Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much
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I've been working with people from Italy, the Balkans and Ukraine for a product. That has been the most true diverse project I've have ever been involved. And this people's input in the product actually mattered.
But of course this didn't allow for clear virtue-signaling because everyone was white, and we had balkan sick jokes involved.
For most companies diversity is just a checklist.
I've been very lucky to work in very diverse environments for the past 10 years, before that (also the time where I emigrated) most of my previous jobs in Brazil were very homogeneous in the R&D team compositions: men, usually young, Brazilians, with nerdy hobbies (videogames, Magic the Gathering, sci-fi media, etc.).
For the past 10 years I've worked with Iranians, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians, Indians, Australians, Brits, Argentinians, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Germans, French, Dutch, Italians, Romanians, Mexicans, Americans, Canadians, Nigerians, South Africans, Moroccans, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians, Colombians, Venezuelans, Turks, Albanians, Serbians, and the list goes on further but those nationalities are the ones I can vividly remember from the top of my head where people I worked closely together were from. On top of it also a pretty good split between genders, men, women, non-binary, etc.
It has given me many, many more perspectives about life in general, about different cultures, also including professionally relevant culture and experiences. It's been one of the greatest things to happen in my life to experience this diversity and expand my own world without requiring all the effort to go visit each one of those places.
The d in DEI has always been about hiring people of color, not diversity of origin or thought.
This is the most generic rendering of the most generic thing that can happen to a generic person. C'mon if this is for reals Mr Someone almost certainly did not get fired (only) for saying that there's diversity even in a room full of white guys. There was something else.
I should have added that link to begin with I suppose...
But 99.9% of humanity doesn't understand statistics. And if offered a cheap way to virtue-signal, most large groups are happy to fake it.
Honest question
Should there be a call for more 'white' or 'east-asian' basketball players or long-distance runners? No, there should be not, may the best person win. The same should be true for every other field of endeavour, identity politics should be removed from the narrative and shunned for the divisive effects is has had and has on public discourse where it served and serves to create a fractal of warring factions.
A well-intentioned corporation might make sure it was not creating nor subsidizing the problem (say, dumping toxic waste in disadvantaged areas while donating generously to universities priced for the 0.01%), not tolerating stupid racism/sexism in its white male staff, and not motivating its staff to be racist sexists by exposing them to lower-bar "peers" who were selected for their non-white-male status.
Of course we could ask all sorts of "what if pigs could fly" questions and then redesign our farms as if pigs could fly. But those farms will go bankrupt sooner or later because they won't be competitive. Just like how the West will decline if they keep chasing these false ideas. Meanwhile Asia keeps building and Asian companies keep hiring based on merit. The West won't be able to compete in the long run, not only because of DEI policies but other self-imposed handicaps that stem from the same ideology.
Turns out that capital markets have a great metric for ranking people without discrimination: how much profit they can make by managing their risk.
Ironically, the worst places I've seen for discrimination is in the public sector. They seem to see it as a virtue to promote people of their favoured race or sex/gender.
For example, I'm looking for a friendly kickboxing gym. I scroll through photos of various gyms and if I see a wall of tough looking men, I, a fellow man, am intimidated. If I see some women sprinkled in there, I think hey maybe this place is open and friendly and they won't punch my face off.
Same could apply to jobs. Of course we do want diversity of thought and experience but that's harder to measure upfront.
All companies eventually fail, because the people in charge make stupid decisions. The bigger and more established the company, the longer this usually takes. But failure is inevitable. But the economy rarely fails, because the market is pretty good at reallocating resources to companies that are not failing particularly badly at the moment.
I am, of course, aware that companies are not the market, and I am one of those "privileged elites making all the decisions.
My compensation is closely tied to our performance, and we "privileged elites" constantly look for ways to gain an edge over our competition. In my experience, that edge is not to be found in hiring people based on their skin tone, sexuality or genitalia.
I currently focus on making my Organization a place where people want to work, and, therefore, work marginally harder than they would for our competition. This allows us to hire the kinds of people who have options because they are that good.
