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>DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist and to date I have seen zero solid scientific evidence proving that diversity is a strategic advantage

I can't speak for the broader, more recent term of DEI, therefore I am not speaking to how diversity is achieved.

However, I can speak to diversity being a huge win. I've seen features go through the lifecycle process that if there weren't other perspectives in the room (namely, people of color, non male genders and folks with disabilities), we would have ended up releasing things that would have either not been good for our entire addressable market, or accidentally offensive.

Saved us embarrassment more than once. Having a pool of people from different backgrounds, ability, ethnicity and genders can be real value add, in above their competency as engineers (of which, they most certainly were some of the best I ever worked with in many cases)

> However, I can speak to diversity being a huge win

For the sake of example, let's substitute diversity for wealth.

Wealth distributed equally and justly is good. People who feel they must control the distribution of wealth because of the injustice of the world are evil. And their practices are evil. And the actual implementation of those practices only leads to more injustice and evil.

How does diversity in the work environment being a plus somehow equate to wealth distribution?

This quite frankly does not address anything I wrote at all.

Simple.

Diversity is good. People who enforce it for the sake of diversity and build their careers around it are bad and essentially parasitic.

That still doesn’t make sense in terms of replying to what I wrote.

Not to mention, as with many things, it all comes down to the details, I would t paint it with such a broad brush

"I have seen zero solid scientific evidence proving that diversity is a strategic advantage."

It depends on what you define as solid. There are some compelling case studies on diversity effects, at least when going from almost zero diversity to a little diversity. I don't think there's any solid research on what levels of diversity are beneficial or detrimental.

In additon to your points, one thing about DEI initiatives that I don't like is how they ignore other types of diversity, including people with disabilities. It seems to be all about gender and ethnicity.

> In additon to your points, one thing about DEI initiatives that I don't like is how they ignore other types of diversity, including people with disabilities

This varies. I've led DEI initiatives and one of the points I make is "there's diversity in diversity". Meaning it isn't just gender and ethnicity. I do believe that actually caring about people is the most important thing, and I've found that people who do care about others generally share the trait that they want diversity in their environment -- at least certain types of diversity that aren't inherently detrimental to the work they do (e.g., you probably don't want small/light offensive linemen). The reason for this is because I think most rational people who care realize they have major gaps in their understanding and want to bring in more people, in whatever capacity makes sense.

While I don't have anything near conclusive data, the people most against DEI tend to be the most insular in general. That said, often those the most extreme for "DEI initiatives" aren't really pro-DEI -- rather they are just pro their specific group, which just reduces to being the same as those that are against DEI.

I've seen people say this sort of stuff, even within/leading the programs. But actions speak louder than words. The organizations specifically track ethnicity and gender without tracking other diversity factors.

My own organization contracted with Auticon for an extremely small number of roles and made a huge publicity push about it. When asked what programs or assistance they have for neurodivergent employees, they had none. Any sort of career pathing or placement assistance for candidates with this issue - no.

The people leading the efforts or training might care, but the people in power don't.

The people in power in your company may care more than you think. The issue is that the folks that track this stuff outside of the company probably don't care.

The reason for this is because there are certain classes of diversity that are legally protected (at least in the US). And there is historical context that generally increases sensitivity around those issues. At least for us, that resulted in us having to make sure we had tracking data for, race, sex, age, and disability. But other types of diversity we still cared about, but didn't spend the same amount of time on.

It's not a perfect system, but the intent was there.

Unfortunately, believing that Diversity isn't just "visual diversity" will get you fired at the world's finest corporations: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...

The studies that claim benefits from diversity are almost always correlation, not causation. It's easy to see how reverse causation could be at play. Companies that are more profitable can afford to have diversity programs. This fact can be reframed to make it look like the diversity came first and caused the higher profitability.

When DEI studies were first being touted I used to ask to read them. I thought that perhaps I would eventually find one that actually had any rigor behind it. After reading dozens, I stopped asking. It seems that rigor is not required. Just a headline that resonates with key constituencies.

