There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file.
Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.
At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.
But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...
Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees.
I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.
Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.
But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.
The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?
Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.
He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?
Or it might just be that some people are introverted and crack under pressure whenever the spotlight is on them but, once they have quiet time to themselves, they can really power through problems.
The description of the scenario isn't nearly enough for us to get any grip on what was going on without making some huge assumptions, but the facts that we have are that she tended to really struggle when coordinating with coworkers and that she completed the work expected of her - there could be numerous explanations and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.
