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Comment by lormayna | Hacker News Reader

> Olohan said he began feeling increasing pressure from his supervisor, who told him that there were “obviously too many white guys” on his management team. In July he was encouraged to fire a male employee to make room on his team for a woman, the suit claims.

This is the most crazy section. Why physical characteristics like gender or ethnicity should be important in the management selection? And if yes, why only those two characteristics and not considering others like body weight or baldness?

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Their goal is diversity. I think diversity might have been shown to lead to better team outcomes.

To me the craziest part is:

> Olohan was told that he had shown favouritism towards high-performing employees

As much as I personally have read on this it's not blanket "diversity", or even "diversity of opinions", but rather quite strictly "diversity of viewpoints/perspectives". You know, like for example when we design urban environments we consider residents, pedestrians, cyclists, disabled and what not.

> Their goal is diversity. I think diversity might have been shown to lead to better team outcomes.

I don't think that's actually been "shown," it's more of an axiom that's assumed to be true without proof. IIRC, the idea that "[sex/race] diversity leads to better team outcomes" may even just be an idea meant to mainly lend legal cover to diversity efforts (e.g. university affirmative action race-based admissions) that would otherwise be illegal.

> Why physical characteristics like gender or ethnicity should be important in the management selection?

To be clear, the below is not taking into account the allegations in the article, but just seeks to explain the thinking without judgement (as I'm frankly not sure which side I fall down on).

There's a school of thought that some degree of weighting helps to redress systemic issues by changing incentives, justified on the basis that there should be an equally capable pool of candidates in the underrepresented demographics.

The thinking then goes that e.g. if promotions at certain levels are biased, the argument for allowing that bias to continue is often that the pool to promote from leaves too few capable candidates of the underrepresented groups.

The problem with that, is that if (to take extreme numbers for simplicity) 100% of people being promoted from VP to SVP in a company are white men, then a lot of women and non-white people will either self-select out or not get promoted at lower level because it's a strong signal they're not valued and have no future there.

That in itself can make it a goal to diversify companies at higher levels irrespective of the current talent available for promotion at the level below.

As a concrete example, in 2006 Norway added a legal requirement for at least 40% of either gender at board level of a public limited company (ASA; usually listed companies as only ASA's can be listed, though they don't have to be) and in some other situations (e.g. companies with significant government ownership), and during the debates over this change, this was part of the arguments:

If there weren't enough qualified candidates, that was itself considered evidence of a systemic bias that making the change was hoped to help address. Both by giving women an incentive to stay on track towards board seats and give companies an incentive to address other biases to ensure there was a capable pool. Over time, it was also hoped that getting women onto boards would further strengthen the pressure from boards on companies to address the, as well as further develop a pool of women with growing board experience.

It was explicitly acknowledged by many proponents that there was a chance that it'd be hard to find suitable candidates initially, but that was seen as a sufficiently temporary problem to be addressed by companies through training and mentoring, not a justification for not changing the incentives.

Thanks, this is a great explanation. And combined with OP's last question, raises for me the question, why not incentivize other marginalized classes, like people who are highly unattractive? Note this a question of curiosity in reasoning, not one of judgement.

*Do we say OP for the top level comment?

The challenge with applying this too broadly, I think is that it becomes a dual problem of objectively enough defining who fits in the marginalised class, and of defining a class that is big enough that you can try to accommodate it without harming other groups, marginalised or otherwise, in an unreasonable manner.

With respect to gender it's fairly simple. Already with respect to ethnicity it starts getting tricky to define objective rules.

It's also a tricky problem to apply at too small scale. E.g. in a small enough team or in a small enough niche, pure chance will end up with some small groups that are not diverse by pure chance even in an idealised setting with no biases. Trying to prevent that all the time could be potentially highly detrimental. Figuring out which imbalances and at which scales are by chance, and which are down to biases is a hard problem.

A cursory look at the way DEI policies are applied shows the claimed justification to be a blatant lie.

If we were actually concerned about tipping the scales properly based on actual income data, white men would not be the primary targets. We would be going after Brahmin Indians, Taiwanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, men over 6 feet in height, men with facial features that are shown by studies to be associated with "leadership", men born to well-connected families, and any number of other by-birth associations that are actually demonstrated by the data to have high correlations to income level.

"White men" are fairly average when it comes to income in the United States, yet we are gunning for them far more for income equity than we are for their obvious statistical superiors.

This, alone, demonstrates the lie underpinning equity efforts.

This argument is missing the results of the regulation. Otherwise it's a bit circular: gender is important in management selection because it is important for management selection in Norway. :)

2006 is 17 years ago. There should be some results by now. What was the failure criteria for the legislation? Did it fail/succeed according to the criteria? Did anything change at lower positions?

I can agree with your points, but I think this is happening in one way, at least for my experience. I have worked for a big defense company and they try to hire as much as women as possible, even if it's not easy to find women in that field (let's say 1 woman over 3 man). Women had also a special career growth path and other advantages. In front of our building there was the headquarters of one of the most famous luxury brand in the world and more than 80% working there were women. According to people working there they don't care a shit about diversity. I am okay with diversity (even with some concerns), but why don't apply diversity also in the fields where women are more than men?

Not that I agree and it is more nuanced than this but the argument used to justify such discrimination is compensating for historical exclusivity. Enforce the diversity and let merit catchup someday basically.

I think given modern technology, companies can and should be extremely regulated and monitored on their hiring and firing decisions. At-will should be federally banned. If they define objective, auditable and specific merit based criteria, they should send that information along with every applicant and every decision to look at a resume, interview, call and hire/reject to the EEOC which can look for patterns and investigate on its own to validate the reasons being given in those decisions. I think with that, there could be a path to meritocratic hiring/firing.

But make no mistake, discrimination based on gender, race,etc... is rampant. I am even all for expanding that to cover any arbitrary criteria. If I decide to wear a clown costume to work, the work has to justify why the clown costume materially prevents me from performing profitably.

Sorry mate, there is no place for rationality in US diversity politics.

> US diversity politics

This is in no way restricted to US.

I agree. However, as a person living in Europe and working for american companies, I can attest gender and race are huge factors when it comes to incentives for hiring, promotion, etc. when compared to companies in my country, which do show some of the same characteristics but not with the same weight.

I understand the reasoning and benefits of positive discrimination but I have also seen rationality being relegated to the point plain bad decisions have been taken in the name of diversity.

My previous job was an US F500 in Europe. We had an open position for a mid-senior role and HR pushed us very much to hire an African girl that was still not graduated and she neither have experience in the domain that we are working (we are looking for someone with experience in cybersecurity and she was completing her master degree with a focus on UI/UX).

Eh, it largely is? I remember the pre-crisis world, were the policies were projected as universal - basically the assumption was that us culture would infiltrate all things, and thus all places would have us culture and discussions.

In russia and china, some values were shared, but by now means all values were shared. Europe may come close to having the same cultural discussions, but 10 years delayed compared to the empire core.

Other regions engage in mimicry and may be doing there own thing entirely otherwise. Means, you got a small layer of "international community" among the elites, but the rest of the population, is of other opinions but also never asked.

I think GP was saying that it comes from the US, not that it only occurs in the US.

Not that crazy. Such allegations against Google are common. There was a recruiter there a few years ago who accused them of tasking recruiters to not hire men.

Socially accepted in some circles „positive“ discrimination.

Because we as society decided so.

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