Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diversity into an already squishy process is the least of your worries.
They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
>Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?
It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he says,
>I fear that when large companies hire and promote people based on group identities, it discourages individuals from cultivating their abilities.
It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
> It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well, that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have a racist/sexist manager.
The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just that they considered all the candidates.
The article is a lot more than just complaining about D&I policies, for example you'll notice that the manager spent several months unsuccessfully trying to get even one qualified diverse candidate to interview with Microsoft. What's up with that?
"Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?"
I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning.
"They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?"
The biggest thing is that this metric is meaningless. They don't define what the target is and why. They don't dig into the how of the increase either. If it was the policy, they have not taken a systems thinking review of it to see if it's working as expected or causing some other harm. I see no inclusion of the root issue - a pipeline of diverse candidates via schools. If the numbers are underrepresented in school, then they will be in industry too. Maybe you can juice your own company's numbers, but that simply leaving less for other companies. Figuring out diversity discrepancies in the talent pipeline (school, mainly) is the first step. Then figuring out if it's an actual problem and what the proper metrics are, is a step that seems to be glossed over. Without understanding these, there will be no meaningful progress.
> They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?
I'm still unclear as to why we're even bothering to ask the question. How many blonde leaders are there vs. brunettes? Are brunettes poorly represented in corporate leadership? Does anyone care? Why should they.
This presupposes they are discriminated against for these positions. 3-5% representation is extremely high for a demographic that comprises 1% of college graduates.
Don't we already hire managers explicitly to make decisions like this? Given we've hired them, shouldn't we trust them to make the best decisions for their teams and their objectives? It seems as though the additional bureaucracy introduced by DEI serves only to disempower managers. This is the function of all bureaucracy, to disempower individual decision making.
>> "Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?"
> I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
Therefore institute race-based policies?
All that matters here is how things _should_ work. The hiring process should be based off merit. They should not be based off race. We should do our best to correct these when they deviate.
> Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people.
It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires, with no real change. People who actually care realise that if you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there without changing anything that really matters.
> Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions
You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.
> which is pretty squishy to begin with
I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job, which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided by a dice roll.
> Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections in high places and likely more pressure to perform.
> You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.
I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?
Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in leadership circles. It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"
> I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job.
This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)
> just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways
Evolution does work. Assuming people are free to try everything out, usually the strategies that become the norm are the strategies that work better than the other ones. If you know better then the market, you could theoretically go in, make your own company execute your own strategy and start dominating the market, this has been done in history multiple times.
> it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice
Would you try this out if your own money or health was on the line?
> I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes.
I have a lot of complaints against democracy, however that does not mean I desire fascism, it means I want a better democracy.
> Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?
Assuming we want the people who can best perform, we should be looking at ways how to better identify the best performers instead of actively sabotaging the process by adding arbitrary discrimination into it that is proven to work against the goal.
> It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"
Would you give keys to your house to someone you don't trust? Would you give the keys to your car to someone who has a reputation of crashing cars?
Democracy is based on trust as well, you don't know if your favourite politician is actually going to do what they say they are going to do or if it's actually a good idea, yet you are likely going to go with your feelings and cast your vote.
How do you think a CEO would fare if that CEO would not have the respect of their subordinates?
> Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true.
For highly skilled roles, I doubt that this happens often in real life, usually you will have candidates with different qualities and you have to figure out which are the ones you believe to be more valuable.
> You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers?
I would probably try to see who would do the job for less, but sure, if that's the case you could also choose at random, however the higher the skill requirement, the less likely you will get into this situation.
You're writing with the implicit assumption that private companies ought to be meritocratic above all. I don't think that's the case. I think private people and orgs ought to be free to choose whom they associate with, hire, and promote based on any criteria they can come up with. Nepotism? No problem. Height/weight/age/beauty/culture/hair colour discrimination? You bet. Then these orgs all compete and the most efficient ones win. This leads to a long conversation about the merits/efficiencies of monocultures.
