Some Problems With My Previous Example

In my previous team, I gave an example of the diverse opinions I'd want if I were forming a team on ending poverty.

The only problem is, we don't hire people that way... and we really shouldn't. Diversity in general can be shorthand for diversity of thought, but we don't officially hire people for their unique perspective. Instead we hire for a position such as "researcher", or "community outreach", or "grant writer", and then pick the best candidate for the job.

Also... nobody should be the sole representative of any particular group. Consider Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which has two Latina women... one a brainy woman who is uptight and always goes by-the-book, and the other tough, aloof, and far more likely to be a rebel. Having two vastly different characters makes it clear that some of their traits have more to do with who they are as an individual than anything else. (That matters. As a woman, I have to admit I am very, very annoyed when I see another woman stand out in a way that reflects poorly on us all. It makes our jobs harder, because there are always idiots who will look at her behavior and say 'women just can't _____'. It's not fair, it's not right, and yet I don't want to have to work any harder at proving myself than I have to.)

So the best way of getting multiple points of view, diversity in thought and diverse representation of various groups, is simply to have widespread diversity. That means you can hire the best candidate for 'researcher' or 'grant writer' or whatever, and odds are the best candidate for at least some of those positions will be a member of a minority class (especially if you're posting for something like 'professional tennis player' and Serena Williams happens to apply.)

And this is where people really start to lose their minds.

I can't speak for every company (I understand Microsoft has had a bit of a discussion about their hiring practices, and efforts to encourage diversity), but I'll talk a bit about my last company.

Our company set up some diversity training, and well had to come up to corporate headquarters for a day or two to take part in it. Towards the end there was an open question and answer session where the topic of hiring came up, and I realized there was widespread misinformation on how it all worked (perhaps even willfully ignorant misinformation).

Affirmative action, as my company (and I believe most places) practiced it, was NEVER about hiring unqualified or less qualified candidates. It's always been about picking the minority candidate "if both candidates have equal qualifications," which I'll come back to shortly.

There is a widespread belief that companies have quotas, and will hire an unqualified token minority candidate. It's a 'nice' story, in that it fits in very well with what we want to believe. It's so much easier to say "I didn't get the job because they hired that unqualified _____" than it is to say "I didn't get the job because I wasn't the best candidate". And it, quite naturally, makes people feel resentful and angry.

I went to my high school reunion a couple of years back, and became Facebook friends with a classmate I saw there. We're not close or anything, but FB makes it easy to keep casual tabs on people, so wth. Anyways, he was one of our (very few) black football players, and I remember stumbling across one of those heated FB exchanges that gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I'd walked into a room where two strangers were yelling at each other.

It was some discussion on diversity, and hiring, and one guy eventually admitted that he was upset because he didn't get a job, I think it was as a firefighter or something? Anyways, a black candidate was hired instead, and he thought it was all because of 'diversity' and that the guy wasn't as qualified as he was.

And here's the thing... I know it makes a great story in our heads, but how do you really know? Do you have a friend in HR? One willing to be unprofessional enough to talk about candidate qualifications? Did you see their score on some test, and know you did better? Or are you just saying that because you assume they couldn't possibly be as good as you?

You want to complain about how you didn't get hired because of diversity? Okay, I'll listen... but you'd better have something a bit more solid than 'they didn't hire me' or 'they didn't hire a white male'.

And this is why I keep saying white supremacy, and various other current political views, are less about logic and more about emotion. Emotionally, it's hella satisfying to have that explanation for why we aren't where we want to be. Why, for example, I keep getting rejected for job after job, though in my case the more emotionally satisfying explanation is sexism. I don't actually know, though. (Update, btw. I have verbally agreed to a conditional job offer. Still have to finish the paperwork for it, and I'm told the background check can take 6 months to a year, which sucks, but at least I've got a job offer. Now to figure out a way to pay the bills for the next 6 mo or so...)

Getting back to affirmative action, and the reason companies try to hire a minority candidate if both candidates are equally qualified...

The whole reasoning for this is tied, in some ways, to leadership pipelines. Well, maybe not even 'leadership'... but pipelines nonetheless. When companies refused to promote minority candidates, or give them extra training, or do all the other things that allowed white employees to learn and grow and gain the experience necessary to move up to a better position, that meant that minority candidates weren't able to move up to the next step... and blocked them entirely from any of the positions further up the pipeline. Choosing to hire an equally qualified candidate when they were a minority was a way to help fix the damage that caused by allowing them to move through the pipe a little faster. Those pipelines are years in the making. Decades, even. It's not the kind of thing you can do for a few years and call 'done'.

I agree that in an ideal world, maybe even our future world, we wouldn't need such policies...

But it's quite clear that we don't have equal representation throughout the pipeline yet. It's hard to say for sure how or why that is, but when 7 in 10 senior executives are white men, we seem to have some plumbing issues.

From what I can tell, the people who find white supremacy appealing are tired of 'bending over backwards' to try and fix our past mistakes. They feel they (i.e. 'white men') are being discriminated against, are unable to get the jobs they want and so on and so forth, because of our efforts to create diversity... they generally think we've fixed racism, and believe that minority candidates don't have to worry about being discriminated against anymore. That if the employee pool doesn't match demographics, i.e. if the number of minority candidates is less than we find in the general population, it's for reasons other than racism or sexism, and that affirmative action and the like are unnecessary policies that bring in unqualified candidates at the expense of better qualified white ones.

