A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
To which i replay: "fuck that"
Just because certain practices make more money does not mean they should be done.
We got rid of slavery and child labor for a reason, and have been trying to get rid of gender discrimination in wages.
I'm fine with purely meritocratic hiring/promoting even if it leads to 99.999999999% male workforce in some areas.
Atleast in theory.
In practice, anyone claiming they hire/promote purely on merit is 99.999999999% of the time full of shit.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
I'm fine with purely meritocratic hiring/promoting even if it leads to 99.999999999% male workforce in some areas.
Atleast in theory.
In practice, anyone claiming they hire/promote purely on merit is 99.999999999% of the time full of shit.
I don't see how meritocratic hiring could ever result in a 99.999999% male workforce unless the job is circus strongman.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
Or we make laws to require diversity in hiring/promoting.
And if some companies can't deal with it and go bankrupt? So be it.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
I'm fine with purely meritocratic hiring/promoting even if it leads to 99.999999999% male workforce in some areas.
Atleast in theory.
In practice, anyone claiming they hire/promote purely on merit is 99.999999999% of the time full of shit.
I don't see how meritocratic hiring could ever result in a 99.999999% male workforce unless the job is circus strongman.
Due to the apparent lack of female prospects in the industry, few women enter the field, leading to female representation being 0.000001% of the workforce.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
"Informed consumers will enforce morality for us" is basically a myth. You can't even get informed consumers to buy airline seats with legroom.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
Or we make laws to require diversity in hiring/promoting.
And if some companies can't deal with it and go bankrupt? So be it.
How?
I cannot think of a way to adequately regulate this that does not artificially restrict the number of employed individuals in the group not being targetted.
For instance, mandating a 50:50 split on an industry with a 25:75 imbalance leads to 50% of the available workforce unemployed, or perhaps to a similar situation to your American-first workplace laws where companies 'look' for an applicable diverse employee, don't 'find' an 'acceptable' one in the 25% and then employ someone from the 75%.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
Or we make laws to require diversity in hiring/promoting.
And if some companies can't deal with it and go bankrupt? So be it.
How?
I cannot think of a way to adequately regulate this that does not artificially restrict the number of employed individuals in the group not being targetted.
For instance, mandating a 50:50 split on an industry with a 25:75 imbalance leads to 50% of the available workforce unemployed, or perhaps to a similar situation to your American-first workplace laws where companies 'look' for an applicable diverse employee, don't 'find' an 'acceptable' one in the 25% and then employ someone from the 75%.
I get the feeling "adequately" is going to become synonymous with "perfectly" but an easy first step is mandating that companies above a certain size redact personally identifying information on applicants before making initial interview decisions to eliminate subconscious racial/gender bias in screening. Then you could potentially increase enforcement of existing workplace discrimination laws and proactively audit companies that reported unusually poor diversity metrics for workplace discrimination rather than relying on complaints.
Those aren't perfect solutions but that's just top-of-my-head stuff.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
I'm fine with purely meritocratic hiring/promoting even if it leads to 99.999999999% male workforce in some areas.
Atleast in theory.
In practice, anyone claiming they hire/promote purely on merit is 99.999999999% of the time full of shit.
I don't see how meritocratic hiring could ever result in a 99.999999% male workforce unless the job is circus strongman.
Due to the apparent lack of female prospects in the industry, few women enter the field, leading to female representation being 0.000001% of the workforce.
Like any other male dominated field it will be solved via education, diversity friendly/anti-discimination laws, and people within the industry reaching out and changing the culture from within. This takes generations to fix.
edit: For example, in the US the very first female doctor was Elizabeth Blackwell - who did this in the 1900's. AS you can assume, this was not an simple matter to be a pioneer in.
Once again, through her sister Anna Blackwell procured a job, this time teaching music at an academy in Asheville, North Carolina, with the goal of saving up the $3,000 necessary for her medical school expenses. In Asheville, Blackwell lodged with the respected Reverend John Dickson, who happened to have been a physician before he became a clergyman. Dickson approved of Blackwell's career aspirations, and allowed her to use the medical books in his library to study. During this time, Blackwell soothed her own doubts about her choice and her loneliness with deep religious contemplation. She also renewed her antislavery interests – started a slave Sunday school that was not ultimately successful.[1]
Dickson's school closed down soon after, and Blackwell moved to the residence of Reverend Dickson's brother, Samuel Henry Dickson, a prominent Charleston physician. She started teaching in 1846 at a boarding school in Charleston run by a Mrs. Du Pré. With the help of Reverend Dickson's brother, Blackwell inquired into the possibility of medical study via letters, with no favorable responses. In 1847, Blackwell left Charleston for Philadelphia and New York, with the aim of personally investigating the opportunities for medical study. Blackwell's greatest wish was to be accepted into one of the Philadelphia medical schools.[2]
"My mind is fully made up. I have not the slightest hesitation on the subject; the thorough study of medicine, I am quite resolved to go through with. The horrors and disgusts I have no doubt of vanquishing. I have overcome stronger distastes than any that now remain, and feel fully equal to the contest. As to the opinion of people, I don't care one straw personally; though I take so much pains, as a matter of policy, to propitiate it, and shall always strive to do so; for I see continually how the highest good is eclipsed by the violent or disagreeable forms which contain it."[5]
Upon reaching Philadelphia, Blackwell boarded with Dr. William Elder and studied anatomy privately with Dr. Jonathan M. Allen as she attempted to get her foot in the door at any medical school in Philadelphia.[1] She was met with resistance almost everywhere. Most physicians recommended that she either go to Paris to study or that she take up a disguise as a man to study medicine. The main reasons offered for her rejection were that (1) she was a woman and therefore intellectually inferior, and (2) she might actually prove equal to the task, prove to be competition, and that she could not expect them to "furnish [her] with a stick to break our heads with". Out of desperation, she applied to twelve "country schools".[2]
She had to do all this before she could enter Hobart College, and she required lots of luck to get that far.
Harry Dresden on
+6
Options
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
edited August 2017
This wasnt chat...
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
And yes, I recognize the solutions I posted aren't perfect. Redacting PII is a hassle if you are trying to do less formal, less public job openings. It doesn't work well for career fairs where you interview dozens of potential interns with only a few people going to a college, none of which are likely HR or have the time to digitize and edit all the resumes received. Proactive audits probably mean relatively onerous recordkeeping restrictions and may artificially punish good faith actors with the effort of compliance with the auditor.
But the point is those are very surface level ideas that are at least an effort to solve obvious, known issues rather than assuming the baseline must be a law that just says "hire 50% women or else"
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
"Informed consumers will enforce morality for us" is basically a myth. You can't even get informed consumers to buy airline seats with legroom.
We couldn't even get informed customers to stop buying Chick-fil-a because have you HAD Chick-fil-a??
FF XIV - Qih'to Furishu (on Siren), Battle.Net - Ilpala#1975
Switch - SW-7373-3669-3011
Fuck Joe Manchin
+3
Options
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Blind hiring doesn't work. You end up hiring more men because other aspects of the gender imbalance results in men having more experience, better job history, etc. Affirmative action is meant to correct problems elsewhere in the system, ignoring those problems isn't going to solve them.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
I'm fine with purely meritocratic hiring/promoting even if it leads to 99.999999999% male workforce in some areas.
Atleast in theory.
In practice, anyone claiming they hire/promote purely on merit is 99.999999999% of the time full of shit.
