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I want to add that while I agree that in most companies "most of it is hubabaloo" and the companies just hire qualified people, there are some loud and visible examples of blatantly unqualified people getting a position with only apparent qualification being pronouns in their bio. For example a game developers spokesperson not realizing calling all gamers "insufferable bigoted incels" on social media is not a reasonable way to market a videogame.
So while most companies just call countering biases in hiring DEI, the term DEI for many people is now associated with hiring unqualified people, largely because those rare examples I mentioned being amplified and presented as the norm by right-wingers.
If you ask me, companies should drop the term DEI from their hiring policies and just write them neutrally. Sure, most of the perception of unfairness is probably unfounded, but not all of it. And whether true or not, the perception that the hiring process was not fair by people rejected by the hiring process just builds resentment and builds support for morons like Trump that speak against such policies.
Hiring unqualified people also happens without DEI though and looking at studies on DEI's impact on productivity it might actually happen more without it in place considering that output usually increases when implementing DEI measures...
A bunch of candidates from diverse backgrounds, the unqualified white dude gets hired out of unconscious systemic racism or out of fear of being flagged as a company with DEI measures in place. Nepotism as well, hire the son of a good employee even though better candidates exist...
Absolutely it does.
Maybe, but I am sceptical in trusting studies like this, since they are rarely unbiased.
But even assuming it is true, making these policies obvious and giving them a name (DEI) creates an easy target to point at when assholes rouse hate against minorities. So as I said, I don't think it is worth it in the long term. Plus, it probably also helps create/reinforce the subconscious notion that minorities need help to qualify for jobs, rather than being equal. Appearances matter when trying to win people over.
Because of subconscious notions they do need help to get jobs they're qualified for. Hell, being bald is a deterrent, being called Kevin is a deterrent, being short is a deterrent to get hired with similar qualifications!
According to AI, not having a bookshelf in the background of a video call is a deterrent.
But why not do blind remote interviews or similar neutral policy? DEI doesn't help any of the people you mentioned.
"Our new fairness in hiring program ensures we hire strictly on merit by eliminating human biases using cutting edge technology."
You can't argue against that. Compare that with random DEI selling pitch and tell me you don't see how DEI is unnecessarily divisive.
Hiring on merit means only hiring white men because from birth they have an advantage. Unless you ignore all socio-economic issues people need to deal with throughout their whole lives, hiring based on merit only makes no sense, sometimes you have to give a chance to people you wouldn't naturally give a chance to in order to break centuries old practices. Maybe in a thousand year a black kid will have exactly the same opportunities as a white kid, but it's not the case now.
Or you could do the reasonable thing and instead of hiring less qualified people, you can sponsor DEI training programs, scholarships, and followup internships. Help them become qualified.
That's not the employer's job to take the government's place.
It's also not their place to level the social playing field, yet here we are.
If it's clear they are otherwise discriminating then yes it is
The Employers either should help the less disadvantaged, or they shouldn't. Make up your mind.
If they should, I argue they should do it by sponsoring training opportunities. If they shouldn't do it, then they shouldn't do it at all, including by preferentially hiring the disadvantaged.
I personally think it is not the Employers responsibility, but it is still the right thing to step up when the government fails at its job.
They should, in the place that is under their jurisdiction, i.e. the hiring process.
So they should help, but only in an inefficient, counterproductive way that could also damage their business?
Because why exactly? Who said training and education has to be outside a company's jurisdiction?
You also want companies running towns while we're at it?
It is efficient in the long run because offering them very jobs means they're kids get to grow up in better socio-economic conditions.
You can give all the education you want to women and people of various ethnic backgrounds and the handicapped, in the end the white guy with the same (or sometimes worse) qualifications will get hired in their place unless DEI measures are put in place, that's their whole point, getting companies to recognize that if they don't make a conscious effort to prevent it, there's systemic discrimination happening in all industries.
They also affect people after they get hired. Hiring a woman to end up giving her less money for the same work goes against DEI. Accommodations for people who have physical or mental health challenges affects everyone, even people who believe it's not for them, they're one car running a red light away from needing those and in some States that accident could mean them simply being laid off with no consequence for their employer and no recourse for the employee.
I want government to do a better job. In lack of that, training and education is something I don't mind handing over to employers. A lot of job specific training is already provided by employers anyway. Safety trainings, how to work with specific tools and technologies, continuous education, regulatory compliance, business ethics...
The whole point of my post is arguing for removing biases by making the hiring process race and background blind, instead of "positive discrimination". The argument isn't to bring back discrimination, but what is the best way to prevent it.
I am talking about hiring policies here. I have opinions about wages as well, but if we keep switching topics, we will get nowhere.
