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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota. Not good for anyone.

There are no easy solutions, but it would help I think if all effort was concentrated on removing hurdles rather than patching problems downstream with lazy fixes.

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> The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota.

The thing I hate about it is that it involves rejecting candidates on the basis of the colour of their skin.

I agree. Unfortunately, lazy fixes at clear and prominent decision points are much easier than removing hurdles in, say, the early childhood education system.

This goes beyond a lazy fix. According to another HN commenter here:

> under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes.

The former veteran Google recruiters behind this suit are claiming they were 'instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.'

The fact that it's illegal doesn't make it any less lazy.

The entire thing is ridiculous, but I can't help but laugh at how it seems to them that all the different races and cultures have been reduced to being one of: white, asian, black, hispanic. What about Arabs, Persians, Turks, Natives, etc? Would those have gotten rejected as well?

Tell that to the white and asian males who get rejected on the basis of their race and gender despite having worked their entire lives to be the most qualified and technically adept candidate.

I'm pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have.

Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists.

I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can some of the conversation be about that?

I think I'd settle for having a proportionate amount of the conversation being about discrimination against white men. So, perhaps, for every thousand comments about discrimination against other groups, we could include a word or two. I am a white man - I have never to my knowledge been meaningfully discriminated against. I think only a fool would suggest that if I was black, or a woman, I could say that - or even say that for a more limited time period.

I am trying to wrap my head around this. The level of black employees at Google is at 2% and actually dropped since 2016. How fair is it to say from a statistical point of view that if you did not get hired, you lost out to a lesser qualified black person and not someone from a white or asian of equal or more qualifications? I pick on the black statistic specifically because at the end of the day the blow back for these perceived diversity programs lands on this group in particular.

You’re correct that the difference is in the margins. But, at the end of the day, is any exclusion based on race acceptable? From my perspective, it’s hypocritical to champion equal opportunity while systematically having a different hiring process for different races, not to mention illegal.

That is not the argument I am making. I am asking the question if there is a super majority of white and asian males being hired at these firms (that is present in the Google stats), is it fair to say on an individual basis that the reason you did not get the job was because you were passed over for someone unqualified in an underrepresented group, or is it because said person just did not get hired for some other reason?

If you were to accept the current estimates on IQ, where blacks have an average IQ of 85, Hispanics an average IQ of 90, whites an average IQ of 100 and Asians an average IQ of 105 with a standard deviation of 15 by design, and that Youtube only hires people two standard deviations from the mean, then about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian. I am quite sure that whites are over represented at the expense of Asians.

This assumes that there are equal number of people in the hiring pool in each category. There is nothing to suggest that the applicants that apply are drawn at random from the population.

Also the absolute numbers of each groups also matter. On this basis we should expect far few Asian and Black employees just on the basis that there are fewer than whites within the USA [0].

0. This is assuming the employee pool is drawn from the USA population.

Ok. California is 39% Hispanic, 38.8% White, 5.8% Black and 13% Asian. California has 40 Million people. Let's say half have not graduated college yet and are not in the employee pool. That means 8 Million Hispanics, 8 Million whites, 1.16 Million Blacks and 2.6 Million Asians. Taking this new information into account, Asians should be around 37% of the employees, Blacks less than 1%, Hispanics around 9% and Whites 54%. Google's numbers say 61% White, 30% Asian, 2% Black and 3% Hispanic. So, it's both Hispanics and Asians who are under represented.

Based on those assumptions, which I'll iterate below first, let's get the numbers:

1) hiring based on IQ, cutoff at 2 standard deviations above the global mean (mu = 100, sigma = 15, by design), 2 sigma above that makes 130. You get hired if you're the candidate with the highest IQ, if you satisfy the minimum of an IQ of 130

2) 8/20 hispanic, 8/20 white, 1.16/20 black, 2.6/20 asians (and let's just pretned that sums to 100%). Or: 40% hispanic, 40% white, 5.8% black, 13% asian

3) let's assume 1000 candidates for each position.

