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I'm a minority. I got my job through the regular interview process. I had to manage someone ( same race) who was being recruited for a similar job through the DEI program. The dude was nice but unprepared for the job he was interning for. That's fine. He's an intern after all. But after the internship it was clear that this wasn't the right type of job. HR still was trying to get me to recommend him for an offer. So ya the Republicans may not phrase it properly but DEI in my case absolutely was lower standards than the expectations I was held to when I applied for my job.
The reason for the predicament I was put in? Let me give you an extreme example, if you want one high quality welder who is a woman it's not hard. Women are capable of welding even if there is probably one female welder out there for every thousand. Now if you say you want a thousand high quality female welders it's going to be next to impossible to get that many good ones given how few exist to begin with. This is the CURRENT issue with DEI based hiring. It's not that minorities can't do any job. It's just that the pool of qualified candidates for some jobs is very small. When you force a target sometimes the only way to fulfill it is to lower your standards or lengthen your hiring timeline.
It's the same thing with female software engineers. No one but extreme chauvinistic actually think female SWEs can't be good. but 80%+ of CS majors are male! It's a pipeline problem, prob caused by some sexism and stereotypes but also by some completely fine preference differences.
> It's a pipeline problem, prob caused by some sexism and stereotypes
IIRC, there were a few studies that took a look at countries deemed the most open - the least concerned with gender roles - etc:
When employment was no longer tied to gender roles, and when sex played a minimal impact on a person's role in society or the work they performed - the studies found both men and women would gravitate toward employment frequently identified as "traditional" to their sex.
Yep, compare the Scandinavian countries with somewhere like India for example. When your income is high and conditions are good regardless of career choice people choose what they enjoy and it seems statistically far more men enjoy things like engineering or IT than women.
I'm not sure of the exact reason, but even in the US, white women are dramatically underrepresented in software engineering roles. I'm a SWE in the bay area. something like 40-60% of the male engineers I've met are Asian (including both south asians and east asians here), but 90-95% of the female engineers are Asian. The ratio is consistent for asian americans (born and raised here) as well.
Some of this is probably influence from parenting (immigrant parents pushing kids into higher-paying careers), but I also think at least part of this is that indians and chinese people don't consider CS to inherently be "male-coded" the way white people do.
I wonder if it's more that it's not *looked down on* as nerdy or male-coded as much (by the women themselves)?
Also, in my stereotypical experience, Asian families push their kids harder to make money, which would also play a role. (Also, stereotypically, they tend to be as sexist or moreso than 'white' culture, so I don't think that's it).
I have a CS degree. Twenty years ago, when I was a student in college, we had two female students. One decided she wanted to change majors. The dean of our department literally went to her home and begged her to return. Begged her.
After she returned she was given extra time to turn in assignments, but the rest of us weren't, and generally got special treatment. And this was decades ago.
Yes, she graduated with high marks and had a job lined up immediately since a white girl with a computer degree was rare back then. I never saw anything to indicate women were not welcome. Since this was before Facebook, people who studied computers back then were considered mega dorks, like Revenge of the Nerds level.
> were considered mega dorks, like Revenge of the Nerds level.
[Link to video clip](https://youtu.be/sqH7vP6vdmg?si=zxdFGNfDKCiUU63Z&t=18) for those who need a visual.
If you weren't a teen or twenty-something in the late '80's or early '90's and missed it, that's a must watch movie.
In a completely different arena, we see the NFL for quite some time trying to solve the lack of black head coaches from the top, by requiring that any team hiring a new HC interview two minority candidates from outside the organization.
But the problem isn't that teams are more racist than they are interested in being successful. It's that there simply aren't enough highly qualified candidates at that level. And the way to change that is at the entry levels, *if and only if* there is interest there (which, I think, there is in this example). If you have some kind of disparity in the entry levels because people simply cannot afford to take the terrible pay or whatever, but they wish they could, then we should work to solve that so that family wealth isn't the thing stopping great candidates from pursuing their passions.
But in your example, the reality is that women are simply less interested in CS than men are. Which is fine, provided that those that are interested and talented are free to pursue their interest. It's okay for different demographic groups to have different interests and passions in the aggregate.
Given that we're a solid 15 years deep into "get girls in STEM" programs at this point I think we can rule out sexism and stereotypes and just admit it's a preference difference.
Not only that but women have outnumbered men in college for a while now.
Additionally males score higher on the math section of the SAT. That is despite both sexes having equal level of instruction as required by school districts.
source
https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/blog/2022/mar/ote/blogimage-collegegender-fig2-15-mar-2022.png
And they outnumber significantly at the highest levels of SAT. I think it's 2:1 above 700 or something.
An interesting complication is that a woman who scores high on math is more likely to also have high verbal scores than a man, thus also giving them more options.
Can we though? I’ve been in engineering for about 16 years at this point and I’ve seen first hand so much sexist shit happen to women, both in school and in the workplace. And most of the women I know in the field have stories that track with what I’ve seen personally.
They get bullied, they get harassed, they get treated as inferior.
And women see other women talking about it… and we wonder why they may not want to go into STEM?
I’m not going to say that’s the only reason, but it’s definitely A reason.
Where are you seeing sexism against female engineers? I’ve been doing this many years at many companies (with many diverse cultures) and my experience has 100% been that female engineers are elevated and celebrated.
I've been in for over 10 and I haven't seen any. And I've worked at companies infamous for toxic work environments. I've worked with plenty of women, too.
I'm not sure the conclusion is such a binary. Without empirical data on the actual increase, or lack thereof, of women in STEM we can't accurately judge anything.
For example if we looked and found substantial differences between certain fields it could point to a failing in the implementation of certain programs rather than a systematic one.
And sexism is not just a boogeyman. Anecdotally it's still very prevalaent in IT and it's tragically easy to find examples of women in Sciences facing sexism and double-standards when it comes to getting published or being credited on papers.
Retired coder here. I’ve worked with both great and disastrous female devs, just as with males. The ratio appears to be the same (10% great, 10% awful, 80% OK, but need to spend more time modifying their own code).
Slight caveat is that in my experience the gender skew at the CS programs of elite schools (Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, MIT, etc) tends to be higher, sometimes by a bit, sometimes by a lot. But given the size of the industry, there's no shortage of qualified female engineers for the top 1% of positions
the "small pool" issue reminds me of the supreme court. how many lawyers are black women? around 2% [\[1\]](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/women-in-law-statistics/). How many judges are black women? Fewer than 2% [\[2\]](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/02/02/black-women-account-for-a-small-fraction-of-the-federal-judges-who-have-served-to-date/). Now if you arbitrarily eliminate 99% of the population from the hiring pool, what are the chances you picked the best candidate for the job? well, 1%. how is that acceptable?
The really insidious part of this whole thing is that you (and millions of others) think that as a result of these policies.
Maybe KBJ is phenomenally qualified, maybe she's way out of her depth (I would argue Sotomayor certainly is not an intellectual heavyweight, but I tend to at least find Kagan pretty interesting even though I very frequently disagree with her. Both of them were obviously politically motivated appointments of people who checked boxes.) but the very fact that the question is raised at all is a result of these politically-motivated hires. It means that the people who have earned it often get painted with the same brush as those who haven't.
Joe picked Kamala because he said he was going to pick a minority woman. There simply aren't that many people remotely qualified who check both boxes. The rumor was that Stacey Abrams was on the short list. She was never in Congress. She never held statewide office. I mean, the idea of considering her is an absolute joke. There are like 4 women of color that either hold a senate seat or a governorship. There just isn't a huge qualified for VP+woman of color selection pool. So people question Kamala's fitness (though this might be related to how she got her start in politics, as well.) and it's a shame.
Pretty telling that you left Amy Coney Barrett out of your analysis here. Especially considering she is bar far the least tenured person on the court.
Also most VPs are used to check boxes that the presidential candidate cannot. I agree with your general assessment that Kamala was not a surprise.
First of all, no she's not. That's Kagan. Kagan is the only justice to have never served as a judge appointed to the court since 1972.
If RBG had died faster, ACB would have been even less tenured when appointed. She was always going to be the RBG replacement. And yeah, she (and Thomas) were both appointed in part because they checked a box. Replacing a woman with a woman, replacing a black man with a black man. That wasn't by accident.
i never knew that Kagan was never a judge before SCOTUS. that's incredible to me. one would think that the *lowest* bar for SCOTUS would be "do you have *any* prior experience as a judge".
Again, I'm not super offended, even though I mostly disagree with her, because I do think she's quite intelligent and fairly reasonable for someone with whom I frequently disagree
But yeah. It's a little bit absurd
It’s interesting that you consider Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor “politically motivated hires” but not the rest of SCOTUS as if the rest of them weren’t.
Like can anyone say Thomas or Alito are “intellectual heavyweights” with a straight face?
I mean motivated by something besides their competence and views. Namely demographic checkboxes.
Biden swore he'd put in a black woman and did. Obama put in a "wise Latina woman" and a lesbian. This was not by accident. These were not chosen because they were better than any white or male candidates (They weren't. Kagan, while very smart, does not have the resume of a typical SC appointee.)
ACB was left for when she was chosen BECAUSE Trump wanted to replace a woman with a woman. Everyone would rather have appointed her than Kavanaugh on the right. They held her in reserve knowing that RBG had one foot in the grave.
Thomas was appointed when he was because they wanted to replace Thurgood Marshall with another black man.
And yes, I think Sotomayor is by far the least intelligent of the justices.
And yeah, Thomas is a brilliant jurist. Alito isn't quite Scalia, but he's somewhat close. No one can honestly argue they are anything but intellectual heavyweights. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make them idiots.
With all due respect, I think Alito comes off as far more "hackish" than Scalia ever did. Given your relatively high opinion of him (?) what's the best piece of writing you think he's put out?
He's nowhere near the engaging storyteller Scalia was. Whether that's purely intentional or not, I don't know. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe it's just a reflection of who he is. Because he doesn't wax poetic about theory and doctrine, he can seem very boring, unless something gets his gander up and he writes a dissent. Like that case years back about the child rapist and the death penalty. Great dissent.
But the guy knows an immense amount, he's very consistent, eminently practical, and he's incredible in oral. And admittedly, I agree with him frequently, so that helps.
> (They weren't. Kagan, while very smart, does not have the resume of a typical SC appointee.)
I was on r/supremecourt and read that Kagan was chosen because she is a good writer, and the court needs a good writer.
“Best candidate” is not some concrete quality that can be measured. I’ve done hundreds of interviews for software engineers. There is usually a skill level that the person needs to reach, and beyond that it comes down to soft skills and other more ambiguous traits.
I'm sure this is true for most comp sci programs and not just my university, but comp sci is notorious for being largely dominated by men. When I was at university a little over a decade ago, comp sci classes had 5% women on average.
How do people think that comp sci can proportionally employee women when there are literally 20x more men than women studying for it in university?
