Lets say you have a company that requires a level of technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that technical skill, you hire them based on being blue. Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for that work. This creates resentment, which creates discrimination.
You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.
Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas like “the only reason blue people can be hired is if we lower our standards,” since everyone who works with them can see that they are talented and deserve to be there.
The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.
>The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.
Any metric is a goal. Boss says we have a program that focuses upon hiring minorities and wants a % that check off some boxes to ward off title IX suits and make them look good. Hr really wants to see new hires for this reason too. You open up interviews, candidates can't meet the standards. Your boss says they really want to get those numbers up. Do you A. Do your job and hire, or do you B. Not do your job?
By definition minorities are a scarce resource. Industry wants a disproportionate amount in comparison to the available pool that meets requirements. Some are perfectly capable, sometimes the best, but the company isn't looking for 1, they want dozens to hundreds.
Therefore, to meet the requirements you will have to modify the process, and that is overwhelmingly done by making it easier. That's not how it should be, but that's how it's done because it is the easiest method. People respond to incentives.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, especially at large companies, but it is much less common at smaller companies and startups in my experience, where I’ve consistently had colleagues from underrepresented populations who were among the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
What I am doing is arguing against the idea that it’s the way things have to be or the way they always are, and I’m particularly arguing assuming that any given person was hired for that reason.
Assuming your colleague must be less talented than you because of some hypothetical hiring process that you in all likelihood aren’t even privy to is exactly the kind of ego-assuaging, prejudicial arrogance people in our field are so prone to.
Such assumptions also only make the field more hostile for everyone who’s not of the typical profile, because they have to fight constantly to prove that they belong in a way that Jimmy the drinking bud of the hiring manager for some reason doesn’t.
People get hired for the wrong reasons all the time. I don’t think “diversity quota hire” is meaningfully more or less common than hiring for nepotism, or subconscious biases about looks or height, or just because someone is a smooth talker. Focusing on this one thing both hurts the industry and distracts from what we should really be doing, which is assuming our colleagues are just as smart and talented as we are and working from there. If someone is a bad hire, they’re a bad hire. It happens all the time, and we can deal with it on that individual level rather than letting our assumptions color the entire group.
(Generalized “you” throughout, not saying anything about you personally.)
You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.