To be clear, Meta's "Diverse Slate Approach" was explicitly discriminatory with regards to protected class. It prohibited hiring managers from proceeding with an offer until at least one of the on-site interviews contained an "underrepresented group", meaning women and URM males. In practice this meant that white and Asian men had to wait a long time to get an offer even after they passed the interview rounds. But women and URM never had to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled because their presence caused it to be fulfilled.
To see how this is discrimination, consider a company that decides to wait 90 days before proceeding with any offer to a Catholic candidate, but no such delay if the candidate is not Catholic. Surely we see that this is discrimination. Even if we argue that the Catholic candidates are still getting their offer eventually it's still plainly discrimination. What if instead we rolled a dice and added 0 to 90 days of delay? Some Catholics have zero delay, just like non-Catholics. Is that still discrimination? Of course.
Now considering how the DSA works. Most candidates are not "diverse". If you look at the sequence of candidates with non-diverse (N) or diverse (D) candidates the sequence looks something like this:
NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND
So if we introduce the requirement that at least one interviewed candidate must be diverse, a non-diverse candidate may get lucky and the next candidate is diverse. Or maybe they'll be waiting a long time until a diverse candidate is interviewed and fulfills the DSA. But a diverse candidate never has to wait for th DSA to be fulfilled. Sounds like a familiar situation where an offer is randomly delayed on the basis of protected class, right?
It's true that the DSA never lowered standards for diverse candidates. But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.
What you're describing is not how it works. Chiefly, the hiring pipelines are not set up for a single role, but a whole family of them. They are filled ahead of need. (Or were, at a time when this would've been taking place.)
There are other inaccuracies, but suffice it to say, this comment section is full of comments by people who have never been hiring managers talking about how hiring works.
The phrase "confidently incorrect" comes to mind
I re-read the wiki page on the DSA multiple times. It does explicitly spell out that at least one "diverse" candidate must be on the slate for each role. Yes, candidates are considered for multiple roles as they go through the hiring pipeline, but that doesn't change the fact that it prohibits moving forward with a hire if the candidate pool for the role does not include a diverse candidate.
If this is wrong, but all means explain how the DSA actually works.
Nothing you just said contradicts the OP in any way, as those details don't change any aspect of the argument.
> NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND
If the pattern resembles this for a group that represents over 50% of the broader population (women and some subset of males), I'd argue that it's highly possible there are other, possibly discriminatory, factors at play.
So we should expect 50% men in elementary schools? How about lumberjacks? Should those be 50% women too?
A non discriminatory hiring process should reflect the demographics of the workers in the given field (other factors like geography matter too). Why would we expect, say, pediatricians (80% female) to have 50% men?
Achieving a 50/50 split between men and women in a field that's 80% one gender requires hiring one gender at 4x the rate of the other. This line of thinking is what leads companies to set up discriminatory hiring practices in pursuit of DEI goals.
The even government office of non discrimination compliance agrees: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs
> The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market.
One question we should ask ourselves is why a field would be dominated by men and not evenly split, or mostly women, etc. Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?
Because men and women have different interests. Even if you think that socialization is the cause, the law mandates that all applicants are treated equally with respect to gender. If gender discrimination is carried out in pursuit of a 50/50 gender split, that does not make it legal.
> Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?
What people feel is hard to quantify. But what we can quantify is the call back rates of male and female applicants. Tech companies are more likely to call back women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
The point of all of this stuff is to find a balance between evaluating applicants independently and objectively according to a well-defined set of critera -- equality of opportunity -- and producing an end result that is representational and fair in the societal sense -- equality of outcome.
A good illustration of this concept is the "equality vs. equity" cartoon, with people of different heights trying to look over a fence. https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...
I understand why a lot of folks, especially technically-minded folks, bias for equality of opportunity exclusively. This is essentially what a meritocracy is. There's lots of good things about equality of opportunity and meritocracies, but they also have problems, and one of those problems is that, generalizing, they both tend to reflect and reinforce pre-existing biases, and in particular implicit biases. This is exactly the kind of problem that DEI initiatives are trying to address.
I don't really want to litigate the pros and cons of these two concepts, I just want to point out that they both exist, and that initiatives like DEI can have as goals improving one or the other or both.
