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.