And I consider almost all "anti-rqcism" to just be racism but against groups it's permitted to.
For example, asians and higher ed.
Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown
Org B) 10% of applicants are brown, 0% of hires are brown
Org A might be close enough to a rounding error you can call it good. Org B likely has some issues.
Hard to fix what you don't measure.
"So which report makes an organization less racist"
So that implies that org B is more racist(because it hired zero brown people) - is that not the conclusion the author of the comment wants us to reach?
Forrest Gump is smarter than a rock, but he is not smart.
Do you or do you not think it is incredibly likely this is an unfair die.
That's Company B.
But hiring isn't random. Maybe all the "brown" candidates lacked necessary qualifications. Or needed visas which they couldn't get. Or a million other reasons other than "org B is racist".
My point is: you need further context. To look at that one stat as given above and conclude org B is racist is....unwise.
I am not sure I have ever been on a team without some kind of like-me bias. It's real hard.
Or in the exact time slice you got the data there weren't any brown applicants.
> Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown
That means nearly all brown applicants for got hired. You're probably thinking this is a "good stat" and therefore a "good employer". But what if the rest of that company's stats were "90% of applicants are white, 80% of hires are white." Is that still a "good stat/good company"? According to you, it should be (and I would tend to agree.) In both cases, we're pretty much showing "If you apply for a job here, you have a ~90% chance of getting in, regardless of skin color." Not bad!!
But wait. What if the demographic of applicants is more like 50% white and 50% brown. (Assume a non-remote workplace). Now, one has to wonder why, in a demographic where half the population is brown, why only 10% are applying to this organization? Could be many reasons. Culturally, maybe the brown folds simply choose not to apply here. Or maybe the organization has a history of mistreating brown folks, abusing them, paying them less, etc. That could explain the low rate of applicants here. Your good example of a "less racist" org doesn't look so good anymore. Many factors could be a play; some less intentionally-evil than others. Hard to draw conclusions simply by reporting on one stat in isolation.
> Hard to fix what you don't measure.
Yes, but harder to think critically about the data you do gather.
Nope, the denominator is different. If you select the same percentage from each category the proportions stay the same.
If there are 100 fruits where 10 are apples and 90 are pears and each fruit has 10% chance to be selected then you get on average 1 apple and 9 pears => 10% of the selected fruits are apples.
Not measuring something doesn't make it go away.
To answer your question - if there is such a complaint made, I'd appoint another qualified hiring manager(or HR person) to sit in on any future interviews with this person and give me their report on the situation.
Some people think that affirmative action isn't racist.
But tell me what it is when you think like: "hey we have enough asians, exclude that person, let's find a black to get our quota"
Some people will defend it like a user said below:
"By engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism."
But what is "anti-racism"? It's being racist in the opposite direction. You think Y group is being oppressed "subconciously" so you oppress X group as much as you think you need to, to "even" it out.
We should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
Tl;dr: it is less about the company being less racist on their own by knowing the race, it is more about the company having to report those numbers so that others could hold them accountable (in case there are any arising concerns about racism).
For instance, if you see that applicants that are otherwise equally qualified are getting rejected on recruiter screen disproportionally by race, you may have an issue with how your screening is done. And yes, this happens: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf
A reasonable goal is that race, gender, and sexual orientation should have no bearing at all on how likely it is that you get hired, promoted, or fired. So these inputs are typically blinded to hiring managers but available to HR in aggregate to let them perform these kinds of analyses.
I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
There being more male construction workers doesn't make it a sexist system.
There being more female teachers doesn't make it a sexist system.
There being more asian doctors doesn't make it a racist system.
Let people do what they want to do, you can look at demographics but stop trying to read racist tea leaves with it.
If it doesn't, you have an issue. The only way to know for sure is to measure.
E: To be clear, assuming equally qualified candidates, you would want expect hiring proportions to match the same A:B ratio as you get from applications.
No, I wouldn't expect this at all as I do not expect the height distribution of basketball player to reflect the height distribution of the general population. As I do not expect the personality trait distribution of pop stars to be the same of programmers, and again I do not expect the latter to be similar to the general population. Personal inclination, innate intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, and of course demographics, parenting, generational wealth all play a role.
Skin color is not an advantage when programming. It is also a characteristic by which it is illegal to hire a programmer.
That can be measured (imperfectly, but well enough), by filtering only for qualified candidates and then comparing the rate at which both A and B are hired and the rate at which they appear in the filtered list. E: This of course requires the filtering to be done _only_ with knowledge of a candidates skills/accomplishments, and association with demographics (including name, location, etc.) to be done only after the sorting.