I don't see how meritocratic hiring could ever result in a 99.999999% male workforce unless the job is circus strongman.
Due to the apparent lack of female prospects in the industry, few women enter the field, leading to female representation being 0.000001% of the workforce.
It's about 15% -20% even now. Unless you have less than 20 coders, chance should mean that anything under about 10% female is pretty dodgy looking.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
"Informed consumers will enforce morality for us" is basically a myth. You can't even get informed consumers to buy airline seats with legroom.
Airline seats is one instance where men might complain they are being discriminated against. I'm a short, small woman and I find airline seats to be spacious and comfortable so what are you guys whining about? Suck it up guys.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
Yes, what is the objective worth of diversity? What is the maximum skill/fit gap diversity can overcome when comparing two potential hires?
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
Yes, what is the objective worth of diversity? What is the maximum skill/fit gap diversity can overcome when comparing two potential hires?
Why are you demanding an objective quantification in a primarily subjective decision? This is the flaw in the argument - once you're beyond the baseline of skill needed for a job, the decision making is pretty much subjective, so arguing for quantitative values makes no sense. As for why diversity it good, research has shown that more diverse teams are more flexible and tend to be better at seeing things from different viewpoints.
A pure meritocracy is like a perfect sphere or a frictionless surface
It only exists in the minds of STEM majors
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
Yes, what is the objective worth of diversity? What is the maximum skill/fit gap diversity can overcome when comparing two potential hires?
Why are you demanding an objective quantification in a primarily subjective decision? This is the flaw in the argument - once you're beyond the baseline of skill needed for a job, the decision making is pretty much subjective, so arguing for quantitative values makes no sense. As for why diversity it good, research has shown that more diverse teams are more flexible and tend to be better at seeing things from different viewpoints.
Because certain positions have pretty undefined baseline criteria, meaning every applicant is judged according to absolute qualification. And the hiring decision goes through multiple people, so having some objective basis helps consensus, even if it's understood to be inaccurate. Value is assigned to each aspect of the applicant and at least given an informal rank.
Maybe the fact that we don't have rigid baseline competency metrics is the problem.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
0
Options
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
The end decision will always be subjective in some respect, though.
The end decision will always be subjective in some respect, though.
What I'm worried about is how this subjectivity affects how employees value themselves and their coworkers.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
0
Options
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board.
In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.
The article gets more detailed on how diverse teams are better on racial, gender and cultural merits - they focus more on facts, process facts more thoughtfully, and are more innovative in general.
It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious—you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts—but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?
The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.
If you're looking for objective reasoning as to why diversity is a boon to a team, then these should help prove that out. Diversity results in actual observable improvement to company bottom lines and results in more productivity from teams, as well as more challenge to bias. Diversity itself is a merit when you're considering a new hire.
The end decision will always be subjective in some respect, though.
What I'm worried about is how this subjectivity affects how employees value themselves and their coworkers.
Well, if the hiring process is racist, that probably affects value much more negatively, so....
More to the point, if you need an objective rubic to determine the value of yourself or your coworkers, you're either in a job that is built around rote tasks, or you're setting yourself up for a fall. Just because the requirements of a job are subjective in nature doesn't mean that it makes it harder to judge one's value, but that it's different from "can perform X tasks an hour". The problem is that we tend to put greater subjective value on skills that we can quantify, as opposed to more qualitative skills - even when those qualitative skills are more important.
The end decision will always be subjective in some respect, though.
What I'm worried about is how this subjectivity affects how employees value themselves and their coworkers.
Well, if the hiring process is racist, that probably affects value much more negatively, so....
More to the point, if you need an objective rubic to determine the value of yourself or your coworkers, you're either in a job that is built around rote tasks, or you're setting yourself up for a fall. Just because the requirements of a job are subjective in nature doesn't mean that it makes it harder to judge one's value, but that it's different from "can perform X tasks an hour". The problem is that we tend to put greater subjective value on skills that we can quantify, as opposed to more qualitative skills - even when those qualitative skills are more important.
The act of placing ranked values on aspects of a potential hire is around the precision I'm looking at rather than data on a continuous scale. I would like to be able to compare demographic diversity to other aspects on a relative level. Applicants themselves are ranked according to the sentiment of their overall value in discussion, and I feel like a hidden fuzzy equation is used to arrive at the conclusion that the rankings are legitimate. A standardized method of determining diversity's relative value would make it easier to bring up in such a discussion. The next mathematical step after determining that diversity is beneficial to the workplace is determining the effect size of this benefit and ranking it among known positives.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
0
Options
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
One of the things about the whole conversation about "what is the relative value of X vs Y?" is how often hiring managers ask for things in job briefs that are literally insane. The field of Data Science is a good microscope for this kind of problem, since it's a field that is barely 10 years old, yet hiring managers have job briefs requesting 10 years of Data Science experience.
In such a situation as that, it's clear that the hiring manager is not actually trying to find the best fit for a position, but simply looking for what looks and sounds like "the best product" and willing to purchase that product at whatever price. If a man in his 30s, dressed well and acting confidently, applies for that job and gets it, the hiring manager will of course say that it's because he had the best qualifications. But in a situation where the job qualifications are literally just made up on the spot by HR with no connection to reality, it can't be qualifications that actually got the person in, it can be any number of real things, but how could it possibly be a fantasy rating on a fantasy scale? And yet we act like that "qualifications" are a firm, objective rating that doesn't deviate based on our preferences.
That Cordelia Fine quote from The Truth has Got Boots On essay is pertinent here:
In a similar study conducted at Yale University, undergraduate participants were offered the opportunity to use the same kind of casuistry to maintain the occupational status quo. The students evaluated one of two applicants (Michael or Michelle) for the position of police chief. One applicant was streetwise, a tough risk-taker, popular with other officers, but poorly educated. By contrast, the educated applicant was well schooled, media savvy, and family oriented, but lacked street experience and was less popular with the other officers. The undergraduate participants judged the job applicant on various streetwise and education criteria, and then rated the importance of each criterion for success as a police chief. Participants who rated Michael inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle. As a consequence, regardless of whether he was streetwise or educated, the demands of the social world were shaped to ensure that Michael had more of what it took to be a successful police chief. As the authors put it, participants may have ‘felt that they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man.’
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board.
In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.
The article gets more detailed on how diverse teams are better on racial, gender and cultural merits - they focus more on facts, process facts more thoughtfully, and are more innovative in general.
It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious—you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts—but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?
The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.
If you're looking for objective reasoning as to why diversity is a boon to a team, then these should help prove that out. Diversity results in actual observable improvement to company bottom lines and results in more productivity from teams, as well as more challenge to bias. Diversity itself is a merit when you're considering a new hire.
I think that second article nails it when it says:
Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they only show that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.
And then kicks off into smaller scale studies that focus on whether diversity affects decision making, etc.
The increase in profitability in companies made me think that perhaps diversity helps screen out workers hostile to diversity, and those people aren't the best workers.
But the smaller scale studies eliminate that potential effect.
Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board.
In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.
The article gets more detailed on how diverse teams are better on racial, gender and cultural merits - they focus more on facts, process facts more thoughtfully, and are more innovative in general.
It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious—you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts—but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?
The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.
If you're looking for objective reasoning as to why diversity is a boon to a team, then these should help prove that out. Diversity results in actual observable improvement to company bottom lines and results in more productivity from teams, as well as more challenge to bias. Diversity itself is a merit when you're considering a new hire.
