‘No white men’ policy: what you can and can’t do in diversity hiring | Hacker News Reader

‘No white men’ policy: what you can and can’t do in diversity hiring

resources.workable.com

14 pointshunglee223 comments

> In short: one in five respondents say they have received explicit instruction for a ‘no white men’ policy. Another one in five say they’ve been implicitly instructed to follow this kind of a policy.

... meanwhile the entire rest of the article is how you can promote diversity without having that kind of policy.

There's only one right way: to acknowledge that your skin color and sexual orientation are irrelevant to your ability to perform your job. The hiring process should never involve these attributes.

I think what you can reasonably do is to monitor how many employees of a certain race/gender/etc are in a particular job - and if the distribution is significantly unlike the general distribution of the population, see that as an indicator that something is wrong.

That doesn't mean that try the first available thing to "fix" the distribution, but it would be a good starting point to ask further questions why it is so skewed - and then try to identify root causes.

I.e., if you only hire by skills and then find that you still hire 80% men, even though they only make up 50% of the population, then obviously something else is going wrong. The question is what.

Continuing this line of thought:

- I feel like you'd have to compare demographics of your successful applicants to something more specific than general population. Maybe demographics of your applicant pool?

- What do you do if the root cause turns out to be "upstream" of your company's hiring process, e.g., social conditioning from a young age throughout education that introduces disparities in field of study across demographic categories?

> - What do you do if the root cause turns out to be "upstream" of your company's hiring process, e.g., social conditioning from a young age throughout education that introduces disparities in field of study across demographic categories?

Yes, absolutely. It's a large-scale problem and probably has to be solved at a societal level.

You first have to determine if that really is a problem though. And put evidence forth before you start to actively discriminate.

this is not even something necessarily wrong in your hiring policy or even in your industry. you could have lower numbers of certain groups because other industries or companies are carrying out discrimination in favour of those groups.

> if the distribution is significantly unlike the general distribution of the population, see that as an indicator that something is wrong.

most technical roles are >80% men (e.g., google) but companies don't provide breakdowns by functional roles to avoid conversation with people who think like this.

are you ageist if 12% of your talent isn't above the age of 60? once you open a debate about available talent, it ceases to be a useful metric.

So if the local daycare is staffed by all women there's something wrong? Thus, diversity hire to the rescue?

Kindergarten teachers also. Almost 100% women. What is wrong with this world?

> I think what you can reasonably do is to monitor how many employees of a certain race/gender/etc are in a particular job

Obviously we can do that technically but maybe we shouldn't. We did monitor it and that lead to people having some most arcane conclusions they derived from this data.

If you hire 80% for IT tech jobs, you probably just hire the average available on the job market. Some deduced this has to be discrimination and maliciously smeared the whole industry. This should not be repeated.

So no, people maybe should keep their ethnicity private if they don't want it to be abused by busy bodies making everyone's live worse.

If diversity is the goal: there are going to be fewer white men because they don't count as diverse. It's tautological. Anything else is speaking out of both sides of the mouth.

> because they don't count as diverse

Well yes. If your fruit salad consists of 80% apples and 20% pears, you're not going to get a better mix by adding even more apples. That's basic math, even if the apples might not like it.

That being said, I keep reading about growing pies and not-zero-sum games, so you could apply the same logic here as well: if the percentage of women (vs men) or blacks (vs whites) etc should be increased, that doesn't necessarily mean that the absolute counts of men has to be reduced or that from this day on, no more men have to be employed for new jobs. It just means that employment numbers of women have to grow faster than those of men.

Also, if there are root causes that can be addressed, such as different training biographies, it could be possible to archive that change without mandating any kind of specific employment policies.

Its weird though, because there's no combination where some HR manager is going to say, hmm, lets get a white guy in there. 100% (non-white) same-ethnicity is very diverse according to HR metrics, but its the opposite of the meaning of the word.

Sorry, but it is paradoxically discriminatory. This should start with equal opportunity in education, anti-discrimination, and then, meritocracy from there.

> So how to communicate in a legal way ‘We want more female engineers cos we think it’s gonna be really good for the business and all.’ without being discriminative?

A bit OT, but I wonder why DEI is frequently chalked up as a "left" topic. Racial/feminist /etc injustices in society do have a lot of similarities (and alliances) with class struggle - but I think traditional leftist theories see this more as an indicator of a fundamentally unjust system, and don't promote a hundred contradictory DEI initiatives inside companies as bandaid solutions.

...and now, apparently DEI even does away with the reason of fundamental rights at all and just present it as something that "is good for business".

In the 60s and 70s, there was a thread of Western academic thought in Marxist circles that mapped connections between traditional leftist narratives like the exploitation of labor to things like race and gender. Of course, socialist feminism has a longer history, and can be traced back to the early 20th century. It's debatable how much influence the academics had, beyond their simple existence adding some weight to the previously only political movement.

Within those circles, it seems they like to think of it as extending Marxism to include feminist (and race-related) thought. Having read (only) a bit of it, I'd probably say the connection is a little forced and fraught with motivated reasoning. Though Marx criticized colonialism, I read him as more focused on its relationship with the capitalist system, exploitative by his measure at home as well as overseas. Furthermore, on race, Marx (and Engels) wrote some things that would be hard to utter in polite company today.

Yeah, I heard about that and I think would be really important to understand that connection to make sense of the various movements that exist today. I think it was connected with the western "new left" movement, but I'm still weak on details unfortunately.

The thing is however, that modern DEI seems to have morphed into yet another thing, which I think some leftists describe as "woke capitalism": It kept the feminism and diversity angles but threw out Marx altogether - hence why we now have DEI initiatives that justify their actions with "diverse employees increase profits".

I don't see what part of that is still left-wing.

Most of the comments here assume that if the staff are not diverse then there's something wrong with the hiring process, as in its biased.

There are plenty of reasons other than hiring bias why the employed staff may not be diverse.

It's amazing that there aren't clear-cut lawsuits against companies with a "no {demographic group}" policy. There is some bizarre ambiguity happening in the culture right now where "white men" are not considered a demographic group, while at the same time the language definition of what a "demographic group" actually is, seems to be changing.

Under-represented groups should be receiving better opportunities from day 1, in grade school. Not at the meritocratic finish line where we are trying to measure whether any of those efforts have worked, as Coleman Hughes put it nicely on the All-In podcast last week.

The McKinsey study linked here 404s. The folks at Workable would do well to keep their linchpin up-to-date.

https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/diversit...

culture wars are flame bait. just flag and move on.

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