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I saw an interview with one of the late night hosts (I think it was Seth Meyers). He told a story about building the staff for their show as part of the launch. They asked the various talent agencies for packets for writers (which are collections of sketches and other material tv comedy writers use to get hired. Think artist portfolio). The show wanted to hire a more diverse writing staff and asked for that in packet submissions. They only got a handful packets from women out of hundreds of options. The show went back and said they would only look at packets from women. Suddenly packets came from all over and the show found a number of great female writers.

It was a really interesting conversation because to get a diversity of outcomes they had to completely change their approach, not just sprinkle some diversity into their existing process.

Applied to the rooney rule from above it would involve cultivating multiple inputs to the talent pipeline to make sure interesting candidates don't get blocked along the way. NFL positions like head coach have a pretty limited pool of candidates to begin with, so ensuring an interview quota is likely sufficient. For something like software developer the pool is so much deeper and wider and interview quota on its own is unlikely to be sufficient.

Isn't that blatantly illegal?

Certainly.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense though as a fair hiring process, it's just brutal gender-specific hiring.

Nobody ever doubted that there were 'good female writers' but there are 1000 writers for every 1 job, it's a hugely asymettrical situation.

The reason it's completely illegal and morally questionable to hire that way is because it ignores the material character of the individual in question.

If there are 10x more guys running the gauntlet of early-phase writing career, then it's really unfair and they are not getting the best writers (staff composition advantages notwithstanding).

A better approach wold have been to work with the agencies to get a true sense of the pipeline, and then to encourage and demonstrate the job is 'real' for more young women to understand that it's something they can aspire to.

The possibly sexist/racist actions of these companies are probably only going to get us into more culture wars, I'm not sure if they are a 'temporary pain' issue.

Edit: if you listen to 'Inside Conan OBrien' podcast by the head writers you'll get insight into several very inside conversations about the gender issue. In the 2000's there were hardly any female writers. Writing is a buddy-buddy system that's going to lean a certain way, so expressedly looking outside the boundaries of the pipeline is reasonable. Also a lot of the female writers in the 2000's indicated they literally 'did not know it was a job' in their youth. To be fair - almost nobody did. Though I'm not in the biz, as a young man I literally never contemplated the concept, I don't know anyone that even thought about it, it was like a thing that happened in a far off land. It's a hyper-niche kind of job with specific dynamics.

Jon Stewart had a similar story. They had to change the way they did hiring to diversify the writer's room because the existing pipeline was just going to keep sending them college-educated ironic white guys.

https://youtu.be/p1H7KxPlbQw?t=2631

"lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech companies. "

Tech companies are diverse, more so than most companies.

You mean to say 'not the right kind of diverse'.

The ridiculous, Monty Python conversation that nobody wants to have, is that since White Americans are slightly underrepresented, but Asian Americans are about 600% over-represented ... which means getting the 'right' kind of diversity literally means hiring less people of colour, specifically Asians, which seems really unfair to them for very obvious reasons.

It's funny and Orwellian at the same time that the problem exists out in the open, but nobody dare speak a word of it. These are the kinds of problems that Cults and the Bad Kinds of religions have.

The problem with the 'rule' as you describe it is it may decrease diversity in any sense.

There is no data to support the fact that African Americans and Latino Americans are showing up in the pipelines in sufficient the right qualifications to 'balance out' diversity.

The data actually works the other way - the ethnic and gender composition of people hired basically is a good reflection of the pipeline.

I understand we can do better than just looking at the pipeline, but from any specific, direct hiring perspective, the pipeline is it.

Within the pragmatic but admittedly narrow confines of 'the pipeline' - any company is going to be hard pressed to hire considerably more of the 'right race' of people. It's not going to matter that much how you do interviews.

'The Solution' is going to have to be 1) getting more kids from different backgrounds interested in tech at an early age and into the pipeline and 2) accepting that 'diversity' is an ideology on some level, and that just because you have people of some group, doesn't necessarily imply negative or racist behaviours. Nobody will ever state the later in public, but it's possible we come to terms with it.

Can you cite sources for "more diverse"? I'm curious if you mean "higher percentage of POC" or "numerous different minorities are all represented"? A company composed entirely of 30-something black men is 100% POC, but it's still not actually that diverse.

I definitely agree that it's weird how much we focus on holding tech companies "accountable" for diversity when they're fundamentally working with whatever pipeline society gives them.

By 'diverse' I meant 'PoC' mostly.

Tech, particularly in the Valley has technically an under representation of non-PoC.