So each round has 1000 candidates: 400 hispanics, IQ taken from N(90, 15) 400 whites, IQ taken from N(100, 15) 58 black, IQ taken from N(85, 15) 130 asians, IQ taken from N(105, 15)

The numbers: 33.42% Asians, 10.85% Hispanic, 0.54% Black, 55.20% White

Odds of getting hired under those criteria: 0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White

And that's why nobody's going to be happy with expected outcomes. Just imagine the (completely "fair") news headline "Asians 25 TIMES more likely to get hired than blacks in the bay area".

  import random

  counts = {'h': 0, 'w': 0, 'b': 0, 'a': 0, None: 0}
  experiments = 10000

  for x in range(experiments):
    candidates = []
    for h in range(400):
      iq = random.normalvariate(90, 15)
      candidates.append((iq, 'h'))
    for w in range(400):
      iq = random.normalvariate(100, 15)
      candidates.append((iq, 'w'))
    for b in range(58):
      iq = random.normalvariate(85, 15)
      candidates.append((iq, 'b'))
    for a in range(130):
      iq = random.normalvariate(105, 15)
      candidates.append((iq, 'a'))

    # filter iq > 130
    candidates = [(iq, typ) for (iq, typ) in candidates if iq > 130]

    if candidates:
      selected = sorted(candidates, key=lambda (x,y):x)[0][1]
    else:
      selected = None
    
    counts[selected] += 1
       
  total = sum(counts.values())

  print total
  for k, v in counts.items():
    print "%s %2.2f" % (k, 100.0 * v/total)
  
  print "odds of hire if hispanic : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['h']/experiments / 400)
  print "odds of hire if white : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['w']/experiments / 400)
  print "odds of hire if black : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['b']/experiments / 58)
  print "odds of hire if asian : %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts['a']/experiments / 130)
  print "odds of no hire at all: %2.4f%%" % (100.0*counts[None]/experiments)

You are going to have trouble fitting all of this into a tweet.

It has math and numbers. Nobody interested in that on Twitter anyway.

> Odds of getting hired under those criteria: 0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White

> about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian.

These two comments say the same thing. Mine is standardized.

Your take away from all this is a little strange. The Google numbers say that Asians are 25 times more likely to be hired than blacks. That has happened in real life. No one complains about that. I have read that Google is too Asian though.

People harp about less-talented people not deserving to be there, but that is already the case. From a statistical point of view, Whites are over represented at the expense of Hispanics and Asians with a higher IQ. Real life is messy, but you get the idea.

This battle has been fought already and enough people at Google were convinced that there was a bias in their hiring practices. So, now they are in the process of correcting.

What does the first number in N(90, 15) mean? the median IQ of a given race? I guess the truth is hurting people's feeling.

It's shorthand for a normal distribution with mu=90 sigma=15.

What percentage of those populations have the requisite secondary education and or experience (coding, statistics, marketing, electrical engineering) to work at Google? Before you try to just match up a general population to a workforce let's at least try to have a representative sample of what the "pool of qualified applicants" looks like.

I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.

The level of the problem doesn't matter. Working at Google is an elite job. We could go a level lower to Stanford. Asians are under represented at Stanford. We could go down a level to an elite California High School. Asians are still under represented. Blacks and Hispanics are really under represented at this level. It only gets worse for them the lower you go at elite institutions.

I use the general population because that is where the workers are coming from. If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.

> If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.

That's an interesting conclusion, statistically and as a societal commentary. Assuming for a second we take your conclusion as given, and we look at the legal liability question that someone in alphabet legal or HR has to be thinking about when the make hiring policy decisions: which population should their workforce be representative of: the base population, or the population of qualified applicants?

Edit: >I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.

I don't care I'm here for the legalities and statistics discussions, see my other comments here about judging people based on melanin or Genetics. It's silly where it isn't insulting to reduce a real person based on their inclusion/exclusion to poorly defined groups with little to no impact on actual ability to perform/qualify.

The guy asked a question, can we stop making these assumptions? It's childish, it's more constructive to provide the statistics the inquirer asked for.

How are you drawing the conclusion that IQ is correlated with hiring value?

I think you have put your finger on why these programs are bad for everyone. They really help nobody in the long run and create enormous blowback.

A pretty straightforward explanation is that ⅔ [1] of the tech workers in Silicon Valley are immigrants. Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world, and it doesn't make sense to apply US demographics to an industry that recruits from such a pool.

If you assume that the Silicon Valley percent of immigrant workers holds for Google you conclude that 6% of the American Googlers are African Americans, since none of the foreigners can be. About 2.4% [2] of computer science degree recipients in the US are African American.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://cra.org/crn/2015/09/expanding-the-pipeline-the-state...

