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Comment by abracadaniel | Hacker News Reader

I think definition is definitely an issue in the debate. What you’re describing I knew as affirmative action. I’ve only understood DEI as being willing to hire from diverse backgrounds, implemented by posting job positions in diverse areas like HBCUs. I’ve not personally seen any examples of different criteria for different people. Is this actually documented as something companies with DEI initiatives were doing post affirmative action?

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Google "diversity quotas" or "hiring targets". If you are explicitly demanding a disproportionate number of minority candidates, you are disadvantaging other candidates.

That's the thing, DEI advocates generally don't advocate for diversity quotas or hiring targets and such practices are not common. For example, when I went through the DEI portion of interviewing training we were explicitly told that we were not allowed to hire people of a certain group in order to try to improve diversity.

If your mission is to promote diversity and your job is to hire people, you are either increasing diversity hiring or you aren’t completing your mission or job.

You can find reports of hr employees and lawsuits involving major companies and universities to the contrary, where there were quotas and discrimination, implicit or explicit.

You can find a lot of this in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. At its most extreme an Asian Student and Black student with the exact same MCAT test score would have a 21% acceptance rate for the former and 80% acceptance rate for the latter. The lawsuit revealed the admissions office would use intangibles to discriminate, like giving Asian students low "Personality scores"

My bonus at a fortune 50 bay area firm was based (partially) on % minority hires. These were called "DEI Targets"

I've been told face to face by several tech recruiters that they are not looking to hire my race and gender, but I should tell my minority wife should apply.

The terms get lumped together by conservatives and then blamed for all evils. Defining it might help, but good luck with that.

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