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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

This guy!

Imagine thinking “diversity programs” are a significant cost center, as if their spend were comparable to real estate or employee compensation

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Feel free to disagree with me on this, but I hold the view that diversity programs erode productivity generally speaking.

And for the record here, I'm not even opposed to them as a worker. It bothers me about as much as companies providing me with free lunches (not at all). In my current place we spend around an hour each week either discussing diversity or in diversity & inclusion training, and it's always the easiest hour of my week.

Diversity programs are best viewed as a relatively cheap marketing expense. They exist to make the company look better to certain people. When there are more pressing concerns, you pare them back because you have better things to worry about that what non-customers think of you.

It's not really about the cost though, is it? If they were donating to the KKK or literally setting cash on fire, I doubt you'd have the same outlook. Wasted or misspent money is never something to overlook, particularly when you could have justified keeping a few more employees on if you'd just stopped setting money on fire.

Watch out for the PACs. https://www.protocol.com/tech-company-pacs-2019-2020 (somewhere between donating to the KKK, setting it on fire, and using it for bribes). I wonder what a company that donates equally to both sides is trying to achieve, hmm?

I don't know if you're American or not but that's a common strategy to select higher quality candidates for your side whilst selecting the lowest possible quality candidate for the opposing side via the primary process. That said, that's not always the case and you could absolutely be right.

Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Falsely equivocating spending on diversity programs to "donating to the KKK or literally setting cash on fire" is really telling.

This monthly discussion comes up on HN and it's already turning into a dumpster fire.

> Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

I hope this is right.

But I keep seeing stats like that being thrown around and implying that the cause of those high financial returns are diversity when it is as likely that projections of high financial returns give you the money and time to focus more heavily on diversity. Both can also be symptoms of a common cause such as healthier management.

Again, correlation is not causation.

This is surely the case. It gets old watching progressives paint their interpretations as objective fact.

Could you share some of these stats being thrown around that you're eluding to?

> Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Falsely equivocating correlation and causation is really telling.

So true. SJW at its finest :-(

And yet, somehow, there is zero correlation between hiring KKK members and organizational competitive success - hence the false equivocation.

Nobody said anything about causation, you raised that straw man yourself. If you'd look up the stat I quoted, you'd see McKinsey says the same thing:

>While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...

Right but it is instead likely the case that companies with ridiculous profitability are likely to have diversity programs. That’s the thing about statements like this, it’s just one interpretation of the data.

> top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity

This is the rare case where BIPOC is actually a useful concept. Is this still true when counting only BIPOCS (no Asians, no Hispanics, etc.)?

How can you equate spending on diversity with spending on the KKK?

Google is bragging about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity programs every year.

Revenue: 256 billion dollars.

So "hundreds of millions" is .1% of their spending.

And it is a line item that can be effortly axed in hard times. As others said, it's basically marketing. If you have a company that actively consumes your personal information, but it's a rapacious creepy fascist company, people aren't going to hand over their data to it.

Even if you hate the "woke", you probably still trust a company with a bunch of sensitive, moralistic raving SJWs that will scream if Google is abusing things too much. Which has happened!

Likely, worth every penny.

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