There’s a lot of pushback on DEI these days, with some major companies ending their DEI programs. This has been tied into the competence crisis, which is bullshit.
Let’s put the idea that there isn’t massive discrimination to rest. There have been many studies. One found that identical resumes from people with black names vs. people with white names had half the interview requests. A meta-study found the effect less overall: 24%.
Now I don’t know if DEI overcomes that, but modern studies don’t find any less of a gap, so I’m guessing “no”, though the effect on promotion may be more significant.
The obvious solution is to do something similar to the how orchestras evaluate musicians: they place them behind a screen, and they play their music. The evaluators don’t know who’s playing, or anything about them.
Modern technology makes this viable: wipe the resume of any identifying remarks and do the same with any testing. Have the interview with an avatar with a computer masked voice. If you really want to evaluate entirely on merit: their record and their abilities, that would be the way to do it.
The counter-argument is “cultural fit” and I’m not going to say that there’s nothing to it. The evidence is that diverse teams improve quality at the cost of speed and increased conflict but the benefits don’t accrue for teams which don’t work together much. If you’re doing something you already know how to do, where quality isn’t much of a factor, speed is and team members don’t interact much anyway, then there’s a case for “cultural fit” teams. But if you’re dealing with uncertainty, or quality is more important than speed, then a diverse team is probably better.
(Amusingly the evidence is that startup funds perform less well without diversity, but silicon valley hates diversity and prioritizes fit, which is one reason for their under-performance the last couple decades since the tech-bros took charge.)
I’m not a huge fan of DEI. It introduces a variable that shouldn’t matter. Problem is that variable already matters, and DEI is an effort to counter people hiring less competent people because of prejudice.
But there is another solution: one that prioritizes merit, at least for hiring (and it could be extended to some types of promotion decisions). Decisions based on blinding out gender and race.
If the real issue is merit and not something else, this is the obvious way to go. Strange how rarely it is suggested.
Jan Wiklund
The real problem with DEI is that there is no limit of the identities that should be favoured. Immigrants, obviously, old age, probably, youth, blind, allergics, …. Finally you will end up with “intellectually handicapped”. But it will never solve the problem, because there will always be people who will find themselves disadvantaged.
Corruption researcher Bo Rothstein pointed out that in the university world there was a huge over-representation of Jews (he is a Jew himself) – but should Jews be discriminated against, then? Some countries have done that. It didn’t solve anything.
So an anonymized test looks fine. That favours those with aptitude and interest, as it should be.
And, by the way: At least the Norwegian Business Association complained as early as in the 90s that their members took too much account to “cultural fit” when they employed people, to the detriment of their performance. They devoted a whole issue of their membership magazine to this. I don’t know if Norwegian businesses have improved since then, however.
Feral Finster
“The obvious solution is to do something similar to the how orchestras evaluate musicians: they place them behind a screen, and they play their music. The evaluators don’t know who’s playing, or anything about them.”
IIRC, at leat one symnphony orchestra got sued for doing precisely that, since the process you describe didn’t deliver the approved results.
GrimJim
For Reich-Wingers “Merit” means “Anglo-American Christian Heterosexual Male,” and nothing more.
Purple Library Guy
I could go for this. But I’d want to also have free higher education so the poor didn’t get shut out of the qualifications in the first place. And I’d want to have a solid social safety net so kids weren’t growing up in tents or their mom’s van, but instead had access to a strong public school system and a decent home.
I mean, you can have your blind application system, but if it’s ruled by credentialism and the credentials are out of reach for disproportionate numbers of people in disadvantaged groups because you have to be this rich to buy them, then it is not going to produce equal results anyway.
Joan
I am grateful that the US doesn’t do photos on resumes at least, or require specific dates like graduation where they’d be able to figure out your age.
I have a man’s name in real life. Twice I’ve been told in job interviews that they were expecting a man for the role and I had to talk my way into still getting the interview. In both cases I still got the job, but I had to go max charisma for it. And that’s just the two hiring managers that were willing to say it to my face. I wonder if my name has helped me in more situations that I don’t know about.