I think that second article nails it when it says:
Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they only show that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.
And then kicks off into smaller scale studies that focus on whether diversity affects decision making, etc.
The increase in profitability in companies made me think that perhaps diversity helps screen out workers hostile to diversity, and those people aren't the best workers.
But the smaller scale studies eliminate that potential effect.
I disagree. The claim that social diversity causes better business outcomes in general is incredibly strong, and I don't think the article offers a compelling defense of the thesis in the form that the author seems to be relaying it or as it is being accepted here.
By way of introduction: I thought it was lovely that Arch and the author of that medium article went through the trouble of explaining exactly how partial the evidence offered by vervet monkey & CAH girl play preference literature is, how ambiguous the interpretation is, and how many gaps there are between that actual evidence base and the sweeping conclusions that gender-difference partisans try to draw from it. I think the same thing should be done to articles which supply conclusions we like more. I should be up front that I don't have the statistical literacy, experience with study design, or background knowledge base to do anything like as good of a job. So I apologize for that--but I will at least give it a college try.
As both you and the Scientific American article note, the sorts of large surveys being mentioned can establish correlations, but those correlations can be explained by all sorts of causal patterns. You mention one: maybe misogynists aren't very good at their jobs, so the better performance of boards with women on them is because already-better boards hire women, not because gender diversity itself makes boards better. I would also mention: the claim that companies willing to hire diversely will have access to better talent--because they'll have an effective monopoly on the best women--would also explain why companies with women on the board do better; they're getting better talent. But notice that this is also compatible with diversity per se making no contribution at all once candidate quality is controlled. And this is just explanations which go through discrimination, diversity, and so on as somehow on the causal path--there are also tons more options that don't even do that. Short of reading the methodology, I have no idea what alternate hypotheses the researchers tried to rule out, but it could be something as tangential as "2015 happened to be a good year for industry giants, the really huge megafirms, and industry giants put women on the board as a matter of course." The correlations at face value are a very loose form of evidence.
It's worth pausing at this point to note that this should be especially salient to someone who thinks "evolutionary psychology is just bullshit because they can't do experiments to establish causation so instead they just notice correlations and build up just-so stories around them that happen to fit their ideological priors." I think that critique is too strict: not all science can do the sorts of experiments we'd ideally like, and noticing correlations and building stories around them can be a legitimate part of multiple convergent lines of inquiry. But if we're going to be strict, we should be strict across the board.
Similar remarks apply to the science-quality study the Scientific American article discusses. These correlations are just susceptible of so many interpretations.* And I have to admit that the science quality study was where my bullshit meter really started ringing. My dad works in foundations of mathematics. The sci am article leans on the way that diverse life experiences and expectations spur creativity and demand rigorous justification. The idea that the way my dad would justify a conjecture about the continuum hypothesis to a colleague would vary depending on whether that colleague is German, Russian, or Singaporean is just independently absurd. Similarly, if I think of trying to justify my dissertation to various other writers in the field--Kenny Easwaran's an Indian dude... and so what? "Spurring creativity" is vague and hand-wavy as fuck here.
The article discusses some work beyond demographic-level correlational studies, though. But those experiments have very particular characteristics which make the generalization to all business settings and/or innovation simpliciter rather breathtaking. First, the participants are mostly very particular: people who have never met before and are having one-off meetings. Second, the things they're deciding are very particular: questions with no particularly well-established formal methods for resolution, which require making qualitative judgments that record and balance many competing factors, where the issue is fraught with moral-political upshot in our culture, and where it's known that moral-political opinion tends to divide on demographic lines. That's what you're getting when it's a faux-jury study with 4 white people and 2 black people, or a murder mystery story, or Ds vs Rs on the death penalty--of course law, justice, crime and guilt are racialized in our society (and tied to party affiliation), and, furthermore, deciding whodunit doesn't have a technical resolution, it's a matter of looking everything over and then making a judgment call about reasonable doubts. It is entirely plausible to me that in this very specific judgment situation diversity is really, really important, because racial anxiety about being perceived as racist causes white jurors to be hyper vigilant about dotting their is and crossing their ts with their reasoning when that reasoning borders on racially fraught culture issues, and that this is something white jurors could do with more of in general. But what does that tell us about any other judgement situation?
Our culture has stereotypes about Indian people, but it doesn't have stereotypes about what they think about formal epistemology. And what people think about formal epistemology has just about zero moral-political upshot in American culture. There are (relatively) formal methods of argumentation. Plus: I already know what Easwaran thinks: I've read his books, and I don't have to guess! The idea that Easwaran's Easwaran-y diversity would spur any collaboration of ours to greater heights than I would get with white alternatives... it's all kind of goofy. The judgment situation just has nothing to do with the jury studies. And of course nothing in the actually-maybe-causation-establishing randomized studies says that they should be the same either.
But okay: how much like a jury situation is an average office? Well, I don't know what an "average office" is, which is part of why any claim about diversity being good ~for business~ was so bold in the first place. But I do know that in a lot of offices, the same people interact over long periods of time. I know what Easwaran thinks, and probably lots of coworkers know what each other think too. This is already a big departure from the jury studies. I would also guess at other departures. But it doesn't really matter what I would guess! The point is just that if you're trying to establish a result as sweeping as "diverse human groups reason better, because diversity causes people to reason more carefully" then you need a lot more than some correlational studies plus a handful of small causal studies on very specific and very similar reasoning contexts. You'd want to replicate that result broadly, over and over, in contexts as diverse as you could possibly imagine.
It's also worth noticing that even taking the effect's existence at face value, it's not clear it's even good for it to hold in all contexts! Consider the experiment wherein white students ranked a dissenting perspective (on a hot button issue, of course) as more interesting and novel when presented by a black student. But: were they right? I mean, what if it was actually a pretty banal point, and their assessment of it when said by a white student was closer to the truth than it was when said by a black student? The author treats the cognitive effort of hypervigilance as if it were at worst free, and more likely positively beneficial--exercise for the brain, seems to be the favored analogy. But anyone who's ever been in a group with sharply divergent perspectives can know that hypervigilance can be exhausting and time-wasting in a way that presents real costs and that it can prevent interesting work being done precisely because you can't feel confident just assuming a lot of the basic stuff and cutting ahead to (what you take) to be the unsettled frontier.
In other words, this:
The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.
Seemed like a hueg extrapolation from what was actually presented. Maybe not quite "this is what vervet monkeys did with a toy truck, and this is eight twins in Wisconsin's favorite blankie, so women drive like this" or whatever--but not of an entirely different species either.
~~~
*Science papers by American authors with an ethnically diverse mis of names get cited more. This could be because diverse collaborations spur more creativity--they are more successful as collaborations. Well, it could. But it could also be any number of other things. Consider that scientists are people. Suppose they collaborate with people either because 1) they interact with that person socially, anticipate partnership will be pleasant, and that it will yield publishable results, or 2) the other author may be a relative stranger, but they have a compelling professional reason to collaborate--they anticipate the work will be killer. It's plausible that papers from 1-type partnerships, though publishable, are more likely to be mediocre, whereas 2-type papers are more likely to be great. It's also plausible that general social segregation of the races will also lead to fewer 1-type papers by racially diverse groups. And then we would have an explanation for the quality difference, but not one where diversity was itself causative in the way described and not one where causally intervening on diversity would improve quality. That's just one such explanation!
The increase in profitability in companies made me think that perhaps diversity helps screen out workers hostile to diversity, and those people aren't the best workers.
