Unrelated, but hiring by race or gender is inherently racist.
We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male
We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male
Another argument is that it's necessary to be discriminatory in favour of minorities to level the playing field.
I share your opinion, but not everyone does.
1. I think few companies are out there "hiring by race or gender". At most companies I know, affirmative action means hiring by skill, but making sure at least XX% of the hiring pool are women, black, etc. This really just means your resume is more likely to get seen and maybe you're more likely to get a first round, but not that "you're being hired by race or gender".
2. You could argue this is still unfair (although as previously stated, you're still hiring people who earned it based on skill). Unfortunately not doing anything would me more unfair, specifically by stagnating things in the problematic state they are now [1].
In the macro-historical context, white Americans brought African slaves to their country, and actively deprived of wealth and knowledge, right? That was a societal, conscious commitment to push these people down.
Now that they're free but seriously lacking wealth and behind on knowledge too, they're expected just create that wealth and knowledge themselves. Thanks to "unfair" institutions like public education, this is going to happen regardless, but very slowly unless there's a societal, conscious commitment to push these people up.
[1]: Having a huge chunk of your society be alienated not only socially but also economically leads to conflict, could worsen the gap instead of improving it, weakens social and cultural ties, etc.
It doesn't bother me if an applicant pool is made a bit bigger for marginalized people than myself, because I do not struggle to fall into any applicant pool whatsoever and have not for most of my adult life. Be it for employment, education, or housing.
Where conversations can get annoying is when I feel demonized because inequity exists independent of my individual actions. But I can live with someone bitching on Twitter because I'm not afraid of the police or telling potential employers I have a kid on the way.
What I don't like living with is the inability of others like myself in my own caste who would dismiss reality on reductionist notions "hiring by race or gender is inherently racist" without critical thought. Ignoring lack of diversity tacitly supports inequity and is itself racist or bigoted, by virtue of doing less than nothing to correct it.
How is this true? What if someone is a broke straight white man with three kids and someone else LGBTQ person of color is a young childless heir of fortune? How is the first person possibly privileged in comparison with the second one?
Looking from Europe, America seems to be very determined to recast its very obvious class problem as a race (or even gender) problem, even if it means introducing disadvantages based on immutable characteristics AGAIN. Two wrongs do not make a right and this farce will bite you again in the future, just like slavery and old style racism did.
That said, in the United States, non-white men were systemically marginalized and prevented from participation in society to the same degree. There are numerous examples of this over the last four centuries, but they did not decrease in fervor until about a generation ago. For many reasons, our class divide is correlated to our racial divide. That doesn't mean we don't need to fix both, just that the there are two problems to fix there.
Looking from America, it's hard not to be frustrated at Europeans on their high horses talking about class versus racial divide. Is it so hard to recognize that we have different social problems, and a different history? And that things we talk about might be colored one way, because race, gender, and sexual orientation impact real people on a daily basis? Do you reject the idea that bigotry exists independent of class and it's something we need to work on?
That is the Internet - Americans commenting on Europe, Europeans on Islam, Muslims on Israel, Israelis on India, Indians on China etc. The distance may make you wrong, but it also may make you notice more general outlines of the forest you are commenting upon, while the locals see only individual trees.
Theoretically, complex societies should be able to fix multiple problems at once. In practice, it is very easy for one topic to exhaust ALL the oxygen in public debate.
2020 was all about race and other immutable characteristics in America. Among all that, class problems such as enormous healthcare bills that destroy lives every day, are basically forgotten.
Of course that there are many facets of bigotry out there. But: would you rather be a black upper middle class than a white unemployed person without good marketable skills?
These days, I would say that the answer is very different from the KKK days.
While class problems do, absolutely, exist in the US, race problems also exist.
How fortunate for you. On the other hand, other people are hurt by the explicitly racist policies you endorse. You don’t speak for them.
> in my own caste
Why don’t you speak for yourself, instead of speaking for others and assuming they’re “in your caste”, whatever that means?
But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process. There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias, so you need to look at alternate methods. Setting hiring targets is one way to do it. If you're going to complain that the targets are unfair, you can't just say "Well shucks, guess we have to stick with the system that produces massively unequal outcomes." You've gotta propose a system that's less unfair than the status quo.
Be careful here, the wind has changed and blind auditions are now problematic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
The argument made in the article you cite is ludicrous, blind auditions cannot possibly hurt diversity. If there is a problem when blind auditions are used in hiring for professional orchestras, the problem is elsewhere in the pipeline, and the way to fix it isn't replacing blind auditions, its fixing issue further up the pipeline.
There may be a pro-diversity case for using something other than current skill as a factor at other stages of the pipeline which are intended as, in whole or in part, educational and where current skill is being used not as a measure of current professional competence, but as a proxy for potential. But even there that's largely a poor substitute for identifying and addressing the factors producing a skewed pool.
That's assuming people only know their clones.
Other companies have tried. Names and vitals deleted from resumes before any people involved in the hiring process see them, remote interviews conducted over IM or with voice masking. That's one benefit I see with the much-maligned leetcode-style interviews, is that your identity is completely isolated from the process until the very end.
There's no reason you can't do an interview over text-chat instead of in person -- hell, with most of us working remote for the foreseeable future, that's how the majority of on-the-job communication will happen anyway.
This is actually kind of funny to me, because in the open source world plenty of people have extremely productive working relationships without ever seeing or hearing each other, and in many cases without even knowing what country the other person lives in, how old they are, or what their legal name is.
So while there are definitely arguments that face to face communication is "higher bandwidth" or has other advantages, it doesn't seem out of the question to me that the hiring process could be "blinded" to a similar extent to orchestra auditions, without any significant reduction in hiring accuracy.
(Ok, maybe not quite the same extent; language fluency and style of speech are still significant signals even if everything is done over text)
In this case, I'm not going to respond in much detail, other than to note that there are 30+ years of writings about affirmative action which get deeply into this issue. Your summary of it is misleading and incomplete.
Since you can't actually calculate someone's skill, all you can do is hire on an attempted measurement of skill. And if you find reasons to think that your measurement of skill has inaccuracies, you'd probably be better off taking that into account when evaluating a candidate.
It's a hell of a lot easier for a white male to pick up those skills because of culture and society than it is for most other groups of people.
I think there's a lot that can be done to help minority groups succeed and I'm a little less concerned about what's "fair" to white males like me.
Do you think it's possible that you can "hire by skill alone" and given two equally skilled people - one man, one woman - always hire the man, and that you could hire some equally skilled women if you randomised or removed whatever male-bias exists in your hiring?
Do you think it's possible that there are equally skilled men and women available to employers to hire, but that employers have built frat-boy workplaces where only men are interested in working, and cultures that drive away skilled women?
Do you think "hire by skill alone" means always hiring the most expensive people - like buying jewellery by value alone? What if a company can't afford to staff with all the maximally skilled people, but can get 80% of the skills for 50% of the money?
What about hiring people who can be trained or skilled up, and training them?
What about teams, where the collective skills can be greater than the sum of their parts, but maybe not if all the parts are identical?