Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn't Propose Plans to Advance Diversity (2020)

Senior government (and crown corp) jobs in Canada often make french proficiency the first requirement, even when the defacto working language is english, and for jobs where ostensibly being bilingual has nothing to do with being qualified for the job.

When I am looking at jobs and I see "bilingual" as the first requirement, I know to stop reading because I see they are trying to tick a box instead of actually solve a problem. So I look at this in a very similar way. Why, as an academic, would you want a job being a diversity champion or whatever. If this is something you're passionate about, cool, but its unlikely the best physicists or biologists or whatever actually want to spend their time on that stuff, so just don't bother applying for the job. If employers want to add silly requirements that don't actually pertain to the job, they will get candidates optimized for those requirements instead. Just like government which is a sea of mediocrity, this will happen to these institutions as well. Let them make their bed and lie in it.

I like to ask people what they mean by diversity. Although diversity of thought is one of the core reasons for hiring from diverse backgrounds, it never seems to come up!

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