The case studies we reviewed in classes had causative mechanisms behind them, such as changes in strategy, design, or marketing suggested or implemented by the minority group. It's a lot more involved than "added x number of minorities and revenue went up x%". Many of the diversity studies are junky though if they aren't as granular as a case study due to how the data is reported and the lack of context.

This type of case study could be valuable but it could also just be cherry picking. Did they look at all changes suggested by minority employees? Or did they just look back and reflect on the changes that worked out?

I have seen posts on social media by journalists looking to write about DEI. Instead of asking open-ended questions they were just soliciting success stories. That doesn't lead to the truth. It leads to the preferred narrative.

How did you organization create its case studies? Would it have actually written up a case study showing that the net effect was negative?

I understand it's hard to control for bias.

If we approach this from a different direction, can we disprove that having people from different backgrounds and perspectives who can point out things the others missed are not beneficial or provide a negative? Perhaps focusing on the claimed mechanism of benefit can shed some light on the effects.

Quite some re-framing there. I'm all in favor of viewpoint diversity. But suggesting that this is achieved by hiring based on skin color is not the right way.

Also it is very easy to show how a team is hurt when normal hiring standards (GPA, other numerical prerequisites) are ignored in order to hire someone based on sex or race. I first experienced this when I sat in a classroom and worked on group projects with people who were clearly admitted via AA preference. AA was not functioning as a tiebreaker in close cases. It was used as an enormous boost, and everyone could tell.

Sorry, I was talking about actual diversity and not what diversity programs have become (the problems you listed).

Diverse groups trust each other less, that is often framed as a positive (your workers are less likely to unionize!!) but you can clearly see why it can also be a very negative thing for teamwork.

So in general you want diversity when you want weak subordinates that are easy to control, that is the main advantage companies are really after. The other thing is if you want a group of people that holds each other accountable, since diverse groups are less trusting they are less likely to conspire, so useful on boards etc.

Yes, there are a lot of kinds of diversity that can have value in an organization. For example: People whose native language is not English. A mix of people from different continents, where different kinds of items are common in hardware stores. People from rural and urban areas. Introverts, extroverts. People from countries with different social norms. People with different understandings of the term "football field". People from countries that don't use US dollars and US-formatted zip codes. People who write their family name first, followed by their given name. People who have lived in areas without reliable internet access or electricity. People who have worked in blue collar jobs. People who don't drive a car. People who did not attend university. People who have spent time homeless. People who have taken care of aging parents. People who have raised infants.

There are all kinds of diversity, and it's really valuable to have someone in the room who realizes that your product will be offensive in India or unusable in Brazil, or dangerous to young children. It's way more than skin deep.

> DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist

We live in a sexist and racist society (and always have). One either takes no action which is passive acceptance of the status quo or we attempt to take action which will inevitably have some racist and sexist consequences (intentional or not). There is no neutral option.

Railing against DEI almost always comes across as a convenient scapegoat to justify the status quo which overwhelmingly favors men in the tech industry. I will admit I don't have the statistics, but I would expect that one would find proportionally fewer and fewer women at every rung in the organizational ladder in tech firms, which to me speaks to the challenges that women face even in this supposedly level tech space. It is one thing to get an entry level job, possibly even through a DEI initiative, but another to actually be treated as an equal after hiring. My experience at a big company made clear to me that even men who like to think of themselves as egalitarian or even feminist, often have very obvious unconscious bias. I can particularly recall a manager talking up the potential of a young man relative to his female peer even though she was more productive than him on basically every imaginable metric.

Wrong. You refrain from people from achieving incremental improvements. The opportunity for change towards a positive direction is inhibited. That there is a status quo is a wrong assumption as there certainly was a positive development strongly associated with free societies that specifically prohibit discrimination among racial lines. A development that hopefully doesn't get stunted by DEI any further.

People that do DEI as their main job certainly try to ensure that discrimination will stay. They have a vested interest in it for themselves. What can I say, they are just human. Probably sexist and racist, just like you said.

If you're asking if sexism in the industry still exists, yes, it does.

I worked for a company that had 0 female programmers. "How curious", I thought as a fresh grad, "that while there were some women in my CS classes, there were none at the company". "Well, there are only 30-40 of us, so it must simply be a quirk of statistics."

