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.
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.
I was speaking very specifically about DEI hiring policies, not the rest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
There really is no mentionable amount of DEI hiring quotas, at least the market I am familiar with (US). It’s practically illegal due to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. Though it was rare even before that. Not sure if that is the case in other places.
I think that’s sort of an impossible task though, for any sufficiently large idea. You can’t control all people. I definitely agree there should be concerted effort to educate people on what something is truly about. However, that is already happening, but you can’t teach people who won’t hear or only listen to outlets who oppose it ideologically. Basically every company with a DEI department gives training of some sort to their employees, yet many of them will ignore what they are told if it doesn’t fit their preconceptions. I have seen it at my own company (people arguing we shouldn’t do something we already don’t do).
For the point about universities, this is a fairly significant area of discussion in the field of education. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the ideas or statistics. But deciding what is “better” is a very difficult question. An elite school in the US is objectively more likely to produce better outcomes in the aggregate, but a lot of that (in my opinion) comes down to confounding variables: only accepting already high performers, having more opportunities, having access to already successful people, not having to work their way though school, etc.
If we could truly remove many of those, especially around wealth, access, and opportunities by making school affordable/tuition free and distributing access and opportunity amongst all schools (e.g., internships), I think we could much more accurately measure the quality of schools here. But we simply can’t right now.
There really is no mentionable amount of DEI hiring quotas, at least the market I am familiar with (US). It’s practically illegal due to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. Though it was rare even before that. Not sure if that is the case in other places.
I think that’s sort of an impossible task though, for any sufficiently large idea. You can’t control all people
Sure, it is impossible to do perfectly. But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Look how many comments into this thread we are based on my perception that DEI hiring involves preferential treatment for only minorities. And this is not the only thread.
At most people mention that not many companies do that. So far, no one outright stated giving preferential treatment to minorities when hiring shouldn’t be part of DEI.
Even you didn’t come out and explicitly say, let’s only look at peoples socioeconomic backgrounds, not race and gender. It even sounds a bit like you want them to, it’s just the pesky SCOTUS blocking it.
Supporters of DEI are either afraid to commit to not doing certain things, or they do want them, which is why these bad perceptions are able to spread so much.
That’s certainly a fair point. Though, there is a difference between complaining about what something actually is versus what some supporters may desire. Not sure I see much distinction made from the grumbling crowd when they cry DEI hire.
My opinion on that matter isn’t a simple yes or no. If we could realistically make significant progress undoing generations of institutional racism purely looking at socioeconomic background, I’d be much closer to no. Socioeconomic background is not really a checkbox that many companies are willing to suss out, however, since it requires a lot of effort and has many dimensions.
The hope with using it as part of decisions is that, since in aggregate a race or gender may have statistically worse representation, you’ve got increased likelihood of a hit than going in blind. But if a company is achieving the same results going on their metric of socioeconomic background, that’s sufficient to me.
I’m sorry if recognizing the complexity of the situation leads to bad perceptions, but I’m not going to pretend the world is simple to appease those who are not interested in nuance. My interest is in achieving outcomes and frankly we don’t have the knowledge on which methods are most realistic and effective. I can’t make a hard decision about something without that.
I’d really like for there to be a mostly agreeable method of evaluating socioeconomic background that companies would be willing to implement and have real A/B testing. That’s total fantasy considering how the world works, though that is why I don’t take a hard stance that there’s one way to work at it.
My interest is in achieving outcomes and frankly we don’t have the knowledge on which methods are most realistic and effective. I can’t make a hard decision about something without that.
My issue isn’t with trying varying methods. My issue is with labeling very different methods with the same name (DEI), which results in confusion and not constructive discussions, since everyone is working with different definition of the word.
The resulting vagueness then makes the issue far more divisive then it needs to be as proponents pick best policies to defend and detractors pick the worst examples to criticize.
DEI is not a singular method. It’s a larger framework in short concerned with certain outcomes. A number of different methods may be part of DEI at a particular place. I think you are driving at a salient point in that the grammar used with it can give that impression. It’s easier to speak about in a way that isn’t repetitive by using shorthands, and there’s definitely danger there that uncurious people not willing to have good faith discussions like we are will make assumptions.
Conquering that is going to be difficult because it’s a larger linguistic issue common to many unproductive politicized topics. I hate that a lot of discussion time is taken up by essentially semantic arguments rather than substantive ones. I’m not sure how to solve for that because language almost always creates more generic categorizations to lump similar but distinct ideas to save time. To your point, by its nature that introduces vagueness.