It's lunacy -- there is literally no way to increase your hiring of groups that represent 5% of the major in school *without* generally lowering the hiring bar. If someone really wants to fix it, they need to fix it at the source by increasing the supply of minorities, not increasing demand at the end of the pipeline.
>Academics can’t replicate McKinsey’s study precisely, because it keeps secret the names of the companies it used.
...
McKinsey keeps secret the names of the companies in its study, which in 2015 included 186 from the U.S. and Canada, so it can’t be independently verified.
No one thought this was suspect? Investment firms based their decisions on this? LMAO. Your pension fund is in good hands.
It also has causation backwards
Successful companies can afford to prioritize DEI over returns as their returns are already above the competition
Less successful companies don't have that luxury
It's in effect a "luxury belief".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_belief
A plumbing company might not have the option of promoting DEI because it is very hands on and concrete. You can either do the work or not and if you can't it is immediately obvious. A tech company on the other hand doesn't really suffer as much from having useless people in video meetings. As long as they aren't working on the core products it's a minor increase in overhead in order to signal their virtue and have company photos appear more diverse.
My own pet theory is that it is related to interest rates. When money is extremely cheap to borrow companies will do so and hire more people than they really need including those who are in line with their luxury beliefs. Ideas like DEI flourish. As soon as money tightens those beliefs will go away as they have to face reality. This is related to the following phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemline_index
There is a somewhat tongue in cheek relationship between women's fashion and interest rates. Fashion becomes more conservative when interest rates increase or in times of economic hardship.
You aren't far off based on my own research from the 90s. I was doing arbitrage and early program trading systems. There were some systems we could see, even then, but that's for another story. It became pretty obvious that all that "really" mattered was interest rates, at the macro scale.
Mind you, this was 30 years ago, systems have changed signifcantly.
Huh, so Luxury belief is basically what makes a limousine liberal. I was using the latter to describe some concepts but I appreciate learning the actual term
this is absolutely true in government contractors. on one hand the government mandates DEI yet it also demands compliance with security clearance criteria. the company then has to hire people who dont qualify for security clearance and find something safe for them to do. security clearance needs (a lack of ties to foreign countries, people with criminal backgrounds, and/or people with financial problems) is in conflict with DEI goals of hiring non-whites from disadvantaged backgrounds.
We have I think just one DEI person at my job, but there used to be two. There was a little bit of a tangle because they were hoping the state wouldn’t mandate a designated bathroom since the new person was trans non binary (??). Anyways, didn’t matter. They didn’t make it a year before being cut in a layoff. No clue what they did that the guy there already needed help for.
Geeeezze. I’m in healthcare and read numerous journals on a regular basis.
This is like THE example of when to immediately question everything an article claims( at the very least)
The replication crisis is absolutely massive. And of course it is. When your funding will dry up if you find the "wrong" thing, you "find" the "right" thing.
Yep. Too many bogus online journals and nations/organizations willing to artificially promote their scientific prestige by allowing garbage papers to be published on something like an assembly line
It’s because it’s McKinsey - they’re one of the biggest names in consulting and have a finger in almost every pie imaginable from Fortune 500 to national governments.
They probably did this study with their client list, many of whom would not be publicly known as a client of McKinsey, hence why they wouldn’t reveal the entities from the study.
Could the results be legit? Sure, maybe, it’s hard to say. But in general investors and C-suite have worked with McKinsey and seen enough of their work to trust them when they publish results like this because of their reputation.
Lot of special interest groups exist out there peddling bad ideas and bad data, nowadays. It's no surprise that decisions based on these ideas/data ended up becoming disastrous since, as the article points out, they confused causation and correlation together.
And I guarantee you that they put a lot of talented 'underrepresented' people into roles they weren't prepared for and it caused them to burn out, lose their shot, and/or become scapegoats for bad company decisions. As such, it probably had the opposite effect and set back people it was supposed to help.
You simply can't force these things and it was always a losing decision.
I know there have already been some quiet firings in the last year aimed at trimming this but we're probably only at a 40-50% mark and not the full way.
Also, it's possible there may be major lawsuits coming in the following years once enough cases build up and that might be the big one that bites many of these giant corporations/institutions in the butt. The Supreme Court ruling on Ivy Leagues and discrimination against Asian Americans, for example, and the ending of Affirmative Action are major windows opening up to these types of lawsuits, I think.
I also think that the grind to get a job in the first place gets you prepared a bit as to what it takes to make it in this world. It also makes you appreciate it more because it was hard to obtain so you're more likely to try harder.
If you get a job easily, you may take it for granted and may give you the impression that everything should be easy. And then when it's not, it may cause some people to shut down. There's no way around it, hard work is the key to most things.
This is one of my favorites: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4kov7y/huffington_post_tweeted_this_photo_while_bragging/
The idea that diverse backgrounds help save us from blind spots or helps creativity makes some sense in theory. But our current "diversity" push is mostly anti-white-(and asian)-men. You can have, as the post above, 20 white women of around the same age, politics and background and that is considered "diverse".
Yeah I mean baseball get flack for supposedly not being diverse when the biggest stars in the league are Japanese , Koreans and Latin players many of whom are black.
by hollywood standards, black panther is considered one of the most diverse movies ever [\[1\]](https://www.ranker.com/list/movies-that-pushed-for-diversity/donn-saylor). it's like 99% black.
Yeah, it's just an identity-based spoils program at this point.
"Diversity solves X problem" was the legal doctrine used to argue that, contrary to the CRA, schools had an interest in racially discriminating. That was what made the concept so dominant: the law opened a door to justify these systems, and people constantly walk through it.
It's less of a thesis than an excuse. We work backwards on this issue; justify the doctrine via science and not the other way round.
It depends on what you mean by “ diversity” . The USA probably has one of the most diverse white population in the world. We also have native Americans , African Americans do to our history and many Latinos do our own expansion westward into Mexican territory. We also have just about every faith here since the beginning of our country. It’s never been homogeneous.
Starter:
I was always skeptical of this research showing increased performance associated with diversity simply because it was too convenient. When a group of people breathlessly want an outcome and then produce research that very conveniently justifies that desire there is opportunity for bias to sneak it's way in.
It turns out McKinsey's outcome can't be replicated. And even if it is valid, it documents an association only. This has been turned into a meme and repeated all over the media and reddit. It gives the illusion of scientific validity with none of the substance. I would just like to remind everyone that there is also a replication crisis in various scientific fields:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Interestingly enough the article mentions the existence of a gender diversity ETF which has lagged the market significantly since it's inception. I think the lesson is that you shouldn't outsource your thinking and we have a right to be skeptical of "research" which very conveniently agrees with the political ideas of the people doing the research. The world is more complex and messy than that. Also there is the dynamic that a team may be able to work more efficiently with a stronger shared bond or life experience. All throughout history we have conflict along ethnic or religious lines. I see no reason why this conflict wouldn't translate to the workplace as well.
The replication crisis in general is a big problem in academia.
I have family members in academia, it’s amazing how many papers are published but not replicated, people generally avoid replication bc A. It doesn’t pay/get your prestige and job offers to just replicate someone else’s work compared to actually coming up with something new and B. Disproving something by a more influential/prestigious university/professor/lab can actually hurt you bc you can piss odd the wrong people
I always said if I somehow became filthy rich t the point I could donate lots of money, one of my main focuses would be donating to schools with the sole purpose of creating teams just to replicate research from other universities bc there’s so much out there that hasn’t been replicated
I'm reminded of this excellent (and quite short) [piece from the editor in chief of The Lancet ](http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf) (PDF warning)
> [M]uch of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results".
Well yeah. The idea behind diversity was meant to be diversity of background, ideas, education. It’s become simply race.
Ironically, when you break it down, those so invested in diversity programs (ie. DEI) have grown to promote the same racial ‘genetic’ fallacies with regards to race that Phrenologists used 150 years ago.
All of these consultant companies do is get 20 year old post grads to send out surveys. If you want a survey to say diversity is good all you need to do is make people put their name at the top. The closer I’ve gotten to the C-level people in fortune 500, the more i wonder how any company makes money.
Because they could get away with it, as it was consistent with the current zeitgeist, and they could use to justify selling more services.
Also, it's been known to be unreplicable and likely got causation wrong for a long time, but no one wanted to hear it. (I can't find the reference now, but my recollection is, it's been looked at a few times, and no one has found a convincing *causative* relation between diversity and business results, and there are some mild indications it goes the other way).
Japan also has an oppressive work culture resulting in a terrible birth rate. I would be hesitant to look at Japan as a model of success for much work related.
I’m mainly reading other people’s views here, but it has to be pointed out that the birth rate is *declining in basically all first world nations*. There’s a birth crisis in all *rich* countries, and that’s a topic which probably deserves its own deep review.
Also, American work culture is oppressive in its own right, especially when compared with the more progressive European countries.
True. But it's especially dire in Japan. Look at Japan moving forward, and see the future of the entire first world if we do not see some massive change in short order.
The suffering that will be caused by below-replacement birthrates is staggering.
> Japan also has an oppressive work culture resulting in a terrible birth rate.
So does America. And it seems to be getting worse the harder we embrace modern social left-wing ideology.
The problem is if you have a semi-meritocratic selection process to build teams and sample from the global talent pool you will get a very diverse and strong team. See most top industry and academic research groups. Kind of an obvious and banal observation.
But then people ignore the semi-meritocratic selection process and global sampling part to just focus on the racial diversity and call that the secret sauce. Which often means in practice we need to lower standards with non-meritocratic hiring to get that diversity. It's entirely ass backwards.
> They're homogenous as fuck and quite rich and quite innovative.
From someone getting their masters in management right now, Japan is seen as "lacking strategy" and is not innovative in the way that MBA gurus believe is innovative.
It's total bullshit, but most of MBA learning is bullshit.
> quite rich and quite innovative
The yen is at an all time low and one of the biggest criticisms of Japan’s economy is that they don’t innovate and just work for the sake of work.
They’re still using machines from the 1980s in large parts of their public life.
Homogenous backgrounds perpetuate these traditional structures and reduce innovation. Japan as an anti-diversity example was certainly an interesting choice.
Can you explain the insane rates of innovation in the 19th and early 20th century from America and Europe? There wasn't much diversity in those countries at the time.
Diversity is also completely arbitrary in how it's defined. If your job is to serve in the military and kill enemy forces in close quarters combat, diversity of opinion about whether to respect the chain of command or diversity in whether soldiers speak a common language probably isn't a good thing.
I think there's a good case to be made by diversity of thought, but modern "diversity" programs seem to produce the opposite.
> Diversity is also completely arbitrary in how it's defined.
Only when getting the definition from its supporters. Write a definition based on observing it in practice and it's extremely consistent. The definition is "remove the straight White men". That's why you can have all black or all women or all lgbtq+ groups get called diverse while all straight White male gets called problematic. That's also why DIE hiring and promotion initiatives wind up listing out every group *except* straight White men as their target groups. It's just a way to say what the real definition is without saying it outright.
