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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

>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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