The GP was arguing a point that is agreed-upon by many who argue against affirmative action — that the minorities ostensibly helped are harmed in the bigger picture. Yet you rip on the GP for not thinking enough about the whites and Asians who are also the victims of affirmative action? You could be a bit reflexively polarized about this issue.

Perhaps he's against discrimination, and that then automatically leads to the "reflexively polarized" opinion.

How about we judge people on their merits ?

The GP didn't post their resumé and CV -- nor should that be some kind of pre-requisite for discussion -- so I'm limited to judging and critiquing the content of their comment. Likewise, we shouldn't be interested in each other's character beyond the personal viewpoints we each have relating to the discussion.

I don't see how their race affects anything. Race and gender affect the outcome, but only in negative ways. Either by preventing a fair outcome, or by casting doubt on the fairness of the outcome.

> How about we judge people on their merits ?

That's fine if everyone starts from the same base and has the same opportunities which, currently, they most assuredly do not. Let's knock this privileged bullshit on the head until then.

That will never happen. Life isn't fair and never will be, just by virtue of the natural world itself.

We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity (not outcome) but it's important to realize what is actually reasonable and achievable vs impossible.

> That will never happen. Life isn't fair and never will be

And that's why "we should just judge people on their merits" is a bullshit statement.

> We can and should do our best to clear the way to ensure equal opportunity

I am 100% behind this if it actually results in equal opportunities (spoiler: it never will.)

Human society will NEVER provide absolute equal opportunity to everybody. If you want that, please first work on rethinking capitalism.It's not practical and has been tried in the past.

Some of these Asian males may have come out of abject poverty in countries like India - worked all their lives for a chance at better living, were that given the "same" opportunity ?

Please stop this entitled thinking. We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.

> Human society will NEVER provide absolute equal opportunity to everybody.

I know. Which is why "just judge people by their merits" is a nonsense argument.

> We should aim to get all kids high quality education, not social engineering in the job market.

But since there's little chance of the former happening within the next decade or two, we're stuck with the latter.

Most of these are also misclassified as white and asian Americans. ⅔ [1] of Silicon Valley tech workers are immigrants that risk discrimination due to being misclassified into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs.

It is currently impossible for an immigrant to avoid being mis-classified because the EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.

The misclassified immigrants is by far Silicon Valley's largest source of diversity, and the misclassification also makes diversity statistics incorrect for Americans in tech.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

The horror! Who can say what unspeakable acts people will perform in the interests of potentially securing a better life for their children. I for one am reassured that there is at least one voice speaking out against this atrocity.

nevermind, hn is not the place for discussion of race.

1. Discrimination is bad.

2. Minorities have faced discrimination the most.

3. Let's discriminate against Whites/Asians to correct #2, even though we accept the truth of #1.

I don't get this thought process at all..."lets fight discrimination with more discrimination!"

It's not simply more discrimination though. It rebalances the existing discrimination.

Punishing the grandchildren for the wrongdoings of the grandparents.

I though we left that behind a 100 years or more ago?

That's an ideal to strive for, but if society as a whole seems hellbent to keep punishing people who have neither themselves nor had their grandparents do anything wrong, then shifting it to people whose grandparents did can be a better solution than doing nothing.

Original sin is a heinous concept, and so are blood feuds, and this sounds like both. If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes? It seems like that is what you are asking of people as 'better than nothing'. I'm not being hyperbolic either, your logic, applied to criminal law would condemn me to suffer due to the actions of a person I have ever met once.

You seem to be happy to ignore that the larger context is this:

Non-white people are discriminated against because society as a whole accuses their parents as a whole of being degenerates.

> If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes?

I'm a german. Ask me about the amount of paying back my entire life has consisted of.

You're also veering very off-topic from the fact that op made the claim "more discrimination is being proposed as the solution" to which i replied by disagreeing that it is more, and claim it is the same amount of discrimination, just moved around.

> "...i replied by disagreeing that it is more, and claim it is the same amount of discrimination, just moved around."

How is this an acceptable solution??

So its more like "discrimination is bad, but only against some groups, if we discriminate against this other group though, its okay"...I still don't how this is "fair" or "just" in any sense

It is not acceptable in the sense of "ok, we can stop now."

It is however an improvement, unless you think it is fair to discriminate one group massively and one not at all.