If you also collect demographics of applicants, it may tell a different story.
If your employee demographics look skewed, but they're consistent with applicant demographics, you have an easy out when accused of ism.
Of course, if you collect the information, you might also use it for ism purposes. Or you might just lose or discourage applications from non-favored people. It's hard to show.
(It also doesn't help that the federal categories feel poorly chosen and ill-defined)
Are you sure? There being more male programmers is widely used as evidence that it's a sexist system.
If females don't want to go into programming then don't make them.
There are really good female programmers, but males tend to be more frequent.
We all have different traits that make us good at different things, that's the beautiful thing about humans.
But if there is something to address, address the pain points specifically and directly.
Don't try to guess a "correct" ratio and work backwards with affirmative action (denying one race to boost up another).
For all you know the current ratio is the realistic ratio and where we should be.
In reality, the proportion of women in STEM directly matches the proportion of women in STEM majors, which directly matches proportion of women who say they're interested in STEM.
Maybe institutions can afford to leave sexual orientation out of it until you’re talking about a body of people that is firmly within the age of consent threshold or has at least hit puberty. A lawyer might disagree but for him the remedy is to bend him over and remove the stick from his ass.
Ideally the race information you input would only be given to HR and not shown to anyone involved in the hiring process. It would then be used to identify anomalies indicative of bias occurring.
[1] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discriminati...
I'm just suggesting we let this same process unfold naturally. And that affirmative action, by placing emphasis on superficial differences between people, takes us in the wrong direction.
I don't doubt that some companies use this data to drive quotas but that isn't something inherent to collecting and analyzing race/gender info in hiring.
On top of that, something being impolite to mention doesn't mean it's not driving discrimination.
You seem to be avoiding the question. This process clearly works, and doesn't require any metrics collection or monitoring. Furthermore, DEI initiatives are clearly harmful to organizational goals[1] and clearly disenfranchise people who are just interested in colour-blindly carrying on with their work. Why do we need them?
PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI. The example below was undertaken at a major corporation with the world-class consultants.
1. https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-me...
Across what time scale? Exactly how long is acceptable to you to wait as things work themselves out? Surely 400 years would have been enough time for this to really kick in.
> PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI
I'm not defending DEI as practiced, I'm merely defending the idea that 1) racial discrimination in hiring happens, and 2) it's possible to do stuff about it faster than letting this work out "naturally".
I'd say ~80 years is about an appropriate amount of time. It's about how long it took antisemitism, anti-Irish and anti-Italian sentiment to die out. No amount of metrics will change the minds of adults who grew up in "a different time". Your only option is to wait for them to die.
> it's possible to do stuff about it faster
My point is that by attempting to address the concern faster than "naturally" you are almost certainly prolonging the "natural" time actual integration takes.
I'd prefer to be called German Irish (or some other identifiable family history origin) or American. White or Caucasian isn't a nationality or race.
If your father is from Ireland, but you are dark skinned then you will suffer the same prejudices and abuses as anyone or your skin color. If your father is Kenyan and you are light skinned, you will smoothly fit in with the “white majority” without anyone digging into your history.
The context of US race questions is to counter US racism. Logical etymology doesn’t really apply.
If your ancestors came to America and were Irish, they faced discrimination just as much as other groups, if not more than most, even if they had a similar color tone as other Europeans.
What possible genetic diversity can be had from just 3 families [0]... (Shem, Ham, Japheth)
I identify most with Inyalowda [1], haha.
Several South American countries have more European ancestry than does the US.
Hispanic/Latino (and not-Hispanic/Latino) are the only ethnicities in that context, and it exists specifically to enable categorization that reflects the social construction of Whiteness at the time it was created while not obviously breaking the (bogus, in any case) biological rationale for the construction of “racial” categories, which is why most categorizations of data using that ethnicity treat Hispanic/Latino as another bucket alongside the racial buckets, from which everything of either White or every race (usage differs) is transferred if Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is also indicated, leaving the effected race buckets with only the non-Hispanic/Latino elements.
> Don't they call you "white hispanic"?
Usually they ask me to check a box, and as a Brazilian I don't ever really check "hispanic" as I don't feel that is a term that applies to me.
I’m committed to anti racism but the US approach is charlatanism all the way down. The esteemed Dr King and Mr X would be rolling in their graves.