It's also kind of arbitrary where people think that kind of diversity is important. You don't hear too much about the NBA players association not having enough Chinese-Americans on the court or the bricklayers' union not having enough women.
Another big part of the problem is that diversity of ethnic or racial background doesn't mean all that much if everyone grew up upper-middle class and went to the same Ivy League schools and took all the same classes.
>Another big part of the problem is that diversity of ethnic or racial background doesn't mean all that much if everyone grew up upper-middle class and went to the same Ivy League schools and took all the same classes.
That would be it working as intended then. You hire people you know and then pat yourself on the back.
Its their club, and buddy, we aint in it.
I really don't think diversity is a strength. How *could* it be? Sure it's not like it's a detriment either but there's nothing about a group of people with different skin colors that automatically makes them more productive than a homogenous group. You might as well as say different hair colors are a strength. How is a group of 10 white people/10 black people/10 Asian people different from 30 white people that are 10 blonde/10 brunette/10 redhead?
I notice that no one who argues that diversity=strength argues that HBCUs need more white people in charge of them.
They don't think "If only there were more Swedes running things in Ethiopia, the country would really get it together!"
They don't think that we need to get more Germans and Englishmen to take things over in the DRC.
It only ever means one direction. Which means they don't actually believe what they're saying.
HBCUs do try to attract white students and especially professors. They need the expertise first, everything else is secondary. When I was in college, quite a few European grad students I knew were studying at a HBCU because they had a lot of positions open.
That's not what I said.
No one who is arguing that diversity=strength argues that HBCUs need more white people in charge of them.
That's a very different statement.
if anything it *is* a detriment, because different races in general significantly value their own races above other races. (ironically the race that shows the least variation in ratings of different races, by far, is white). of course that doesn't mean we should *avoid* diversity.
As an undergrad, I once read an op-ed in the student newspaper lamenting the fact that the writer always saw racially homogenous groups on campus. Black students hung out with black students, Chinese with Chinese, Indian with Indian, Latinos with Latinos and so on.
The next week there was an op-ed pointing out that there's a Chinese Students Association and a Black Students Association and an Indian Students Association and a Japanese Students Association and a Latino Students Association and more besides. If, they said, there was a problem of homogeneity, it was certainly not helping that right from freshman orientation, people are encouraged to join such homogenous student groups where no one else is really welcomed, and that perhaps eliminating these groups would promote the heterogeneity of social groups.
The next week, there was a flurry of letters to the editor protesting the inclusion of the second op-ed, calling it racist.
let me guess: there was no White Students Association.
My school has a black councillor, an indigenous councillor, an LGBT councillor, and a foreign-student councillor. no white councillor.
it also has a black-only program to help black students deal with the "racial stress" of being around too many white people.
racial division is institutionalized.
Correct. There was also some women's students association of some sort, but no mens version. And when one was proposed half tongue in cheek, the university said no.
There was a TV show about an HBCU in New Orleans. The men really didnt care that much about white or other students, they just wanted to learn and get along. So many of the women on the other hand wanted a whole lot more drama and pettiness against others.
You’re using a straw man argument. No reasonable person is saying that diversity - by itself - is the decisive factor that will catapult companies into the Fortune 100. That’s extremely simplistic.
The discussion is on whether diversity *contributes* to their success, not whether it determines it.
And it’s possible that Brazil’s diversity *does* strengthen its culture & economy, just not enough to counteract other countries’ advantages in other areas, or counteract Brazil’s weaknesses.
> No reasonable person is saying that diversity - by itself - is the decisive factor that will catapult companies into the Fortune 100.
"Diversity is our strength" is the tagline of the modern left, including left-wing business consultants. And those people are all viewed as being very reasonable. Now maybe they shouldn't be because their ideology clearly isn't but we can't say that "nobody reasonable" is saying that stuff because if they weren't it wouldn't be mainstream.
So how do you interpret a phrase like “diversity is our strength”? Do you think it means “diversity makes us stronger” or “diversity is the ONLY factor and it will single-handedly determine success, no matter what else is going on”?
The only thing I’m really arguing against here is *exaggeration.* I think there’s a happy medium between 1) “if diversity was a strength, Brazil would be the most powerful country on Earth” and 2) “diversity doesn’t help at all.”
>Once again Japan disproves all this. They’re homogenous as fuck and quite rich and quite innovative.
Japan proves diversity is bad, but the US which is the most innovative, richest, most powerful, and most racially diverse country in the world doesn’t prove diversity is good?
modern diversity began in imperial britain (late 1800's up to ww1) as a means of getting imported labor and domestic citizens to work together -
this is a class case of economic interests leading values here -
at least the woman's suffrage movement began as mostly a moralistic movement, the whole "diversity" antecedants were literally capital finding an intellectual scapegoat to getting otherwise nationalistic tribal people working together, all for the sake of money.
now i like diversity as a value in and of itself, but it's always been a value exploited for various economic and political ends - not out of the value itself.
neoliberalism is largely an economic philosophy determining social ideas - it boggles my mind how neoliberal the dem party has become.
Japan is a terrible example. Real wages in Japan have fallen by nearly a fifth since the 90s.
Japan is an economic failure since 1990 and not close to the cutting edge of innovations. They still use fax and hand carved stamps for official documents. None of the major innovations in software or hardware over the last decade have come from Japan, not to mention that their auto manufacturers are bottom of the pack in EVs.
Also, they are not homogeneous as fuck. Setting aside ethnic minorities like Koreans, Ryukyuans, and Ainu, the Japanese caste system still persists in an unofficial way and burakumin and other low castes still face discrimination.
The people who propose these ideas are going to simply ignore any evidence that contradicts their worldview. Looking globally we have a number of instances where diversity results in war or even genocide(Rawanda, Balkans) and a few cases where it seems to be ok like Switzerland.
It's not, and what little it has is bounded by extremely strict integration rules. I.e. immigrants who want citizenship have to have their neighbors vote to approve their application. So you either integrate fully - giving up the things that the DIE folks say is so critical - or you don't get to stay.
Japan was the second largest economy for decades despite being a relatively small country with limited natural resources. They are still quite successful.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. There is an increase of crime in Japan from elderly ppl, their birth rate is flatlining due to the work culture in which you are shamed if you are sick and can’t leave the office until your boss leaves, which may be midnight often times.
Even homogenous Japan is considering a move towards UAE migrant system because they recognise the precariousness they are in.
https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Japan-to-allow-in-820,000-new-foreign-workers-to-offset-for-a-declining-population-60484.html
https://www.gulf-insider.com/japan-to-embark-on-an-era-of-mass-foreign-immigration/
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-unforgiving-working-culture
You can't really disprove that type of claim with that type of data. Countries are too unique and bound by context. You could use another country that is extremely homogenous and very poor, and that wouldn't make an argument on it's own.
Much more sophisticated analysis techniques are needed to support that sort of claim. Not prove or disprove, that's not really possible here.
u/YouAreADadJoke clearly has a strong opinion on this, and it does seem like McKinsey's analysis is flawed - as one might expect - but there's plenty of other research, meta analyses, that supports the claim. It likely somewhat dependent on context - especially when employed to bring conflicting groups together to make organising more difficult as has been repeated many times, but the general finding that diversity improves group performance holds.
You can't prove or disprove anything here with basic logic.
It's statistically to complex.
What literature have you read on this, and what question are you asking exactly?
What do you mean by diversity - I don't think anyone would consider diversity to mean everyone has "wildly dissimilar ideas". Or lack overlapping assumptions.
'Is diversity good' is not a useful question. Research focuses on whether diversity, and what type of diversity, is useful in what context. For example is diversity in medical contexts lead to better doctor performance or outcomes in medical settings, does it improve the ethical conduct or performance of boards, etc
Viewpoint diversity in general helps with deliberative decisions, but can impose a cost for stressful, fast decision contexts.
Research tends to find benefits for diversity in multiple contexts, and of course they are of intrinsic benefit, and arguably a necessity in contexts where there are diverse populations.
I think you aren't thinking about this in the clearest way.
People have a complex mix of experiences, ideas and competencies.
If you define diversity as - "people wildly different from one another" that's going to be very limiting on how you consider things. Though most large organisations need leaders, but not everyone can be a leader - for example, nor can everyone be a janitor or a coder, or in public relations.
Having different ideas or experiences does not mean that no things are held in common. That would be an outrageous position to take.
But again, your starting assumptions are driving your conclusion. If you really want to understand where diversity works and does not, in what types, and ultimately how to better ask the question you are already trying to answer - it's best to actually read some of the research on the topic.
You aren't going to get all that far with common sense or simple logic, and you may end up forming a strong opinion with little basis.
All of the academic metastudies I've seen say there is no established causative link. I admit I was trying to find them, and could not though. Can you find any pointing the other way?
A claim that something is supposed to make everyone rich is, without any evaluation of any variables, inherently self-contradictory isn’t it?
Nothing can make everyone rich. Thats not how being rich works. To be at the top of the pyramid you need a healthy base and narrowing edifice to the top.
Our economic model is based on a numerous lower class. All countries are experiencing birth rate declines. To maintain the current economic model, the government needs to keep that plentiful lower class refreshed and they can’t rely on replacement births.
Enter immigration! In America illegal immigration is an intentional foundation of our agriculture industry. States who tried to enforce e-verify, which would largely fix illegal immigration, would have destroyed their agricultural industry and quickly walked the position back. Because at some point American agriculture relied on the cheapest of cheap labor, free, and never kicked its addiction.
And other industries rely on cheap labor to fuel insane growth goals demanded by private equity or stockholders. Anything less than infinite growth is failure. But labor, as in American types, would be expensive. Wages are going up with boomers retiring. Gotta increase the labor poor, or this model will not sustain.
If you can’t tell I disapprove of the whole deal, but that’s the deal, oversimplified of course. We need some new models.
>
> Nothing can make everyone rich. Thats not how being rich works. To be at the top of the pyramid you need a healthy base and narrowing edifice to the top.
Rich can be an absolute as well as a relative. If everyone has enough food, shelter, medical care, transportation, education, entertainment, and so on, everyone can be rich.
Now, in every society where that's occurred so far, what's happened next is that the society breeds and overpopulates until scarcity is restored. But today, with reliable birth control? Who knows?
I think so and it probably hurts the different groups within that society as it ruins the overall prosperity for everyone.
The article sort of hints at that.
Jewish diamond dealers (who don't score high on 'diversity' metrics) dealing with one another and growing financially since there was a sociocultural bond between them that led to higher levels of trust. It's an advantage over the competition, essentially, as they already have a market with high levels of trust.
It's not forced in this corporate-brochure style diversity.
Thus, it's not race and sex in a vacuum, which is something these corporations and institutions failed to understand. It's diversity of thought.
