Google employee anti-diversity memo causes row
bbc.comHonest question: is the goal really to have a 50/50 split of men and women employed in the field? Because that's the general sense I get when the existing distribution numbers are cited. If so, why is that the goal?
And why is positive discrimination justified? Why not lift all the fingers off the scales and see where things end up?
> And why is positive discrimination justified?
Who's suggesting positive discrimination? That would imply quotas or lowered standards, which are already deprecated approaches to the problem. Outreach and support are favored precisely because they're not zero-sum, and they're necessary because there are so many fingers on so many other scales. "Watch others discriminate and then do nothing" is not a solution.
That's exactly whats happening - people in the right "diversity" bucket are being hired while others who are qualified are being passed over.
And how is that worse than before? Qualified women and minorities were being passed over before. Qualified women and minorities are still being passed over, despite diversity efforts, unless you want to make the somewhat circular argument that 81:19 (men:women) reflects qualifications. Is it just bad that more white men are now being affected?
I contend that qualified people will always be passed over, in every demographic group. Making that number zero for any group is not a goal. Making it proportional is. Do you have any evidence that a higher percentage of qualified men are being passed over than of qualified women? I highly doubt that you do, because everything I've seen suggests that women are still more likely than men to be passed over.
There's a word for the attitude that one's own group should be immune to phenomena that affect others. It's called privilege, and we could do with less of it.
It's not worse, it's exactly as bad.
> It's called privilege
You missed an important part: that only ones own group should be immune. If you believe all groups shouldn't face discrimination, then it is no such thing.
The "phenomenon that affects others" in my comment was that some qualified people get passed over for promotions. That's not the same as your "shouldn't face discrimination" so your response is a non sequitur. It is not possible to eliminate the phenomenon of qualified people being passed over for hiring/promotions, for all groups. The decision-making processes involved are just not that precise or perfect. The only way one group can be immune to that effect is in the presence of systemic bias that outweighs the vicissitudes of that imperfect decision making ... and that is indeed privilege. You're not going to prove otherwise by twisting other people's words.
It's not a non sequitur, by "discrimination" I mean unjustified discrimination. I didn't "twist words", so stop making bad-faith accusations. You have setup a strawman of your own, deciding that by "face no discrimination" I must mean an extreme level of literally no negative bias, even at random or by error.
I disagree that "Making it proportional is [a target]". Hiring should not be based on sex/race, but that doesn't mean it can't be based, justifiably, on things that correlate with sex/race. The issue is here is that there is no direct insight into the factors hiring decisions, other than broad hiring statistics than do not distinguish between e.g correlation and cause.
> Honest question: is the goal really to have a 50/50 split
To answer honestly; anything other than a 50/50 split prompts questions as to the cause of that discrepancy, and whether that cause involves unfairness (that would hurt both the individual and the organisation).
There's a lot of evidence for bias in both hiring and performance evaluation, so it's not unreasonable to look for those things in fields where the gender or racial split is skewed.
> And why is positive discrimination justified?
Your question assumes that the status quo is a level playing field, which is demonstrably not the case.
Positive discrimination is NOT a great solution, because it can create resentment/mistrust among those who feel threatened and feel that the "bar" is being lowered (it isn't). However it's a solution that's easier to administer than increasing merit through bias reduction, which can be quite labour intensive.
[Edit: gender 'or racial' split]
If 50/50 is a goal it would be easier to start in jobs which don't require extensive field-specific knowledge for new recruits to be gainfully employable. Once this goal is achieved there the field would be levelled for those jobs which deviate from the 50/50 target.
I suggest starting with the following jobs:
* garbage collectors
* butchers
* construction workers
* loggers
* fishermen
* miners
All these fields are heavily male-dominated. All of them are heavy jobs, some of them include challenging work environments. While many jobs need specific training, most of these fields allow beginners to gain experience on the job without having to spend a long time and a lot of money up-front.
If the reaction is "but women don't want to work in those fields" I'd like to know whether this is more important than the strive for 50/50. After all, many men work in fields they're not exactly enthusiastic about. They work there because those were the jobs which where available when (and, sometimes, where) they needed one.
An interesting observation can be made here: the more freedom people - man and women alike - have to choose where to work, the more the sexes differ in their choices [1]:
"Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.". This study is cited in the first part of the Norwegian 'Hjernevask' documentary series [2], titled 'The Gender Equality Paradox' [3].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18712468
> "If 50/50 is a goal..."
Stop right there. There is no "goal" other than fairness.
What there is is evidence of bias in hiring processes, which is (a) unfair on individuals, and (b) reduces the productivity of companies.
If you want to talk about the evidence, fine. If you want to talk about strategies for assessing candidates without bias, great.
Everything else in your post is irrelevant.
True, there is bias in hiring processes, this is one of the main points the author of the 'manifesto' (for lack of a better word) addresses. Maybe he does not address it in ways you agree with, but address it he does.
We already tried it without fingers on scales - but where things ended up was where we were thirty years ago.
It's probably not useful to think in terms of goals - a 50/50 split might be an _ideal_, but clearly is not one that's ever very likely to be arithmetically real.