It's fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're only interested in equality of opportunity. That's probably the position that most people who are anti-DEI would take. But I think it's also fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're interested in both equality of opportunity and outcome. Both are valid.
Using protected class as a factor in employment is prohibited nation-wide under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is no "balance" between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former is required by law. Using protected class as a factor in hiring doesn't become legal just because it's done in pursuit of equality of outcome. They are not both valid concepts, at least not unless you're willing to violate people's civil rights. One is what employers are legally required to do. The other is illegal discrimination.
Also, think through the implications of this photo in the context of hiring: https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...
What's really the difference between having a group of candidates standing on a box, and lowering the bar for those candidates? At the end of the day, whether it's standing on a box or lowering the bar the end result is the same: some candidates are considered to have met expectations despite not reaching the same heights as others.
I highly encourage you to think through whether this is a good metaphor to use to justify DEI in a workplace setting.
You are focusing on the specific details of the hiring process, and evaluating stuff like DEI in terms of a single hiring outcome. I'm trying to clarify that the relevant scope is actually much broader, for example it might be the demographics of the entire engineering org within that company, measured after this updated hiring process has been in place for a year or more.
Again, deliberately engineering equitable demographics of the entire engineering org is illegal discrimination. Scope is irrelevant. You cannot use protected class as a factor in hiring, not in a single hiring decision nor in the broader scope of an entire org. Lets say you measure the hiring demographics over the span of a year. What then ? Directing your recruiters to prioritize underrepresented candidates is still illegal. It doesn't matter whether the scope is a single hire or an entire org: equality in hiring is mandatory.
It's not a question of scope. Equality and equity are not equally valid concepts in hiring. The former is required by law, even if it produces an inequitable outcome. There is no "balance" between respecting candidates civil liberties and achieving your preferred demographic distribution.
This question only ever seems to be asked about "desirable" fields. There doesn't seem to be as much of a push to achieve gender parity in sanitation work[1], for example.
The whole exercise feels like an effort to take attention off of the problem of income inequality by instead framing it as an issue of identity. Under this framing, "fair" means we have parity in male and female CEOs - never mind that those CEOs are still making 300x or more of what "frontline" workers make. Why not focus on pushing for higher wages in female dominated fields like teaching or nursing?
[1] https://www.zippia.com/sanitation-worker-jobs/demographics/
On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.
Rather than "desirable" I would maybe say something like "economically dominant". If the highest-paying and most-powerful careers in a society don't at least somewhat meaningfully reflect the demographics of that society, then, well, what does that demonstrate, and is that something we want to try to fix? Hopefully you can at least see the position where the answer to that last question is yes, even if you don't agree with it.
It may be that hire paying fields attract men who want to be able to attract mates. That women prefer men who make more than them is pretty established in research, as is is the lack of interest in what a woman makes as income. (On average in psych studies). Why wouldn’t we expect results and society to reflect this?
It's not -- "why wouldn't we expect important career X to have way more men than women, given <whatever>"
It's -- "if important career X has way more men than women, is this a good thing, at a net societal level, regardless of <whatever> that can explain why this is the case?"
Nobody is looking for complete and perfect parity in all influential careers. The intent is just to make sure that, for the highest-impact careers, we should work towards making them representative of our society, as much as possible
Do you believe some better out come for society as a whole, or some individuals in society will benefit from this intervention? Why? And at what cost?
Your question implies serval beliefs, which may or may not be true. And that others may, or may not share.
For one, I don’t think the average developer has a ton of say on how products get made. So that’s not likely the power you’re seeking to ensure changes hands? Market forces and legal structure pretty much ensure enshitification and other outcomes which many would likely consider sub optimal.
It is well established that teams with more representation make better decisions, likely because of their diversity of viewpoints. It is worthwhile both to companies and to society to have higher quality decision-making in fields like finance and in roles like chief executives.
citation(s) for this well established claim?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/%22The_Terrib...
The most commonly cited study is the McKinsey survey. But they didn't release their actual data set until years after publication, and when they did their analysis was thoroughly criticized: https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p...
It doesn't matter if the average developer has any say on how products get made. What matters is the salary that developers earn, in general, at a demographic level, is generally among the highest. And it's important that the highest-salary occupations in a society, are equally available to everyone in that society, invariant to class or race or gender or creed or anything else -- measured by outcome, not by opportunity.
What should the split be?