Might that be a "stupid decision"? Should I have hired for diversity instead? Time will tell, as will my bank account, but for now, it appears to be the right call
There is a common fallacy in hiring that "best" is a subset of "good". Usually it's not. Most of the time, the "best" candidate you end up hiring is pretty average, and there would have been plenty of other equally average candidates. If you hire five people using any semi-reasonable process, one of them is probably good, three are average, and one is bad. If you then switch to another process, you will probably get similar results. And you will likely never have enough data to tell the difference, because the world keeps changing, rendering your old data obsolete.
Assume that you have some critical flaw in you reasoning. You almost certainly have, because most people have their blind spots. Assume that you can't rely on your own judgment to identify it and deal with it. (If you could, it would not be a real blind spot.) The promise of diversity is that if people are different enough, their blind spots are less likely to overlap. So if you have to choose between several candidates with similar qualifications, you should choose the one who is least like the people you already have. But you will probably never have enough data to tell if this heuristic makes any difference.
"Best" being a subset of "good" is not some obscure fallacy; but well recognized by HR departments. For the purposes of most jobs one hires for, they are well aware that Persons A and B are likely fungible quantities (and, also, why the impersonal word "resources" is in their very job function). We hire for demonstrated work ethic, ambition, the ability to deal with adversity, and work track record, rather than skin tone, genitalia, sexuality, handicaps, etc. Foreseeably, we end up matching (more or less) the demographics of the population we source from.
Being fallible humans, we absolutely do have blind spots in our hiring process; something we fight hard to correct for. I concede it is entirely possible that some experience a diverse person has had might some day become useful, but I am skeptical that similar experiences don't exist in most candidate slates. I am obviously overstating this for effect, but we have never done a lessons learned session and said "damn, if only we had hired a black lesbian quadriplegic, instead of John Smith, we would have succeeded at our task".
We hire those we perceive to be the best match from our slate of candidates. Some of these people are women, some are old, some are variously pigmented, but all of them can do the job they were hired for.
There is also another common fallacy: you measure what can be measured easily and then use the data to make conclusions about what you would have wanted to measure. For example, you measure the performance of an employee and use that to make conclusions about the success of the hiring decision. But to actually determine that, you would have to know how well other candidates would have performed in the role, and how the presence of the chosen candidate (would have) affected the performance of everyone else. Among many other things.
That's also a big part of the reproducibility crisis in science. It's impossible to make justified conclusions from data alone. You can rarely measure what you actually wanted to measure, and you never know if you took every relevant factor into account. In order to make conclusions, you have to assume a model of the system you are measuring. Then your conclusions depend on the assumption that the model you have is a useful description of the system.
You’re probably right that in 1932 it would have been largely distracting / difficult for a random company to aggressively recruit female workers and source quality female executives. But, the reason would have been work norms, cultural mores, experience for women workers, and so on, not (as it turns out) that they were incapable of producing high quality results and value for corporations.
Put another way, valuing people “accurately” may well trend into some Nash equilibrium that’s far from optimal when you perturb the surrounding context.
Go after hiring the best person for the job instead of finding the most oppressed and hiring them to improve 'quotas'.
The problem is the pipelines, primarily poor education. Papering over the cracks resulting from that isn't fair on society at large, whether it's the pointy end of the wedge (e.g. incompetent doctors and engineers), or just hampering economic productivity in general.
Some of the best schools in the US are public schools. It's a funding issue.
> These things have very complex dependencies, and just doing nothing will not improve anything.
You literally responded to me suggesting what to do, lol. These issues require serious investment to solve, not this pathetic posturing.
Presuming competence, it seems that one of the following must be true: either (1) external coercion plausibly threatened profits enough that a more controlled sacrifice of profit (call it a tribute or blood money) was objectively preferable, or (2) profit is no longer the objective.
One doesn't have to presume competence, but I don't know enough about BlackRock's leadership structure to meaningfully comment on that.
Companies have been pushing for more women and minorities to be in leadership positions since well before 2015.
And nobody was doing it because there was some tenuous connection to profits.
> The research was used by investors, lobbyists and regulators to push for more women and minority groups on boards, and to justify investing in companies that appointed them.
Where they imply that some people thought there was causation.
> While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit) ...
From the actual report.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...