Oakchair
Boeing can no longer make safe aircraft.
Blame DEI
Hollywood can no longer develop characters or tell a quality story.
Blame DEI
The medical industry is poisonings everyone
Blame DEI
Imagine a world where the masses saw through the fabricated scapegoats put forth by the ruling class. Where the ruling class sacrificing safety, quality, health, environment, and the population for wealth and power was blamed instead of the social outrage of the day.
—-
But I’d want to also have free higher education so the poor didn’t get shut out of the qualifications
—
The problem with education is it’s less about education and more about daycare, installing obedience, and providing social status in the form of degrees.
Society is worse off spending 150,000$ and 4 years of a young persons life so that person can flaunt their degree in social settings.
Our education system has kids following orders and memorizing a bunch of facts and in the process leaves them unable to learn by themselves, hating learning, and being miserable because the capitalistic rate race needs to be ran and ran and ran some more.
When society had less education Boeing could make planes, we went to the moon, Hollywood knew how to structure a story, people enjoyed reading and could understand it, people were happier, and people acted less like obedient livestock.
Knowledge and intelligence is a worthy goal, but that’s not the purpose of our ruling class controlled education system.
mago
Right on Oakchair. Rock on.
someofparts
Economic justice, or the lack of it, is the elephant in the room that all the purveyors of these concerns work so hard to ignore. In a community where people are not homeless, where the civilized basics of life are available to everyone, qualifying for that good job is not a matter of such desperate concern. If a person of modest means can still count on having food, housing, healthcare, transportation and education, the majority of people would probably prefer to push themselves relentlessly to become rich.
someofparts
NOT prefer to push themselves
KT Chong
I actually know a lot about DEI, because it’s being heavily pushes by Hollywood and the video game industry. DEI has been injected into the contents of their products. I love (or used to love) movies and video games, so I have been paying attention to how DEI has really destroyed the things I used to love.
The good news is: the free market has already decided.
Consumers have already voted with their wallet… AGAINST DEI. I know I have. That is why so many movie and video game franchises that were once beloved are now in serious troubles. Many high-profile video game studios that had gotten into DEI and been injecting DEI into their products… they have been losing money (because customers refused to support DEI products, and are even actively boycotting them.) I think a lot of game studios, some big major names, are gonna shutter in 2025, and it’s due to DEI. Anyway, maybe I’ll tell you guys more about it if I have more time.
Jan Wiklund
someofparts: In that case, people would look for a job that was rewarding in some non-pecuniary terms. Fun, to pose it simple. I could still do it in the early 80s; the neo-liberal crisis didn’t strike here until the early 90s.
But the jobs would still have to be portioned out. Those who wanted a job done would still look for someone to do it. And it seems that employers are lazy rather than looking for excellence. Culture fit is easy and doesn’t require labour. But a DEI list would grow until it is completely unmanageable.
Purple Library Guy
@Oakchair A lot of people confuse “Higher Education” with “The Business Department”. If you look at Boeing, the problem is that it used to be run by people with higher education IN ENGINEERING and is now run by people with “higher education” IN BUSINESS. You see this pattern over and over again.
All that stuff you’re talking about is because of the rise of the Business and to some extent Economics departments . . . in the university I work at, Business Administration gets to be a whole Faculty, like Arts and Science, because just being a department isn’t awesome enough for them. After all, they get all the grants from the richest alumni. And yes, the Business dept. is in the business of turning people into business zombies. But if you look at most of the university, it isn’t actually like that at all. The sciences teach science, the arts teach cool stuff which does actually get people to think, computing teaches you to program a computer, Education is a bit fluffy but probably does a decent job teaching people to teach. And despite everything “Stuff outside of Business and Econ” is still most of the university.
Mind you, I’m in Canada. I don’t know what US campuses are like, let alone the heart of the monster ones like Harvard.
bruce wilder
Most jobs are as a cog in a bureaucratic machine. Testing individuals with a single instance of isolated task performance would be irrelevant.
