Comments on Reddit about this HBR article:
* Diversity programs and Diversity teams do not exist to solve an actual or perceived problem but rather exist to cover the companies ass to make it look like the company is doing ‘something’ to solve a ‘problem’. See also: TSA
* Someone else put it best, diversity programs are the corporate version of, but I have a black friend.
* I work at a hospital. It’s also entirely obvious when we have a diversity physician and we even have coded language about them because their patient’s have some of the most catastrophic complications. What’s telling is that, after their patients have a bad outcome, their patients are then transferred to another team (often white, asian, or south asian doctors) for “higher level care.” …
I have bunches of stories. Primarily, the worst complications I’ve seen come from the surgical teams. Unfortunately, it’s a lottery who’s on surgical call the night of admission so it’s a toss up who becomes the treating team.
Often, patients admitted to the “diversity hires” have long, complex surgeries which are performed for reasons that don’t entirely make sense on review. Moreover, given the complex surgeries, outcomes can be poor.
For example, we recently had one case of a young 30 y/o F who was admitted for appendicitis, but was otherwise normal and healthy. Normally this is treated with a simple laparoscopic appendix removal. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the patient’s emergent surgery was delayed by several days and she became very septic. The CT scan on admission showed a leaking appendix, which usually merits immediate admission to the OR. She ended up with removal of half her colon, perforation of her colon resulting in several deep abdominal abscesses, and a colostomy bag. Her course ended up becoming so complicated that she stayed several weeks in the ICU and almost died.
* I work at a top fortune 50 company. I was a manager for 5 years there, and you are so right. HR, EEO, Ethics, HRI, Corporate Investigations, and Legal are all COMPLETELY SEPARATE groups to protect the companies interest first. I’ve participated in investigations in every part, and 95% of the time the only vested interest is avoiding lawsuits. Employee protection? Naw. Morale? Naw. Safety? Only if it prevents lawsuits.
* Somewhere in the company there’s a director or executive that knows good staff are hard to recruit and retention is the most important thing. When you can’t retain staff, your training costs go up. People simplify processes in order to widen the recruitment pool, and the result is more, less skilled staff. Then your product starts to suffer.
Then you have to lay off staff because somehow your business has begun to “bloat”. So you do, and then the whole thing starts to implode.
I’ve seen it a couple of times and it’s one of the reasons my entire generation is commitment-shy with employment.
* I’ve sat through those programs. They cemented in my mind the conviction that minorities are less “coworkers” and more “walking, talking liabilities”.
Sad too, because I was one of the ones who didn’t give a f*** about a person’s ethnicity once I had decided they were smart and effective.
. EDIT: Okay lemme explain.
I worked in an engineering shop, 90% male, 70% white, 25% Indian, 5% other. The work culture was fantastic, it even felt kind of like summer camp, we were all in it knee deep and I was surrounded on all sides by brilliant minds. Nobody cared one bit about ethnicity: engineers, more than any other group, only care about “What works”.
Then we got acquired by MonoCorp Inc., and thus began the sensitivity training and sexual harassment training and diversity training. The training was the first time any of us had ever even had a passing thought about ethnicity. Suddenly ethnicity was capital-I important. Suddenly it was something we had to Be Aware Of. Now we felt like we should be tiptoeing about . . . something.
. EDIT2: Okay, here’s the short short version:
If your goal is for me to actually respect you, then you can’t begin our relationship by announcing that I’ve got to give you any kind of special treatment.
These sensitivity lectures are conflating “respectful treatment” with “respect”. And by demanding the former, they make the latter significantly harder to obtain.
You know how I treat somebody I actually respect? I openly call him/her a dumbass when they screw up. THAT is respect… because I’d never say that to somebody who actually is a dumbass.
.EDIT3: Some more examples come to mind:
One of my longest-term coworkers is British. I profoundly respect this dude, I think of him as at least equal to my talents. And I make fun of him relentlessly. I call him a damn limey, I ask when’s the last time he had spotted dick in his mouth, I’ve threatened to throw all his tea in the harbor again, and I tease him mercilessly about the last big mistake he made that I was the one to catch. That’s what respect looks like.
