The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.”
All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side.
I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
The crazy thing was that white males were NOT over-represented in the first place. 2 years later, they are the most under-represented group, and the overall org is now more unrepresentative of the population than it ever has been. There are 3 times as many asian females as there are white males in the org, even though there are ~10x as many white males in the population at large (which is allegedly what the org cares about), which produces a representation disparity between the two groups of nearly ~30x. Most white males left the org, as they could all see that advancing at the company would be nearly impossible given the incentives put in place.
For the record, I think it's perfectly fine if asians are over-represented in a tech company (i'm asian myself), I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.
If someone ever believed the stated goals they are not capable of rational thinking.
I know plenty of smart people who sadly go along with this BS just because it's what all "reasonable" people are doing and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The same people don't think about politics and parrot what left wing media tells them.
The activists themselves are not capable of rational thinking.
There are many more factors at play here.
They're saying that nominally, what diversity efforts care about are people being underrepresented relative to the general population. That's the bar they're using, yes, but they didn't choose it.
But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020.
The protests that summer sent a cultural shockwave in urban/upper-ish class society, and the social pressure ratcheted up for orgs to favor non-white male groups, particularly for one particular non-white group. The issue was that this particular non-white group was not overly abundant in the pipeline, so there wasn't as defensible of a position for the discriminatory policies the company felt they had to put in place, so they resorted to indexing to the broad US population. (which I flat out don't think is defensible myself, but I'm empathizing with the mindset that they were employing at the time)
Most companies are representative of their pipeline but then if you set that as the benchmark - well those DEI people would get fired and never be able to have a job or be able to start a culture war over a mostly non-existent issue.
I wasn't even in that department and the drama that came from it was exhausting.
They would often take longer than their allotted meeting time in meeting rooms because after their meeting someone in there was crying ... why? Who knows... it was only known within that group. It just kept happening over and over... Along with folks storming down the hall all upset, again who knows why. Now stuff happens sometimes at work, no big deal, but running into these exhausting people couple times a week really takes a toll on you.
When were moving offices the tech support team was seated next to HR. At one point HR invited the both all of tech support and HR (at least those at that building) to a meeting to discuss why tech support wasn't "social enough" and "spent all day in their cubes", I duno maybe they're working... Thankfully that got cancelled quickly after a number of people (me included) noted to a VP that "No matter what the reason, there's no way this meeting ends in anything but a total disaster."
Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team and how much work they put into it and so on... I even left those events early because it's a lunch event and I don't want to eat veggie pizza only, I can only take lunch for so long.
Sometimes a group's workplace culture is ... not a lot of culture. Depending on how things are going, that might not be bad.
People who don't consider the needs of others are bad employees, regardless of their gender.
At some point we have to start recognizing that forcing employees to attend work parties and lunches and other events by using social shame tactics like this creates a hostile work environment.
Managers who enable this are toxic as hell.
Fortunately for me at that workplace HR eventually realized nobody was listening to their complaints / we weren't going to entertain them.
And who has benefitted? This stuff was supposed to help people that lacked opportunity but for the most part it’s people who were upper middle class (predominately white women) to begin with reaping the benefits & using these policies as a political weapon to get more influence inside companies.
I’m personally hopeful that the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Harvards admission practices also affects the private sector and that these types of policies simply become illegal.
In 2015 I worked at Dropbox when DEI discrimination was ramping up. Among other things, we only interviewed boot camp grads if they were diverse. We also have diverse applicants two tries at the phone screen instead of one. The onsites we're pretty fair, save for a couple hiring managers.
If you asked someone in person, nobody would ever admit to anything. But the company did a poll on whether the hiring process was biased against men and 83% responded yes. What did Arden, the head of HR at the time, do? Rant about how offensive this was to women and how we're all sexist.
To reiterate, most women and URM did not want these policies. There was some more support for affirmative action supporting URM, which makes sense to me and I largely agree with: things like lower college attendance and family income are concrete examples of systemic disadvantage. Women, on the other hand, attend college at largely the same rate and the disparity is due to choice rather than lack of opportunities.
Were they poor? Sure. Were they marginalized? You bet. But the single mother, the child without a father figure and the idle black man were not serious issues, let alone stereotypes, until after people tried to "help" them.