I don't think it is fair to discriminate against anyone at all and certainly don't think that this "shifting discrimination around" game is going to work well at all in the long run...

I just wrote:

> It is not acceptable in the sense of "ok, we can stop now."

That means: It is not supposed to work well in the long run.

Just to be clear, holding modern Germans accountable for the actions of the third reich is also absurd, and and I would speak to defend you from those sorts of attacks.

The sins of the father should not condemn his children.

I appreciate the thought. However i do think that it has ultimately made germany as a whole a better country, so i don't entirely agree. Then again i also don't wholly disagree. There are plenty situations and cases where children absolutely should not suffer for parents' sins. I think it must be considered in each case, and especially so if the children derived benefits from the sins.

What's your proposal for a solution that doesn't discriminate? Do nothing?

Can you fix the existing imbalance without doing something?

What if the affirmative action were only temporary, and was designed to stop once balance is reached -- is it still discrimination?

The solution can't be to do nothing, doing nothing is why we are where we are, doing nothing is why discrimination exists. We need to fix #1 and #2 on your list before we can fix #3.

I would love to hear of an alternative thought process, please please suggest something better than affirmative action that might fix discrimination.

> Not good for anyone.

Not good for employees but I don’t see how it’s bad for Google.

Unhappy people are less likely to reflect on things, and more likely to do what the boss tells them to. Which is what you want your employees to do when you attract them with nice “don’t be evil” slogan, and make them optimize an ad server for the market capitalization metric.

This isn’t a new problem. Women and POC that were hired following affirmative action reported being called “affirmative action hires” and faced workplace discrimination based on the idea that they didn’t deserve the jobs. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but how was the issue of them being denied jobs based on sex or race to be solved otherwise?

Anyone have a good response or just typical HN downvotes when challenged?

You shouldn’t complain about being down voted.

To answer your question the issue of discrimination is solved by not discriminating. If women and others are being discriminated against then stop doing this, rather than just start discriminating against other people.

You can't stop discrimination without addressing the long-term systemic effects of pervasive discrimination.

This sounds awfully like we had to destroy the village to save the village.

No one expects it will be easy to end discrimination, but it is hard to see how it will be solved by piling on more discrimination.

The phrase "we had to burn the village in order to save it" was uttered by the officer who perpetrated the My Lai massacre, and it was an unironic paraphrasing of "better dead than red". Nothing about addressing the past and ongoing effects of long-term discrimination requires destroying anything. If you think affirmative action is reverse discrimination, then fine: there are other ways to address systemic disparities.

Taking your boot off someone's throat doesn't make them your equal when they're still on the ground.

It seems this is an issue many don’t want to talk about. Is the solution to ignore systemic discrimination that led us to where we are today? That only leaves one group happy.

I know this is not popular, but honestly how do you stop discrimination against women and others? It is easy to say “stop doing this,” but does that happen?

Blind hiring _might_ work: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-...

To ignore gender this should be combined with gender-neutral voice processing for phone interviews, but it’s doable and not that hard.

What if the candidate went to Wellesley or Howard? What happens if the person went to university in Africa or Latin America? What if you puts SWE or NSBE on the resume, or obtained a merit-based UNCF scholarship and mentioned that as an achievement? The blind hiring system would fall flat pretty quickly.

What happens after the person is hired?

These guys tried it out, I'll leave the interpretation of the conclusion to the reader

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

(yes, its inconclusive, but)

> for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.

You stop discrimination by changing the brand. Many people have the impression that women aren't good at STEM, so hire more high quality women. Can't find enough of them? Grow your own. Google can start free bootcamps and apprenticeships aimed at women (men are welcomed too of course, just like women in engineering groups), don't graduate them until they meet a certain level of excellence. It might be more expensive, but rebranding is not cheap.

How do you create a bootcamp/apprenticeship system aimed at women, but is gender neutral in terms of admissions?

The problem is, there is no way for an organization to tell whether it's succeeding at this, besides looking at the hiring outcomes.

There are actually lots of ways. The most obvious way is to secondary screen using a external party all rejected candidates to make sure that the best candidates was selected. This will also provide you with political cover when you don’t just hire people on the basis of their skin color.

How do you know that external party isn't also biased?