This is actually a good point. I didn't really consider disabilities and health accommodations as part of DEI, since they are protected by law where I live, not part of the voluntary DEI initiatives. These should stay imo.
So you're ready to wait centuries before making the hiring process fair to non white CIS gender hereto men because that's how long it's gonna take to fix all socioeconomic inequalities that need to be fixed in order to guarantee that no matter who you're born at, you have access to the same opportunities to build your CV in order to apply for a job for a blind process that only tries to determine who is the most qualified candidate. Sounds like a white person wanting to protect their white privilege they don't realize they have.
I'll give you an example, white vs white. Quebec families don't have as much wealth accumulated in general compared to Ontario families because until the 1960s the Catholic Church was omnipresent in people's lives and forced them to have more kids and to pay to build churches and to keep doing manual labor under English management. To this day it still has an impact on their average level of education and on the kind of life they can afford to live.
Yeah, this right here is why so many people don't take these issues seriously. Because surprise, people don't tend to listen to people insulting them.
I don't believe it would take more than 40 years to fix them, if there was enough political will to fix them. And my whole point is that the bad perceptions around DEI sap away the political will for solving the systemic issues in exchange for short term relief with little long term benefit.
An amazing example of one of the many inequalities, that pretty much every DEI policy I have ever seen completely ignores.
I'm not familiar with the example you're referencing. Was it stated this person was only hired for their pronouns or just due to a diversity initiative?
There are people who reveal themselves to be unqualified and incompetent through all types of hiring practices all the time. That does not invalidate the methodology entirely because none is perfect. If it was doing so consistently in a way that can be documented, that'd be different. But if that were the case, for profit companies would drop it on their own without external pressure.
The problem is it doesn't matter what you call it. Affirmative action, DEI, whatever. The people who complain about DEI will complain about that new term. I'm not sure there's a neutral way to describe that if two candidates are about equal, you'll pick the one from a disadvantaged/underrepresented background. Even if you said you're looking for unique perspectives, if it's not a white man who ends up making the mistake, some people will complain that unique perspectives are anti white and racist and hurting the country.
So is having that policy even worth it? I would argue doing blind remote interviews without knowing the persons race and background would be almost as effective without giving ammunition to hate-mongers.
It's not like you have roughly equal candidates for a position often in the first place. And it could also help against nepotism and other unfair practices.
The problem is the size of the gulf. If we were talking about, for instance, there only being 5% more white male executives compared to their share of the population, then compete blindness would more or less erase the problem given time.
When the gulf is large, the time period to erase that even with completely background-agnostic selection in any direction is many generations. It doesn't sound fair to say, "OK, the racist stuff was wrong. We stopped (we didn't totally). Your great-great-great grandchildren will see parity! Stop complaining." You're basically saying nobody alive will ever see something approaching equity.
Part of DEI is reassessing the metrics used to evaluate candidates. People often unconsciously will be more forgiving of shortcomings in people they identify with. So they can certainly write candidate evaluations that make one candidate seem clearly better than the other. But jobs are rarely so simple that you can list out and check boxes on every possible pro or con, and it's easy to miss the pros if you aren't looking for them.
Also, I will say having been on the hiring side for many positions, there are definitely plenty of cases where a couple candidates are roughly equal. That literally happened in the last position we filled. Maybe we're outliers.
Why? Am I missing something? I would expect it to be completely gone in a generation, once every non-blind hire was replaced.
Part of the problem with the hypothetical is not everyone in one of these positions is truly hired. I mean if we completely got rid of inherited wealth so nobody could pass on their company to their kids, that'd certainly accelerate the timeline.
Background-agnostic will also still miss the knock-on effects. If someone goes to a high quality college with a name because their rich parents can afford it that leads to an attractive internship that lands them a career job, on paper they got their current job because they had good qualifications.
Or, if the company has a history of only white men in positions of power and goes background-agnostic with zero outreach to marginalized communities, you're not going to get a lot of applicants from there. They may not even know the company exists, while every kid of those powerful white men sure do, and they know which skills are most necessary to look good in a job interview.
DEI is not just handing out roles to unqualified people because they're not white men. It's about access, outreach, thinking differently, being welcoming. It's complex. It's certainly easy to rabble rouse over because dumb people don't want to take the time to understand complicated things. I don't believe we should abandon nuance because some people refuse to attempt to understand it. They'll just do that with the next thing until everything is dumb and simple.
I was speaking very specifically about DEI hiring policies, not the rest.
As I mentioned in a different thread, I think outreach or even something of the kind "let's try to get x people from different backgrounds to an interview" is a good idea. Just the final hiring decision should be background-agnostic.
Unless I am missing something, DEI as it currently exists also does not help here? It does not redistribute ownership of companies. And since it is not mandatory, it does not prevent nepotism from company owners either.