Furthermore, we as a culture ought to be at least not hypocritical in our tolerance of clearly nepotistic/discriminatory hiring practices in minority-owned businesses (restaurants/trades/jewelry/etc.) but somehow intolerant of them in some sectors like tech and finance. These things are equally silly:
1. Expecting a Chinese restaurant not to exclusively hire more Chinese people
2. Expecting a tech-bro agency not to exclusively hire a more tech bros
3. Expecting a Kosher butcher not to exclusively hire more Jews
4. Expecting a WASPy finance org not to exclusively hire more WASPs
Most of these (Kosher Butcher for example) are going to be very small companies and these kinds of requirements don't usually kick in till you have a certain minimum level of employees since there is an assumption in most states that very small businesses will mostly hire (extended) family.
Well, it's easy to not notice on the middle of all the noise. But policies that fight wealth concentration are much clearer and have many less side effects than the ones for diversity and inclusion.
They are probably more inclusive too, but that measurement is noisy.
Sure that's a nice libertarian framing of the issue. I would love to be able to hire whoever I want, with no say from anyone else, for my companies.
But that's not what the law says.
Title VII of the CRA 1964 says:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer—
(1)to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
(2)to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
It isn't like the law is being enforced in any case-- as people are posting all over these threads the diversity policies are explicitly "fail(ing) or refuse(ing) to hire or to discharge any individual ... because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."
So really, GP poster got their wish-- companies are just not using their ability to ignore the law the way the poster expected.
Yes please - let people make their own decisions. Why this list but not height or hair colour or beauty or sexual orientation or any one of 1000 traits that people have little to no control over? Do you think the last 50 years of identity-driven public policy have served to unify or divide Americans?
Also "race" isn't really a "thing", so what does it mean in the context of this law?
My reading of the original article tells me that these initiatives were interfering with this manager's ability to accomplish his team's objectives/provide value to shareholders. Indeed an assertion could be made that these initiatives run counter to fiduciary duty.
If you want to accomplish a goal, hire people you trust, given them clear objectives, and then get out of their way. Don't micromanage them with endless bureaucracy. Do you think that these policies will deter a real racist? Do you think an interview requirement or call asking "Did you consider candidate X?" accomplishes anything? Can you describe what?
Also MSFT is publicly traded not publicly owned. It's still a private company.
They sure can be seen as reactionary as one of CSPI's areas of interest in "The Great Awokening" (see https://www.cspicenter.com/about).
I found the article interesting as I've just started to work in US corporation and I've wondered how achieving specific diversity goals are achieved in cases there is a very limited pool of people to hire / promote in a select subgroup.
>They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders.
So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with as having not really earned their position the same as everyone else. It puts them on equal footing with the bosses nephew, who nobody respects.
It's 2022 - maybe we can stop trying to defend race-based favoritism and discrimination?
We're simultaneously being told that the pipeline doesn't contain enough minorities and that catching more fish from a smaller pond isn't going to impact the average size of those fish.
I know one megacorp that achieved its diversity by paying above-market for those workers and poaching very qualified people. That's expensive and zero-sum, exacerbating the situation elsewhere, but at least their employees knew diversity didn't mean unqualified.
It has nothing to with the people who were given an unfair advantage based on skin color, it is the fact that skin color is used to give a preference that invalidates accomplishments.
When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question. If you want to argue that it is impossible to judge merit, it is you who needs to provide proof.
And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
> When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question.
Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody.
> And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
The article explicitly states they are not asked to make promotion decisions based on race.
It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like
abcd
efgh
ijkl...
And you would be surprised by the number of people who it takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're not
I've been coding for over a decade including things 1000x as complicated as that (think embedded systems from the ground up). I could easily take 20 minutes or even fail doing such a task because I'm literally never asked to code things in a professional environment with 3+ strangers breathing down my neck and judging me based on some simplified fizzbuzz.
I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't do much other than test for how you perform with a group of strangers pressuring you to jump through hoops publicly on which in a short time your entire value is judged (including determining say if you'll have money for daycare next week), which for most software professionals basically happens never except during an interview.
I don't understand what's the value in having 3 people in the room looking at you solve a coding problem, at any level of seniority. Sounds like it's just wasting the time of 3 engineers when 1 could perform the task.
