Kill two bird with one stone, fire white/asian to rebalance your "diversity" metrics. I just don't understand how people can be onboard with this.
"We ensured we didn't fire just blacks, browns, and pregnant women. Because sometimes that does happen -- where a downsize disproportionately targets a minority group."
Why would a downsize disproportionately target a minority group unless you directly admit that part of your management is racist?
There doesn't have to be an admission. It could be overt and conscious, or it could be subconscious (e.g. associating minorities with having less competence without even realizing it).
Imagine a company with an office in Atlanta, that hires a disproportionately large number of black employees relative to the rest of the company due to the proximity to more diverse engineering talent. Then they close the whole Atlanta office and lay everyone off.
Or
Imagine a minority tech influencer that does a great job of recruiting underrepresented people to the part of the company they work for.
Or
"We're staffing up our test engineering group, and we're making a new junior test engineer program that targets career switchers." => "Hey, we're getting especially good employees from underrepresented groups in this career switching program, let's double down the advertising to these groups." => "Times are tough, engineers can test their own code. Let's axe the whole entire test engineer group."
I'm sure you can come up with your own examples also.
Deciding whether or not to close an entire office should probably not take into account the racial makeup of that office. You either have the funds to keep it open if you don't, because if you now keep the office you have all these other expenses and end up having to lay off even more people.
If someone doesn't meet the bar to survive a layoff saying "oh but they help us hire people with green skin, keep them on!" is pretty blatantly saying "you're not good enough to do your job, but you're a good enough token to keep your job." It's offensive and discriminatory.
Recently hired, early-career/less-skilled, and QA/test are always let go first before mid-career and seniors who aren't at the top of their pay band. If you're at the point of double-digit percentage layoffs, the testing group is a pretty attractive target.
I think the issue I have is that I have no problem whatsoever with examining your hiring (and firing) practices to try to eliminate implicit or unintentional biases against any group - disadvantaged, underrepresented, or not. What I have a problem with is saying "here is a completely legitimate, bias-free business decision that is in the best interest of the company (e.g. closing the Atlanta office for cost savings). But it hurts this minority group, so we're not going to do it, which puts the business on less solid ground and has a larger net negative impact."
If bias results in you disproportionately impacting one group over another, you should fix it. If business does, it's more racist to try to "fix" it by taking everyone's demographics into account.
If 12% of purple-skinned employees were laid off but only 10% green-skinned ones, is that disproportional, confirming racism?
(a) avoid disproportionally laying off some demographics, vs.
(b) intentionally disproportionally lay off some demographics to reduce layoffs of other demographics.
(Edited for clarity)
What they said was that race was a factor in considering who was laid off, or how they were laid off. There's no way to polish this turd.
And if they find such an imbalance do they just pick random majority class people and fire them instead?
If so how do they choose people?
At the end of the day, skin color should not factor into WHO gets laid off, or HOW they are laid off.
Anti-racist policies, are by definition (per Ibram X Kendi), not neutral. A neutral policy that does not intentionally benefit minority racial groups, is classified as racist under Kendi.
Edit: Further more, per DiAngelo, investigations should not see IF racism took place, but HOW. Neutrality is not an option. And per Kendi again:
> The only remedy to racist discrimination, is antiracist discrimination.
> The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
> The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
How ANYONE ever took these principles seriously is beyond me.
This needs to be discussed openly and without bigotry. We need to confront the issues of racism on both fronts that includes reverse racism.
Its just racism.
Fairness/Competitiveness is deeply rooted in humans (and primates): https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html
If you go against it, you're asking for societal upheaval.
I can't imagine what I would feel like if my company said something like this and I was a white guy. I guess I would be really sad, offended and discriminated.
But this is something else, instead of saying "we will fire the bottom 11% of performers in the team" or "we fire the bottom 11% based on seniority", they come outright and say that when choosing between two "similar" employees they will fire the least "diverse" person. It's madness.
They don't come outright and say that. They come outright and say something that could mean that, but could also mean "when choosing between two "similar" employees, we ensured we didn't always fire the most "diverse" person."
When faced with multiple possible interpretations, you're treating the one you find offensive as the only possibility. It's not. It might be the case, but there's no way to know from the text.
They're two completely separate things.
Even if you make a generalization about your own ethnicity, it's still a generalization that's not particularly helpful. If an argument is considered inappropriate because it targets a different ethnicity and is also an unhelpful generalization, it does not suddenly become helpful when retargeted to the speakers' own group.
Without seeing internal company data (that a lot of the execs probably don't even have as it's across several teams), it's impossible to say for sure which one Twilio did, but "anti-racist" is going to be a dog whistle for a lot of people who will assume it is the latter.
Any one who isn't asleep at the wheel is well aware that corporate/institutional newspeak terms like "Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" means anti white and asian.
If 90% of the people who work at Twilio are white, and 90% of the laid off people are white, that isn't discrimination.
> how people can be onboard with this?
I think people are not and you might be jumping to conclusions from the previously mentioned leap.
If the layoffs are NOT based off of performance, as the CEO says:
> By no fault of the Twilions impacted today,
Why not ensure they are equitably distributed? Is it racist somehow to ensure that black people aren't the only people laid off?
Performance motivated layoffs are where a company decides they're going to do a reduction solely to cull underperformers (like what IBM has done historically with their "up or out" yearly staff reductions).
When it comes to a economically forced reduction, management is 100% going to first cut the underperformers or those whose roles are no longer needed due to a change in business direction.