But the smaller scale studies eliminate that potential effect.
One thing that I think might be worth looking into is whether it helps screen out managers hostile to diversity. Anyone who isn't capable of managing a diverse team would probably damage a non-diverse team in more subtle ways. See that pair of letters linked here earlier, as an example.
Prelude: this is a technocratic, neoliberal defense of diversity, an argument as to why our Western liberal societies (capitalist, meritocratic, democratic, etc,) and their institutions (public and private) should embrace diversity measures. It is rather intentionally amoral. It is also abstract and high-level, focusing on policy goals and societal decision-making while ignoring practical and political difficulties.
---
At the very least, if we're going to get all grognard and talk about the objective benefits of diversity, as a society, we should consider why diversity is even a thing that exists, based on our history with it. Diversity is part of the meritocratic impulse. Diversity is part of the democratic process. We went from a world where only a few were considered capable of complex tasks ("Women can't be rulers! Queen Elizabeth? HA!") to a world in which we acknowledge that many of those older limitations we placed upon ourselves (and others) were erroneous and self-aggrandizing, that things like race, sex, sexual orientation, and most importantly as well as most forgotten, class aren't really as limiting as we once thought they were.
I'd argue that, based on our past experiences, we should always at least try diversity, if we're looking to improve our society, and specifically to improve our overall societal efficiency by maximizing our general societal output. We abandoned caste systems for a reason. We opened up citizenship privileges for a reason. We enjoined in universal suffrage for a reason. We created public schooling for a reason. We discarded the chivalric code and the noble privileges for a reason. Over and over again, throughout our history, we have found that claims that so-and-so-people can't do so-and-so-job are wrong, and we have found that enabling so-and-so-people to perform so-and-so-job, whether that be running the nation or serving in the military or just, you know, not being slaves, has worked out for the better! Unless we have strong evidence that a certain demographic is either incapable or obviously and seriously disadvantaged at something based on inherent, largely immutable traits, we should probably at least try affirmative action policies and see where it gets us.
For example, nobody thinks the NFL should have 50% women. We know that women are smaller and slighter than men. We're pretty damn sure most of that is genetic, though we cannot rule out that at least some of that disparity is socialized, and so, unless we engage in a major artificial selection project over the course of several generations, there's no real point in trying to see what the NFL would look like with ~50% women and whether that'd make for better, more competitive football players. It's pretty damn unlikely. (That being said, it also seems likely that there are some positions in the NFL at which a women could excel at, if it weren't for structural disadvantages keeping them out of the professional football player pipeline entirely. See: the slow uptake of female NFL officials and coaches.)
On the other hand, we don't have any real evidence that women (or any specific race) are inherently less capable to be computer programmers. Then, in a society in which women are locked out of computer programming via various soft measures, we are not efficiently selecting for the best computer programmers. This is not upholding the meritocracy; this is a failure of the meritocracy. (Remember, meritocracy is not an innate moral good; it's "good" because it results in various moral goods, like fairness, societal unity, utilitarian benefit, etc.. The meritocracy does not come into existence in the interview room and vanish into the aether once you leave it. The meritocracy should only be considered as a broad principle applying to the entire structure of society.)
As a concrete example, I've mentioned doctors before in this thread. People once thought women can't be doctors, because of ???. But how could they have known, unless women could be doctors, and we could see the results of their doctoring? In the end, women became doctors, the sky didn't fall, and we now live in a presumably better world for it. Similarly, one might look at commercial airline pilots. Like with doctors, there once was a presumption that women couldn't be pilots. So we went to war with only male pilots*, and air forces complained that they couldn't find enough people to be pilots, and those pilots all then left the military and entered into commercial aviation, which is still dominated by male pilots, and now we have airlines all complaining that pilots are very expensive and that their labour costs are bankrupting them.**
* And worse, just a subset of males were acceptable as pilots, because fighter cockpits were designed extremely inflexibly, an issue that actually persists to this day, albeit at a lesser extent.
** Well, they did anyways. The advent of autopilot systems has changed this dynamic somewhat.
---
In some ways, this is just a more complex version of, "If you don't let Jimmy try playing quarterback, how do you know he'll be a terrible quarterback?" Unless there's strong evidence that women can't be competent computer programmers, that there isn't a plausible alternate reality in which there are many women programmers and society is better off for it, then we should, as a society, give it the ol' college try. Questions like, "Well does this mean that programmers have to be 50% women? Or is 40% enough? Or what?" are questions that we can answer in time, when we get there. Trying to answer them now is putting the cart before the horse: we have to run the experiment to see what the results are.
The principle of diversity, as part of a contemporary liberal meritocratic effort, is not one of quotas established based on sound scientific evidence. It is presumptive, based on our historical experience, that, generally, most people are more than capable of most things, such that if there is a major disparity between demographics in some sector, there should also be strong accompanying evidence explaining that disparity and its correctness/acceptability. Women shouldn't have to prove they can be programmers before we let them be programmers, and not just because we have consistently been wrong when we have said, "So-and-so can't do this-and-that," in the past, but also because that's an insurmountable hurdle. That's us, as a society, saying, "Prove us wrong. But oh, we're not going to give you the opportunity to prove us wrong." That's us pointing at negative evidence that we ourselves produce, and refusing to allow experiments that might produce the positive evidence that would contradict our negative evidence.
Remember, above and beyond women and certain professions, the same line of argumentation has been leveled against many others demographics at many other points in time. people once looked at someone like Stephen Hawking and said, "People with disabilities like this can never amount to anything, so we shouldn't bother trying to make society inclusive for them."*** Or they looked at Jews and said, "Jews can't be scientists," or blacks and said, "Blacks can't be intellectuals." Queer people can't raise families. Peasants can't be trusted to vote. Or be military leaders. Or serve in the government. Or do math. Or read. Or write. Over and over again, humans have seen a lack of evidence that people of a certain demographic can do something, and mistake it for evidence that people of that demographic can't do that thing.
Ultimately, for all the Google goose's blathering, he was never actually able to demonstrate that the women he derided as being less competent/qualified were actually less competent/qualified. He took issue with Google's diversity hiring without actually demonstrating that said diversity hiring was causing problems. That is to say, if he thought of Google as a giant social experiment in which we were testing the hypothesis, "A corporation that hires X% women as software engineers can be successful," he was explicitly ignoring the results of the experiment itself and jumping to reject the hypothesis. At best, if he wasn't just looking at a highly successful multinational tech corporation and saying that its hiring policies were already failing, he was looking at the state of the world and saying, "This is the only possible, valid state of the world. Any other state is inferior, and so Google's attempts to change the state of the world are in error," which is, again, a tendency of evolutionary psychology-like thinking: this is the state of society/humanity, because evolution, so therefore this is the only possible "natural" state of society/humanity, and efforts to change that "natural" state are to be rejected.
*** Does it not blow anybody else's mind that if Stephen Hawking's disease had manifested earlier, or if he'd been born a few decades, that the world's most famous physicist probably wouldn't have been a contributing member of society, never mind a physicist, at all?
We're PA fans, so I assume that most of us are gamers, right? Isn't our hobby a prime example of how people's beliefs about what women can do/are interested in are culturally loaded and can create harmful feedback loops? "Women just don't play video games! It's not in their natures," they said, "So that's why we don't make video games that appeal to women, or have women protagonists, or advertise to women, or why we won't remove all the busty sex objects from our games! Because they wouldn't sell anyways!"
