physical strength). But on the types of teams I mentioned, the diversity of experiences and opinions across the team probably matters as much or even more than the sum of every individual's "talents." I would guess that this diversity becomes more important the larger the team gets and the larger the audience for their products/services gets.

To be clear, I also suspect that more diverse teams are more difficult to hire and manage effectively, and that's probably a big reason that some companies either don't care about diversity or actively resist the suggestion to increase their diversity.

> There are and always have been professions dominated by men and those dominated by women.

Put in the most mercenary way I can think of:

There are and have always also been professions in which hiring decisionmakers screw their own organizations out of talent by ignoring or down-ranking candidates they were bigoted against. There similarly are/have been professions in which talented people with potential to add great value have been driven away by similarly bigoted leaders.

We don't know what might have been, what potential might have been achieved, because of the idiotic/cruel things we've practiced throughout history. Acting like ethical, compassionate, empathetic people seems like a way more pragmatic way than "well, it worked so far, let's keep being bigoted assholes" to see if we could do better in the future.

You seem to be conflating quotas and diversity, and also conflating mechanisms and results. The point of a diversity office or officer is to provide a resource for discussing whether mechanisms of hiring and recruitment are fair, and trying to improve them if they're not.

Once all those studies that send out the same exact resume with the names John, Jane, T'yesha, Jamal, Xiaoying, and Shan Shan at the top find you get the same number of callbacks, then we'll actually be in a situation where people are being hired on their qualifications!

Apologies, I should have been more clear as I intended to point out an example, not a fixed quota, because clearly if you consider diversity when making a hiring decision you inevitably have to end up aiming to hire more people of certain characteristics(and not necessarily qualifications) that fit your long term quota goals.

Besides, what do you mean by fair recruitment? Because personally in this context I view diversity and fairness as contradicting terms, since it would always be more fair to hire a candidate that has higher qualifications and is a good cultural fit over one that wasn't as qualified, but turned out to be a good match when it comes to meeting present quarter's diversity goals?

I believe that basing hiring decisions on physical appearance, race, religion, gender or political views is simply wrong. I recall there was a company that focused on distorting candidates' voices during phone interviews that effectively prevented the interviewers from distinguishing the interviewees' gender. If companies like Google want to actually be more "fair", perhaps they should move in that direction rather than introducing artificial quotas and justifying them with a vague "need for diversity"?

You mentioned "good cultural fit". I have heard many hiring managers mention that they want somebody who is a good fit for the team. And it's very natural, I mean, everybody is going to have to work with this person, right?

This almost guarantees the perpetuation of inequality. We need to stop hiring for that kind of fit.

I'm certain that I have heard of research (by IBM maybe?) that determined that more diversity made teams more productive, but the people on the teams were less happy/comfortable.

> more diversity made teams more productive, but the people on the teams were less happy/comfortable.

Maybe because nobody wanted to socialize with each other so they spent more time doing work?

The resume problem is the inverse, isn't it? The studies I've seen where resumes were having names removed before being sent to recruiters showed a slight bias against white men which is why these schemes always get shut down - increasing fairness decreases (slightly) diversity.

This whole thread is becoming toxic; and I know my karma will be negatively impacted but I have to say:

Diversity of race or gender is not really important when it comes to working by itself.

Diversity of experience and thought is very important when it comes to working.

What I mean is a very middle-class white family and a very middle-class black family producing offspring in a house next to each other and sending their kids to the same school(s): are not going to be functionally diverse enough for what I'm about to say.

Why?: because people who are thinking differently to you are approaching problems from other sides than you are, if you can be civil then you can build your product in ways you could never do alone.

Now; people who were raised in a different kind of culture or social class than you are basically by default: thinking differently.

It doesn't have to be colour, but in the US (from a brit perspective) your class system looks like black people are sandwiched between middle-class white folk and very low-class white folk. So some people might see that 'hiring black folk would increase our diversity of thought'

or.. more likely, they're being judged on metrics and skin colour/gender is an easy metric to game for.

Giving people an equal shot is noble and we should aspire for it. The business incentives come in because your product will be better with divergent opinions and by increasing the talent pool the supply of coders will meet the demand.. (and then they can pay coders less in the longer term)

> To me the notion of a need for diversity in a workplace is absurd. Seriously, whats the point?

There are some advantages. For instance, people with different religions or cultural backgrounds will have non-overlapping holidays, so your office might be open on days that you might otherwise have to close.

Or consider if you're creating a dating app, you would absolutely want a woman's input on how to reduce harassment (see Tinder vs. Bumble).

I think the idea is to counter one artificial construct with another. It's been shown that otherwise identical resumes are less likely to be selected when the name is clearly female or minority rather than a common white male name. That would indicate a hiring bias that has nothing to do with ability. Since it's virtually impossible to fix that bias, a common solution is to introduce an opposite bias. Not perfect, but I've never seen a better solution posited. "Just have better hiring managers/practices" doesn't seem to scale.

> since you had to reject a number of candidates that likely were more qualified for the position in order to reach your equal distribution goals

Your assumption here is that the status quo of hiring is an optimum that must be sacrificed for diversity.

The reality is that every hiring program already uses diversity as a criterion, but unless a measurable objective is set, it will invisibly optimize for the comfort of current employees, rather than job performance.

The purpose of measuring diversity in hiring practices is to remove or control a confounding factor, not to add one.

I generally agree with you. Certainly 50%/50% is insane when the pipeline itself isn't giving you that percentage of qualified candidates based on objective measurements.

However, as other have mentioned, there are already biases to hire people "like you" and offsetting those biases is valuable. Often, I'd argue "culture fit" is an umbrella term used to keep people who are different out.

"There are and always have been professions dominated by men and those dominated by women."

And a lot of that was caused by pervasive discrimination.

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