The DEI thread

[Admiral Yi]

EDI is about hiring the best candidates regardless of race, gender, or creed.
That's the reason it exists.
That's where the Muskites are so dumb when they claim to hate DEI because they're meritocrats.

The fact that when you start doing this you no longer have 100% straight white guys is good for marketing is a nice bonus.

I've seen one or two corporate DEI reports.  The data I remember reading about was along the lines of the percentage of staff that were in protected classes.  I don't ever remember reading a DEI report which included an objective measure of new hire competency.

DEI is in many ways a perfect culture wars arguing point.  Both sides are completely convinced they are dead right and the other side is pure evil and neither side can be proved wrong.  People can go on arguing about it until the sun goes supernova.

[Josquius]

Again, if a company is profit driven then they'd just hire the best candidate. Why would they need DEI (i guess EDI over there?) ? DEI must have some mechanism of enforcement beyond profit considerations then.

I'm not championing or condemning DEI* I just take issue with your reasoning. One can argue that DEI is a social good fine. But to argue that it's there because it aids a companies bottom line is, to borrow a brit phrase, daft.

*

If you're just targeting your recruitment at people who went to certain schools for instance then you're missing out on a hell of a lot of potential talent elsewhere.

Maybe these schools are the ones where people have the best grades so you can argue they're the best candidates?

... But maybe that's because these are rich schools with priveleged students and given the same opportunities some of the people from the lesser schools could have done just as well.

Maybe (probably) the different experience of growing up in a rough area and going to a shit school gives other candidates a unique slant on things that can really bring something to your business.

A good example of this I find is in any infrastructure made more than 30-40 years ago.
For instance the main central metro station in Newcastle - so obviously designed by nought but able bodied men. Accessibility is just horrendous. Just a single set of narrow lifts.
If they'd had a disabled person involved or even just someone who had experience of looking after kids (it was the 70s. Guys didn't do that) they would have realised this wasn't fit for purpose.

When you're trying to serve a diverse customer base it really helps to have diverse ideas. Both in terms of appearances and practical reality.

actually I will condemn one aspect, but mainly as a means of countering a point that you made that that it helps the bottom line by expanding the hiring pool.  Take engineering as an example because it's easy and I work with both good and bad ones.  Having a DEI target of 50/50 screws a company over. Men vastly number women in the field. Let say for simple math 75/25. Not only is filling the DEI quota hard, thus having vacancies, you'd have to hire women who are inferior in skills to men. The math gets even more damning when mixing in race. Again  social pressure can make it happen, and it can even be a social benefit, but it's not a profit benefit to a company.

Demanding a strict 50-50 split in the workforce would be an example of a shit EDI policy.
I don't believe this is how it normally works (though I am no HR goon).
It tends to be more about making sure you interview people from under represented groups.

Better is aiming for at least 30-40 for the smaller group (either way. Always forgotten it should go both ways. Men will be thankful for it later...)

Also worth noting the way it goes with women in engineering is its a lot more big picture than immediate needs. More women engineers means more women become engineers in the first place which means you have more good engineers.
This is another area of EDI where government tends to have involvement in incentivising things that the short term interest of a business may skip over but which are ultimately better for that business, that industry, and the country in the long run.

[Zoupa]

DEI includes things like wheelchair access ramps btw. I think there's an overarching argument here which is that's it the right thing to do.

[Razgovory]

In the US that is achieved through the American with Disabilities Act.  Whether something is the right thing to do is a different question than "Does it work".  Josq seems to think that evidence that it works is that some companies do it.

[Zoupa]

I have no idea if DEI policies have shown they improve outcome for the persons affected since I don't have the data and wouldn't know where to look. I imagine it'd be hard to accurately pinpoint since a zillion other factors would be at play.

What I'd posit though is the fact that the right wing media ecosystem has once again successfully steered the debate to their latest culture war buzzword instead of you guys discussing much more impactful things.

[Admiral Yi]

Joe Squeeze is part of the right wing media ecosystem!!

[grumbler]

Your theory doesn't flow. If a company is purely profit driven then they'd hire the best candidate regardless of race gender or creed. Therefore DEI actually limits the hiring pool by removing a class from contention. You can't have it both ways.