This walking on eggshells stuff? That’s how you treat weaklings.
* The “walking talking liability” bit was proven by the incident with that ridiculous try-hard “feminist” Adria Richards. She thought she had on some sort of impermeable armor that allowed her to be an incorrigible ass, thanks to being a black-jewish woman in tech employed by a “progressive” company. (I won’t even get into how the “Developer Evangelist” job title is one of the most meaningless job titles I’ve ever heard of – at a tech company, everyone is a developer evangelist, because everyone understands that the technology is what is bringing home the bacon). She absolutely reeked of “college-feminist-that-doesn’t-realize-she’s-in-the-real-world-now.”
Not only did she get a man with a wife and three kids fired from his dreamjob (and all the stress and heartache that entails – men really take it hard when they can’t provide for their children; in the extreme form it’s called Failed Provider Syndrome and is suspected to be the cause of a lot of murder-suicides, not to mention regular suicides) for making a private joke to his friend – that she had to make an effort to overhear and be offended by because it wasn’t even a sexist joke, it was just a joke about “big dongles” – but then she also got herself fired from SendGrid because thanks to her try-hard bullshit, SendGrid’s servers got DDoS’d by rightfully-outraged script-kiddies, and maybe a couple real hackers. Once she was fired the DDoS’ing stopped.
* I am a woman and I fucking HATE working for women. There is always some passive-aggressive bullshit going on that I am not clued in on. Being direct is a major No-No. Men do not normally have to deal with it because it is expected that the passive-aggressive approach won’t get noticed or something because it may not work with their husbands. But other women! We should KNOW what you mean when your boss says,
“No, it’s fine. You go work on your projects and I’ll just do my own work.”
* My sister graduated from university after completing the teaching program here. Everyone from her class has been having trouble getting the jobs they were promised were just so available right now (our province insists we need more teachers but the reality is we have a substitute queue over 4 months long and all the oldies refuse to retire). Everyone except the one guy who lost a finger (somehow that qualifies him as disabled) and two African American students.
The finger guy wasn’t qualified to teach the position they hired him for and the other two straight up admitted that they felt bad and singled out for their race as they were not as qualified as many of their peers (different teachable, science/math is almost always more valued and placed easier).
I understand what affirmative action / diversity quotas are trying to achieve, but I can’t imagine the stigma of ‘you only have this position because of your skin color’ is doing anyone any good. I don’t see how that’s any less a racist behavior.
* Let’s say you want 10% of your IT staff to be black. Black people make up 13% of the country, so that’s reasonable, right?
Well no. Black people go to college at a much lower rate than whites and Asians. Of the ones that do, they enter into stem programs at a much lower rate than whites and Asians, to say nothing of how well they do in those programs. Let’s say they go to college 2/3 as often as whites and go into stem 2/3 as often (both of which are optimistic numbers), then you would expect the applicant pool to be less than 6% black. The other 4% has to come from somewhere.
* A manager had to let one of his team go, so he brought them all in a room to break the news. “Times are tough, and one of you will have to go.”
“You can’t get rid of me, I am a woman and I will sue you for sexual discrimination”, Said the woman.
“You can’t get rid of me, I am a minority and I will sue you for racial discrimination”, said the black guy.
“You can’t get rid of me, I am a Senior Citizen and I will sue you for age discrimination” said the old man.
All eyes turned to the young white guy.
Sweating, nervously, the white guy said “Ummm, I think I might be gay”.
* At one company where I worked, we had our annual diversity training delivered online. There was an interactive exercise where you would answer a series of questions that were designed to help you understand how you personally relate to people of different ethnicity, cultural background, etc. The multiple choice answers would cover the spectrum from open hostility to vocal support and encouragement. Because I don’t really care one way or the other about color or creed or national origin, at least in terms of my ability to be civil and respectful of my coworkers, my answers would always tend towards the “neutral” responses.
I kid you not, at the end of the exercise I was told that my responses indicated that I was not aware of my own prejudices and not sensitive to my coworkers’ need to feel included.