No, it doesn’t. In fact, most of the time in the US, “skin color” is code for race/ethnicity. Light-skinned Black people, White non-Hispanics, mostly-White Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians can have very similar or even identical literal skin colors; but the Black person is still Black, the Whites are still White (except maybe the Hispanic ones), and the rest are neither White nor Black.
Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
You are correct that the government has started asking contractors and large employers for some of this data. But it is only a requirement for the business itself, not for their customers.
"Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
"Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
"Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
ETA: More importantly, I had forgotten about the EEO-1 report. Any company with over 100 employees is required to track and report this demographic data. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
A really good defense would be to build a totally race and gender anonymized system of hiring. How could we have discriminated against your race and gender when your name was obfuscated, your voice was modulated, and we took very strict precautions to ensure nobody involved in interviewing or setting compensation even knew your gender? This was not feasible before remote interviewing became normalized during COVID, but I'm interested in seeing if it gains traction.
The evidence the plaintiff brings can be as simple as "I polled ten people with my job title in the company." If the company hasn't tracked this data at all and can't produce it in its defense, then in a civil case the plaintiff would have the preponderance of evidence on their side and the resulting resolution to make them whole could be all the back-pay they are owed between what they made and what their peers made.
So even outside of the need to file EEOC-1, companies are heavily incentivized to track this data (as any competent employment lawyer would indicate); you don't want to be scrambling to satisfy evidentiary burden in a lawsuit.
If someone complains about an orchestra that doesn't have the racial or gender makeup they want, but the orchestra points out they have blind auditions and robust systems to ensure that the identities of musicians aren't leaked to evaluators then it's tough to provide a preponderance of evidence of discrimination.
We'd have to wait to see what happens if someone tries it. Point is: in the average case, it's setting oneself up to spend time in court, and most companies optimize for staying out of court, not becoming a test subject on the path-dependency of novel caselaw.
The requirements to prove a discrimination suit are far more direct: you need to prove that the company directly used protected class to make hiring or compensation decisions. And if the people making these decisions were never even informed of the candidate's protected class status it's exceptionally difficult to make the case that this was affecting this decision making.
> for example, basing a candidate's pay on 110% of their pay at their previous employer can result in implicit wage discrimination because men tend to enter the workforce at a higher pay and catch higher pay bumps in promotions
Actually, this is a perfect example of something that isn't going to get the company into legal trouble. They didn't make this decision on the basis of race, gender or another protected class. They made this decision based on something entirely objective: the candidate's previous pay. If that employee's previous employer was engaging in racial discrimination, then that's the company that vulnerable to a lawsuit.
I'm interested in this notion that you can sue your current employer, because a co-worker's past employer potentially engaged in gender discrimination that bumped their salary, which in turn was used in negotiations with the current employer. Do you have an example of any such lawsuit succeeding?
Rizzo v. Yovino, 9th Circuit ruling, indicates that basing present pay on past pay may violate the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericbachman/2020/03/13/past-sal...).
... but more importantly, this case has entangled the Fresno County public school system for over a decade. That's expensive relative to the alternative of... Not doing that.
> "Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
> "Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
No. It should be more along the lines of "Prove it". To come forth with such a claim carries with it the implication that one actually has /evidence/ for it, however (in)substantial. The response is NOT to automatically deflect to the defense in order to prove innocence.
> "Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
Nothing wrong with that. Evidence can be procured on demand by court order. And even if it were discovered that this one individual female client were paid less than her male counterparts, you'd have to prove that it was because she was female. That means gathering evidence on what her female peers were paid, as well. This particular client could have been an anomaly (e.g. less hours worked, less responsibility, not exactly a peer to her counterparts, the lower pay was only temporary and/or due to some previous agreement, etc.) leading the courts to find nothing systemically wrong with this employer. Don't be so quick to judge, without evidence or context.
And the burden of proof is on the accuser. The court doesn't just say "we don't have the data, so we must assume it's what the accuser says".
> If you insist that the complainant is the one who has to investigate the salaries and work performance of all her coworkers, you’re immediately setting her up for failure.
Yes! And that's exactly how the court works: the burden of proof is on the accuser.
> Requiring the company itself to record this information can provide evidence that they’re abusing employees
And why on earth would the company want to do this, when it could potentially harm them?
It is so ridiculous that it gives the information to allow the company, manager, HR to discriminate (even unconsciously), exactly the opposite of what the legislation is trying to achieve.
What is worse from a cyber security perspective is that this information is now proliferated increasing the chances that it will be breached.