And then it turns out, no, no that wasn't true at all.
We're PA fans, so I assume that most of us are gamers, right? Isn't our hobby a prime example of how people's beliefs about what women can do/are interested in are culturally loaded and can create harmful feedback loops? "Women just don't play video games! It's not in their natures," they said, "So that's why we don't make video games that appeal to women, or have women protagonists, or advertise to women, or why we won't remove all the busty sex objects from our games! Because they wouldn't sell anyways!"
And then it turns out, no, no that wasn't true at all.
Has there been any research on the impact of cultural/ gender / general-life-experience on the effectivness of collaborative R&D?
Because I'm curious, given the semi-random, experience-based nature of inspiration, if the human brain's aptitude/proclivity for pattern matching would suggest that the more diverse the team's individual memory banks are, the broader it's collective capacity is going to be to innovate/problem solve.
Anecdotally I find this to be true. And I suspect that if I just worked with 10 clones of myself, I could implement my own ideas faster; but I feel like I would stagnate just as quickly without different perspectives. And if a person merely being a non-clone has merit, then perhaps the magnitude of difference does as well. And, if so, Race/sex/gender/sexual preference could be handy, spreadsheet-friendly markers for assessing the potential depth of your team's inspiration gene pool.
We're PA fans, so I assume that most of us are gamers, right? Isn't our hobby a prime example of how people's beliefs about what women can do/are interested in are culturally loaded and can create harmful feedback loops? "Women just don't play video games! It's not in their natures," they said, "So that's why we don't make video games that appeal to women, or have women protagonists, or advertise to women, or why we won't remove all the busty sex objects from our games! Because they wouldn't sell anyways!"
And then it turns out, no, no that wasn't true at all.
Can we not turn this into Gamergate?
This existed long before the GamoraGibbons, and is a re-occurring chicken and the egg cultural touchstone in various male dominated industries.
We're PA fans, so I assume that most of us are gamers, right? Isn't our hobby a prime example of how people's beliefs about what women can do/are interested in are culturally loaded and can create harmful feedback loops? "Women just don't play video games! It's not in their natures," they said, "So that's why we don't make video games that appeal to women, or have women protagonists, or advertise to women, or why we won't remove all the busty sex objects from our games! Because they wouldn't sell anyways!"
And then it turns out, no, no that wasn't true at all.
Can we not turn this into Gibbledygoop?
No, because Gibbledygoop and MRA nonsense was always at the heart of this.
wiltingI had fun once and it was awfulRegistered Userregular
edited August 2017
There's absolutely a doubled edged element to gender diversity in the workplace.
Teaching being female dominated is a big concern when males are increasingly falling behind in education, when female teachers grade male students lower and male students put in less effort under female teachers.
This has big knock on effects - less successful in school, less likely to find work, more likely to end up in prison, or homeless, or to take their own life.
Poorer men have a harder time finding - and keeping - a partner - a problem successful women are also having at the other end of the scale.
Then there's the overwhelmingly majority of workplace injuries & deaths being male. Which is worse, women not getting promoted, or men dying?
What is even the solution there? To encourage more women to take up dangerous work so the deaths/injuries balance out?
Would higher concern for female welfare improve overall safety?
Men being evaluated on their financial success - and the expectation that they should be providers - means that they work longer hours, are more willing to make longer commutes, and work in those more dangerous jobs.
Which means the rational decision for many couples ends up being for the lower earning partner (often the woman) to do more of the work in the home, which feeds into her being less able to get ahead at work, and feeds into the man not seeing his kids as much - and losing access to his children in the divorce. Which is worse, being stuck in the home, or rarely seeing the family you work so hard to support?
Working to provide for a family apparently isn't considered taking care of them, and little value is placed on fatherhood despite the strong correlation between single motherhood and negative outcomes in all kind of areas - mental health, self harm, drug use, unwanted pregnancy, criminality.
It's a lovely traditional gender roles shit sandwich.
There's absolutely a doubled edged element to gender diversity in the workplace.
Teaching being female dominated is a big concern when males are increasingly falling behind in education, when female teachers grade male students lower and male students put in less effort under female teachers.
This has big knock on effects - less successful in school, less likely to find work, more likely to end up in prison, or homeless, or to take their own life.
Poorer men have a harder time finding - and keeping - a partner - a problem successful women are also having at the other end of the scale.
Then there's the overwhelmingly majority of workplace injuries & deaths being male. Which is worse, women not getting promoted, or men dying?
What is even the solution there? To encourage more women to take up dangerous work so the deaths/injuries balance out?
Would higher concern for female welfare improve overall safety?
Men being evaluated on their financial success - and the expectation that they should be providers - means that they work longer hours, are more willing to make longer commutes, and work in those more dangerous jobs.
Which means the rational decision for more couples ends up being for the lower earning partner (often the woman) to do more of the work in the home, which feeds into her being less able to get ahead at work, and feeds into the man losing access to his children in the divorce.
Working to provide for a family apparently isn't considered taking care of them, and little value is placed on fatherhood despite the strong correlation between single motherhood and negative outcomes in all kind of areas - mental health, self harm, drug use, unwanted pregnancy, criminality.
It's a lovely traditional gender roles shit sandwich.
But all of that is "MRA nonsense" right?
It is when you're ignoring the fact this doesn't have to a choice one or the other. And how exactly does having more women on staff make more men die from work injuries? That sounds like an OSHA and regulations problem.
Plus this is ignoring the context that women do not have equal power or representation in male dominated industries like this one to begin with. Yes, it is important to make diversity a big priority, since everyone deserves the right to work where they please. And it is disingenuous to talk about discrimination against men when that's been a huge obstacle women have had to face in the work force and society since forever. Why is it that this is suddenly a concern when men get this blowback, yet the concern for women is non existent in identical circumstances?
Does this opinion reflect on other industries, as well? Do you think Elizabeth Blackwell pioneering women becoming doctors was something that shouldn't have occurred?
edit: This ignores the fact this specific industry was built by women in the first place, and their contributions have been unrecognized by society RE: NASA.
Posts
Yes, but then you're only introducing another variable.
The question for companies becomes then how much is diversity inherently worth and also how much should you deliberately correct for the injustices in society when hiring employees?
The right wing point of view says: "The job of a company is to make money, not to correct the injustices of society. A company can only serve one major cause, so is one or the other". So there's that.
To which i replay: "fuck that"
Just because certain practices make more money does not mean they should be done.
We got rid of slavery and child labor for a reason, and have been trying to get rid of gender discrimination in wages.
I'm fine with purely meritocratic hiring/promoting even if it leads to 99.999999999% male workforce in some areas.
Atleast in theory.
In practice, anyone claiming they hire/promote purely on merit is 99.999999999% of the time full of shit.
.. and so we need a strong public sector employer to lead the charge, as they don't need to make money.
Or, if we don't do that, we need informed consumers to make these issues cost the companies involved.
I don't see how meritocratic hiring could ever result in a 99.999999% male workforce unless the job is circus strongman.
Or we make laws to require diversity in hiring/promoting.
And if some companies can't deal with it and go bankrupt? So be it.
Due to the apparent lack of female prospects in the industry, few women enter the field, leading to female representation being 0.000001% of the workforce.
"Informed consumers will enforce morality for us" is basically a myth. You can't even get informed consumers to buy airline seats with legroom.
How?
