Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
Uh, no.
Contrary to popular belief, DEI policies are not about filling an arbitrary quota nor are they about giving roles to lesser qualified minority candidates over more qualified white male candidates. In fact, it's just the opposite: the purpose of DEI policies is to ensure that more qualified minority candidates are not unfairly passed over in favour of lesser qualified white male candidates due to individual or institutional biases.
In the end, does that mean that fewer white men will be hired/promoted/accepted into university programs/etc.? Maybe, but if someone is losing out to a minority applicant for a limited slot because of the existence of DEI policies, it's because the only reason they would have otherwise been accepted is because of systemic discrimination that would have formerly unfairly elevated them above more qualified minority candidates.
Here's a sports example: when Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in Major League Baseball in 1947, he opened the floodgates to many more Black players earning spots on MLB rosters over the next decade as the league became racially integrated. As a result of this, many white players lost their jobs or were demoted to the minor leagues. But here's the thing: those white players were not good enough to be MLB players anyway and the only reason they had a roster spot in the big leagues was because of discriminatory systemic racism in baseball that unfairly barred more qualified Black players. The best white players had nothing to fear. Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and Warren Spahn and Mickey Mantle all kept their jobs because they earned their roster spots through performance, not systemic biases, but some scrub white player who could barely hit above .200 and had suspect defensive skills was replaced by a better Black player...and that's the way it should be.
That's exactly what DEI policies are about: they're not about taking away positions from more qualified white men, they're about making sure more qualified minority candidates aren't passed over for unfair, biased reasons.
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Right. But since its hard to measure systemic bias, the KPI for DEI programs is almost always representation. And logically most things should have roughly equal splits between men and women, with races represented in equal proportion to their representation in the wider population. That's how it should end up with no systemic bias.
The issue with that is, unlike baseball, there aren't very good objective statistical measures of most employees performance. And the turnaround time for existing employees isn't very fast. So you end up with a bunch of old white male boomers hanging on to positions in many organizations, and since that generation wasn't equal at all to make the overall numbers equal you end up overcompensating at the Gen-Z hire level if you want to show progress.
And a Gen-Z male isn't going to think some old white guy hanging on to his middle management job benefits him in any way, he's just going to see the women he knows that have way better outcomes than the men and wonder why society is still pushing that.
I love a good baseball analogy, and basically the situation is those pre-Jackie Robinson white scrubs are hanging on to their jobs and then since life is mostly NOT like moneyball to make things balance you need to tip the scales against the younger white males. Lots of old Boomers batting below the Mendoza line but still hanging around.