For me, the lesson needs to be to seek depth where something seems disagreeable but has vagueness, especially ideological labeling. I wish that was a realistic ask for all people. It has made me change my opinions a lot over the years as I’ve learned more—not necessarily dramatically, but it has tempered them with nuance.
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.
There really is no mentionable amount of DEI hiring quotas, at least the market I am familiar with (US). It’s practically illegal due to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. Though it was rare even before that. Not sure if that is the case in other places.
I think that’s sort of an impossible task though, for any sufficiently large idea. You can’t control all people. I definitely agree there should be concerted effort to educate people on what something is truly about. However, that is already happening, but you can’t teach people who won’t hear or only listen to outlets who oppose it ideologically. Basically every company with a DEI department gives training of some sort to their employees, yet many of them will ignore what they are told if it doesn’t fit their preconceptions. I have seen it at my own company (people arguing we shouldn’t do something we already don’t do).
For the point about universities, this is a fairly significant area of discussion in the field of education. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the ideas or statistics. But deciding what is “better” is a very difficult question. An elite school in the US is objectively more likely to produce better outcomes in the aggregate, but a lot of that (in my opinion) comes down to confounding variables: only accepting already high performers, having more opportunities, having access to already successful people, not having to work their way though school, etc.
If we could truly remove many of those, especially around wealth, access, and opportunities by making school affordable/tuition free and distributing access and opportunity amongst all schools (e.g., internships), I think we could much more accurately measure the quality of schools here. But we simply can’t right now.
Sure, it is impossible to do perfectly. But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Look how many comments into this thread we are based on my perception that DEI hiring involves preferential treatment for only minorities. And this is not the only thread.
At most people mention that not many companies do that. So far, no one outright stated giving preferential treatment to minorities when hiring shouldn’t be part of DEI.
Even you didn’t come out and explicitly say, let’s only look at peoples socioeconomic backgrounds, not race and gender. It even sounds a bit like you want them to, it’s just the pesky SCOTUS blocking it.
Supporters of DEI are either afraid to commit to not doing certain things, or they do want them, which is why these bad perceptions are able to spread so much.
That’s certainly a fair point. Though, there is a difference between complaining about what something actually is versus what some supporters may desire. Not sure I see much distinction made from the grumbling crowd when they cry DEI hire.
My opinion on that matter isn’t a simple yes or no. If we could realistically make significant progress undoing generations of institutional racism purely looking at socioeconomic background, I’d be much closer to no. Socioeconomic background is not really a checkbox that many companies are willing to suss out, however, since it requires a lot of effort and has many dimensions.
The hope with using it as part of decisions is that, since in aggregate a race or gender may have statistically worse representation, you’ve got increased likelihood of a hit than going in blind. But if a company is achieving the same results going on their metric of socioeconomic background, that’s sufficient to me.
I’m sorry if recognizing the complexity of the situation leads to bad perceptions, but I’m not going to pretend the world is simple to appease those who are not interested in nuance. My interest is in achieving outcomes and frankly we don’t have the knowledge on which methods are most realistic and effective. I can’t make a hard decision about something without that.
I’d really like for there to be a mostly agreeable method of evaluating socioeconomic background that companies would be willing to implement and have real A/B testing. That’s total fantasy considering how the world works, though that is why I don’t take a hard stance that there’s one way to work at it.
My issue isn’t with trying varying methods. My issue is with labeling very different methods with the same name (DEI), which results in confusion and not constructive discussions, since everyone is working with different definition of the word.
The resulting vagueness then makes the issue far more divisive then it needs to be as proponents pick best policies to defend and detractors pick the worst examples to criticize.
DEI is not a singular method. It’s a larger framework in short concerned with certain outcomes. A number of different methods may be part of DEI at a particular place. I think you are driving at a salient point in that the grammar used with it can give that impression. It’s easier to speak about in a way that isn’t repetitive by using shorthands, and there’s definitely danger there that uncurious people not willing to have good faith discussions like we are will make assumptions.
Conquering that is going to be difficult because it’s a larger linguistic issue common to many unproductive politicized topics. I hate that a lot of discussion time is taken up by essentially semantic arguments rather than substantive ones. I’m not sure how to solve for that because language almost always creates more generic categorizations to lump similar but distinct ideas to save time. To your point, by its nature that introduces vagueness.
For me, the lesson needs to be to seek depth where something seems disagreeable but has vagueness, especially ideological labeling. I wish that was a realistic ask for all people. It has made me change my opinions a lot over the years as I’ve learned more—not necessarily dramatically, but it has tempered them with nuance.