Maybe so (though I don't really believe you couldn't) but I gotta evaluate people somehow. And my job is to prevent false positives. False negatives are less damaging.
I could bikeshed on this, but I think this is missing the overall point. It's not that nothing is measurable, obviously some tech skills are measurable and obviously some people are going to do better on those things, but those things are less measurable as you move up the ladder, and less measurable for leadership skills over technical skills, and less measurable among groups of people with relatively similar levels of experience. I'm not saying nothing can be measured so you might as well hire the mailperson to the principal engineers job. The point is that you can have a fairly large group of equally qualified people for a job.
Unless you're hiring someone for a speed coding competition, I don't see what speed has to do with it. Especially since it seems like you would be biasing for younger candidates and committing ageism in the process.
You don't need to prove that that measurements are reliable to highlight the existence of discrimination. If 10% of applicants are X, and I mandate that 20% of hires are X, then even if my interview results are truly random it's still discriminating in favor of X.
Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting discrimination.
I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion process. What does get on my nerves is when people privately push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.
The post doesn’t suggest there’s any mandated quota for hiring or promotion—only for interviews or consideration. And it doesn’t suggest any secrecy about this policy.
The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people because they had not encountered any applicants of required race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the position at all because they never encountered applicants of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they had qualified applicants, they ended up forced to hire nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired, despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants and wanted--needed--to hire one.
The post also notes that this was invisible to people who weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether or not it was intentionally so.
If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people, it's not discrimination because it's not actually prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion is absolutely a form of discrimination.
I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of discrimination, and demanded that we address this disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely, were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-screen to the on-site instead of engineers.
> recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires)
It's hard to attribute longterm success of the company to any given hires but race is easy to count. What is easy to measure comes to dominate your thinking.
Agreed, I'd much rather just be honest and transparent with processes. That's not to say there aren't potential down sides. Of course, I still hold that trying to resolve these issues completely on the demand side of careers that often involve an educational component doesn't always work well, it can drive up incomes, but won't necessarily make the implied problem better.
What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.
> What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.
100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's going to increase the representation in tech as a whole is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech workers.
Instead, companies seem to only care about signaling diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their representation of "diverse" demographics up a few percentage points, they're increasing the diversity within the company. They're doing nothing to actually increase the diversity of the field.
I'm not really convinced how good we are at measuring merit.
But I don't buy into that being the reason for <insert my idea>.
I DO worry that "hey we doubt we're doing it right based on merit so we're picking race this time / some times" will have an effect, and not a good one.
Absolutely - there aren't clearly defined lines between cultural notions of race, and the scientific community doesn't even recognize race as anything but a social construct [1]. So in the end it's either how someone self-identifies, or the arbitrary superficial judgement of race by the hiring team, which is patently ridiculous.
Society defines racial categories according to made-up rules. The basis of these rules is not biological. All good so far. But, then we have to live with these categories, and they get applied to how we organize society, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less explicitly. And we may wish for these rules to change, or for the ways that they shape the experiences of individuals to change. But then the people who benefit from the status quo have a material interest in having them stay the same. And in fact the people who benefit from the status quo often are in a position to shape society in a way that keeps them the same. You get the idea.
These rules and categories are ill-defined and even don't exist in some cases. You are not wrong stating ruling class has promoted racial ideas to weaken and control the populace at large. That doesn't mean they exist. The real power structure is held by particular networks and families, not races, as there is no such thing as race. The idea that you can draw lines around a group based on physical characteristic is what they promulgate to fool us, so to use the same groupings to supposedly fix society is a stupid mistake. Both Norwegians and Yemenis are considered "white", which makes no sense. Are you telling me that Kanye West should get more privileges than a poor Yemeni because they are white? This is absurd. Did you know that Swedes and North Africans are less diverse genetically than northern vs southern chinese? What about mixed race people? What about countries that are in between regions that follow traditional "racial" groupings, such as central asia? Are we really that dumb to categorize people based on superficial vague judgements about appearance? And to leave it up to the completely non-scientific and biased judgements of HR?