Yeah no, the owner didn't think women could handle production systems so he only hired men. He told us this directly at lunch one day. He looks exactly how you're probably imagining he looks based on that statement. His wife made him give me a bigger bonus one year because at a company dinner, I made the mistake of sitting next to her because I didn't recognize who she was, and mentioned (over the course of dinner) that my wife and I wanted 3 kids and she was going to be a stay-at-home mother. I worked there for far too long because I was a new grad who hadn't ever left a job before.

It being so obvious at my first job was honestly a good wake-up call, because now that my generic white male illusion that it's all in the past was soundly shattered, I see it's more insidious forms. Like at my next job, how the one woman on our team was suspiciously the only one who took longer than 2 years to get promoted from [mid-level eng] to [career level / sr eng]. I don't think that one was nearly as explicit, but I no longer sit here and go "hmm how curious that the only woman is the only one who didn't fit the pattern". It's because of unconscious biases in the promotion review panels.

> When adjusted for factors such as lifestyle choices, women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's

Ignoring what lifestyle choices means and taking this claim at face value:

Can I have 5% of your lifetime earnings? Can I increase your taxes by 5% for no benefits?

It's not a negligible difference even with your handwaving. It's someone else's money and not your problem is the tl;dr here.

"It's not a negligible difference even with your handwaving."

So what are the root causes and fixes?

The handwaving is "lifestyle choices" make the gap closer than it's been documented elsewhere and is now "95-99%" vs. say 85%.

Even at that rate it is not negligible. Does that clear it up for you or are you still beating your wife?

"Does that clear it up for you or are you still beating your wife?"

Please abide by the HN rules or leave.

There are two separate rates and have been for a long time. Those rates are non-adjusted (in the 80)s and adjusted (95%+). Of one actually reads the BLS reports, you will find both. They are indicative of separate issues. The adjusted number measures fairness of pay. The unadjusted number measures essentially vocational distribution/choice.

Many politicians misrepresent the unadjusted number and its meaning, including presidents in SOTU addresses, to evoke the kind of emotional response that you are displaying right now. All while their proposals will do little to nothing to close the unadjusted number (their proposals focus on pay fairness which is a much smaller number).

Yes, 5% is significant. If you have suggestions for how to address either of the numbers, that would be great since that's what I asked for in the first place. Perhaps some of those things can even help me - people with my disability face a 30% (unadjusted) detriment to earnings.

> Can I increase your taxes by 5% for no benefits?

You know that's not how taxes work, right? If someone's taxes are increased by 5% that means there's more money available to do things (or pay off debt). Many or even most of those things might have no direct benefit to the person paying the taxes but "we live in a society" (haha) and hence, we all pay into a pool that helps everyone in our community, state, country, etc.

Sometimes the benefits are obvious such as infrastructure but for most government spending it's indirect such as restoring wetlands or hiring more code inspectors so fewer buildings burn down or collapse.

Only hiring cis white men from your local network or only recruiting from the college that only allows men is by definition sexist and racist.

The point of DEI is to first try to teach and then to punish managers that are stupid and say that they have a meritocracy when they absolutely don't.

> women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's[0] - a negligible difference.

So I am guessing you would be okay if I only paid the men in my org 95-99% of what I pay women? Enforcing that they are paid the same is just giving preference to men. Didn't think so.

I have a special place in my heart for the men that whine about the one woman in their org that didn't work out, ignoring the countless men that don't work out. The idiot men that get through the interview screening are somehow okay, but heaven forbid we hire a single woman that couldn't cut it. When I ask for more details these guys eventually admit that they just hate the idea that finding a job could be slightly harder or it is plain old misogyny with the belief that all men are better than all women. This doubly applies to men who seem to not be doing amazing at their job. Not only are the other men better than them, but they get really mad when a woman does better too.

I just want to do a good job, but I have had to deal with this stuff my entire career.

Women's salaries are 95-99% of men's, when adjusted for lifestyle choices, on a macro scale. It is almost impossible to achieve complete salary parity. Let's not forget, men have higher physical performance, take more risks, and are willing to do dirtier work. These factors increase the salary ceiling. It's actually quite impressive if the difference is only about 5%.