I cannot think of a way to adequately regulate this that does not artificially restrict the number of employed individuals in the group not being targetted.
For instance, mandating a 50:50 split on an industry with a 25:75 imbalance leads to 50% of the available workforce unemployed, or perhaps to a similar situation to your American-first workplace laws where companies 'look' for an applicable diverse employee, don't 'find' an 'acceptable' one in the 25% and then employ someone from the 75%.
I get the feeling "adequately" is going to become synonymous with "perfectly" but an easy first step is mandating that companies above a certain size redact personally identifying information on applicants before making initial interview decisions to eliminate subconscious racial/gender bias in screening. Then you could potentially increase enforcement of existing workplace discrimination laws and proactively audit companies that reported unusually poor diversity metrics for workplace discrimination rather than relying on complaints.
Those aren't perfect solutions but that's just top-of-my-head stuff.
Like any other male dominated field it will be solved via education, diversity friendly/anti-discimination laws, and people within the industry reaching out and changing the culture from within. This takes generations to fix.
edit: For example, in the US the very first female doctor was Elizabeth Blackwell - who did this in the 1900's. AS you can assume, this was not an simple matter to be a pioneer in.
She had to do all this before she could enter Hobart College, and she required lots of luck to get that far.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
But the point is those are very surface level ideas that are at least an effort to solve obvious, known issues rather than assuming the baseline must be a law that just says "hire 50% women or else"
This still wasn't [chat].
We couldn't even get informed customers to stop buying Chick-fil-a because have you HAD Chick-fil-a??
Switch - SW-7373-3669-3011
Fuck Joe Manchin
It's about 15% -20% even now. Unless you have less than 20 coders, chance should mean that anything under about 10% female is pretty dodgy looking.
Airline seats is one instance where men might complain they are being discriminated against.
(joke by the way)
Yes, what is the objective worth of diversity? What is the maximum skill/fit gap diversity can overcome when comparing two potential hires?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Why are you demanding an objective quantification in a primarily subjective decision? This is the flaw in the argument - once you're beyond the baseline of skill needed for a job, the decision making is pretty much subjective, so arguing for quantitative values makes no sense. As for why diversity it good, research has shown that more diverse teams are more flexible and tend to be better at seeing things from different viewpoints.
Because certain positions have pretty undefined baseline criteria, meaning every applicant is judged according to absolute qualification. And the hiring decision goes through multiple people, so having some objective basis helps consensus, even if it's understood to be inaccurate. Value is assigned to each aspect of the applicant and at least given an informal rank.
Maybe the fact that we don't have rigid baseline competency metrics is the problem.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
What I'm worried about is how this subjectivity affects how employees value themselves and their coworkers.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Well, if the hiring process is racist, that probably affects value much more negatively, so....
The article gets more detailed on how diverse teams are better on racial, gender and cultural merits - they focus more on facts, process facts more thoughtfully, and are more innovative in general.
Scientific American also has an article on how diverse teams increase innovation.
If you're looking for objective reasoning as to why diversity is a boon to a team, then these should help prove that out. Diversity results in actual observable improvement to company bottom lines and results in more productivity from teams, as well as more challenge to bias. Diversity itself is a merit when you're considering a new hire.
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
More to the point, if you need an objective rubic to determine the value of yourself or your coworkers, you're either in a job that is built around rote tasks, or you're setting yourself up for a fall. Just because the requirements of a job are subjective in nature doesn't mean that it makes it harder to judge one's value, but that it's different from "can perform X tasks an hour". The problem is that we tend to put greater subjective value on skills that we can quantify, as opposed to more qualitative skills - even when those qualitative skills are more important.
The act of placing ranked values on aspects of a potential hire is around the precision I'm looking at rather than data on a continuous scale. I would like to be able to compare demographic diversity to other aspects on a relative level. Applicants themselves are ranked according to the sentiment of their overall value in discussion, and I feel like a hidden fuzzy equation is used to arrive at the conclusion that the rankings are legitimate. A standardized method of determining diversity's relative value would make it easier to bring up in such a discussion. The next mathematical step after determining that diversity is beneficial to the workplace is determining the effect size of this benefit and ranking it among known positives.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
In such a situation as that, it's clear that the hiring manager is not actually trying to find the best fit for a position, but simply looking for what looks and sounds like "the best product" and willing to purchase that product at whatever price. If a man in his 30s, dressed well and acting confidently, applies for that job and gets it, the hiring manager will of course say that it's because he had the best qualifications. But in a situation where the job qualifications are literally just made up on the spot by HR with no connection to reality, it can't be qualifications that actually got the person in, it can be any number of real things, but how could it possibly be a fantasy rating on a fantasy scale? And yet we act like that "qualifications" are a firm, objective rating that doesn't deviate based on our preferences.
That Cordelia Fine quote from The Truth has Got Boots On essay is pertinent here:
I think that second article nails it when it says: And then kicks off into smaller scale studies that focus on whether diversity affects decision making, etc.
The increase in profitability in companies made me think that perhaps diversity helps screen out workers hostile to diversity, and those people aren't the best workers.
But the smaller scale studies eliminate that potential effect.
I disagree. The claim that social diversity causes better business outcomes in general is incredibly strong, and I don't think the article offers a compelling defense of the thesis in the form that the author seems to be relaying it or as it is being accepted here.
By way of introduction: I thought it was lovely that Arch and the author of that medium article went through the trouble of explaining exactly how partial the evidence offered by vervet monkey & CAH girl play preference literature is, how ambiguous the interpretation is, and how many gaps there are between that actual evidence base and the sweeping conclusions that gender-difference partisans try to draw from it. I think the same thing should be done to articles which supply conclusions we like more. I should be up front that I don't have the statistical literacy, experience with study design, or background knowledge base to do anything like as good of a job. So I apologize for that--but I will at least give it a college try.
As both you and the Scientific American article note, the sorts of large surveys being mentioned can establish correlations, but those correlations can be explained by all sorts of causal patterns. You mention one: maybe misogynists aren't very good at their jobs, so the better performance of boards with women on them is because already-better boards hire women, not because gender diversity itself makes boards better. I would also mention: the claim that companies willing to hire diversely will have access to better talent--because they'll have an effective monopoly on the best women--would also explain why companies with women on the board do better; they're getting better talent. But notice that this is also compatible with diversity per se making no contribution at all once candidate quality is controlled. And this is just explanations which go through discrimination, diversity, and so on as somehow on the causal path--there are also tons more options that don't even do that. Short of reading the methodology, I have no idea what alternate hypotheses the researchers tried to rule out, but it could be something as tangential as "2015 happened to be a good year for industry giants, the really huge megafirms, and industry giants put women on the board as a matter of course." The correlations at face value are a very loose form of evidence.
It's worth pausing at this point to note that this should be especially salient to someone who thinks "evolutionary psychology is just bullshit because they can't do experiments to establish causation so instead they just notice correlations and build up just-so stories around them that happen to fit their ideological priors." I think that critique is too strict: not all science can do the sorts of experiments we'd ideally like, and noticing correlations and building stories around them can be a legitimate part of multiple convergent lines of inquiry. But if we're going to be strict, we should be strict across the board.