They do exist... the fact that they are not biological does not mean they do not exist. They have a social-historical reality. They exist in the minds of people making decisions, overtly or not. Trying to become conscious of that and counter it, and (of course imperfectly) correct for some past wrongs due to it, is what this is about.
The discussion is on the socially constructed nature of race. My comments directly address this with specific examples. Your final response is nothing more than "no, you are wrong". Not sure what I was expecting on a public forum, as this topic is sensitive and brings out a lot of deep seated irrationality, gaslighting, and binary thinking in people.
I have no objections to your claim that race is socially constructed. I agree. Where I disagree is in the logical leap that that means it doesn't exist. Your specific examples are irrelevant to this point.
(Added: and for what it's worth, I don't necessarily disagree on the specific examples you give. They are just irrelevant.)
I think we are getting caught in what it means to "exist". Perhaps my language was not precise enough. My meaning wasn't that the idea and abstraction of race does not exist in my earlier comments - my point was that the abstraction (social construct in this case) is very leaky, and doesn't match reality, hence the several examples I provide where the idea of race doesn't make sense at all. My argument is that the abstraction is so far removed from the reality that it's more harmful than helpful. In our computerized data driven modern reality, there's no reason we couldn't deeply assess every individual's full history and situation to determine how underprivileged they are, rather than using superficial and inaccurate measures such as skin color.
DEI is anti-intellectual to the core. Worse, it is codified racism. It creates problems where there were few to solve.
Nobody can measure merit, but that doesn't mean you can hire people based on skin color and that is exactly what DEI did. And not much else, it remains plain racism. Without bias you can see it because racial quotas are the expression. People in the past also thought they had good reason for racial discrimination.
There are real good arguments against DEI hiring practices aside from people disliking them. Although many dislike them because of its racism.
I haven't seen a single example where it can justify its racial discrimination, which of course would require some real hard evidence of its own necessity. I think we agree that racial discrimination is very negative.
Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong, but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more objective.
Intra-organization measurements are not the same as inter-oganizations measurements.
(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)
If you do not believe someone can demonstrate merit, you cannot believe in equality of opportunity.
If you do not have Equality of Opportunity all you have left are power structures, usually attached to some degree of structural determinism.
At that moment, you have the same logic as the Communist/Marxian/Dialectic revolutionaries we have seen time and time again. Once they gain power they label everyone else a reactionary.
Saying they don't believe in being able to demonstrate merit is why I suggest they are a Communist/Marxian/Dialectic. Because not only is that stupid in the real world, it is literally a defining feature of the base ideology.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what I did or didn't say. I didn't say people can't demonstrate merit. I said people are bad at measuring merit, and I think that is relatively true on its face, and the subject of a whole mess of thinkpieces and arguments on Hacker News. Shit I thought it was funny there was one posted today:
No where in the article is it suggesting that anyone is pressuring managers to promote demonstrably poor performers for racial reasons. They are being asked to adjust their processes to consider the most candidates.
I think for a medium size group of relatively equal performers, it would be nearly impossible to rank order them in a way you could get a small handful of people to consistently agree with. Everyone seems to love to straw men this with some idea that Microsoft is firing all of their principal engineers to replace them with entry level candidates from state universities.
They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating.
Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear similarities:
1. The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
2. The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.
3. The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.
4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies. See here:
> The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
Wholly untrue. Inequality happens for a whole mess of reasons, including individual ability and interest, it's just not exclusive to that either.
> The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.
We're probably going to disagree on the definition of oppression, but no, there should is no need for "reverse oppression", unfortunately, I can't control how people feel about aid fixes, but I think everyone should be able to pursue opportunity equally.
> The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.
This is taken too far in the other direction where I have to accept every single "DE&I Bad" Argument so as not to seem elitist. This is a complex issue and there are plenty of good arguments on both sides, the original article just didn't attempt to make them.
4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies
"In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist, but, in their opinion, contain elements of feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism or other characteristics of the ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements."
Wow, that is way more involved than I meant it to be. If forgot reactionary was a loaded term, I just meant it to mean that his argument was in reaction to "wokeism" and wasn't independent of that. See item 3.
They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.