I don't know why we have to pretend men and women are exactly the same. They're not. They each have different characteristics, different preferences, and different capabilities.

At least in tech, many companies have massive over-representation over Asian-American employees. Over-hiring cishet white males is not exactly a problem, in fact in many roles they are under-represented compared to the national slice. See the BLS data.

E.g. 50% of NVIDIA's staff is AA. Third most valuable company in the world. That's about 10x the national average. Similarly with CISCO. You can keep digging these up.

What should we do? Systematically disadvantage and discriminate against Asians (part of the honorable and noble BIPOC coalition) to make sure to return to the national averages?

Of course this also touches upon the insanity of wanting company x to match a certain demographic split. Should they mirror the world's demographics? The US's demographics? California's demographics? South Bay's demographics? Santa Clara's demographics? Each one of those is different, and nobody seems to be able to agree on which we should use as the authoritative reference. If people are going to be shaming firms for not meeting a certain bar, can we at least agree what that bar should be?

And the wage gap is most likely not going away, men are women are not identical, they do not have the same impulses, incentives, timelines, or desires. They're not perfectly homogeneous interchangeable robots that behave the same way. It's entirely not surprising that we're seeing a gap. See the Uber study which was trying to find sexism to explain their drivers' 7% wage gap, only to find out that it ultimately boiled down to risk taking, hours worked, and more aggressive driving: https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf - this is going to be true across all jobs.

Side note: the real "wage gap" is everybody vs mothers, not men vs women. If you want to advocate for making child rearing easier on mothers in the workplace, I'm fully in support.

Links:

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...

https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/about/csr/esg-hub/people/wor...

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

"over-hiring cishet white males is not exactly a problem, in fact in many roles they are under-represented compared to the national slice."

I've been on teams where I'm the only white person. I've also been on teams where women outnumber the men (yes, even in tech).

> I've been on teams where I'm the only white person. I've also been on teams where women outnumber the men (yes, even in tech).

This isn't surprising at all. There are tons of asians in tech. And it's not uncommon for a couple devs to be on a team with lots of product or design people. I'm on one such team right now. The vast majority of this team is non-white women.

> What should we do? Systematically disadvantage and discriminate against Asians

TBF that's exactly what Harvard did.

> When adjusted for factors such as lifestyle choices, women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's

Assuming that is true (I'm not buying Wikipedia as a source), the career and job norms were created by men for men. If it was women who had created them for centuries and men were just joining in, the norms would be structured so that raising children was assumed - like taking weekends off - and not a career killer, and maybe everyone would get a day off every ~28 days (I don't mean that snidely at all; it would be realistic and reasonable).

> White, working class British boys are one of the poorest performing demographics in education but I have rarely seen it discussed. As a British lad who left school less than a decade ago, I don't think the education system is suited to engage boys whatsoever.

This kind of undermines your comment, IMHO; it's a cliche of white racial solidarity and a race competition. If race doesn't matter to you, then it's not an issue of race.

Among successful people in Britain, clearly white males have great advantages. The educational system engages them fine. Maybe it's poor kids of all sorts who don't have access and engagement?

>Assuming that is true (I'm not buying Wikipedia as a source)

The sources are on the Wikipedia page itself.

> This kind of undermines your comment, IMHO; it's a cliche of white racial solidarity and a race competition

Why is it a race competition to point out when white people are at a disadvantage, but justice to point out when black people are at a disadvantage? It seems you have biases of your own.

>Among successful people in Britain, clearly white males have great advantages

That isn't so obvious to me. A vast portion of successful people in London, especially in the finance sector, are not white British. In fact, as a London-based tech worker, I have become completely accustomed to not seeing white British people in high places.

> Why is it a race competition to point out when white people are at a disadvantage, but justice to point out when black people are at a disadvantage? It seems you have biases of your own.

That's all part of the same old routine, almost out of a script. It's not hard to understand the difference if you want to. It's your business, but if I find myself following someone else's script - I'm human too; I can get caught up in things too - I look carefully at my reading and my reasoning.

Can you be more specific about what script I am following? You also didn't answer my question, you avoided it.