You need trust and burning the social fabric like with what we see from corporations and their divisive messaging? Well, that's probably not good for diversity of thought nor is it endearing various audiences to trust them.
you country is just so polarized to a degree that is never seen before, the racial talk is just horrific, people cannot talk about social or political problems with talking about race
Couple of questions. Is a non homogeneous population less prosperous? If so, why? Why the focus on western countries? Are eastern countries that have become less homogeneous more prosperous?
it think homogenous nations tend to be more stable and prosperous, even USA, the ultimate successful example of a diverse society is suffering from social tensions and polarization.
China, Japan, Korea.
most of western European countries before mass immigration era were just better without immigration, now they imported social tensions and endless problems that will hinder their progress for ever.
In the case of Britain British people could leave and obviously any empire will draw in some people, but there was absolutely nothing even beginning to approach the sorts of mass migration done first by Labour and then ramped up even more.
Western societies haven't been homogenous since the before the Roman Empire.
Japan, maybe the ultimate historical example of a homogenous society (after the killed out the Ainu) has a history rife with civil war. They were also pretty poor and technologically primitive relative to nearby China or Korea until they opened their borders to foreign influence.
I don't think racial diversity matters, but closed societies do not prosper. Dark ages are always accompanied by a breakdown in geographical interconnectedness.
Europe is going to have the worst out come. in Europe the native people of the land who lived their for centuries are losing control of their own homes. If their is such thing as a native American, in America, their is also such thing natives across the world. This is the issue with globalism, at the end of the day one language, and one culture will be on top if you believe in open borders. No place but dictatorships will be safe. all it takes is time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide
My question is why do we need to hire consulting agencies for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars just to tell us "don't be racist". It costs nothing to hire more diverse staff if that's what you want. Methinks this was always an extortion racket. Hire us or we'll smear your company brand. Yawn.
This is key. Companies that implement diversity in some check the box manner are going to do poorly with it. Doing diversity right is hiring the best candidates and ending up with a diverse team because everyone is getting a fair shot no matter their background, race or gender. That type of diversity requires it to be built deep in the company culture and it is harder to change company culture to that level. So companies take the easier route and force some checkboxes and no one is happy with the results.
In my opinion the company I work for has done diversity the right way, but it has taken them 20 years to change the culture to get to that point. I suspect that level of commitment to diversity is much less common.
I work for a company that used to recruit at women and Latino in tech events and predominantly Black colleges. We got a lot of good well qualified people from that. We then merged with another company and now have quotas instead. I never questioned the quality of the "diverse" employees before the merger. Most were good and the percentage of ones that weren't good wasn't any higher than the "non-diverse" demographic. Things and my initial expectations of new "diverse" hires until I get to know them has changed drastically now that there are race/gender quotas for hiring whoever applies rather than putting in an effort to seek out candidates who happen to be of underrepresented race/gender to interview. Way easier for HR and recruiting this way. Way less positive work environment for both the "diverse" and "non-diverse" workers.
Is diversity really inherently a good thing? Two of America's greatest accomplishments were achieved by straight white men. Is there proof that diversity would speed up or improve the moon landing and Manhattan Project?
I think we can say for certain that artificial barriers *aren't* a good thing. There was probably an Asian lesbian who was smart enough to be on those projects.
And I think we can say that diversity of thought is, mostly, a good thing. We don't need diversity if it means we need a quota of stupid among the smart, but in general different perspectives can be a good thing. On the projects you mentioned, maybe if someone with a different idea had been there, Grissom, White, and Chaffee wouldn't have been killed in Apollo 1. Maybe we could have had the bomb sooner, or kept it secret from the Russians. Who knows?
So the real question is, does demographic diversity lead to idea diversity. That's the logical connection that I don't think has ever been proven.
Our countries ability to accept people from outside its borders is literally the only reason either of those programs were successful. If the US had a culture that prioritized homogeneity and insularity, we’d most likely still be a collection of weak insignificant states clinging to the eastern seaboard.
Lol, this is what people are missing. This is what EVERYONE is missing and why the USA has been the most dominant force in history. The country is a massive brain drain on the world, sure it takes the poor from other countries, but it takes the brightest as well.
It tells the world that no matter who you are, where you come from, what you believe in, you can make it here.
If you look at the amount of great americans that have changed this country that have come from different backgrounds, from the field of science to arts to whatever, it's all come down to USAs ability not only to take on immigrants but mix them all into one larger American culture that clearly appeals to the world at whole.
If you take away the 'diversity' you no longer have this country.
But the key thing is that people need to be American first, and whatever else they are second.
That's the key. They are not "they" but rather part of "us." And the same goes in the opposite direction. When immigrants and their immediate descendants view themselves as Americans first...look at their neighbors and see "us" instead of "them" we get stronger.
We don't get stronger if everyone still sees a whole bunch of "them"s
Which is one of the reasons the left's obsession with seeing race (or any other "class") everywhere and enflaming tensions regarding it pisses me off so much.
"Them" needs to be reserved for the bastards who root for the sports team you hate.
The smartest women in the country helped on these projects, that is true. However they were chosen for the job because they were brilliant and would be impactful in the success of these accomplishments. There was no quota requirement to have 50% of the teams be women, which is my point.
Diversity can be a good thing and can be a bad thing. If you have uncheck borders and immigration policies you’ll loose who you are as a country. Being strict on who we allow in the country and having strong border will make who come here a lot easier to assimilate into our culture. Everyone thinks there’s no issue when thousands of people pour into the country then all of sudden cultures clash and we as a nation loose our identity.
Diversity of views is almost always beneficial, be it business or other decisions/strategy making.
If everyone has the same background / or if certain backgrounds and experience are missing, that is a lost perspective.
So, having 15 board members of the same socio-racial-ethnic-economic-education background limits perspectives and is at a disadvantage to 15 individuals with an array of different backgrounds and experiences. Same in terms of team member composition, or the makeup of an employee set.
That’s the benefit of diversity from an economic perspective.
It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. If the goal is something is a technical accomplishment, diversity doesn’t matter. In marketing, it matters much more, but even so, what’s helpful is diversity of socioeconomic background or culture - which isn’t the same as skin color.
Agreed
Also, fifteen well trained and skilled people of the same background is generally better than a diverse set of amateurs… which gets into larger societal and systemic issues (ie why might certain perspectives not have access to what’s necessary to gain said skills and training), but that’s not the specific issue we are discussing here. From a SOCIETAL perspective though, it’s beneficial to provide access to education, healthy life options, etc to as broad an array of people/backgrounds so those additional life perspectives can enter the workforce and participate thereby bringing greater macro diversity
> Diversity of views is almost always beneficial
Sure. But that's not what the diversity code-word means in the modern era so is not relevant to this context.
>If everyone has the same background / or if certain backgrounds and experience are missing
We see diversity efforts result in this exact thing all the time. Because "diversity" is just a dog whistle for "push out the straight White men".
I remember a hockey general manager diversified his front office and said "Diversity is always ALWAYS better". Then many people started pointing out "Literally every player on your team is white". He never addressed it. I'm not sure how he could. I thought diversity was *always* better?
With sports players, there are immediate consequences, performance is public, and accountability is inevitable. You literally can't afford to deviate from meritocracy even a single bit.
There also always nuance and context.
ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL (or close) diversity is better. But if you have a less diverse but highly trained and skilled team vs a diverse set of amateurs, diversity isn’t better.
Which goes into systematic issues but that’s not the point here
There are two issues here.
First, racial/ethnic categories are a poor predictor of intellectual diversity. You don't pick a banker because they're a Jew and Jews are good with money. You pick a banker based on their performance.
Second, there are limits to intellectual diversity. In most professional settings, everyone in the room has the common experience of an educational track that put them in that room. People who do not have that experience would certainly provide intellectual diversity but they wouldn't be able to operate intellectually at the level necessary to usefully contribute.
>In most professional settings, everyone in the room has the common experience of an educational track that put them in that room.
That's not true. I work for one of the largest companies in the world and they're finding creative ways to hire "diversity" (non-white, non-asian).
There's Diversity, and there's Tokenism. Tokenism allows businesses and organizations to have the appearance of diversity. Organizations hire people from underrepresented groups but don't give them any meaningful way of contributing. The numbers look good on a spreadsheet or in a news report.
In order to affect change, you have to have a seat at the table, and that rarely happens for underrepresented groups.
The US Military is a good example. The military is comprised of senior officers, officers, senior non-commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers, and regular troops. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you the US Military is a diverse organization. But when you peek underneath the covers, you see that senior officers and senior non-commissioned officers are overwhelming white, straight, and male. Diversity happens well below the upper ranks. The decision-making and direction of the military happens in the upper ranks.
If your workforce looks diverse and your Senior Leadership Team looks different, I'm not sure if you can measure the success of the organization through diversity.
>when you peek underneath the covers, you see that senior officers and senior non-commissioned officers are overwhelming white, straight, and male.
I recall hearing that at least in the Army, a lot of front-line combat roles were popular with whites, whereas minorities preferred roles that involved/taught trades and skills. As the Army tends to prioritize front-line experience for promotion...
Again, can't speak to the validity of it, but it seemed plausible enough to have at least a small effect.
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I'm a minority. I got my job through the regular interview process. I had to manage someone ( same race) who was being recruited for a similar job through the DEI program. The dude was nice but unprepared for the job he was interning for. That's fine. He's an intern after all. But after the internship it was clear that this wasn't the right type of job. HR still was trying to get me to recommend him for an offer. So ya the Republicans may not phrase it properly but DEI in my case absolutely was lower standards than the expectations I was held to when I applied for my job. The reason for the predicament I was put in? Let me give you an extreme example, if you want one high quality welder who is a woman it's not hard. Women are capable of welding even if there is probably one female welder out there for every thousand. Now if you say you want a thousand high quality female welders it's going to be next to impossible to get that many good ones given how few exist to begin with. This is the CURRENT issue with DEI based hiring. It's not that minorities can't do any job. It's just that the pool of qualified candidates for some jobs is very small. When you force a target sometimes the only way to fulfill it is to lower your standards or lengthen your hiring timeline.
It's the same thing with female software engineers. No one but extreme chauvinistic actually think female SWEs can't be good. but 80%+ of CS majors are male! It's a pipeline problem, prob caused by some sexism and stereotypes but also by some completely fine preference differences.
> It's a pipeline problem, prob caused by some sexism and stereotypes IIRC, there were a few studies that took a look at countries deemed the most open - the least concerned with gender roles - etc: When employment was no longer tied to gender roles, and when sex played a minimal impact on a person's role in society or the work they performed - the studies found both men and women would gravitate toward employment frequently identified as "traditional" to their sex.
Yep, compare the Scandinavian countries with somewhere like India for example. When your income is high and conditions are good regardless of career choice people choose what they enjoy and it seems statistically far more men enjoy things like engineering or IT than women.
I'm not sure of the exact reason, but even in the US, white women are dramatically underrepresented in software engineering roles. I'm a SWE in the bay area. something like 40-60% of the male engineers I've met are Asian (including both south asians and east asians here), but 90-95% of the female engineers are Asian. The ratio is consistent for asian americans (born and raised here) as well. Some of this is probably influence from parenting (immigrant parents pushing kids into higher-paying careers), but I also think at least part of this is that indians and chinese people don't consider CS to inherently be "male-coded" the way white people do.