Isn't the issue there with the education system? Besides, if you need college education for a spot, you shouldn't hire a person incapable of doing the job. If it is not necessary, then requiring college is problem itself. You just push people to waste money and time getting over-educated for the position.
Those are all inseparable parts of a whole for DEI. Frankly, they are the most significant parts. Much of the time, companies have zero DEI policy at the hiring step. It's part of why the griping about it is confusing to me. Most of the companies I am familiar with are already where you seem to want them. But I guess they have to pretend to throw it out and call it something different to appease the complainers.
I never said it was a silver bullet. I explained why doing away with an effort like it and achieving a fantasy of background agnostic hiring will not solve the problem in a generation, since you were not sure why generations of institutional racism would go away with one generation of blind hiring practice.
There is also a very large difference between no college education and just not going to an exclusive institution, which is explicitly what my example was about. The people who go to state schools also get a quality college education believe it or not.
One can be critical and consider if the candidate has some attractive points because they are truly more capable or they just had better opportunities. More questioning beyond that may reveal that they truly are great or just had it easier. The problem is a lot of traditional hiring stops at taking things at face value.
Yeah, I guess my point in that case is, that perceptions are important. The loudest public promoters and detractors of DEI are probably pushing an extreme version with hiring quotas and so on, so anything labeled DEI gets a bad rep.
Unfortunately, this happens if a community does not push against taking their ideas and positions too far and set a clear boundary of what they want to achieve.
Sorry, sounded to me like you vere implying DEI hiring would solve the issue faster than background agnostic hiring, since it was a response to my promotion of background agnostic hiring. I guess I misunderstood.
I guess this is true for the US, where I live that is not really a thing. Anyway, I think my argument still holds. Either the more expensive universities are not better, so it is bias. Or they are better but not necessary, so employers are asking for overqualified people. Or they are necessary and in that case, working as expected on hiring level and we need scholarships.
I agree.
I fully agree with your second point, it's so easy to blame minorities (be it racial or gender or sexual identity) that those situations are what gets talked abkut. The number of unqualified people who are hired/have been hired based on who they know vs what they know probably far outweighs mishandled DEI policies.
I agree, but as I said, making it obvious and giving it a name (DEI) creates an easy target to point at when assholes rouse hate against minorities. So as I said, I don't think it is worth it in the long term.
Plus, it probably also helps create/reinforce the subconscious notion that minorities need help to qualify for jobs, rather than being equal.
I just first want to say kudos for having a well reasoned point that you're defending with logic, patiently and consistently, with respect for all.
That's rare on the Internet, and Lemmy in particular, which is severely prone to the group generally deciding on one "right" position and mercilessly punishing dissent.
All that said, I think I broadly agree with you, and further, think that all of this DEI stuff is essentially "affirmative action for a new generation".
It's so hard to nail it down and defend it because (it seems) proponents don't like to explain so much of how it works (and how it works differently from not incorporating it), and rather tend to answer with what it accomplishes. In theory at least.
The problem, of course, being that this subtly shifts the criticism and defense from DEI itself to its goals.
You can say "DEI means that the company is better by getting the best employees and also helps historically disadvantaged demographics get better jobs" without at all describing how that happens, and suddenly disagreeing on the merits of DEI gets misconstrued as "companies should only hire white guys and maintain the status quo", at which point they're more easily targeted with ad hominem and lumped together with true bigots and racists.
Regarding the issue itself, from everything I've seen, DEI should be less "this is an initiative we're doing and have a team on it and track it's metrics" and more just, "We'll hire the best person for the job."
Because ultimately, anything other than "We'll hire the best person for the job." means, by definition, "We'll pass on the best person based on their, or the other candidates' race, gender, religion, etc."
If that means an overwhelmingly white male workplace, that's a social indicator, not a problem for the company to fix. Also, hypothetically, what's the desired end goal in terms of workplace diversity? To match the local area as closely as possible? If so, what happens when the most qualified candidates happen to be overwhelmingly from a minority? Are they going to start hiring less qualified white guys to balance it out? They shouldn't. But they also shouldn't hire a less qualified woman just because they only have one other woman in the whole building.
Ultimately, the only extent I could see a DEI policy actually having merit and being worth talking about would be something sort of like the Rooney Rule. A company saying, "For any position we post, we're committed to interviewing at least X candidates from historically underrepresented minority demographics. We may still end up hiring a white guy...but this will ensure that we don't get so used to seeing nothing but white guys that we forget to look elsewhere."
Thank you. What a nice comment :)
Yes, I believe this would make sense if done correctly. I also like what company I work for does, that is sponsor a programming courses for women to help them become good candidates.
Yes, we should strive to remove biases from the hiring process in general. It's not like recognized minorities are the only ones disadvantaged by biases.