(I myself have worked at companies that were 95% Asian, being almost the only 'White Guy').

The reason 'tech' is highlighted is ironically that's were the 'woke folk' are. You can go the Midwest Cracker Co. and find 90% White and people are not too worried about it, except for in a kind of 'corporate optics' way.

It's the general employees of tech, tech press etc. that are fairly assertive in promoting issues of diversity because it's what they care about. A company has to have a certain profile in order for it to be newsworthy. CNN, even if they wanted to, can't really run an article on the Midwest Cracker Co. but they can for Twitter because it has public resonance.

Traditionally, tech diversity referred to gender diversity, in which case, yes tech companies (especially engineering) are very skewed for a white collar position. Note that this post is about gender diversity.

If you attempt to extend it to ethnicity (which this post is not about), this gets all really arbitrary, which is where your point comes in.

The cause of underlying skews is then a different discussion altogether.

"Traditionally, tech diversity referred to gender diversity"

This is definitely not true.

" extend it to ethnicity ... gets all really arbitrary "

I don't think so, the issues are very similar.

Ethnic diversity is relatively new (it was rarely discussed much 10 years ago compared to gender, at least as far as goal settings was concerned) -- and how is it not arbitrary?

The "major groups" used are entirely arbitrary (yes, they are EEOC definitions generally, but those are arbitrary and there's no particular reason they should be relevant for tech).

It's also an arbitrary choice whether to consider group intersectionality or not. (e.g. Are Asian women underrepresented in tech?)

What’s funny to me is that people are only complaining about diversity in the US and Europe. Although I have seen a few articles about class based diversity in Latin America and India.

Maybe I am missing something but I don’t see complaints about diversity in Arabia, Persia, African Regions, Asian regions.

Yet there are historic multi-ethnic conflicts in most of not all of these areas.

Take the Hausa, Fula, Igbo, and Yoruba of Nigeria for example, as an example.

Ultimately, dividing people and calling it “diversity” resembles a divide and conquer tactic for reducing the cohesion of a society, making it easier to control (via narratives and reducing my inter-group trust compared to some central, approved authority), in my view.

Check out Ryan Long for a humorous example: “When Racists and Woke Agree On Everything”:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg

Diversity in the West basically means 'Not Just White People' due to historical power asymmetries, and the fact that at least in the 'New World', 'race' is not supposed to be a defining feature of national identity, or at least for some. It's slightly more of a paradox outside the New World because ethnicity and nationality are really tightly intertwined.

Power asymmetries are not always and not simply the result of a lack of "diversity".

Power asymmetry can be the result of a variety of interactions between a variety of factors-- not just "lack of diversity".

For example, a power asymmetry might result from information asymmetry, and information acquisition does not necessarily require [political/economic] power.

Also, a power asymmetry might result from a competency or cultural asymmetry (such as "need for achievement" *), which are also not necessarily due to a "lack of diversity".

Competency or cultural asymmetry can result from cultural or sociological tendencies of a given group to promote certain activities for their particularly culturally nuanced view of "status".

Power can also be a geographical asymmetry. And a demographic one, in terms of political economics.

* "Need for achievement (N-Ach) is an individual's desire for significant accomplishment, mastering of skills, control, or high standards. The term was first used by Henry Murray and associated with a range of actions. These include: "intense, prolonged and repeated efforts to accomplish something difficult." . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_achievement

There's multiple problems with a Rooney Rule:

1. You'll lose candidates to companies that close faster. In fact, you'll likely lose the best candidates.

2. Can be gamed by hiring managers. If they want to close a rec fast, they just find an unqualified member of an underrepresented group to interview to hit the Rule. Waste of time for everyone.

3. Demographic targeting (especially beyond gender) has a variety of issues (arbitrary definitions, unknowns about whether candidates are in what demographic, etc.).

> The beauty of this approach is that you don't lower your hiring bar.

You don't lower the bar but you do put a locking mechanism on your recruiting pipeline that reduces your hiring throughout in an already supply constrained environment and you impose greater hiring costs to make sure you always have a candidate.

Now that may still be a profitable thing to do, but you can pretend there are no costs and downsides. What you need to do it look at all the pros and cons and balance those considerations to find out what is most profitable. Anything that isn't profit maximizing over the time scale we are optimizing for is also to the detriment of the company.

The Rooney Rule sounds good in theory, and yet 28 out of 32 head coaches in the NFL are white.

(For reference, only about 25 percent of NFL players are white.)

How many were white before the Rooney rule?

30 of 32.