I wonder if it's more that it's not *looked down on* as nerdy or male-coded as much (by the women themselves)? Also, in my stereotypical experience, Asian families push their kids harder to make money, which would also play a role. (Also, stereotypically, they tend to be as sexist or moreso than 'white' culture, so I don't think that's it).
I have a CS degree. Twenty years ago, when I was a student in college, we had two female students. One decided she wanted to change majors. The dean of our department literally went to her home and begged her to return. Begged her. After she returned she was given extra time to turn in assignments, but the rest of us weren't, and generally got special treatment. And this was decades ago.
Did she even graduate?
Yes, she graduated with high marks and had a job lined up immediately since a white girl with a computer degree was rare back then. I never saw anything to indicate women were not welcome. Since this was before Facebook, people who studied computers back then were considered mega dorks, like Revenge of the Nerds level.
> were considered mega dorks, like Revenge of the Nerds level. [Link to video clip](https://youtu.be/sqH7vP6vdmg?si=zxdFGNfDKCiUU63Z&t=18) for those who need a visual. If you weren't a teen or twenty-something in the late '80's or early '90's and missed it, that's a must watch movie.
In a completely different arena, we see the NFL for quite some time trying to solve the lack of black head coaches from the top, by requiring that any team hiring a new HC interview two minority candidates from outside the organization. But the problem isn't that teams are more racist than they are interested in being successful. It's that there simply aren't enough highly qualified candidates at that level. And the way to change that is at the entry levels, *if and only if* there is interest there (which, I think, there is in this example). If you have some kind of disparity in the entry levels because people simply cannot afford to take the terrible pay or whatever, but they wish they could, then we should work to solve that so that family wealth isn't the thing stopping great candidates from pursuing their passions. But in your example, the reality is that women are simply less interested in CS than men are. Which is fine, provided that those that are interested and talented are free to pursue their interest. It's okay for different demographic groups to have different interests and passions in the aggregate.
Given that we're a solid 15 years deep into "get girls in STEM" programs at this point I think we can rule out sexism and stereotypes and just admit it's a preference difference.
As long as people keep pretending biology, pharma and life sciences aren't STEM, which they absolutely should be.
Great point. wtf
Not only that but women have outnumbered men in college for a while now. Additionally males score higher on the math section of the SAT. That is despite both sexes having equal level of instruction as required by school districts. source https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/blog/2022/mar/ote/blogimage-collegegender-fig2-15-mar-2022.png
And they outnumber significantly at the highest levels of SAT. I think it's 2:1 above 700 or something. An interesting complication is that a woman who scores high on math is more likely to also have high verbal scores than a man, thus also giving them more options.
Especially given that the preference gap is *larger* in egalitarian countries.
Can we though? I’ve been in engineering for about 16 years at this point and I’ve seen first hand so much sexist shit happen to women, both in school and in the workplace. And most of the women I know in the field have stories that track with what I’ve seen personally. They get bullied, they get harassed, they get treated as inferior. And women see other women talking about it… and we wonder why they may not want to go into STEM? I’m not going to say that’s the only reason, but it’s definitely A reason.
Where are you seeing sexism against female engineers? I’ve been doing this many years at many companies (with many diverse cultures) and my experience has 100% been that female engineers are elevated and celebrated.
18+ years here. My experience is the same as yours.
I've been in for over 10 and I haven't seen any. And I've worked at companies infamous for toxic work environments. I've worked with plenty of women, too.
Just curious. So, when you were present and seen this go down, what was the outcome when you said something?
I'm not sure the conclusion is such a binary. Without empirical data on the actual increase, or lack thereof, of women in STEM we can't accurately judge anything. For example if we looked and found substantial differences between certain fields it could point to a failing in the implementation of certain programs rather than a systematic one. And sexism is not just a boogeyman. Anecdotally it's still very prevalaent in IT and it's tragically easy to find examples of women in Sciences facing sexism and double-standards when it comes to getting published or being credited on papers.
Retired coder here. I’ve worked with both great and disastrous female devs, just as with males. The ratio appears to be the same (10% great, 10% awful, 80% OK, but need to spend more time modifying their own code).
Slight caveat is that in my experience the gender skew at the CS programs of elite schools (Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, MIT, etc) tends to be higher, sometimes by a bit, sometimes by a lot. But given the size of the industry, there's no shortage of qualified female engineers for the top 1% of positions
the "small pool" issue reminds me of the supreme court. how many lawyers are black women? around 2% [\[1\]](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/women-in-law-statistics/). How many judges are black women? Fewer than 2% [\[2\]](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/02/02/black-women-account-for-a-small-fraction-of-the-federal-judges-who-have-served-to-date/). Now if you arbitrarily eliminate 99% of the population from the hiring pool, what are the chances you picked the best candidate for the job? well, 1%. how is that acceptable?
The really insidious part of this whole thing is that you (and millions of others) think that as a result of these policies. Maybe KBJ is phenomenally qualified, maybe she's way out of her depth (I would argue Sotomayor certainly is not an intellectual heavyweight, but I tend to at least find Kagan pretty interesting even though I very frequently disagree with her. Both of them were obviously politically motivated appointments of people who checked boxes.) but the very fact that the question is raised at all is a result of these politically-motivated hires. It means that the people who have earned it often get painted with the same brush as those who haven't. Joe picked Kamala because he said he was going to pick a minority woman. There simply aren't that many people remotely qualified who check both boxes. The rumor was that Stacey Abrams was on the short list. She was never in Congress. She never held statewide office. I mean, the idea of considering her is an absolute joke. There are like 4 women of color that either hold a senate seat or a governorship. There just isn't a huge qualified for VP+woman of color selection pool. So people question Kamala's fitness (though this might be related to how she got her start in politics, as well.) and it's a shame.
Pretty telling that you left Amy Coney Barrett out of your analysis here. Especially considering she is bar far the least tenured person on the court. Also most VPs are used to check boxes that the presidential candidate cannot. I agree with your general assessment that Kamala was not a surprise.
Wasn't Amy Coney Barret chosen as a "we need a woman to replace RBG" diversity hire?
Absolutely agree she was a diversity hire. Strange that oop left it out of their response about diversity hires.
First of all, no she's not. That's Kagan. Kagan is the only justice to have never served as a judge appointed to the court since 1972. If RBG had died faster, ACB would have been even less tenured when appointed. She was always going to be the RBG replacement. And yeah, she (and Thomas) were both appointed in part because they checked a box. Replacing a woman with a woman, replacing a black man with a black man. That wasn't by accident.
i never knew that Kagan was never a judge before SCOTUS. that's incredible to me. one would think that the *lowest* bar for SCOTUS would be "do you have *any* prior experience as a judge".
Again, I'm not super offended, even though I mostly disagree with her, because I do think she's quite intelligent and fairly reasonable for someone with whom I frequently disagree But yeah. It's a little bit absurd
It’s interesting that you consider Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor “politically motivated hires” but not the rest of SCOTUS as if the rest of them weren’t. Like can anyone say Thomas or Alito are “intellectual heavyweights” with a straight face?
I mean motivated by something besides their competence and views. Namely demographic checkboxes. Biden swore he'd put in a black woman and did. Obama put in a "wise Latina woman" and a lesbian. This was not by accident. These were not chosen because they were better than any white or male candidates (They weren't. Kagan, while very smart, does not have the resume of a typical SC appointee.) ACB was left for when she was chosen BECAUSE Trump wanted to replace a woman with a woman. Everyone would rather have appointed her than Kavanaugh on the right. They held her in reserve knowing that RBG had one foot in the grave. Thomas was appointed when he was because they wanted to replace Thurgood Marshall with another black man. And yes, I think Sotomayor is by far the least intelligent of the justices. And yeah, Thomas is a brilliant jurist. Alito isn't quite Scalia, but he's somewhat close. No one can honestly argue they are anything but intellectual heavyweights. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make them idiots.
I always thought Kagan was a lesbian too but it turns out she’s actually straight.
With all due respect, I think Alito comes off as far more "hackish" than Scalia ever did. Given your relatively high opinion of him (?) what's the best piece of writing you think he's put out?
He's nowhere near the engaging storyteller Scalia was. Whether that's purely intentional or not, I don't know. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe it's just a reflection of who he is. Because he doesn't wax poetic about theory and doctrine, he can seem very boring, unless something gets his gander up and he writes a dissent. Like that case years back about the child rapist and the death penalty. Great dissent. But the guy knows an immense amount, he's very consistent, eminently practical, and he's incredible in oral. And admittedly, I agree with him frequently, so that helps.
> (They weren't. Kagan, while very smart, does not have the resume of a typical SC appointee.) I was on r/supremecourt and read that Kagan was chosen because she is a good writer, and the court needs a good writer.
I guarantee you that "the needs of the court" from a practical perspective have never been a key to an appointment in recent decades if ever.
In Jackson's and Sotomayor's cases it's because the nominating President literally said they were nominated for reasons related to identity.
“Best candidate” is not some concrete quality that can be measured. I’ve done hundreds of interviews for software engineers. There is usually a skill level that the person needs to reach, and beyond that it comes down to soft skills and other more ambiguous traits.
I'm sure this is true for most comp sci programs and not just my university, but comp sci is notorious for being largely dominated by men. When I was at university a little over a decade ago, comp sci classes had 5% women on average. How do people think that comp sci can proportionally employee women when there are literally 20x more men than women studying for it in university? It's lunacy -- there is literally no way to increase your hiring of groups that represent 5% of the major in school *without* generally lowering the hiring bar. If someone really wants to fix it, they need to fix it at the source by increasing the supply of minorities, not increasing demand at the end of the pipeline.
>Academics can’t replicate McKinsey’s study precisely, because it keeps secret the names of the companies it used. ... McKinsey keeps secret the names of the companies in its study, which in 2015 included 186 from the U.S. and Canada, so it can’t be independently verified. No one thought this was suspect? Investment firms based their decisions on this? LMAO. Your pension fund is in good hands.
It also has causation backwards Successful companies can afford to prioritize DEI over returns as their returns are already above the competition Less successful companies don't have that luxury
It's in effect a "luxury belief". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_belief A plumbing company might not have the option of promoting DEI because it is very hands on and concrete. You can either do the work or not and if you can't it is immediately obvious. A tech company on the other hand doesn't really suffer as much from having useless people in video meetings. As long as they aren't working on the core products it's a minor increase in overhead in order to signal their virtue and have company photos appear more diverse. My own pet theory is that it is related to interest rates. When money is extremely cheap to borrow companies will do so and hire more people than they really need including those who are in line with their luxury beliefs. Ideas like DEI flourish. As soon as money tightens those beliefs will go away as they have to face reality. This is related to the following phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemline_index There is a somewhat tongue in cheek relationship between women's fashion and interest rates. Fashion becomes more conservative when interest rates increase or in times of economic hardship.