How well an individual “fits in” with the cultural mores and expectations AND how well the organization manages the culture are the issues DEI purports to address, especially the latter.
Among the complaints and criticisms of DEI there is resentment of weaponizing social etiquette and loss of organizational mission consciousness.
Yes, there are some potshots taken at “DEI hires” in political discourse. The loss of mission consciousness is the substantive target of those potshots. When managers are prioritizing managing organizational culture and etiquette to please activists with no knowledge or understanding of organizational mission or competence, that really is a problem. Not a problem solved by overcoming racial prejudice with blind trials, not incidentally because individual performance is not at issue.
Ian Welsh
Bruce,
good critique. Seems like most of the complaints I see about DEI aren’t that, though, they’re about people who are hired being incompetent. I agree about the destruction of mission consciousness, by whatever means (it’s usually because of profit) being deadly.
KT,
I don’t think DEI is a scourge on games and movies. BG3 was made by a very inclusive company which is woke as hell, for example. I think that it’s usually because the people in charge have pushed out the OG good people or forced them to make games they don’t want to make. Bioware in the old days always made relatively woke games. Every Dragon Age game had gays, and the most important writer (Gaider) was gay even before that was allowed (Baldur’s Gate 2, for example.) What destroyed Bioware is EA insisting they make different types of games than they were used to and the resultant exodus of OG devs destroying what remains of the culture.
DA4 isn’t bad because it’s woke, it’s bad because it has a stupid story and bad writing which has removed all nuance from the world and made the protagonist feel like they have no personality. (Completely eliding Tevinter being an evil empire of slavery, for example, which was its entire rep in earlier games.)
EA kept wanting Battlefield level and style of success and by doing so destroyed what they actually bought, which was a studio good at making a different type of game.
Oakchair
If you look at Boeing, the problem is that it used to be run by people with higher education IN ENGINEERING and is now run by people with “higher education” IN BUSINESS.
—–
One bad apple spoils the bunch.
To be more precise to our current situation emergent properties and purposeful actions from those in control cause the system to create bad apples and weed out good ones.
The military, police, marketing, business, finance, politics, religion, law, tech, pharma, tobacco, agriculture, etc are all corrupt and run by those with sociopathic tendencies. Why should we believe the same forces, properties and ruling class skipped over the engineering and science fields? Besides for the wishful thinking induced by the fear and harm the corruption of those fields could cause.
A field that wasn’t corrupt wouldn’t have lied and said opioids were safe, effective and non-addiction.
It wouldn’t have committed millions of cases of medical malpractice by perpetuating the fraudulent chemical imbalance theory of “mental illness”.
It wouldn’t have cracked down on students protesting genocide.
It wouldn’t engage in mass censorship.
It wouldn’t have let the fraudulent amyloid hypothesis of dementia go unchecked and unpunished.
It wouldn’t repeat ad nauseum that pharma products given to almost everyone are safe when the clinical trials show otherwise.
Social dysfunction, psychopaths, and emergent properties of social systems impacts everything and one.
Troy
Tbh, the truest solution would simply for companies to go a next-resume up hiring practice. Hire the top-most resume in the pile. Filter out the resumes without the necessary qualifications, of course, but there’s so many jobs that shouldn’t actually require any qualifications.
Purple Library Guy
@Oakchair Oh, come on. No system is monolithic, there are always contradictions. In order to do things that oligarchs want, institutions necessarily also take on their own internal motivations. For instance, hospitals run by private companies for profit generate doctors and nurses who hate for-profit hospitals, because to get very many people to go into health care jobs you have to appeal to their desire to care for people’s health, and they tend to be unwilling to just drop that idea so some asshole can make more dollars. Even the friggin’ Catholic church unintentionally created liberation theology.