Similar remarks apply to the science-quality study the Scientific American article discusses. These correlations are just susceptible of so many interpretations.* And I have to admit that the science quality study was where my bullshit meter really started ringing. My dad works in foundations of mathematics. The sci am article leans on the way that diverse life experiences and expectations spur creativity and demand rigorous justification. The idea that the way my dad would justify a conjecture about the continuum hypothesis to a colleague would vary depending on whether that colleague is German, Russian, or Singaporean is just independently absurd. Similarly, if I think of trying to justify my dissertation to various other writers in the field--Kenny Easwaran's an Indian dude... and so what? "Spurring creativity" is vague and hand-wavy as fuck here.
The article discusses some work beyond demographic-level correlational studies, though. But those experiments have very particular characteristics which make the generalization to all business settings and/or innovation simpliciter rather breathtaking. First, the participants are mostly very particular: people who have never met before and are having one-off meetings. Second, the things they're deciding are very particular: questions with no particularly well-established formal methods for resolution, which require making qualitative judgments that record and balance many competing factors, where the issue is fraught with moral-political upshot in our culture, and where it's known that moral-political opinion tends to divide on demographic lines. That's what you're getting when it's a faux-jury study with 4 white people and 2 black people, or a murder mystery story, or Ds vs Rs on the death penalty--of course law, justice, crime and guilt are racialized in our society (and tied to party affiliation), and, furthermore, deciding whodunit doesn't have a technical resolution, it's a matter of looking everything over and then making a judgment call about reasonable doubts. It is entirely plausible to me that in this very specific judgment situation diversity is really, really important, because racial anxiety about being perceived as racist causes white jurors to be hyper vigilant about dotting their is and crossing their ts with their reasoning when that reasoning borders on racially fraught culture issues, and that this is something white jurors could do with more of in general. But what does that tell us about any other judgement situation?
Our culture has stereotypes about Indian people, but it doesn't have stereotypes about what they think about formal epistemology. And what people think about formal epistemology has just about zero moral-political upshot in American culture. There are (relatively) formal methods of argumentation. Plus: I already know what Easwaran thinks: I've read his books, and I don't have to guess! The idea that Easwaran's Easwaran-y diversity would spur any collaboration of ours to greater heights than I would get with white alternatives... it's all kind of goofy. The judgment situation just has nothing to do with the jury studies. And of course nothing in the actually-maybe-causation-establishing randomized studies says that they should be the same either.
But okay: how much like a jury situation is an average office? Well, I don't know what an "average office" is, which is part of why any claim about diversity being good ~for business~ was so bold in the first place. But I do know that in a lot of offices, the same people interact over long periods of time. I know what Easwaran thinks, and probably lots of coworkers know what each other think too. This is already a big departure from the jury studies. I would also guess at other departures. But it doesn't really matter what I would guess! The point is just that if you're trying to establish a result as sweeping as "diverse human groups reason better, because diversity causes people to reason more carefully" then you need a lot more than some correlational studies plus a handful of small causal studies on very specific and very similar reasoning contexts. You'd want to replicate that result broadly, over and over, in contexts as diverse as you could possibly imagine.
It's also worth noticing that even taking the effect's existence at face value, it's not clear it's even good for it to hold in all contexts! Consider the experiment wherein white students ranked a dissenting perspective (on a hot button issue, of course) as more interesting and novel when presented by a black student. But: were they right? I mean, what if it was actually a pretty banal point, and their assessment of it when said by a white student was closer to the truth than it was when said by a black student? The author treats the cognitive effort of hypervigilance as if it were at worst free, and more likely positively beneficial--exercise for the brain, seems to be the favored analogy. But anyone who's ever been in a group with sharply divergent perspectives can know that hypervigilance can be exhausting and time-wasting in a way that presents real costs and that it can prevent interesting work being done precisely because you can't feel confident just assuming a lot of the basic stuff and cutting ahead to (what you take) to be the unsettled frontier.
In other words, this:
Seemed like a hueg extrapolation from what was actually presented. Maybe not quite "this is what vervet monkeys did with a toy truck, and this is eight twins in Wisconsin's favorite blankie, so women drive like this" or whatever--but not of an entirely different species either.
~~~
*Science papers by American authors with an ethnically diverse mis of names get cited more. This could be because diverse collaborations spur more creativity--they are more successful as collaborations. Well, it could. But it could also be any number of other things. Consider that scientists are people. Suppose they collaborate with people either because 1) they interact with that person socially, anticipate partnership will be pleasant, and that it will yield publishable results, or 2) the other author may be a relative stranger, but they have a compelling professional reason to collaborate--they anticipate the work will be killer. It's plausible that papers from 1-type partnerships, though publishable, are more likely to be mediocre, whereas 2-type papers are more likely to be great. It's also plausible that general social segregation of the races will also lead to fewer 1-type papers by racially diverse groups. And then we would have an explanation for the quality difference, but not one where diversity was itself causative in the way described and not one where causally intervening on diversity would improve quality. That's just one such explanation!
One thing that I think might be worth looking into is whether it helps screen out managers hostile to diversity. Anyone who isn't capable of managing a diverse team would probably damage a non-diverse team in more subtle ways. See that pair of letters linked here earlier, as an example.
---
At the very least, if we're going to get all grognard and talk about the objective benefits of diversity, as a society, we should consider why diversity is even a thing that exists, based on our history with it. Diversity is part of the meritocratic impulse. Diversity is part of the democratic process. We went from a world where only a few were considered capable of complex tasks ("Women can't be rulers! Queen Elizabeth? HA!") to a world in which we acknowledge that many of those older limitations we placed upon ourselves (and others) were erroneous and self-aggrandizing, that things like race, sex, sexual orientation, and most importantly as well as most forgotten, class aren't really as limiting as we once thought they were.
I'd argue that, based on our past experiences, we should always at least try diversity, if we're looking to improve our society, and specifically to improve our overall societal efficiency by maximizing our general societal output. We abandoned caste systems for a reason. We opened up citizenship privileges for a reason. We enjoined in universal suffrage for a reason. We created public schooling for a reason. We discarded the chivalric code and the noble privileges for a reason. Over and over again, throughout our history, we have found that claims that so-and-so-people can't do so-and-so-job are wrong, and we have found that enabling so-and-so-people to perform so-and-so-job, whether that be running the nation or serving in the military or just, you know, not being slaves, has worked out for the better! Unless we have strong evidence that a certain demographic is either incapable or obviously and seriously disadvantaged at something based on inherent, largely immutable traits, we should probably at least try affirmative action policies and see where it gets us.
For example, nobody thinks the NFL should have 50% women. We know that women are smaller and slighter than men. We're pretty damn sure most of that is genetic, though we cannot rule out that at least some of that disparity is socialized, and so, unless we engage in a major artificial selection project over the course of several generations, there's no real point in trying to see what the NFL would look like with ~50% women and whether that'd make for better, more competitive football players. It's pretty damn unlikely. (That being said, it also seems likely that there are some positions in the NFL at which a women could excel at, if it weren't for structural disadvantages keeping them out of the professional football player pipeline entirely. See: the slow uptake of female NFL officials and coaches.)
On the other hand, we don't have any real evidence that women (or any specific race) are inherently less capable to be computer programmers. Then, in a society in which women are locked out of computer programming via various soft measures, we are not efficiently selecting for the best computer programmers. This is not upholding the meritocracy; this is a failure of the meritocracy. (Remember, meritocracy is not an innate moral good; it's "good" because it results in various moral goods, like fairness, societal unity, utilitarian benefit, etc.. The meritocracy does not come into existence in the interview room and vanish into the aether once you leave it. The meritocracy should only be considered as a broad principle applying to the entire structure of society.)