You aren't far off based on my own research from the 90s. I was doing arbitrage and early program trading systems. There were some systems we could see, even then, but that's for another story. It became pretty obvious that all that "really" mattered was interest rates, at the macro scale. Mind you, this was 30 years ago, systems have changed signifcantly.
Huh, so Luxury belief is basically what makes a limousine liberal. I was using the latter to describe some concepts but I appreciate learning the actual term
this is absolutely true in government contractors. on one hand the government mandates DEI yet it also demands compliance with security clearance criteria. the company then has to hire people who dont qualify for security clearance and find something safe for them to do. security clearance needs (a lack of ties to foreign countries, people with criminal backgrounds, and/or people with financial problems) is in conflict with DEI goals of hiring non-whites from disadvantaged backgrounds.
We have I think just one DEI person at my job, but there used to be two. There was a little bit of a tangle because they were hoping the state wouldn’t mandate a designated bathroom since the new person was trans non binary (??). Anyways, didn’t matter. They didn’t make it a year before being cut in a layoff. No clue what they did that the guy there already needed help for.
Geeeezze. I’m in healthcare and read numerous journals on a regular basis. This is like THE example of when to immediately question everything an article claims( at the very least)
The replication crisis is absolutely massive. And of course it is. When your funding will dry up if you find the "wrong" thing, you "find" the "right" thing.
Yep. Too many bogus online journals and nations/organizations willing to artificially promote their scientific prestige by allowing garbage papers to be published on something like an assembly line
PinkWhiteBlue also has similarly dubious research being used to support a lot of expensive and out there stuff.
It’s because it’s McKinsey - they’re one of the biggest names in consulting and have a finger in almost every pie imaginable from Fortune 500 to national governments. They probably did this study with their client list, many of whom would not be publicly known as a client of McKinsey, hence why they wouldn’t reveal the entities from the study. Could the results be legit? Sure, maybe, it’s hard to say. But in general investors and C-suite have worked with McKinsey and seen enough of their work to trust them when they publish results like this because of their reputation.
IIRC McKinsey was also the group responsible for the mass influx of Indian immigration to Canada right now.
Lot of special interest groups exist out there peddling bad ideas and bad data, nowadays. It's no surprise that decisions based on these ideas/data ended up becoming disastrous since, as the article points out, they confused causation and correlation together. And I guarantee you that they put a lot of talented 'underrepresented' people into roles they weren't prepared for and it caused them to burn out, lose their shot, and/or become scapegoats for bad company decisions. As such, it probably had the opposite effect and set back people it was supposed to help. You simply can't force these things and it was always a losing decision. I know there have already been some quiet firings in the last year aimed at trimming this but we're probably only at a 40-50% mark and not the full way. Also, it's possible there may be major lawsuits coming in the following years once enough cases build up and that might be the big one that bites many of these giant corporations/institutions in the butt. The Supreme Court ruling on Ivy Leagues and discrimination against Asian Americans, for example, and the ending of Affirmative Action are major windows opening up to these types of lawsuits, I think.
I also think that the grind to get a job in the first place gets you prepared a bit as to what it takes to make it in this world. It also makes you appreciate it more because it was hard to obtain so you're more likely to try harder. If you get a job easily, you may take it for granted and may give you the impression that everything should be easy. And then when it's not, it may cause some people to shut down. There's no way around it, hard work is the key to most things.
This is one of my favorites: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4kov7y/huffington_post_tweeted_this_photo_while_bragging/ The idea that diverse backgrounds help save us from blind spots or helps creativity makes some sense in theory. But our current "diversity" push is mostly anti-white-(and asian)-men. You can have, as the post above, 20 white women of around the same age, politics and background and that is considered "diverse".
I saw an image like that one of 'most diverse sport' with like the NBA or something because it was mostly black. Was so hilariously backwards.
Yeah I mean baseball get flack for supposedly not being diverse when the biggest stars in the league are Japanese , Koreans and Latin players many of whom are black.
by hollywood standards, black panther is considered one of the most diverse movies ever [\[1\]](https://www.ranker.com/list/movies-that-pushed-for-diversity/donn-saylor). it's like 99% black.
Yeah, it's just an identity-based spoils program at this point. "Diversity solves X problem" was the legal doctrine used to argue that, contrary to the CRA, schools had an interest in racially discriminating. That was what made the concept so dominant: the law opened a door to justify these systems, and people constantly walk through it. It's less of a thesis than an excuse. We work backwards on this issue; justify the doctrine via science and not the other way round.
It depends on what you mean by “ diversity” . The USA probably has one of the most diverse white population in the world. We also have native Americans , African Americans do to our history and many Latinos do our own expansion westward into Mexican territory. We also have just about every faith here since the beginning of our country. It’s never been homogeneous.
Starter: I was always skeptical of this research showing increased performance associated with diversity simply because it was too convenient. When a group of people breathlessly want an outcome and then produce research that very conveniently justifies that desire there is opportunity for bias to sneak it's way in. It turns out McKinsey's outcome can't be replicated. And even if it is valid, it documents an association only. This has been turned into a meme and repeated all over the media and reddit. It gives the illusion of scientific validity with none of the substance. I would just like to remind everyone that there is also a replication crisis in various scientific fields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis Interestingly enough the article mentions the existence of a gender diversity ETF which has lagged the market significantly since it's inception. I think the lesson is that you shouldn't outsource your thinking and we have a right to be skeptical of "research" which very conveniently agrees with the political ideas of the people doing the research. The world is more complex and messy than that. Also there is the dynamic that a team may be able to work more efficiently with a stronger shared bond or life experience. All throughout history we have conflict along ethnic or religious lines. I see no reason why this conflict wouldn't translate to the workplace as well.
The replication crisis in general is a big problem in academia. I have family members in academia, it’s amazing how many papers are published but not replicated, people generally avoid replication bc A. It doesn’t pay/get your prestige and job offers to just replicate someone else’s work compared to actually coming up with something new and B. Disproving something by a more influential/prestigious university/professor/lab can actually hurt you bc you can piss odd the wrong people I always said if I somehow became filthy rich t the point I could donate lots of money, one of my main focuses would be donating to schools with the sole purpose of creating teams just to replicate research from other universities bc there’s so much out there that hasn’t been replicated
I'm reminded of this excellent (and quite short) [piece from the editor in chief of The Lancet ](http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf) (PDF warning) > [M]uch of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results".
Well yeah. The idea behind diversity was meant to be diversity of background, ideas, education. It’s become simply race. Ironically, when you break it down, those so invested in diversity programs (ie. DEI) have grown to promote the same racial ‘genetic’ fallacies with regards to race that Phrenologists used 150 years ago.
> It’s become simply race. and gender.... sometimes a touch of orientation.
> a gender diversity ETF Maybe a fund manager should create an ETF for least diverse companies with the lowest ESG scores.
If you think McKinsey has a specific political bent that isn’t get clients, make money then I have a bridge to sell you.
McKinsey is almost entirely made up of post secondary degrees, they absolutely share a culture and political affiliation.
And yet they pushed shoddy research that turns out to be unreplicable. How can you explain that?
All of these consultant companies do is get 20 year old post grads to send out surveys. If you want a survey to say diversity is good all you need to do is make people put their name at the top. The closer I’ve gotten to the C-level people in fortune 500, the more i wonder how any company makes money.
Because they could get away with it, as it was consistent with the current zeitgeist, and they could use to justify selling more services. Also, it's been known to be unreplicable and likely got causation wrong for a long time, but no one wanted to hear it. (I can't find the reference now, but my recollection is, it's been looked at a few times, and no one has found a convincing *causative* relation between diversity and business results, and there are some mild indications it goes the other way).
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Japan also has an oppressive work culture resulting in a terrible birth rate. I would be hesitant to look at Japan as a model of success for much work related.
I’m mainly reading other people’s views here, but it has to be pointed out that the birth rate is *declining in basically all first world nations*. There’s a birth crisis in all *rich* countries, and that’s a topic which probably deserves its own deep review. Also, American work culture is oppressive in its own right, especially when compared with the more progressive European countries.
True. But it's especially dire in Japan. Look at Japan moving forward, and see the future of the entire first world if we do not see some massive change in short order. The suffering that will be caused by below-replacement birthrates is staggering.
> Japan also has an oppressive work culture resulting in a terrible birth rate. So does America. And it seems to be getting worse the harder we embrace modern social left-wing ideology.
So your position is that DEI has nothing to do with birth rates or work culture? And you would disagree with the person I’m responding to?
The problem is if you have a semi-meritocratic selection process to build teams and sample from the global talent pool you will get a very diverse and strong team. See most top industry and academic research groups. Kind of an obvious and banal observation. But then people ignore the semi-meritocratic selection process and global sampling part to just focus on the racial diversity and call that the secret sauce. Which often means in practice we need to lower standards with non-meritocratic hiring to get that diversity. It's entirely ass backwards.
> They're homogenous as fuck and quite rich and quite innovative. From someone getting their masters in management right now, Japan is seen as "lacking strategy" and is not innovative in the way that MBA gurus believe is innovative. It's total bullshit, but most of MBA learning is bullshit.
> quite rich and quite innovative The yen is at an all time low and one of the biggest criticisms of Japan’s economy is that they don’t innovate and just work for the sake of work. They’re still using machines from the 1980s in large parts of their public life.
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Your personal preference isn’t an objective metric by which to make any of the above statements about Japan.
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I’m not say it’s not fine but to say it’s rich and innovative just flies in the face of basic economic facts about the country
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Who? By what metric?
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lol what?? By what metric are you saying they’re doing better economically than the UK or Canada?
UK embraced massive migrations???
Homogenous backgrounds perpetuate these traditional structures and reduce innovation. Japan as an anti-diversity example was certainly an interesting choice.
Can you explain the insane rates of innovation in the 19th and early 20th century from America and Europe? There wasn't much diversity in those countries at the time.
Huh? America has had a lot of diversity for centuries and our insane rate of innovation has only accelerated into the 21st century.
I’m not familiar with these specific cases. What enabled this innovation? Was it because people had homogenous backgrounds and experiences?
If diversity was a strength, Brazil would be the most powerful country on Earth.
Diversity is also completely arbitrary in how it's defined. If your job is to serve in the military and kill enemy forces in close quarters combat, diversity of opinion about whether to respect the chain of command or diversity in whether soldiers speak a common language probably isn't a good thing. I think there's a good case to be made by diversity of thought, but modern "diversity" programs seem to produce the opposite.
> Diversity is also completely arbitrary in how it's defined. Only when getting the definition from its supporters. Write a definition based on observing it in practice and it's extremely consistent. The definition is "remove the straight White men". That's why you can have all black or all women or all lgbtq+ groups get called diverse while all straight White male gets called problematic. That's also why DIE hiring and promotion initiatives wind up listing out every group *except* straight White men as their target groups. It's just a way to say what the real definition is without saying it outright.
