The Rise and Fall of the Chief Diversity Officer
wsj.com
wsj.com
Seems to be a natural optimization. A new type of role comes along, experiences rapid initial growth, then orgs figure out that it’s really just another spin on an HR role, so they get merged into mainstream HR.
I expect the same thing to happen to “Chief AI Officer” roles - they will be absorbed back into CIO/CTO roles.
My company started sending out "Eid Mubarak" letters the same year they announced they would no longer have the resources to sponsor MENA visas. They're offering anti-harassment training at the same time the sales team is chasing down far-right orgs with huge contracts. It's all a farce. The rank and file know it, the executives know, the minorities who can't get hired and promoted at real jobs know it; the only people who don't are the DEI teams.
2. ESG credentials attract investors with ESG goals.
3. Diversity is associated with positive goodwill, so it can be exploited to gain an edge in marketing.
I’m not saying I agree these are valid justifications (#1 particularly could be spun as an argument against diversity), but these are some of the reasons that get deployed.
“Save me from what?”
“From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in”
The amount of money spent on diversity executives, well yeah probably a bit high, but about the amount you’d pay an HR exec at that level
As a gay man, if I have 2 similar job offers, one with a company that shows they are accepting and dont accept prejudice, and another that says nothing. Which one do you think I’ll choose?
Not just in diversity, but I’d far more prefer to work for a company that has values that align with me, eg I wouldnt want to work for a company that is involved with arms dealing, sure this will make you a lot of money for shareholders, but do you want to hand out pain, misery and death? Not all of us work for the bottom line. I recognise I am working for a business, but Id much prefer to think of my job as creating something, making things easier for people rather than just making money as a mission, that sounds like a miserable way to live.
As a contrarian data point, as a black man, when I see a company or other organization hit all the DEI talking points about embracing minorities, etc....I throw up in my mouth a little bit and head in the opposite direction. I prefer blind meritocracies, which is what both the Army and Marine Corps used to be when I joined them. Now....even the Marine Corps is looking to staff a DEI Officer in the National Capital Region (seriously).
I honestly don't know. Do you seriously think that a company that has a diversity officer "believes" anything differently than one that doesn't?
We should not confuse promoting diversity with enshrining this into bureaucracy in a very specific and, in my opinion, misguided way. There are plenty of examples of these officers making the problem worse.
... the one that said nothing.
Are you implying that companies that don't beat the pride war drum publicly are prejudiced against you? Do you extend this to other people as well? I've never been to a pride march, I post nothing about supporting this or that movement, yet I don't have prejudice against gay people. They live their lives. I live mine.
This seems like more manufactured victimhood than anything else. Given that companies are driven by profit, and companies find doing this kind of thing profitable, do you think the ones that are "out in the open" are telling the truth? How much kow-towing does a company have to do before you believe them?
> Not all of us work for the bottom line. I recognise I am working for a business, but Id much prefer to think of my job as creating something, making things easier for people rather than just making money as a mission, that sounds like a miserable way to live.
Making money is the mission. The reason a company can afford these supposed "diversity efforts" that you use to judge good from bad are because they are making money. You may be different. I, and many people like me, want to go to work and go home with the least amount of song and dance possible. I don't want to have to sit through another layer of bureaucracy, another layer of song-and-dance, just to have a job. It feels so very forced. I have no evidence it's drives out bad actors either. All it does it give people another job risk where if you don't tow the line perfectly, sing the right song, or march with everyone else you will get fired (canceled). In fact, this sounds like the exact opposite of diversity to me.
Maybe, maybe not. But if one company explicitly says they have your back, and another doesn’t, most people will go with the one saying the right thing.
That’s no guarantee of protection either, inclusivity is superficial at a lot of companies, but there is a better chance that you will have a good experience.
What isn’t clear is whether these analyses are well controlled. E.g. is it over indexing on companies flourishing in wealthy coastal cities. I doubt it’s a causal effect personally. But I don’t have numbers either way.
Promoting inclusivity for sexual orientation and gender is different from trying to improve diversity. I think it’s pretty rare to see the latter relative to racial diversity efforts.
These diversity "studies", as the grandparent points out, are light on data and heavy on marketing. Several years back when I looked up the McKinsey 2012 (or 2013, whichever) study that started all this, it was a marketing flyer with zero data.
It's really convenient you can make such a hefty claim and provide essentially no evidence to back it up.
The McKinsey stuff and other stuff is generally publically available data. It is real. I think you can find it for some resources at least. The question is whether it’s compelling.
As requested, the quote:
> Companies tend not to have data on the sexual orientation of their employees. Such studies are not possible to do.
The studies are absolutely possible to do. Throwing up our hands because companies "tend not to have data on sexual orientation" reads like a cop-out when the comment you responded to was attempting to get at some data around this very issue.
> The McKinsey stuff and other stuff is generally publically available data.
Is it? I found a report [1], which isn't the one which I previously remember seeing but it'll have to do since that older one evades me now.
Look at the footnotes. Several pages say their source is the "McKinsey Diversity Database". I searched for it on Google and DuckDuckGo and it didn't show up for me. Do you have a link to the underlying data for this database? I tried and failed to find one.
Lastly, review the authors at the end of the doc. If you put the authors' bios at the top of the report, the conclusion would be surprising to exactly zero people. That doesn't mean their conclusion is invalid, but given that much of their data is tied up in a "diversity database" that I can't find is VERY suspect.
[1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functio...
> data isn't important as long as I agree with the conclusion
Your quote does not contain a claim that pretends data is not important so long as I agree with the conclusion. It in fact contains a claim that the data is not possible to acquire. And I think it’s kind of dumb of you to pretend otherwise. You cannot practically do a good study or even surface stats on company performance vs sexual orientation diversity when companies do not collect sexual orientation data. That is not a controversial statement. Observe how I am not making a claim that pretends what that data would say in either direction.
