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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

> Many of the job candidates’ diversity statements emphasized their own “intersectional” identities—“a person of color and a member of the LGBTQ+ community,” “a first generation, fat, queer scholar of color” and so on.

When trying to get a job in academia, anyone can get a leg up by identifying as queer, bisexual, or gaining a bunch of weight. I'm especially curious about the first two: I wonder how much of "queerness" (which seems to mainly involve dyed hair and piercings) is just a response to incentives.

In retrospect, of course, DEI will be totally incomprehensible. Imagine explaining this to future people.

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Academic who has served on tenure-track hiring committees here.

At my (public) institution, none of these identities were discussed when considering candidates.

We did look at diversity statements as an indicator of if applicants were aware of the broadening participation requirements set by federal funding agencies.

As an aside, the experiences of the marginalized people you describe don't seem to indicate that there is a net advantage to them. I think anyone who was adopting an identity in bad faith would quickly discover that it wasn't as helpful as they thought.

> As an aside, the experiences of the marginalized people you describe don't seem to indicate that there is a net advantage to them. I think anyone who was adopting an identity in bad faith would quickly discover that it wasn't as helpful as they thought.

I doubt it's helpful enough to land a poor applicant a job but it's probably quite beneficial for a good applicant to be bisexual or queer and to find a way to bring that up in their DEI statement. There's little cost involved in claiming those identities. The linked article describes situations where candidates are selected for these reasons.

Also, I'm not alleging "bad faith" so much as people gravitating toward identites that confer advantages and street cred. People are capable of convincing themselves of all sorts of things, for example in the past many gay people convinced themselves they weren't gay and really believed it.

Imagine the vocabulary you'll have to use to do so

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