Golf clap US government...
For all the talk about it in this thread, we aren't moving to some kind of double-blind anonymous voice muffled 60 Minutes interview screening processes anytime soon. It's a goofy idea because once you hire somebody, people are going to work face-to-face with them anyway.
Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example:
> An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs.
Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
This preoccupation with race as a demographic discriminant is pretty uncommon in Europe.
Perhaps Europe would benefit from more data in this regard?
If we could guarantee that another genocidal dictator won't come to power then I might be OK with it. Couple that tracking with the surveillance and one might be able to ensure few slip through the cracks.
But is the race of someone voting really useful, or is it just a fairly good proxy for other demographics. And at what point does this use of race as a demographic in itself become a societal pressure for blacks, latinos, asians etc to fit into certain stereotypes?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/politics/joe-biden-poo...
But of course, some people are so coddled by modernity and their social media bubbles that they implicitly think racism is all about choice of vocabulary or other completely superficial things.
1. HR gets asked by their employees for statistics on how many non-binary/PoC/women/<insert your label here> people in the organization are represented in management/executive/engineering/<insert your probably under-represented role here>.
2. The org at first responds "We don't know because we don't collect this data".
3. The question-askers respond "How convenient, that's because you know they're under-represented".
4. Company responds with typical "meritocracy" answer, then eventually launches long, drawn-out process because hey, "we're a data driven organization!"
5. Years later, after the original question-asker is long gone they share the data, ideally after a few cycles that show <current under-represented individuals> have grown from small percentage of total to slightly larger small percentage. Company loudly boasts on all social media platforms about wokeness and snowflake status.
6. Times change and society moves on, leading to questions of "why does the company care if I'm <whatever, it's now a non-event, progress!>"
7. Employees respond with lack of giving a sh!t or manufacture false outrage at the violation of their personal privacy.
8. the cycle continues, while data deteriorates, leading to some pretty hilarious options in drop-downs.
I suspect it's very rarely actually important, it's just on the list of things they always have asked for and always will.
And some positions are only offered to diverse candidates or candidates from a particular subgroup, like LGBT etc. Last year, one of the roles I had to fill was diverse-only. Only applicants of color were allowed to apply for the role.
Technically-legal-but-still-violating-the-spirit happens if the people involved bother asking legal about it.
2. I can at least point to plenty of evidence that this happens. Take this 2021 UC Berkeley Study [1] showing that job applicants with black-sounding names were significantly less likely to get called back than applicants with white-sounding names. What's the motivation there? Good ol' fashioned racism. Y'know, the exact motivation that prompted the laws in question to be written.
It’s not my job to argue with HR about what constitutes legal hiring practices.
This is as close to a neutral and objective description of ESG as could be written in English! That is not grievance, and it should not be downvoted as such.
Now sexual orientation, that's a head scratcher.
However, in most applications and services, this is not used like that. The gender mapping seems to be used exclusively to determine whether the marketing emails should start with "mr." or "mrs.".
Anything vaguely social is going to have instances where you want to refer to a user in the third person.
Of course, an easy solution to this is not to ask for gender per se, but for what pronouns to use. Even a dropdown with "he/she/they" options is going to cover basically everyone. If you need something more complicated than that, so be it, but probably YAGNI.
Die deutsche Sprache hat Geschlechter, welches Geschlecht passt am besten zu dir? Maskulin, Feminin, Neutrum oder zurück zum Englischen wechseln?I want to think we've grown out of the early design era of launching an image editor and getting asked on first run what format I want to use for exporting images. Ask me that question when I hit the export button. Similarly, ask me questions about grammar when it's relevant to the software, don't ask me questions up front that might never be relevant to my use of the software.
As an analogy, imagine if you started using Bandcamp and it asked you up-front for tax information just in case you ever decided to publish an album in the future. If the user hasn't ever switched to a language that requires knowing what gender variants they use, then that question is just one additional tiny piece of signup friction sitting in front of your service that you could get rid of for the majority of your users.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/diversity-boards
The simplest way to game this is to claim to be a bisexual. This is even easier if you’re already married, since no one will expect you to prove it.
The ranking is referred to as the "progressive stack". Arguing over which groups go where is called the "oppression olympics".
And in some cases it could even be considered as sexual harassment.
Example: "I am lesbian" in other words means I'm sexually attracted and may or may not have sexual intercourse with another woman.
Now try to think of questions you would have to ask to receive the above as the answer.