Which might be more believable if we didn't have widespread, consistent, and recent evidence that discrimination still occurs on a regular basis, or if I couldn't see the lack of evidence behind their assumptions about certain hiring decisions. (Or if it wasn't obvious that we, as in 'white people', are acting a bit too much like someone who says 'I'm sorry' when they mean 'I'm sorry that I am feeling repercussions for my misdeeds, can you just quit bringing it up so we all can move on now?' instead of the more sincere 'I'm sorry' that means 'I realize my actions were hurtful, I regret taking part in something that hurt you, and I will do what I can to try and fix the damage.')

Thoughts on Diversity

I saw something on twitter discussing how some people will agree that we need diversity of thought, and use it to emphasize that they don't actually need racial diversity (or other types of diversity), and I wanted to jot down some thoughts.

Most of what I've written here has been coming at this somewhat sideways, in that I feel discussing it in certain ways triggers political biases and preconceptions, and people's minds shut off.

I hope I've done a fairly good job of making the case for diversity in thought (and avoiding groupthink and the like), so here goes.

Diversity of thought and the other types of diversity are related, though somewhat distinct. I'll explain in another sideways fashion:

My uncle had multiple sclerosis, and I only ever knew his health deteriorated enough that he needed a wheelchair. My aunt got onto the topic of universal design after they came to visit relatives in Indiana (driving from Colorado).

She started explaining just how difficult it was for them to travel... How hotels would say a room was handicapped accessible, but my uncle couldn't fit his wheelchair under the sink and thus couldn't reach the faucet. How they wouldn't have the bathtub/shower configured right, making it a challenge for him to use. How she kept track of which specific rooms along the route had the setup they needed, and would call the hotel to reserve that room in particular, only to arrive and discover they'd given it to someone else.

And these are all things that I was unaware of, because I've never had a problem using the sink in a hotel, or shower, or whatever (and really, after hearing my aunt talk.... if I was designing a brand new home I think I'd try making it handicapped accessible from the get go. Especially if I plan on retiring there. Having the electrical outlets a little higher, the light switches a little lower, the doors a little wider, their latches easier to turn when your hands are less dexterous... you never know if you'll need such a thing and you might as well just plan for it from the start.)

Yes, you can write up a list of requirements for accommodating such disabilities... but it's just not at the forefront of our minds the way it is for someone who deals with this sort of thing on a daily basis.

So someone with that sort of background can provide much needed diversity of thought for teams that need to consider accommodating people in wheelchairs. They could head off all sorts of problems if they helped design hotel rooms, for example. Or buses. Or theaters.

The things we currently associate with diversity - race, sexuality, gender, disabilities, etc - often lead to diversity of thought, so encouraging diversity in general does help. At least, in a general fashion. But you may need to look for and cultivate specific types of diversity, depending on what you're trying to do.

If you're creating a video game, or a movie, or something that you hope will appeal to the largest audience possible, then you don't want to alienate some of your potential customers out of ignorance. (I started following a rabbi on twitter, and she mentioned things that are problematic to Jews that I was completely unaware of. Like referring to Philistines, which... well, I just looked up the Bible passage I was thinking of, and it actually doesn't specify philistines. I thought Jesus had been condemning them as hypocrites, for publicly signaling their faith - and really, it's part of what bothers me about the Christian conservatives, who make such a big show of their faith while generally supporting policies and actions that have nothing to do with what I was taught a Christian would. So now I know, and if I want to discuss that I can do it without using the term 'Philistine.')

But consider a different scenario. You've got a team trying to end poverty, and you're trying to figure out who to hire. Racial diversity is still be important, given demographics and the racial factors involved, but a minority candidate who comes from an Ivy League background may not provide much more insight than any other team member from an Ivy League school. Otoh, having someone with direct experience with poverty would probably be essential if you want to succeed. If you only have one opening, and if you haven't got a diverse enough team already, I'd probably prioritize the candidate with first-hand experience being poor over someone who's a minority from a more upper-class upbringing (but ideally, your team would already have both racial and socioeconomic diversity and you shouldn't have to choose one or the other. I'd also probably throw in some economists from different schools of thought, and a few people with experience running a business, plus people who've been involved with philanthropy, and so on and so forth in order to get the most relevant perspectives on the issue.)

Consider the classic parable of the blind men asked to describe an elephant, each of whom has touched a different part. If you want the full picture of what an elephant is, you have to know how to take their descriptions and piece them together.

Diversity of thought is extremely important, imho, and that diversity of thought often is easier to get when you include the 'usual' types of diversity - race, sexuality, religion, disabilities, gender - as well as socioeconomic status, regional differences, jocks vs. geeks, and more.

Which particular backgrounds are necessary to get the full picture for your task... well, it depends on the task. We don't really know what those different perspectives have to offer until we give them a place at the table, but our picture of an elephant wouldn't be completely if we excluded the experience of the one person who touched it's tusk.