* I experienced this back when I was applying for undergrad. Not to brag, but I had damn good grades and ACT scores. My friend, who happened to be a black guy, also had damn good scores — just not as good as mine. We applied to the almost all of the same schools (Ivy League, good regional schools, and some local state schools), and in every single instance, he was admitted where I was wait listed, given significantly larger scholarships than the ones I was offered, or given any aid at all when I received none. We helped each other write our essays, we both practice interviewed with each other, and our extra-curriculars were fairly similar.
The difference? I made the mistake of marking “Asian” on my applications. Being bi-racial, I could’ve gotten away with just marking “white” had I known what I know now; Asians have to score significantly higher on tests and get better grades than everyone else just to get admitted. That experience really made me resent all of this “diversity” bullshit.
Now, every time I see a black or Hispanic person in any difficult to reach position, I assume that they’re a “diversity hire.” I instantly make the assumption that they were handed the position on a silver platter not for their talent, skill, work ethic, or competence, but rather simply because of their skin color. The irony of forced “anti-racism” diversity quotas is that they only give very real justification for the people who were already racist, and provide some damn tempting motivations for those who were not racist to become so.
Now that the academic community is taking this problem seriously, we might be able to put an end to this garbage. As someone in the absolute worst demographic to be in regarding “diversity” (white/Asian conservative straight religious Southern male), I’m tired of busting my ass only to see others given a free pass, and then not only be ungrateful for the easy ride, but insist that somehow THEY are the victims.
TL;DR- “Diversity” programs screwed me in the past, and made me prejudiced, perhaps even a little racist.
* Anytime I see an Asian doctor, I know for a fact they have to be one of the best doctors out there due to how fucking impossible it was for them to get into med school.
* Thomas Sowell is a black economist and he talks about his life before and after AA in one of his books. Prior to AA people assumed he knew what he was doing, because racism is real and for a black man to have reached his level he must know his shit. I believe he was an Econ professor at Columbia. After AA people assumed he was a quota hire and even non racists began talking down to him.
* I’ve done the diversity training at a few companies, and it’s always absolute garbage. There are real good reasons to value diversity, but the shitlords that make these training videos are either idiots or being intentionally, nefariously obtuse. The first western philosophers and the first historians lived on the Ionian peninsula on the border of the Greek and Persian worlds, where modern Turkey is today. Their exposure to different cultures gave them the perspective to become philosophers and historians. In ancient Greece, semi-legendary lawgivers were always credited for the codes of laws in the various city-states. The legendary backstories invariably included a lot of travel, during which they’d see many cultures and learn from them. European civilization was in steep decline until it reinvigorated itself by importing cultural ideas and artifacts from the Middle East, brought back during the crusades. The Renaissance in Italy was spurred by exposure to widely varied cultures by merchants and sea traders. Exposure to diversity doesn’t just let you borrow good ideas, it helps you to hold a mirror up to your own culture and explore it in ways you never would have thought to.
Instead of talking about the selfish benefits that one can derive from embracing diversity, we make them watch a half hour video with people whining about how it feels to be treated differently, and then act surprised when the training doesn’t take.
* I work at a home health company that’s majority black women. I don’t know the statistics exactly but I’d guess 70% black women, and the rest being a mix of white and Asian men and women. We never had to worry about being under some arbitrary race/gender quota. And this gives us the power to hire and fire black women (and all others) based on their actual goddamn qualifications and work ethic. So many black women with absolute garbage work ethic show up for an interview with the idea that we’ll have to hire them anyway, and then all the other black women call them out for being fucking lazy and incompetent. My guess is those women end up getting a job somewhere that actually needs to fill out that diversity quota.
The company never needed external motivation to hire black women. Turns out, if you live in a heavily black city, and hire the hardest working people, you’ll naturally get a black staff. It takes actual effort into being racist and willingness to take less profit to do otherwise.
* Diversity is a loaded term and it only matters in certain contexts.
Mexico City is not concerned about diversifying.
The city of Watts is not concerned with diversifying.
Its like diversity only matters when too many white people are gathered in one area.
