[0]: https://diversity.ucsf.edu/URM-definition
[1]: https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/
If a company start optimizing on diversity metrics instead of on ability, then they’ll be crushed by market forces from companies who optimize on ability.
Further, isn’t it a bit patronizing hiring people because they fit in a URM group, instead of hard work to sufficiently pass an interview/test/etc?
Interviews are bullshit, arbitrary, and random, as discussed at length in countless HN threads.
Then any time diversity hiring is discussed we suddenly forget that we (collectively, as an industry) don't have a reliable way of measuring competency.
For example, do the statistics of progression and departure in our organisation show any areas in which we're failing certain subgroups? Does our publicity reach everyone we want it to and carry the message that we intend? Do our processes inadvertently cause physical or mental difficulty to anyone?
This is a fantastic statement of what a program should be. And I'm totally going to us it to describe ours.
This is only true if the company has a real product that customers pay for. If the company is based on "growth and engagement" then there is no real product and their survival merely depends on investor goodwill for which PR and virtue-signalling is important (this is the main reason companies boast about D&I so much).
But with the top X% having far more capital, we may continue to see investments, even in bad economic times. But I think that’s unlikely.
> If a company start optimizing on diversity metrics instead of on ability, then they’ll be crushed by market forces from companies who optimize on ability.
isn't necessarily true. A company's success is only very loosely related to the ability of its employees.
And in fields where innovation matters, more diverse teams are more creative because they explore a larger space of ideas (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9284).
To give another reason, a team that fits into a narrow demographic is unlikely to make products that appeal broadly or to other demographics. This creates market opportunities for more diverse teams. For instance, the Spanx founder was able to create a billion dollar company BECAUSE her inventions were dismissed by male-dominated teams in the garment industry.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
1) At least 2.5% of the workforce (rounded down) in workplaces not physically demanding must be disabled, or the company pays some taxes. This has resulted in creating job positions that would otherwise be outsourced, in one company I worked in.
Not a bad thing I guess, but the percentage should really be adjusted downwards in 2021.
2) Veterans (a very large group) should be given preference when equally qualified. This does not affect the ordinary software engineers much, but does have implications in management. It is also impossible to fire a veteran. This was one of the factors that created extremely negative perceptions about veterans in the educated sectors of the society.
As for the US forms of affirmative action, I haven't seen that yet in companies I worked in. But we don't have such a skewed gender representation in STEM as the US has, and in 2021 the minorities who work have equal or greater income than the national average.
That re-framing is the easy part, of course. Actually making changes is hard. On one side we all know that if you make something a metric you run the danger of making it a goal, but on the other side the biases that lead to a lack of diversity are so deep and ingrained they can be very difficult to counter.
But hopefully this re-framing is at least helpful in explaining why a lack of diversity is an issue that matters.
The third and more likely option is that you're sampling from a population that looks mostly like you. If software developers are 90% male and men and women are equally competent, you should still expect to hire 9 times more men than women even if you could pick the best candidates every time.
For example, how should business success weigh against the social justice problem of black access to technological opportunity?
There are none, so none.
In fact, a lot of the implicit biases in the process remain the same as the last 50 years, like how it's regularly advised your CV should include date of birth and portrait.