Maybe it's just me, but unless asked, it feels very inappropriate to just tell people with whom you have sex or wish to have sex with. Especially when the topic of conversation was about something completely different and in no way related.
I feel the same way and have never been able to get a good answer for this one. "Statistics and hiring" is a very lame-duck answer. How does it help our product knowing that we have +1 more homonormative person?
If you have zero, and you're big enough to be collecting data, there's a good chance that something is wrong.
Apparently it helped Subaru a lot. [1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/how-sub...
Unfortunately, I think that's another reason we need to collect those statistics. Because if we can't measure the problem, we'll have a very hard time fixing it.
They found that patients were more likely to follow the doctor's instructions after they left the clinic if the doctor was the same race as the patient.
I mean, I guess both, but it's primarily sexes, isn't it?
I immediately dropped the applications. Perhaps screening out people like me was the real goal to begin with, and maybe it's a win-win after all.
Quite often, it seems, they ask to build your profile to sell to advertisers. As much as it would be great for everyone to be treated equally, our genders do affect the crap that we buy and advertisers often care about it.
But more broadly, finding trends/patterns really does come down to being able to sort people into different buckets. Especially now, with the push towards ML, you never know which feature will turn out to be significant, so the strategy ends up being to collect as much data as possible and let computers churn through it looking for patterns.
It would be tempting to ascribe a gender-specific motive to the collection of gender data just based on the significance that we feel towards gender. But I'm not sure those collecting it have those motivations. They're just sucking in everything that they can get away with in the hopes that some of it will prove valuable.
Turns out that my employer deliberately doesn’t send gender to the insurance company. This means it defaults to male. A urologist appointment for kidney stones was then rejected by the insurer when it didn’t match the provider.
If this was an Ob/Gyn appointment that makes a little more sense, but kidney stones and urology in general are non-gendered. This was not the first claim either. Plenty of others were fine with other providers.
I can see gender being used sort of generically for fraud prevention in some cases. But, it’s a stretch to say it’s broadly useful.
In general now I lie on forms about as much as I can. At Panera Bread I was asked if I’m the CEO when my account came up first name Panera, last name Bread. There’s no reason for any personal data, so I don’t give it.
Gathering this by companies is so they can better profile you and serve you tailored content (as defined by them.) E.g. If you respond "Man", they might want to send you fewer ads for tampons and more ads for razors or whatever. Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's the reasoning.
This whole agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life is ridiculous. Why settle for race and gender? Let's make sure we have equal amounts of people by eye and hair color, height, weight, or any other criteria. Doing anything less is surely discriminatory.
[1] as defined by the prevailing political zeitgeist
So rest assured, companies won't treat chin diameter the same way they treat race and gender in an imagined "agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life".
As people have mentioned, this applies to hiring -- but at the top of the funnel in who your posts are reaching/motivating, not just at the end for diversity stats.
Like, why should they know?
I'm happy for them to have anonymized stats for decision making, but they shouldn't have it attached to a record with my name.
We hate it, but we're required to.
Even still, if you must record the relevant salutations, you can ask for the salutation to use rather than the gender or sex.
Once you internationalize you will need this because in German it's an absolute no go to address a stranger by their first name (at least for B2B services).
And internationalization is on the road map for a lot of companies.
I was working for a UK steel supplier and they would address all their email recipients with their first name. We had to change this when internationalizing into German. If you want to sell to Germans you are much safer to use a more formal tone.
Slightly related to that is the formal and informal you that exists in a lot of languages.
I was also working for a German fashion startup mostly targeted at young women. In German it was fine to address everyone by first name and the informal you, but when translated the page to French, we could keep the first name but had to change the informal you to the formal one.
Insurance.
A very similar thing is asking for your feedback on every second page of the website, and then forwarding it straight into /dev/null. It's because once you shared it via their website, you will be less inclined to go post a (possibly damaging) opinion elsewhere. Your instinct to be heard has been satisfied, and the chance of a negative review visible to others has decreased by N%, which is still good enough for "economies of scale".
Similarly, HRs have somehow collectively figured out that if you nudge people to self-express by stuffing their gender issues into the peers' faces, they will be less likely to self-express by demanding better salary, scheduling, working conditions, etc. It organically grew from the "employee of the month" bullshit and other "trinkets in lieu of a raise" programs, and is now reaching completely ridiculous levels. Hopefully, the rising inflation will give people a more tangible problem to solve, and we will see more focus on things like quality of life, affording kids, retirement perspectives, and so on.