If the average person actually knew what these initiatives meant they would be against them. In practice what it does is make it so members of designated groups typically win by default whenever they & other candidates meet minimum requirements for a position. It’s not even good for the people who get promotions faster as a result imo because everyone around them knows things are rigged in their favor.
And who has benefitted? This stuff was supposed to help people that lacked opportunity but for the most part it’s people who were upper middle class (predominately white women) to begin with reaping the benefits & using these policies as a political weapon to get more influence inside companies.
I’m personally hopeful that the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Harvards admission practices also affects the private sector and that these types of policies simply become illegal.
This is my observation as well. Most women don't want to be hired on account of some eng diversity target. It gets really toxic when a company is simultaneously engaging in this kind of discrimination while also harshly cracking down on anyone who points it out.
In 2015 I worked at Dropbox when DEI discrimination was ramping up. Among other things, we only interviewed boot camp grads if they were diverse. We also have diverse applicants two tries at the phone screen instead of one. The onsites we're pretty fair, save for a couple hiring managers.
If you asked someone in person, nobody would ever admit to anything. But the company did a poll on whether the hiring process was biased against men and 83% responded yes. What did Arden, the head of HR at the time, do? Rant about how offensive this was to women and how we're all sexist.
To reiterate, most women and URM did not want these policies. There was some more support for affirmative action supporting URM, which makes sense to me and I largely agree with: things like lower college attendance and family income are concrete examples of systemic disadvantage. Women, on the other hand, attend college at largely the same rate and the disparity is due to choice rather than lack of opportunities.
In general it’s also a problem with what is considered diverse. If you’re a white man from a poor family with no college education, the policy is to explicitly discriminate against you. If you’re a white woman from an upper middle class background, you’re considered diverse and given advantages despite the fact that you could have gone into any field you wanted, could probably afford to switch on a whim, and don’t have to worry about things like family members potentially dying because they can’t afford their insulin.
Yes this is what bugs me. I and older "white males" were mentioned in DEI surveys as something to fix, by an org full of mostly younger and more privileged backgrounds. AFAIK I was the only person in engineering who had been on welfare as a child, literally lived next to a toxic waste dump, etc. When I was a kid, us "nerds" were picked on/beat up for liking computers. This sort of thing really turned me off on most corporate DEI, as it's frequently not about real diversity.
I’m younger but from a similar background. I don’t have many opportunities available to me, and my family is going to be dependent on me financially when they can no longer work. It’s extremely stressful to have all of this hanging over my head & be expected to applaud it.
It's a strange thing for the adjective "diverse" to apply to a single human, in any case. It's a descriptor that applies to groups; the only way I can see it applying to one human is with genetic mosaicism or something.
Not white male and not Asian male either. Some recruiters at the company went even further and categorized Asian males as "negatively diverse", a category below even white males.
Every totalitarianism claims the opposite virtues, right ? Dictatorship are always named "People's *". Woke diversity is the exact polar opposite of any reasonable meaning of the word.
Ah, maybe that is why I could never get an interview at dropbox? Maybe I should get rid of my profile pic on linkedin and change my pronouns to "they/them"?
Biggest boost would be to change your name to an ethnic or predominantly female name. Recruiters had compiled spreadsheets of names correlated with women and URM exported from census data. Also spreadsheets on ethnic fraternities and sororities.
The rationale being promoted to the corporations by management consultants is that the company will make more money.
>Our latest research finds that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.
This is why the Civil Rights Act passed when the congressman from Virginia (can't remember the name) tried to kill it by including women in the bill. A law designed to save the endangered black family was instead coopted to boost the career prospects of successful women, so I guess the poison pill worked despite the bill passing.
The black family was only endangered because of those very same people who wrote all sorts of asinine rules for the social safety net programs that penalized stable households, penalized married couples and penalized above the table jobs.
Were they poor? Sure. Were they marginalized? You bet. But the single mother, the child without a father figure and the idle black man were not serious issues, let alone stereotypes, until after people tried to "help" them.
Also horribly flawed. In several states if you are not white your resume is just thrown in the trash. There are several studies on this. People simply do not like others who they do not see as equals or as similar to them.
I don't think we can attribute as much of that happening to racism only. With all the DEI initiatives happening its becoming more so the case that people are seeing through the experience and realizing a lot of the accomplishments by minorities are due to favoritism and "help" than actual experience. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant because people believe it.
I personally feel bad for the dedicated, accomplished and smart minority developers that I've met. They get drowned out in all the noise caused by these DEI drives.
So that somehow justifies unequal treatment of people in another state? The only long term solution is not being part of the problem by discriminating on anything except on value brought to the job.
No, it's more complex than that. Racism in large portions of the united states still exists today. Individuals are not given opportunites in the u.s. simply because of something as simple as their last name. While people may base on DEI initiatives in the majority of America in non large corporate and even on those companies they are still refused if any opportunities which add on each other resulting in inequality.
More likely, the misplaced notions of how to easily fix a complex problem created people dependent on them these government programs, which have in turn perpetuated an electorate.
I don't mean to say that good intentions justify the policy, as the 20th century disproved time and time again, but your phrasing attributes malice or cynicism where none is needed or helpful.
And still not much is being done to help them in practice. There’s a deep culture of classism in American corporations which these initiatives completely ignore, so the people who really need help and more opportunities don’t get much.
Most women leave the startup space regardless due to the sacrifices required by the system. It's the same with men but less so due to the cultural norms in American culture. This also applies to corporations. The lack of childcare leads to the inevitability as families are forced to decide who needs to stay at home to take care of their offspring. Typically it's the women as we condition them to take jobs with lower paying fields but also more complex issues such as lost experience and other issues that force them out. I'm not saying it's entirely sexism but rather a systemic issue that effects both men and women. A lot of feminist arguments are just plain wrong. It makes me wonder who is controlling those narratives to ignore the real issues for issues such as pay as we see in companies such as google when you account for experience and job titles the standing does not hold but my example is also flawed as google forces women to take certain careers and only hires women for certain things. Still very complex.
My wife worked for a permanent-part time placement firm...it's 'contract', 4 days a week, 6 hours a day. She was able to send the kids off to school and be there when they got back and continued to have a Programmer/SQL job with no gaps in her resume.
When the kids were old enough to not need it...she stayed in that position. The extra time lets her volunteer and it's been a pretty awesome arrangement.
It's always the case for political extremes-- the one extreme can't exist without the other to act as its boogyman. Everyone else is caught in the crossfire.
And who has benefitted? This stuff was supposed to help people that lacked opportunity but for the most part it’s people who were upper middle class (predominately white women) to begin with reaping the benefits & using these policies as a political weapon to get more influence inside companies.
I’m personally hopeful that the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Harvards admission practices also affects the private sector and that these types of policies simply become illegal.