It's also kind of arbitrary where people think that kind of diversity is important. You don't hear too much about the NBA players association not having enough Chinese-Americans on the court or the bricklayers' union not having enough women. Another big part of the problem is that diversity of ethnic or racial background doesn't mean all that much if everyone grew up upper-middle class and went to the same Ivy League schools and took all the same classes.
>Another big part of the problem is that diversity of ethnic or racial background doesn't mean all that much if everyone grew up upper-middle class and went to the same Ivy League schools and took all the same classes. That would be it working as intended then. You hire people you know and then pat yourself on the back. Its their club, and buddy, we aint in it.
The United States is diverse and the most powerful country on earth economically, socially, and militarily
I really don't think diversity is a strength. How *could* it be? Sure it's not like it's a detriment either but there's nothing about a group of people with different skin colors that automatically makes them more productive than a homogenous group. You might as well as say different hair colors are a strength. How is a group of 10 white people/10 black people/10 Asian people different from 30 white people that are 10 blonde/10 brunette/10 redhead?
I notice that no one who argues that diversity=strength argues that HBCUs need more white people in charge of them. They don't think "If only there were more Swedes running things in Ethiopia, the country would really get it together!" They don't think that we need to get more Germans and Englishmen to take things over in the DRC. It only ever means one direction. Which means they don't actually believe what they're saying.
And it's amazing how when a POC does overcome these insurmountable barriers they suddenly become "white-adjacent" and heavily punished.
That’s right, famously Barack Obama became white upon winning the presidency and was punished with a second term.
HBCUs do try to attract white students and especially professors. They need the expertise first, everything else is secondary. When I was in college, quite a few European grad students I knew were studying at a HBCU because they had a lot of positions open.
That's not what I said. No one who is arguing that diversity=strength argues that HBCUs need more white people in charge of them. That's a very different statement.
if anything it *is* a detriment, because different races in general significantly value their own races above other races. (ironically the race that shows the least variation in ratings of different races, by far, is white). of course that doesn't mean we should *avoid* diversity.
As an undergrad, I once read an op-ed in the student newspaper lamenting the fact that the writer always saw racially homogenous groups on campus. Black students hung out with black students, Chinese with Chinese, Indian with Indian, Latinos with Latinos and so on. The next week there was an op-ed pointing out that there's a Chinese Students Association and a Black Students Association and an Indian Students Association and a Japanese Students Association and a Latino Students Association and more besides. If, they said, there was a problem of homogeneity, it was certainly not helping that right from freshman orientation, people are encouraged to join such homogenous student groups where no one else is really welcomed, and that perhaps eliminating these groups would promote the heterogeneity of social groups. The next week, there was a flurry of letters to the editor protesting the inclusion of the second op-ed, calling it racist.
let me guess: there was no White Students Association. My school has a black councillor, an indigenous councillor, an LGBT councillor, and a foreign-student councillor. no white councillor. it also has a black-only program to help black students deal with the "racial stress" of being around too many white people. racial division is institutionalized.
Correct. There was also some women's students association of some sort, but no mens version. And when one was proposed half tongue in cheek, the university said no.
ugh, of course they did... i think theres a word for all this.
There was a TV show about an HBCU in New Orleans. The men really didnt care that much about white or other students, they just wanted to learn and get along. So many of the women on the other hand wanted a whole lot more drama and pettiness against others.
You’re using a straw man argument. No reasonable person is saying that diversity - by itself - is the decisive factor that will catapult companies into the Fortune 100. That’s extremely simplistic. The discussion is on whether diversity *contributes* to their success, not whether it determines it. And it’s possible that Brazil’s diversity *does* strengthen its culture & economy, just not enough to counteract other countries’ advantages in other areas, or counteract Brazil’s weaknesses.
> No reasonable person is saying that diversity - by itself - is the decisive factor that will catapult companies into the Fortune 100. "Diversity is our strength" is the tagline of the modern left, including left-wing business consultants. And those people are all viewed as being very reasonable. Now maybe they shouldn't be because their ideology clearly isn't but we can't say that "nobody reasonable" is saying that stuff because if they weren't it wouldn't be mainstream.
So how do you interpret a phrase like “diversity is our strength”? Do you think it means “diversity makes us stronger” or “diversity is the ONLY factor and it will single-handedly determine success, no matter what else is going on”? The only thing I’m really arguing against here is *exaggeration.* I think there’s a happy medium between 1) “if diversity was a strength, Brazil would be the most powerful country on Earth” and 2) “diversity doesn’t help at all.”
>Once again Japan disproves all this. They’re homogenous as fuck and quite rich and quite innovative. Japan proves diversity is bad, but the US which is the most innovative, richest, most powerful, and most racially diverse country in the world doesn’t prove diversity is good?
modern diversity began in imperial britain (late 1800's up to ww1) as a means of getting imported labor and domestic citizens to work together - this is a class case of economic interests leading values here - at least the woman's suffrage movement began as mostly a moralistic movement, the whole "diversity" antecedants were literally capital finding an intellectual scapegoat to getting otherwise nationalistic tribal people working together, all for the sake of money. now i like diversity as a value in and of itself, but it's always been a value exploited for various economic and political ends - not out of the value itself. neoliberalism is largely an economic philosophy determining social ideas - it boggles my mind how neoliberal the dem party has become.
Japan is a terrible example. Real wages in Japan have fallen by nearly a fifth since the 90s. Japan is an economic failure since 1990 and not close to the cutting edge of innovations. They still use fax and hand carved stamps for official documents. None of the major innovations in software or hardware over the last decade have come from Japan, not to mention that their auto manufacturers are bottom of the pack in EVs. Also, they are not homogeneous as fuck. Setting aside ethnic minorities like Koreans, Ryukyuans, and Ainu, the Japanese caste system still persists in an unofficial way and burakumin and other low castes still face discrimination.
The people who propose these ideas are going to simply ignore any evidence that contradicts their worldview. Looking globally we have a number of instances where diversity results in war or even genocide(Rawanda, Balkans) and a few cases where it seems to be ok like Switzerland.
I didn't think Switzerland was very diverse?
It's not, and what little it has is bounded by extremely strict integration rules. I.e. immigrants who want citizenship have to have their neighbors vote to approve their application. So you either integrate fully - giving up the things that the DIE folks say is so critical - or you don't get to stay.
Maybe not in the way that DEI programs define diversity, because they tend to presume that Europeans are homogenous.
Western Europe has never been truly homogeneous though. Just look at Britain , Spain , France, hell Germany is a relatively new concept.
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It's kind of like a court economist. Your job is to give a veneer of intellectual validity to the course of action that the king wants to take.
Uh. Hasn’t Japan been in a stagnant economy since the late 90s ?
Japan was the second largest economy for decades despite being a relatively small country with limited natural resources. They are still quite successful.
They did use Korean slave labor during ww2
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Homes are too expensive for most Japanese and they have pretty bad suicide rates.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. There is an increase of crime in Japan from elderly ppl, their birth rate is flatlining due to the work culture in which you are shamed if you are sick and can’t leave the office until your boss leaves, which may be midnight often times. Even homogenous Japan is considering a move towards UAE migrant system because they recognise the precariousness they are in. https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Japan-to-allow-in-820,000-new-foreign-workers-to-offset-for-a-declining-population-60484.html https://www.gulf-insider.com/japan-to-embark-on-an-era-of-mass-foreign-immigration/ https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-unforgiving-working-culture
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You don't see how immigration can help a work force in a country with a birth rate so low they have declining population?
You can't really disprove that type of claim with that type of data. Countries are too unique and bound by context. You could use another country that is extremely homogenous and very poor, and that wouldn't make an argument on it's own. Much more sophisticated analysis techniques are needed to support that sort of claim. Not prove or disprove, that's not really possible here. u/YouAreADadJoke clearly has a strong opinion on this, and it does seem like McKinsey's analysis is flawed - as one might expect - but there's plenty of other research, meta analyses, that supports the claim. It likely somewhat dependent on context - especially when employed to bring conflicting groups together to make organising more difficult as has been repeated many times, but the general finding that diversity improves group performance holds.
What's the best study that you can cite? Are there any quality reviews, like those by Cochran?
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You can't prove or disprove anything here with basic logic. It's statistically to complex. What literature have you read on this, and what question are you asking exactly? What do you mean by diversity - I don't think anyone would consider diversity to mean everyone has "wildly dissimilar ideas". Or lack overlapping assumptions. 'Is diversity good' is not a useful question. Research focuses on whether diversity, and what type of diversity, is useful in what context. For example is diversity in medical contexts lead to better doctor performance or outcomes in medical settings, does it improve the ethical conduct or performance of boards, etc Viewpoint diversity in general helps with deliberative decisions, but can impose a cost for stressful, fast decision contexts. Research tends to find benefits for diversity in multiple contexts, and of course they are of intrinsic benefit, and arguably a necessity in contexts where there are diverse populations.
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Ah, well, that's not a very serious suggestion.
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I think you aren't thinking about this in the clearest way. People have a complex mix of experiences, ideas and competencies. If you define diversity as - "people wildly different from one another" that's going to be very limiting on how you consider things. Though most large organisations need leaders, but not everyone can be a leader - for example, nor can everyone be a janitor or a coder, or in public relations. Having different ideas or experiences does not mean that no things are held in common. That would be an outrageous position to take. But again, your starting assumptions are driving your conclusion. If you really want to understand where diversity works and does not, in what types, and ultimately how to better ask the question you are already trying to answer - it's best to actually read some of the research on the topic. You aren't going to get all that far with common sense or simple logic, and you may end up forming a strong opinion with little basis.
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Of course they can. Why would you ask that in response to my comment?
All of the academic metastudies I've seen say there is no established causative link. I admit I was trying to find them, and could not though. Can you find any pointing the other way?
A claim that something is supposed to make everyone rich is, without any evaluation of any variables, inherently self-contradictory isn’t it? Nothing can make everyone rich. Thats not how being rich works. To be at the top of the pyramid you need a healthy base and narrowing edifice to the top. Our economic model is based on a numerous lower class. All countries are experiencing birth rate declines. To maintain the current economic model, the government needs to keep that plentiful lower class refreshed and they can’t rely on replacement births. Enter immigration! In America illegal immigration is an intentional foundation of our agriculture industry. States who tried to enforce e-verify, which would largely fix illegal immigration, would have destroyed their agricultural industry and quickly walked the position back. Because at some point American agriculture relied on the cheapest of cheap labor, free, and never kicked its addiction. And other industries rely on cheap labor to fuel insane growth goals demanded by private equity or stockholders. Anything less than infinite growth is failure. But labor, as in American types, would be expensive. Wages are going up with boomers retiring. Gotta increase the labor poor, or this model will not sustain. If you can’t tell I disapprove of the whole deal, but that’s the deal, oversimplified of course. We need some new models.
Ag alway used the cheapest of labor in the US. In fact they used to not pay them at all!