Universities have always been sources of dissent, and while there have been strenuous attempts to stop them from being that, success is always somewhat limited . . . there is no way for it to be otherwise without the place no longer being a university, and no longer doing what authorities want universities to do. Certainly I can tell you flat out that every semester as I put readings on reserve for courses, there is always a sprinkling of courses that put on some decidedly anti-establishment readings. While the science courses put on their science textbooks and sometimes some other science-y readings, some boring, some kind of interesting. So I know what I’m talking about here–my job is to see a cross-section of what’s being taught, and it does not fit the stereotype of the blinkered acquiescent university. Except the business and econ departments . . . and lately, occasionally something interesting sneaks in even there. I think the econ people have started to feel the sting of mockery from other disciplines, or something.
There are similar problems with schools–US authorities have gone further down the road to stopping anything like inquiring or learning at schools, but it is having the result that they stop being useful as schools, a tradeoff that is beginning to show how ill-advised it was, although not enough yet for those authorities to regret the choice. And also, this has created a lot of rebellious teachers and even tough teachers’ unions. But even there, success has not been complete–the fascists wouldn’t be desperate to stop schools from teaching real history if some of them weren’t teaching some real history.
You seem to imagine that you alone manage to somehow, by a supreme act of will, transcend the toils of mental oppression that the rulers have successfully imposed on everyone else in the universe. I don’t think it’s like that.
Oakchair
In order to do things that oligarchs want, institutions necessarily also take on their own internal motivations.
————
Why should we trust that the internal motivations of institutions aren’t corrupted and/or based on faulty premises when they:
are funded by the oligarchs
punish dissent
select for psychopathy and obedience in promotion
the ego, social status, and income of the members depend on the institution
fraud often goes unpunished or gets a slap on the wrist
?
—-
to get very many people to go into health care jobs you have to appeal to their desire to care for people’s health and they tend to be unwilling to just drop that idea so some asshole can make more dollars.
—-
Right, instead their internal motivations are manipulated and based on false premises by the corrupted system to align with what benefits those “assholes”.
The justification used for addicting the nation to opioids wasn’t “make the
Sackler’s money” it was “the science shows opioids are non-addicting, safe, and effective”
“a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” –C.S. Lewis
The oligarchs want true believes because they are more effective and easier to manipulate.
—-
Universities… there is always a sprinkling of courses that put on some decidedly anti-establishment readings.
—-
Are you familiar with the writings of Noam Chomsky?
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….”
—–
While the science courses put on their science textbooks
—–
What’s a more effective way to spread propaganda:
a) Organization with conflicts of interests puts it out
b) Said organization gets what appears to be neutral third parties to put it out
?
Why should we trust textbooks, studies etc from a system that
is funded by oligarchs
punishes dissent
selects for psychopathy and obedience in promotion
the ego, social status, and income of the members depend on the institution
fraud often go unpunished or gets a slap on the wrist
?
—
You seem to imagine that you alone manage to somehow, by a supreme act of will, transcend the toils of mental oppression
—-
This personal bait is appealing, but I’m going to pass.
Dan Kelly
Perhaps more gymnasium is the answer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYL-seDv_A
Purple Library Guy
@Oakchair: Dude, Noam Chomsky is an academic. Other academics read his stuff–they know all that. I know about it too, duh. If I’m telling you I’m seeing interesting readings in university courses, I do not mean within the narrow bounds of establishment-sanctioned “dissent”. Look, as I say, I WORK ON A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS. You do not seem to have any first-hand idea what you are talking about, so maybe you should shut the fuck up and listen a bit.
The research that justified the Sacklers was CORPORATE research. And consider–we talk about climate change a lot around here. And we talk about the scientific near-consensus about the reality of climate change . . . in the face of strong corporate efforts to pretend otherwise, using all the money and influence they can muster. WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THOSE SCIENTISTS ARE? They are university academics, standing by the truth of their research despite all efforts to bribe and intimidate them.
If the control of the powers that be was complete, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because we, too, would be compliant sheep. Obviously it isn’t; there are lots of points of resistance, things that are thought and done which the plutocrats do not want. One place where a lot of this happens is and has always been universities. Frankly, I think you’re so married to the idea that dystopia is complete that you cannot allow any exceptions, even partial–but that is both unrealistic and counterproductive. Unrealistic because it just isn’t so, counterproductive because it’s learned helplessness.