Many of these cultural differences are crucial to getting high-paid positions. Like nagging on your kids to study. Like making sure their role models are scientists and inventors, and not gang leaders. Like stressing out delayed gratification and showing how planning and persistence pays off in long term.
If you look very carefully at company founders and people on high-paying jobs, almost every one of them will be from a family with these long-term values. Many Blacks have adopted these values and are successful. Nobody is telling them to go to a different drinking fountain, it's not 1930s anymore. So if you want to fix the problem for good, you need to advertise these values more, teach them at school, and give good examples. Maybe, remove roadblocks like providing free textbooks programming lessons for those in need. Unfortunately, this takes time, effort and only pays off for the next generation. So the racial equality movement has been hijacked by politicians that offer a short-term solution: divide people by the most visible factor, such as skin color, then take from the overrepresented and give to the underrepresented.
Except in the long term, it makes the society more divisive. If you hire a weaker candidate based on quotas, other employees will see the weakness and won't respect them. The employee will perceive this as racism and get offensive. If you try to further address it by promotion quotas, you start getting cliques where Blacks always side with other Blacks, and Whites always side with Whites. You've just created racism out of nowhere.
I think this is totally backwards. If anything, the U.S. government takes from the underrepresented and gives to the overrepresented. This is achieved through gerrymandering districts to dilute minority votes, limiting voting sites, and asking "concerned citizens" to "monitor" voting locations. Our social welfare programs pale in comparison to the subsidies and tax cuts given to big businesses, and other overrepresented groups.
Tax cuts aren't spending and untaxed externalities aren't subsidies. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the use of intentionally misleading language isn't as taboo as lying, so we'll keep seeing this old canard for the foreseeable future.
Haven't you heard these are racist values? Seriously, many of these values are frowned upon, and deemed "white", even though it's what has worked for so long across the world.
I'm afraid this equity, as best-intention as it might be, will make the problem worse by creating a dependency that will further define the culture as needing this form of victimhood status.
Imagine the year 2143, people will have digital assistants, flying cars and also diversity and inclusion training will tell you how oppressed some people still are. It's easier to blame history than to admit you are stupid and need to make better decisions in life.
I am loving this utter shit assumption that is clearly being taken as gospel given the upvotes.
Do you actually believe the AVERAGE Black person you describe is not only engaging in tech with gusto but also good enough to get an interview for a senior staff position at Microsoft?
Ah, but the assumption is not only that this will be the case, but that Microsoft will also just blindly hire said person to "satisfy quotas"... WHEN HAS THAT EVER HAPPENED!?!?
You don't even have a personal anecdote of seeing this happen, and I doubt few of the people upvoting this dribble actually have, and more than likely not to any significant degree in the aggregate either.
Like, holy shit, if your description of an average Black is true, that entire curve on the bell don't even COME CLOSE to participating in tech AT ALL. Good job on the completely un-contextual resort to "statistical reasoning" to dunk on Black people.
Not to mention you show your colors when you fail to account for the children of African immigrants rather than the descendants of slaves in the US. But no, let's believe there's a line of unwashed Black masses, brutish and poorly educated, standing in an employment line that wraps around the Redmond campus waiting to get that hand-out job.
Fuckin hell, what is really happening in the tech industry is that a number of you aren't hiring perfectly qualified people because their afro or some such made you uncomfortable so they were told they weren't hired for "culture fit".
Also unfortunately, our brains are not naturally good with statistics, so many things may seem counter-intuitive until you look into details. Here's some napkin math model (numbers are arbitrary). Assume that we can assign an abstract "techiness score" to every person that will correlate with their chances of being hired.
Assume we have 10 people of population A and 10 people of population B. For population A it's:
* 1 person with score 0
* 7 people with score 5
* 1 person with score 9
* 1 person with score 10
For population B it's:
* 1 person with score 0
* 1 person with score 1
* 7 people with score 5
* 1 person with score 10
The difference it not that large, but if you simply hire everyone with score 8 and up, you get 2 people from population A and 1 person from population B. If you talk to these 3 people, you will see that there is no difference between them in terms of score and can easily conclude that the 2x difference is due to treating people based on their population.
If you introduce a hiring quota, you are forced to hire 1 person with score 5 from population B, and that's where the problem starts because they will be perceived weak and will trigger divisive behavior I mentioned.
As I said several times, I'm not concluding that ALL or MOST Blacks are bad or anything. I'm saying that there are statistical differences that are hard to measure and that can explain workforce underrepresentation. Other metrics you may want to look at is:
* Black-on-white crime vs. white-on-black crime.
* Families with both parents.
* Change in student loan principal after 5 years. This shows whether a certain population is choosing degrees that pay off.
The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
And what if the current practices sans AA are already discriminatory (e.g. try having certain natural hairstyles at your interview that don't fit the status quo)...
Cultural support for STEM comes through parents who themselves are capable of sitting at the dinner table to help kids with their math and science homework. Parents who encourage careers such as mechanical engineering, not just being a car mechanic because that feels most familiar to people they already know.
So what are some “right approaches” for achieving more diverse workforces?
It’s difficult for candidates from disadvantaged to show the same level of experience as candidates from non-disadvantaged backgrounds. Therefore candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds are systematically segmented out from the hiring pool.
Well-run diversity programs aim to better assess the potential of disadvantaged candidates and there are a variety of indicators for success.
The thing is, Affirmative Action is one of those topics where having a "wrong" opinion is seen as treason by these in power. And far too many people here had the "wrong" opinion. The good news is, the tide is turning.
Tell that to the Asian kid that just learnt that he now has to slave away at his studies because of his skin color.
Building a diverse workforce should be about making sure you get the very best people in the job. If the composition of their leadership team is dramatically skewed from the demographics of the general population, how can they argue that they scoured the country and found the very best?
The reason the NBA is different is because sports are based on physical abilities. Race, by definition, is a difference in physical traits. It is therefore unsurprising that race has a bearing on diversity in sports. Race has not been shown to have any bearing on one’s ability to do the work MS needs.
Why am I even explaining this to you? Can you seriously not understand the difference. FFS.
I don't think forcing companies to be diverse per skin color is a good idea. A much better way could be finding aspiring people from underrepresented populations and removing roadblocks on the way of specific people.
Microsoft is not being forced hire more diverse leadership; this Microsoft's own internal initiative.
That is effectively being forced.
I seriously doubt a whole board was strong-armed by a single person, and if it was a plurality of board members that suggested this, then that's how boards are intended to work.
You don't get that high up without playing the political game, and the rules of the game at this point are very clear.
What are these rules of this game, explicitly? And who enforces them?