They can only be biased if they know race/gender/etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment

Ok, yeah, a third party with cleaned info would help. :)

Well, we certainly should concentrate on removing hurdles, of course. But patching problems is not necessarily a bad idea, especially from the point of view of the employers themselves.

Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking people are just hired to fill a "diversity quota checklist", which may or may not be true.

For example, say I'm an employer that wants the best performing employees. I know that, for whatever societal/biological/whatever reasons, the black population in the US tends to have worse schooling (maybe the schools have less money, maybe the parents tend to be less wealthy, it doesn't really matter so long as I believe that the black population has some biases against them).

I can deduce just from these biases that the black population will tend to have lower grades, just because of these biases. I may choose to "correct" this bias by preferring equivalent hires that are black, on the assumption that if they have equivalent grades, they had to work harder/be smarter to achieve them, because of the aforementioned biases. I do this entirely from a selfish perspective - I want the best, and if my beliefs about the world are right, this gets me the best!

The same reasoning can theoretically be reversed for e.g. asian populations (maybe their schooling tends to be better, because e.g. wealthier or stricter parents causing more focus on school? Which would imply higher grades without necessarily translating into better workers).

Note: This is a hypothetical case for why an employer might voluntarily and correctly choose to use some form of "affirmative action". It is not necessarily what I think is right or what I think is happening, and is based on a lot of possible assumptions which I have no idea if true. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a case, which doesn't rely on "social justice" or anything other than correct self-interest of the employer.

This approach only works if someone higher up in the education food chain hasn’t already correct for any earlier poor schooling by using some form of “affirmative action” in grading.

The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis

Of course. My assumption can be stated as: the employer, for whatever reason, sees that empirically the correlation between e.g. GPA and work performance is different for different populations, and therefore corrects it. If the "correction" is done beforehand, then the employer won't see this phenomenon.

The only thing you can really measure is motivation, merit and output. How much "harder/smarter" someone worked to achieve something seems incredibly vague, and in your instance it seems like you're just guessing? How does this get you "the best" in any objective way?

Well I'm talking totally theoretically, just to show that it's possible to discriminate in order to achieve a better end result for the business.

But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man.

An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this.

(No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).

That doesn't make sense. Reviewing by motivation + results already delivers you the best people, which is the best for the business.

Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business.

You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.

Look, I don't think we really disagree on anything fundamental here. Of course you should judge people as individuals. Of course looking at past performance is probably better, and fairer, than anything else. I'm completely with you on that. The only thing I'm saying is, there are logically plausible situations, in which you might want to use generic group attributes. Especially in cases where you have no prior knowledge - e.g. everything you say is great, but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience?

I mean, let's take an extreme case and see if we can at least agree on that. One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity, since if for example everyone is refusing to hire black people because of racial discrimination (think 1930s), then an employer will come along and offer to hire black people for cheaper, and will therefore outcompete other companies, who will have to also hire black people at slightly higher wages, etc.

If we were in such a (1930s-like) world where every employer refuses to hire black people, and we were deciding who to hire, and our normal practice would be only to hire people with 2 years' worth of job experience. We would never hire a black person, because none of them would fit our requirements. In such a world, wouldn't it make sense, from a purely self-interested economic perspective, to change the requirements for black people to compensate for the screwed-up biased world we find ourselves in?

If not, then is the classic economic argument wrong?

> there are logically plausible situations, in which you might want to use generic group attributes.

I do not see what the logical situation is, because it is overruled completely by the individual's data which you already have right in front of you. It just sounds like applying biases by guessing with group membership instead of looking at the person. Anytime the group membership overrules the individuals' attributes, it's going the wrong way.

Also while I understand the context, some things just don't matter because life is fundamentally unfair and full of chaos. Yes everyone works differently at the same task even with similar results. Maybe they're smarter, or maybe they had a bad year, or got sick, or something else... how can you possibly account for any or all of that in a reasonable sense?

> but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience?

Judge their school experience. Give them responsibility commensurate with their skills and measure continuously to establish the history, then promote or fire.

> One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity

Yes, it does. However capitalism isn't perfect and is still up to legal, political, and generally irrational whims of the people. If you're talking about 1930's then there were actual laws segregating people. If you move forward to WWII, then it was the political climate where it was accepted to not work with others regardless of the money. If anything, I think a common love for profit actually does a lot to remove these barriers once people realize they're all better off generating and spending wealth instead of hating each other over looks and other useless attributes.

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