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Comment by BaronVonSteuben | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree. "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men. Female or non-white are "diversity." A great example are the statements and articles from 2020 when Biden announced the most diverse ever White House Communications Team which was 100% female. Biden talked about how critical diversity was and bragged about this 100% female communications team. All the articles I read about it had things like "most diverse White House Communications Team in history" to describe it. At least from a gender perspective, I don't see how they could make it more clear that diversity == women

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> "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men.

Unfortunately this is common, because they do bad things with "diversity", even though diversity itself isn't bad. This isn't a very good defintion of what "diversity" should be, of course. There are many kind of diversity, and which are more important depends on the situation. But, regardless of it, diversity includes white men (and everyone else, too).

Visible diversity in skin colours, height, etc can be relevant for some things (e.g. movies that will have a lot of different people, or when doing research for a computer program that works on pictures of people (to do compression, colour correction for lighting conditions, etc)). Diversity in experience (even if all of them happen to be white men) can be relevant for many things (and is very helpful).

Of course, none of this should mean that you should deny application of other diversity because of their skin colours, height, gender, etc; they should not deny an application for such reasons. Having women in the White House Communications Team is not a bad thing, but that doesn't mean that having men is a bad thing!!! Having men is not a bad thing. One thing being good does not make the other one bad.

> none of this should mean that you should deny application

Is there any evidence that anybody was _ever_ doing this after about 1950 or so?

Asians aren't counted as "diversity" either. This is why they're referred to as "an inconvenient minority" in the context of DEI.

For that, does "asians" mean people from the middle of asia (ie middle east), or people from south east asia (ie oriental)?

Asking because the term has different meanings in say the UK (asian -> from middle east) vs Australia (asian -> from south east asia).

In the US almost no-one would say "asian" for any country west of Nepal. Sometimes they say "south-asian" for India or the surrounding countries, but even that term is only sometimes extended out to pakistan.

>people from south east asia (ie oriental)

it is actually more common from the European and Middle Eastern context to call the (Turkish and Levantine and Arabian) Middle East "oriental"; in Israel, "oriental food" is hummus and felafel; the Orient Express train went to Istanbul. East Asian is the term for ... east Asians and of course the SE Asians you mentioned, and South Asian is the term for "India+Pakistan+" people. Central Asian is the "the -stans" and Mongolia and parts of Russia.

Wow, it's even more complicated than I realised. :)

An Asian-owned company in US can easily get 80%+ Asian. Is that "diversity"?

This depends on how you frame. It is not diverse for the company, but it could be in the larger social context. Putting the same thing in, say, San Francisco can be different from doing the same in Utah.

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