I don't mean to say that good intentions justify the policy, as the 20th century disproved time and time again, but your phrasing attributes malice or cynicism where none is needed or helpful.
I personally feel bad for the dedicated, accomplished and smart minority developers that I've met. They get drowned out in all the noise caused by these DEI drives.
Worst of all, we can't even talk about it.
When the kids were old enough to not need it...she stayed in that position. The extra time lets her volunteer and it's been a pretty awesome arrangement.
It benefits the people who gain power and status by using virtues as a social weapon.
The rationale being promoted to the corporations by management consultants is that the company will make more money.
>Our latest research finds that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organ...
I think the best answer to these divisive, sexist or racist behaviors is to show them in practice they're dumb, kick their ass in the market.
An open-minded, welcoming organization is going to attract the best minds. Collectively, these people will kick those ideological-driven asses.
EDIT: my point is we cannot legislate change to these people's minds. The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society.
If I see a lot of racist behaviors against blacks, or latinos or whatever, I'd be glad to join them and work hard to kick these racists out of the game.
But in the private realm, I think it's not sustainable. It's better for us to work hard and make people learn from reality.
These people are extremists. If we try to legislate change in their private realm, they'll get even more extremist internally. They'll crave for a chance of revenge. Even if it takes decades or centuries. It's unsustainable.
* Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
* the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;
* the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older;
* Title I and Title V of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended (ADA), which prohibit employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in the private sector, and in state and local governments;
* Sections 501 and 505 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities who work in the federal government;
* Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), which prohibits employment discrimination based on genetic information about an applicant, employee, or former employee;
* and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which, among other things, provides monetary damages in cases of intentional employment discrimination.By the way, I'm available to assist whoever is a victim of these shitty extremist behavior. And I can do and say whatever I want. Everything I do is my responsibility and my property. Not my employer's, because I chose to not have one.
Wait, isn't this the exact definition of privilege?
I'm privileged if I have a job.
I'm privileged if I don't have a job.
What a privileged rationale!
>"The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society."
I'd argue that changing minds does not need to be an objective of legislation. Sometimes there's just a behavior you want to prevent and it doesn't matter if people truly agree with the reason why.
But clearly, hiring nominally asserts that it seeks the strongest applications. So it's contradicting itself with DEI discrimination.
That excuse might have been entirely accurate though. Most men are indeed not willing to participate in such a blatantly sexist culture.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's okay either way, I'm just disagreeing with the idea 'most men' won't participate in such a culture; most men (oftentimes unwittingly) do.
what exactly doesn't happen?
Just because something is more represented by a demographic does not make it sexist. e.g. Nordic countries seem to be generally celebrated as being socially progressive and ridding themselves of sexism, yet female representation in STEM fields is incredibly low.
From GP: >The recruiting team was all women
I guess this is what you get when you outsource hiring.
Hopefully someone becomes rich for solving that problem without needing a friend of a friend to get your foot in the door.
Right, but that's exactly the sort of problem that these inclusivity initiatives are designed to tackle (they aim to forcibly change the culture to the point that it is no longer prejudiced). That this one was doing the opposite is highly ironic.
There's a pretty funny picture of the HuffPo team at one point and it is just ... young white women. That's it. That's your diversity.
Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness?
If so, this should be exploitable by a competitor. Assuming you don't have the bandwidth to directly work for or advise a competitor of this type, you might still be able to benefit as an investor.
If not... I have a hard time getting worked up about this. It's contrary to the dominant narrative, but if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job, I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses, because it's not like there's currently a shortage of those.
[additional note, in response to comments: I agree that this behavior still constitutes an injustice. However, among the numerous injustices in the world, one has to prioritize what to fight. My main point is that, as a practical matter, there are plenty of instances of biased hiring that ALSO reduce overall economic efficiency; let's fight those easier and more broadly profitable battles first.]
So your only metric for biased hiring practices being problematic is business performance??
No, if money is used politically. In a free market you would be right, but with the amount of money printing going on, we're not living in a free market.
> I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
They were likely thinking of it in terms of “righting wrongs” in the overall sense by increasing the percentage of women in the company.
Publicly, everyone will swear up and down that “diversity” doesn’t mean “fewer whites/men”, but in practice, it’s how those “ideal” demographic ratios are achieved.
It was reinforced every time there was a self congratulatory post in the company wide channel referring to the “marketing ladies” great work.