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Comment by uup | Hacker News Reader

A single person can be diverse relative to a group, though. Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men, for instance. When we talk about diversity in recruiting, usually we mean diversity of the candidate relative to the makeup of the company.

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Optically maybe, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Just assuming that the “group of white men” are “all the same” is not very deep. The truth is that they’re all individuals with individual stories strangers who judge them by their looks know nothing about. It used to be understood as a good thing to not judge people based on their gender or skin color, including the nowadays declared “evil” white men.

right words, but it is not what's happening in real world in hiring

DIE initiatives achieve extremely poor diversity of beliefs. The type of diversity that matters. It is outright hostile to it.

> Optically maybe, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Just assuming that the “group of white men” are “all the same” is not very deep.

Not just optically. Even slightly different cultures can result in novel ways of thinking or world views that bring something new.

That's what the parent is saying. The aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men. If you were striving for true diversity, it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity, but if you are only optimizing for optical diversity then those considerations go out the window.

> aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men.

Diverse viewpoints are more likely to arise from introducing 3 black women to a group of 3 white men than if you introduced 3 more white men.

> it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity,

Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?

> Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?

People with different backgrounds are "better" at diversity than people with the same background who look dissimilar, for sure. The wealthy black woman who went to school at Stanford alongside all the other white men on your team does not bring any meaningful difference in viewpoint. The tribesman from Kenya, on the other hand, comes with a very different outlook.

Of course, something akin to "Must be a US Citizen" is attached to most jobs because we don't actually care about diversity, just optics.

"diversity of the candidate" doesnt make any sense. Or are you looking at the candidates ancestory and deciding what their diversity is? A single person isn't "diverse." I know some people are trying to change the meaning of "diverse"to mean "a minority."

May be if they are all posing for a stock photo then yes. But how does it add diversity in a workplace. Assuming all the white men are from different countries.

What if the black woman is privileged, and went to a prestigious college all expenses paid by parents...you know, like most of the white men you meet in tech?

Meanwhile, the person who is self made (real diversity in this situation) and successfully bootstrapped themselves gets passed over because thier skin color is too bright.

Qualified diverse people are rare (no relation to skin color "diversity"). That is why everyone is cracked out over skin color and gender because there is an actual population of people that the HR secretariat pool can EASILY identify by just taking a glance. Thier mission, of course, is to please thier white male executives.

> Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men

Yes or, for another example, an Israeli would add diversity to a group of Americans (of various colours).

No, that person is different or divergent, not diverse. The group is diverse.

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