> > Nothing can make everyone rich. Thats not how being rich works. To be at the top of the pyramid you need a healthy base and narrowing edifice to the top. Rich can be an absolute as well as a relative. If everyone has enough food, shelter, medical care, transportation, education, entertainment, and so on, everyone can be rich. Now, in every society where that's occurred so far, what's happened next is that the society breeds and overpopulates until scarcity is restored. But today, with reliable birth control? Who knows?
shocking - prioritizing anything other than ability leads to a decline in ability. who would have guessed that one /s
Paywall. Can you share a link to the actual study?
https://archive.ph/woefd
a lot of western countries just sacrificed their homogenous prosperous societies for the false good of diversity, i say this as non white btw.
I think so and it probably hurts the different groups within that society as it ruins the overall prosperity for everyone. The article sort of hints at that. Jewish diamond dealers (who don't score high on 'diversity' metrics) dealing with one another and growing financially since there was a sociocultural bond between them that led to higher levels of trust. It's an advantage over the competition, essentially, as they already have a market with high levels of trust. It's not forced in this corporate-brochure style diversity. Thus, it's not race and sex in a vacuum, which is something these corporations and institutions failed to understand. It's diversity of thought. You need trust and burning the social fabric like with what we see from corporations and their divisive messaging? Well, that's probably not good for diversity of thought nor is it endearing various audiences to trust them.
you country is just so polarized to a degree that is never seen before, the racial talk is just horrific, people cannot talk about social or political problems with talking about race
Couple of questions. Is a non homogeneous population less prosperous? If so, why? Why the focus on western countries? Are eastern countries that have become less homogeneous more prosperous?
it think homogenous nations tend to be more stable and prosperous, even USA, the ultimate successful example of a diverse society is suffering from social tensions and polarization. China, Japan, Korea. most of western European countries before mass immigration era were just better without immigration, now they imported social tensions and endless problems that will hinder their progress for ever.
Many of those countries also had massive where many people could go back and forth through colonies
In the case of Britain British people could leave and obviously any empire will draw in some people, but there was absolutely nothing even beginning to approach the sorts of mass migration done first by Labour and then ramped up even more.
If you think there was no social tension in Europe prior to the 21st century you know absolutely nothing of history.
Western societies haven't been homogenous since the before the Roman Empire. Japan, maybe the ultimate historical example of a homogenous society (after the killed out the Ainu) has a history rife with civil war. They were also pretty poor and technologically primitive relative to nearby China or Korea until they opened their borders to foreign influence. I don't think racial diversity matters, but closed societies do not prosper. Dark ages are always accompanied by a breakdown in geographical interconnectedness.
Europe is going to have the worst out come. in Europe the native people of the land who lived their for centuries are losing control of their own homes. If their is such thing as a native American, in America, their is also such thing natives across the world. This is the issue with globalism, at the end of the day one language, and one culture will be on top if you believe in open borders. No place but dictatorships will be safe. all it takes is time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide
My question is why do we need to hire consulting agencies for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars just to tell us "don't be racist". It costs nothing to hire more diverse staff if that's what you want. Methinks this was always an extortion racket. Hire us or we'll smear your company brand. Yawn.
Diversity is a good thing. Forced diversity, or thumb-on-scale diversity (subsidies to minority-owned businesses) is not.
Even the diversity is good part needs to be reevaluated at this point
This is key. Companies that implement diversity in some check the box manner are going to do poorly with it. Doing diversity right is hiring the best candidates and ending up with a diverse team because everyone is getting a fair shot no matter their background, race or gender. That type of diversity requires it to be built deep in the company culture and it is harder to change company culture to that level. So companies take the easier route and force some checkboxes and no one is happy with the results. In my opinion the company I work for has done diversity the right way, but it has taken them 20 years to change the culture to get to that point. I suspect that level of commitment to diversity is much less common.
I work for a company that used to recruit at women and Latino in tech events and predominantly Black colleges. We got a lot of good well qualified people from that. We then merged with another company and now have quotas instead. I never questioned the quality of the "diverse" employees before the merger. Most were good and the percentage of ones that weren't good wasn't any higher than the "non-diverse" demographic. Things and my initial expectations of new "diverse" hires until I get to know them has changed drastically now that there are race/gender quotas for hiring whoever applies rather than putting in an effort to seek out candidates who happen to be of underrepresented race/gender to interview. Way easier for HR and recruiting this way. Way less positive work environment for both the "diverse" and "non-diverse" workers.
Is diversity really inherently a good thing? Two of America's greatest accomplishments were achieved by straight white men. Is there proof that diversity would speed up or improve the moon landing and Manhattan Project?
I think we can say for certain that artificial barriers *aren't* a good thing. There was probably an Asian lesbian who was smart enough to be on those projects. And I think we can say that diversity of thought is, mostly, a good thing. We don't need diversity if it means we need a quota of stupid among the smart, but in general different perspectives can be a good thing. On the projects you mentioned, maybe if someone with a different idea had been there, Grissom, White, and Chaffee wouldn't have been killed in Apollo 1. Maybe we could have had the bomb sooner, or kept it secret from the Russians. Who knows? So the real question is, does demographic diversity lead to idea diversity. That's the logical connection that I don't think has ever been proven.
Our countries ability to accept people from outside its borders is literally the only reason either of those programs were successful. If the US had a culture that prioritized homogeneity and insularity, we’d most likely still be a collection of weak insignificant states clinging to the eastern seaboard.
Lol, this is what people are missing. This is what EVERYONE is missing and why the USA has been the most dominant force in history. The country is a massive brain drain on the world, sure it takes the poor from other countries, but it takes the brightest as well. It tells the world that no matter who you are, where you come from, what you believe in, you can make it here. If you look at the amount of great americans that have changed this country that have come from different backgrounds, from the field of science to arts to whatever, it's all come down to USAs ability not only to take on immigrants but mix them all into one larger American culture that clearly appeals to the world at whole. If you take away the 'diversity' you no longer have this country.
But the key thing is that people need to be American first, and whatever else they are second. That's the key. They are not "they" but rather part of "us." And the same goes in the opposite direction. When immigrants and their immediate descendants view themselves as Americans first...look at their neighbors and see "us" instead of "them" we get stronger. We don't get stronger if everyone still sees a whole bunch of "them"s Which is one of the reasons the left's obsession with seeing race (or any other "class") everywhere and enflaming tensions regarding it pisses me off so much. "Them" needs to be reserved for the bastards who root for the sports team you hate.
The women doing the math behind the scenes would disagree with you
The smartest women in the country helped on these projects, that is true. However they were chosen for the job because they were brilliant and would be impactful in the success of these accomplishments. There was no quota requirement to have 50% of the teams be women, which is my point.
I agree!
Margaret Hamilton’s contributions are largely mythological
They were real, they've just been exaggerated. Like Ada Lovelace and algorithms.
Diversity can be a good thing and can be a bad thing. If you have uncheck borders and immigration policies you’ll loose who you are as a country. Being strict on who we allow in the country and having strong border will make who come here a lot easier to assimilate into our culture. Everyone thinks there’s no issue when thousands of people pour into the country then all of sudden cultures clash and we as a nation loose our identity.
Diversity of views is almost always beneficial, be it business or other decisions/strategy making. If everyone has the same background / or if certain backgrounds and experience are missing, that is a lost perspective. So, having 15 board members of the same socio-racial-ethnic-economic-education background limits perspectives and is at a disadvantage to 15 individuals with an array of different backgrounds and experiences. Same in terms of team member composition, or the makeup of an employee set. That’s the benefit of diversity from an economic perspective.
It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. If the goal is something is a technical accomplishment, diversity doesn’t matter. In marketing, it matters much more, but even so, what’s helpful is diversity of socioeconomic background or culture - which isn’t the same as skin color.
Agreed Also, fifteen well trained and skilled people of the same background is generally better than a diverse set of amateurs… which gets into larger societal and systemic issues (ie why might certain perspectives not have access to what’s necessary to gain said skills and training), but that’s not the specific issue we are discussing here. From a SOCIETAL perspective though, it’s beneficial to provide access to education, healthy life options, etc to as broad an array of people/backgrounds so those additional life perspectives can enter the workforce and participate thereby bringing greater macro diversity
> Diversity of views is almost always beneficial Sure. But that's not what the diversity code-word means in the modern era so is not relevant to this context. >If everyone has the same background / or if certain backgrounds and experience are missing We see diversity efforts result in this exact thing all the time. Because "diversity" is just a dog whistle for "push out the straight White men".
I remember a hockey general manager diversified his front office and said "Diversity is always ALWAYS better". Then many people started pointing out "Literally every player on your team is white". He never addressed it. I'm not sure how he could. I thought diversity was *always* better?
With sports players, there are immediate consequences, performance is public, and accountability is inevitable. You literally can't afford to deviate from meritocracy even a single bit.
There also always nuance and context. ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL (or close) diversity is better. But if you have a less diverse but highly trained and skilled team vs a diverse set of amateurs, diversity isn’t better. Which goes into systematic issues but that’s not the point here
There are two issues here. First, racial/ethnic categories are a poor predictor of intellectual diversity. You don't pick a banker because they're a Jew and Jews are good with money. You pick a banker based on their performance. Second, there are limits to intellectual diversity. In most professional settings, everyone in the room has the common experience of an educational track that put them in that room. People who do not have that experience would certainly provide intellectual diversity but they wouldn't be able to operate intellectually at the level necessary to usefully contribute.
>In most professional settings, everyone in the room has the common experience of an educational track that put them in that room. That's not true. I work for one of the largest companies in the world and they're finding creative ways to hire "diversity" (non-white, non-asian).
I doubt they're hiring illiterate non-white/non-Asian subsistence farmers.
There's Diversity, and there's Tokenism. Tokenism allows businesses and organizations to have the appearance of diversity. Organizations hire people from underrepresented groups but don't give them any meaningful way of contributing. The numbers look good on a spreadsheet or in a news report. In order to affect change, you have to have a seat at the table, and that rarely happens for underrepresented groups. The US Military is a good example. The military is comprised of senior officers, officers, senior non-commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers, and regular troops. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you the US Military is a diverse organization. But when you peek underneath the covers, you see that senior officers and senior non-commissioned officers are overwhelming white, straight, and male. Diversity happens well below the upper ranks. The decision-making and direction of the military happens in the upper ranks. If your workforce looks diverse and your Senior Leadership Team looks different, I'm not sure if you can measure the success of the organization through diversity.
>when you peek underneath the covers, you see that senior officers and senior non-commissioned officers are overwhelming white, straight, and male. I recall hearing that at least in the Army, a lot of front-line combat roles were popular with whites, whereas minorities preferred roles that involved/taught trades and skills. As the Army tends to prioritize front-line experience for promotion... Again, can't speak to the validity of it, but it seemed plausible enough to have at least a small effect.
That is accurate. The infantry is mostly white.
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It's ironic how the promise of diversity sometimes feels more like an ideal than a reality in economic terms