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bsuvc

These hardly seem like good questions:

> What percentage of the company is non-male?

> What percentage of the company is non-white?

> What percentage of the company is LGBTQ?

If those things are important to you, better to ask something less bigot-ey, like:

"I like to work with diverse teams. Can you talk about what kind of diversity programs or initiatives the company has?"

It's bad form to single out a specific race or gender, even if it is the most hated trio of white, straight, male (/s). It's not the virtue signal you think it is.

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Yea, if someone came in with that agenda right off the bat, I would drop them immediately. That person spends too much time on social media and if they’re going to get triggered or make a crusade over such social issues as me using traditional terms, not being on a DEI crusade myself, then they’ll be a distraction.

I am male. If I suspect that will be a problem, no hire.

I am Latino. If you insist I call myself LatinX, no.

I appear white to other whites. If you try to lecture me on the issues Latinos face, thinking I’m white and from the US, no way.

It happens, but is usually some laughable SJW who thinks they know my culture without knowing my culture. If this were a interview setting, then a hard no.

Right, I couldn't even answer "What percentage of the company is LGBTQ?" because why would you ask people that specifically?

If they aren't discriminating, what do companies need to know the percentages for?

My previously employer advertised the average age of their employees to me during the interview. I later realized they are calculating that metric because they are discriminating against older people. They wanted young, inexperienced flesh like me.

Employees at my last company complained loudly when the diversity question was asked and the CHRO responded that they didn't collect that info because it was either misleading or of questionable legality. This was by far the youngest & most diverse group I've ever worked with (and I'm an old, white, straight male) so pick your poison.

> i'm an old, white, straight male

Same thing as with diversity metrics: This should not quality or disqualify you from anything, why did you feel the need to mention it?

This makes me feel some sort of uneasy. I wouldn't want to be around people who judge me or people in general by random things that "happened" to them at birth.

Yes, those questions are hilarious. As a person on the hiring end of the interview, I really don't care about anyone's sexual preferences and I don't want to care. It's like stating "I want to work only with people with black hair". It's really a bad filter to use.

Oh wait, the list actually has a question about the skin color...

Rofl, only Americans care about this..

It is bizzare. People care about "diversity", but don't ask whether the company sources materials from horrific kobalt mines of Congo, or whether the company is actively working to addict its users, or whether it's doing tax evasion etc. It almost looks like a corporate psy-op - people were made to care about the one "social justice" thing that does not cut into corporate profits that much.

It's kind of inappropriate to ask someone if they're LGBTQ+ as well; they'll tell you if you want to, but you shouldn't keep statistics or records of it.

Furthermore, what company in it's right mind has data on sexual orientation? Are you asking in the annual engagement survey?

If I was a woman or LGBTQ or non-white I'd definitely want to know those specific numbers since it may materially impact my experience at the company. That said for larger companies you can just google this information.

So, you want companies to gather sexual orientation info from employees, store it in their HR database, and then do yearly analysis ("this year, we lost two gays and one lesbian, but gained two trans people and one bisexual")?

Seriously?

Companies shouldn't care about any of this data, neither sexual orientation, nor race or gender... just pick the best candidate, no matter those factors, and you're done.

They already store it. It's asked for every candidate that interviews. So why should't a candidate get the info if it helps their decision>?

Discrimination is a federal and state crime with severe penalties if either the state or individuals sue. I believe companies are in fact legally required to collect this information. If you don't want companies to protect themselves then go lobby your government representatives to not make it a crime.

edit: I also made no comments on companies using this to make hiring decisions. Interesting how you jump from a candidate making their own decision to not join a company to that.

> It's asked for every candidate that interviews

Seriously? This is like a huge NO-NO here... like asking a woman if she's planning to get pregnant and stuff like that.

I don't have to lobby, since it's illegal here already. But most of our worker protection laws were written in socialist times.

Any companies out there who are explicitly NOT into this diversity BS?

As an LGBT non-white non-man, they seem like perfectly reasonable questions to me. In my experience, diverse workplaces are always more welcoming (or at least less likely to be outright hostile) to someone like me.

But why would an employer keep tabs on the gender identities or sexual orientations of their employees?

I think it’s a useful sanity check. Let’s say you have an engineering department of, say, 5 teams. All of the leads are straight white cis men. That’s could very well be because it’s a small company yadda yadda. But it’s good to keep track of it as the company grows to 10, 15, 20 teams. If your engineering department large and you have literally no minorities or what minorities you hire quickly quit, that should be a red flag that something is going wrong with your company culture. Otherwise you’ll end up having a hit piece about how an engineering director sexually harassed women and HR covered for it (NYT about Uber, Google has had this scandal, blizzard is being investigated right now, riot games had a piece published, etc.)

Edit: that’s not to say all companies with large engineering departments filled with one kind of gender/race/sexuality are always bad. But it should be examined to ensure it isn’t a result of a legally vulnerable workplace.

For "demographic workforce data" it's legally required: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo-1-data-collection

Also in order to establish the level of diversity in the company, they need to count how many of each kind of person there is.

> each kind of person

Everyone in their respective buckets, amirite?

Okay, that covers gender as far as I can tell. But how about sexual orientation?

It's not clear. Technically LGBTQ is a protected class now, so it would make sense that EEOC would collect that data now. But some employment attorneys suggest there are better ways to collect this workplace data. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

Many companies ask the information optionally (https://www.thehrcfoundation.org/professional-resources/self...) in order to provide appropriate benefit plans, as LGBTQ individuals may have specific health concerns that non-LGBTQ people don't have.

>diverse workplaces are always more welcoming (or at least less likely to be outright hostile) to someone like me.

No, they are just more willing to hire you for reasons other than your actual merits as an employee.

That's even more the case for non-diverse workplaces, where skin colour is considered an important merit

What would be a good response to those questions? Or would you phrase the questions slightly differently to how it's worded in the list?

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