Your theory doesn't flow.  A company cannot hire the best candidate for the job if that person never applies for the job to begin with. If the best computer programmer in the world thinks that IBM is a bad place for a gay person like them to work, IBM cannot possibly hire the best candidate for their programming job.  The purpose of DEI is to expand the pool of candidates for hiring, admission, etc ("diversity"), to enhance retention of existing personnel by making them feel that they have a stake in the future of the company, school, whatever ("equity") and also help retain people by making them feel part of a larger community that is the school, company, whatever ("inclusion").  It is unclear to me which of these goals the "anti-DEI" folks really hate the most, or if they are equal-opportunity haters and so hate all of these goals equally.

These initiatives don't always work, in part because methods for implementing them effectively are still unclear, but the investment isn't that large and anything that has a chance to expand the candidate pool and retain existing personnel seems worthwhile.

[grumbler]

I've seen one or two corporate DEI reports.  The data I remember reading about was along the lines of the percentage of staff that were in protected classes.  I don't ever remember reading a DEI report which included an objective measure of new hire competency.

DEI is in many ways a perfect culture wars arguing point.  Both sides are completely convinced they are dead right and the other side is pure evil and neither side can be proved wrong.  People can go on arguing about it until the sun goes supernova.

The reason that the two sides will never convince the other is that they are not talking about the same thing. I have no idea what the folks on the right mean when they say "DEI." If they mean anything.

[viper37]

DEI includes things like wheelchair access ramps btw. I think there's an overarching argument here which is that's it the right thing to do.

Corporations and government didn't start hiring DEI consultants to design wheelchair access ramps or make their office more ergonomic for handicapped people.  We can drop that pretense right now.

A lot of DEI stuff went way overboard and tried to shame white people simply for being white, often accusing them of racism for daring to question false history.

The excess became a problem, not DEI in itself.  It's as if we started designing everything for people in wheelchair and shamed people for not being in a wheelchair because there's been a lot abuse in the past.

As Malthus often said, two wrongs don't make a right.  Because there's racism toward POC and discrimination toward LGBT in some places doesn't mean you have to see abuse everywhere in everything.

[viper37]

I don't ever remember reading a DEI report which included an objective measure of new hire competency.

That's not the objective of a DEI report, however.

There are other internal assessments to evaluate competency.

I've never seen any kind of report in any publicly traded company, or any government owned company detailing employee performance either.  I've never seen Hydro-Quebec reporting on any of its statements something like "We have reached a target of recruiting 85% competent people in all categories, up from 83% last year".

Back when my dad's former employer was a publicly traded company in the 80s, they never published any information about employee management or hiring in the financial statement reports.

Why would today's companies publish anything in a DEI report?

Presumably, a company has fixed itself some internal objectives along all divisions, at all levels.  Each person has a supervisor who will evaluate their performance, and each supervisor will have their performance evaluated, in theory, up to the CEO who will be evaluated by the board.

If the company's standards of evaluation are insufficient, then in a free market, another company that does not practice DEI would presumably be more efficient and offer better products/services at better price, therefore gain market shares.

Unless consumers are willing to pay a premium for a company implementing DEI policies.  Which so far, I have seen no indication.

There can be a lot of problems with DEI policies, again, all is in moderation.

[Zoupa]

DEI includes things like wheelchair access ramps btw. I think there's an overarching argument here which is that's it the right thing to do.

A lot of DEI stuff went way overboard and tried to shame white people simply for being white, often accusing them of racism for daring to question false history.

Any examples? I have no idea what you're referring to.

[Razgovory]

As far as I know DEI is strongly opposed in Quebec.

[grumbler]

Corporations and government didn't start hiring DEI consultants to design wheelchair access ramps or make their office more ergonomic for handicapped people.  We can drop that pretense right now.

A lot of DEI stuff went way overboard and tried to shame white people simply for being white, often accusing them of racism for daring to question false history.

Could I see some evidence that "Corporations and government" "went way overboard and tried to shame white people simply for being white, often accusing them of racism for daring to question false history?"  Note that Truth Social posts do not constitute evidence.

[Zoupa]

As far as I know DEI is strongly opposed in Quebec.

Ok

[crazy canuck]

As far as I know DEI is strongly opposed in Quebec.

So, not very far