As a concrete example, I've mentioned doctors before in this thread. People once thought women can't be doctors, because of ???. But how could they have known, unless women could be doctors, and we could see the results of their doctoring? In the end, women became doctors, the sky didn't fall, and we now live in a presumably better world for it. Similarly, one might look at commercial airline pilots. Like with doctors, there once was a presumption that women couldn't be pilots. So we went to war with only male pilots*, and air forces complained that they couldn't find enough people to be pilots, and those pilots all then left the military and entered into commercial aviation, which is still dominated by male pilots, and now we have airlines all complaining that pilots are very expensive and that their labour costs are bankrupting them.**
* And worse, just a subset of males were acceptable as pilots, because fighter cockpits were designed extremely inflexibly, an issue that actually persists to this day, albeit at a lesser extent.
** Well, they did anyways. The advent of autopilot systems has changed this dynamic somewhat.
---
In some ways, this is just a more complex version of, "If you don't let Jimmy try playing quarterback, how do you know he'll be a terrible quarterback?" Unless there's strong evidence that women can't be competent computer programmers, that there isn't a plausible alternate reality in which there are many women programmers and society is better off for it, then we should, as a society, give it the ol' college try. Questions like, "Well does this mean that programmers have to be 50% women? Or is 40% enough? Or what?" are questions that we can answer in time, when we get there. Trying to answer them now is putting the cart before the horse: we have to run the experiment to see what the results are.
The principle of diversity, as part of a contemporary liberal meritocratic effort, is not one of quotas established based on sound scientific evidence. It is presumptive, based on our historical experience, that, generally, most people are more than capable of most things, such that if there is a major disparity between demographics in some sector, there should also be strong accompanying evidence explaining that disparity and its correctness/acceptability. Women shouldn't have to prove they can be programmers before we let them be programmers, and not just because we have consistently been wrong when we have said, "So-and-so can't do this-and-that," in the past, but also because that's an insurmountable hurdle. That's us, as a society, saying, "Prove us wrong. But oh, we're not going to give you the opportunity to prove us wrong." That's us pointing at negative evidence that we ourselves produce, and refusing to allow experiments that might produce the positive evidence that would contradict our negative evidence.
Remember, above and beyond women and certain professions, the same line of argumentation has been leveled against many others demographics at many other points in time. people once looked at someone like Stephen Hawking and said, "People with disabilities like this can never amount to anything, so we shouldn't bother trying to make society inclusive for them."*** Or they looked at Jews and said, "Jews can't be scientists," or blacks and said, "Blacks can't be intellectuals." Queer people can't raise families. Peasants can't be trusted to vote. Or be military leaders. Or serve in the government. Or do math. Or read. Or write. Over and over again, humans have seen a lack of evidence that people of a certain demographic can do something, and mistake it for evidence that people of that demographic can't do that thing.
Ultimately, for all the Google goose's blathering, he was never actually able to demonstrate that the women he derided as being less competent/qualified were actually less competent/qualified. He took issue with Google's diversity hiring without actually demonstrating that said diversity hiring was causing problems. That is to say, if he thought of Google as a giant social experiment in which we were testing the hypothesis, "A corporation that hires X% women as software engineers can be successful," he was explicitly ignoring the results of the experiment itself and jumping to reject the hypothesis. At best, if he wasn't just looking at a highly successful multinational tech corporation and saying that its hiring policies were already failing, he was looking at the state of the world and saying, "This is the only possible, valid state of the world. Any other state is inferior, and so Google's attempts to change the state of the world are in error," which is, again, a tendency of evolutionary psychology-like thinking: this is the state of society/humanity, because evolution, so therefore this is the only possible "natural" state of society/humanity, and efforts to change that "natural" state are to be rejected.
*** Does it not blow anybody else's mind that if Stephen Hawking's disease had manifested earlier, or if he'd been born a few decades, that the world's most famous physicist probably wouldn't have been a contributing member of society, never mind a physicist, at all?
We're PA fans, so I assume that most of us are gamers, right? Isn't our hobby a prime example of how people's beliefs about what women can do/are interested in are culturally loaded and can create harmful feedback loops? "Women just don't play video games! It's not in their natures," they said, "So that's why we don't make video games that appeal to women, or have women protagonists, or advertise to women, or why we won't remove all the busty sex objects from our games! Because they wouldn't sell anyways!"
And then it turns out, no, no that wasn't true at all.
Can we not turn this into Gamergate?
Because I'm curious, given the semi-random, experience-based nature of inspiration, if the human brain's aptitude/proclivity for pattern matching would suggest that the more diverse the team's individual memory banks are, the broader it's collective capacity is going to be to innovate/problem solve.
Anecdotally I find this to be true. And I suspect that if I just worked with 10 clones of myself, I could implement my own ideas faster; but I feel like I would stagnate just as quickly without different perspectives. And if a person merely being a non-clone has merit, then perhaps the magnitude of difference does as well. And, if so, Race/sex/gender/sexual preference could be handy, spreadsheet-friendly markers for assessing the potential depth of your team's inspiration gene pool.
This existed long before the GamoraGibbons, and is a re-occurring chicken and the egg cultural touchstone in various male dominated industries.
GG was merely the symptom, this is the disease.
No, because Gibbledygoop and MRA nonsense was always at the heart of this.
Teaching being female dominated is a big concern when males are increasingly falling behind in education, when female teachers grade male students lower and male students put in less effort under female teachers.
This has big knock on effects - less successful in school, less likely to find work, more likely to end up in prison, or homeless, or to take their own life.
Poorer men have a harder time finding - and keeping - a partner - a problem successful women are also having at the other end of the scale.
Then there's the overwhelmingly majority of workplace injuries & deaths being male. Which is worse, women not getting promoted, or men dying?
What is even the solution there? To encourage more women to take up dangerous work so the deaths/injuries balance out?
Would higher concern for female welfare improve overall safety?
Men being evaluated on their financial success - and the expectation that they should be providers - means that they work longer hours, are more willing to make longer commutes, and work in those more dangerous jobs.
Which means the rational decision for many couples ends up being for the lower earning partner (often the woman) to do more of the work in the home, which feeds into her being less able to get ahead at work, and feeds into the man not seeing his kids as much - and losing access to his children in the divorce. Which is worse, being stuck in the home, or rarely seeing the family you work so hard to support?
Working to provide for a family apparently isn't considered taking care of them, and little value is placed on fatherhood despite the strong correlation between single motherhood and negative outcomes in all kind of areas - mental health, self harm, drug use, unwanted pregnancy, criminality.
It's a lovely traditional gender roles shit sandwich.
But all of that is "MRA nonsense" right?
It is when you're ignoring the fact this doesn't have to a choice one or the other. And how exactly does having more women on staff make more men die from work injuries? That sounds like an OSHA and regulations problem.
Plus this is ignoring the context that women do not have equal power or representation in male dominated industries like this one to begin with. Yes, it is important to make diversity a big priority, since everyone deserves the right to work where they please. And it is disingenuous to talk about discrimination against men when that's been a huge obstacle women have had to face in the work force and society since forever. Why is it that this is suddenly a concern when men get this blowback, yet the concern for women is non existent in identical circumstances?
Does this opinion reflect on other industries, as well? Do you think Elizabeth Blackwell pioneering women becoming doctors was something that shouldn't have occurred?
edit: This ignores the fact this specific industry was built by women in the first place, and their contributions have been unrecognized by society RE: NASA.