I’m not really interested in trying to find this thing. But I don’t feel like you’re reading what I’m saying. It is very likely a real dataset. It’s just not very deep. It’s public info like stock prices, leadership profiles, and published diversity stats. You can find similar datasets if not this one precisely. And if you would again look at what I said originally, it should be expected that there is a relationship. Why? Because the fastest growing companies of the recent past are generally growth stocks based on the coast in naturally more diverse areas. As I already stated it’s probably not causal.
I think it’s unnecessary to suggest anything here is “VERY suspect”. That’s unlikely. It’s just not very interesting. Like, they’re showing p values of 0.1 on some pages. Shrug. You’re reframing this discussion, which could have been mild agreement off the top of insufficient evidence to identify a causal effect, to an annoying about whether the exercise is a lying conspiracy or not. I’m just not interested in engaging with that.
In the last 3-4 years the amount of, what I will term, "bullshit diversity" has spiked dramatically. The internal politics involved (at least where I have worked) do nothing but create division among the employees. No one will voice it but the term "diversity hire" gets thrown around in one of several reworded forms regularly. I have been at two companies with Chief Diversity Officers whom I lovingly refer to as "Chief of Racism". It's not uncommon for these people to go into company meetings throwing around all sorts of language implying preference of one race over the other. They never say it outright, but imply it with "poorly performing diversity metrics" and "efforts to reach out to marginalized communities". It's nonsense in the strictest sense. Perhaps it's some savior complex.
I think these diversity efforts are doing the exact opposite of what they intend to do. I, and likely many others, view these bullshit positions as manifestations of identity politics. Due to the riots in 2020 companies are focused on driving home this non-sense language about inclusion wherever they can. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like other diversity initiatives, and personally I'm glad to see this position being rendered moot.
I have no idea how to say "diversity of thought doesn't exclude diversity of traits". I've tried before and have been labeled everything from right-wing extremist to white supremacist. The zeitgeist effectively prevents actual discussion on what diversity means. I am puzzled how simply selecting on race/sexuality/whatever somehow brings better engineering/sales/leadership to a company.
All I know is I never hear this charlatans talk about how this improves the quality of the product. The metric they appear to be chasing is putting brown people in company photos (for the optics) and this seems like the opposite of the alleged intention. I've worked with engineers from all background, races, and other traits. A common thread seems to be everyone is tired of this. It would be nice if this noise was relegated to Tumblr and Twitter where it belongs.
However, I've also seen cases of outright bigotry — sexism, racism, agism — where having a DEI office was a godsend and immediately nipped a different variety of bullshit in the bud.
Ideally I'd like to see these DEI efforts settle on some reasonable application of goals and practices that reflect values that most people can agree on. I worry that having it bundled into HR will actually make it worse, as it will just become part of the unaccountable faceless bureaucracy that HR has evolved into, at least typically in the US.
But such is my experience of modern life in the US — well-intended ideas become abused and performative, and then are either ingrained in Kafkaesque bureaucracy, or thrown out like the baby in the bathwater, and we go from one extreme to another.
They intend to neuter any opposition by ensuring every organization is riddled with politically-approved agents.
Prove you don't discriminate by having a chief diversity officer, then that officer makes sure only the like-minded can get/keep jobs. It is after all their job description - the not like-minded contribute to a "hostile atmosphere".
Leaning on the common struggle as the wage class is what unites. The unique focus on how oppressed each of us are turns us all into victims. It's not really something I've seen in my lifetime before the last ten years and I think it's garbage in, garbage out.
All the points you raised against hiring based on race can also be used to be against based on gender. Why do you think one is "powerfully positive" and the other is "counter-productive"?
The distinction of sex occurs everywhere throughout nature. At a broad level, it's consistent.
The amount of melanin in your skin is not. There is a spectrum of mind-blowing diversity in facial features among Black, Hispanic, Asian, White, whatever. In this category, what divides us spans a multitude. It's a cudgel we heft to beat our fellow human being with.
Asia makes up 59.4% of the world population, and Africa makes up 17.6%. Europe and North America by comparison only makes up 9.4% and 7.5% respectively.
>We also have studies that demonstrate positive influence in more gender-equal workplaces.
There are studies that do the same for ethnicity. With a cursory search I found:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
"In the case of ethnic and cultural diversity, our business-case findings are equally compelling: in 2019, top-quartile companies outperformed those in the fourth one by 36 percent in profitability, slightly up from 33 percent in 2017 and 35 percent in 2014. As we have previously found, the likelihood of outperformance continues to be higher for diversity in ethnicity than for gender."
>The distinction of sex occurs everywhere throughout nature. At a broad level, it's consistent.
>The amount of melanin in your skin is not.
But no ethnic/racial diversity proponent would claim that the benefits comes from the difference in amounts of melanin in someone's skin, just like no pro gender diversity proponent would claim the benefits come from the shape of someone's genitals. The equivalent would be something like "distinction of cultures/language" occurs everywhere throughout nature, which as so far as we know is true. Whales of the same species have different calls depending on where they're from, for instance.
My primary objection is to the reification of race, which drives us to compete for ideas of purity that don't really exist. And that is happening, especially in American workplaces. It's contributing to more outrage, not less. I don't think that's healthy for anyone.
And I don't think it'll pay off.
Like "AI ethicist", it seems these roles only attract the most unethical and toxic people in the world.
Neither role is even inherently evil. It just seems that only evil people want to (or get to?) do them.
Yass kween!