Take a step back on the supply side. CS education isn't a requirement, though only 20% of CS undergrads are female.[0]
I'm curious what your stance is on the swathe of asians who got negatively handicapped for checking "asian" on their college applications.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few...
Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.
I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!
For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.
One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.
In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.
I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.
1. https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...
Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.
I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.
If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?
When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.
I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.
Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.
And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.
You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.
You’ve explained your position and OP exposed the holes in your logic. Please don’t pretend to take the high road when someone has engaged with good faith discussion that didn’t end the way you hoped.
That's a pretty bizarre take on this dialog. But, you do you.
The specific details of the hiring process are in question. You are running away from grappling with the (increasingly likely) possibility that bias wasn't the (only) driver in hiring disparity.
The point I'm trying to make is that the details of any specific hiring process aren't really germane to the overall discussion. Hiring disparity is a metric that's measured at a much higher level than any individual organization.
> Hiring disparity is a metric that's measured at a much higher level than any individual organization.
And how do we know if the hiring disparity is due to bias? The details of the hiring process are absolutely relevant, because the notion that the hiring disparity is due to bias is a claim about the details of the hiring process.
My main issue with a lot of DEI programs is that they don't try to eliminate bias. They just assume disparities are due to bias and work towards "fixing" those assumed biases with explicit discrimination. The problem is that when you actually try to measure and quantify bias in tech, the results often aren't what DEI advocates assume. E.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
This is why there's such a a strong pushback against anonymizing interviews and other bias mitigation measures. What happens if your interviews and applications are all anonymized and the hiring disparity remains? The justification for "fixing" the representation is now a lot weaker since it's harder to claim it's due to bias. "Let's address bias in our hiring process" is a lot more popular than "let's set quotas". So the people who want quotas try to claim that they're just fixing bias by setting quotas.
You don't eliminate biases by focusing on the gender ratio of the orchestra. You eliminate biases by putting a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators. We all know this, but some people feel compelled to pretend that they're working towards eliminating biases when in reality they're working towards achieving certain demographics outcomes.
Anonymization wouldn’t work. Turns out people are very very good at picking up subtle signals that might hint at the anonymized identity likely is. What ends up happening is more discrimination rather than less. If you don’t anonymize, people will still discriminate, but they are always aware their decisions may be illegal or unacceptable. But when you anonymize, they just discriminate against anyone that has any hint of belonging to the discriminated class. And now you have given them an out plausible deniability by anonymizing. This has been demonstrably shown to be true over and over again. Anonymizing is an elementary school student solution to a complex phD level type problem
Some interviews I've encountered consisted of uploading code that gets executed on a remote server. Grading is exclusively done on the correct output, runtime, and memory usage. This is a truly anonymous interview that cannot be biased with regards to protected class. How does such an interview pick up on the protected classes of the candidate?
The hostility to anonymized interviews stems from the fact that one cannot discriminate in favor of particular demographics. This is the goal of the above commenter, as stated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830509
This silly solution is often suggested by tech bros who have a really rudimentary understanding of social problems. I guess it makes sense to someone who doesn’t fully understand social issues and thinks of how they would solve it if it was a technical problem. It’s not. Anonymizing does not reduce discrimination. It demonstrably makes it worse. The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.
It's not that the "tech bros" don't understand the problem. It's that DEI advocates tend to misstate the problem they're trying to solve.
> The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.
This isn't reducing discrimination. This is deliberately engaging in discrimination to change demographic outcomes.
We could have avoided a lot of confusion if DEI advocates were honest that their goals are not to eliminate discrimination but rather to employ employ affirmative action to achieve more equitable outcomes. If that's your goal, then of course anonymized hiring doesn't work: if you can't tell which candidate belongs to which demographic, then you don't know who to give advantage to.
Over 60% of the U.S. population don't have college degrees, but you obviously wouldn't expect Facebook's hiring to be proportional to that. The demographics of CS graduates is much closer to what you'd expect the hiring percentages to reflect (and they do)
Had to look up URM
https://diversity.ucsf.edu/programs-resources/urm-definition
Thanks for the link. A bit of clarification: in this context Asian was not in the category of URM since Asians are overrepresented in tech roles at Meta. So URM meant Black, Latin, and American native.
Can’t wait for other physical characteristics like height and weight to join the fray, or other markers of attractiveness/power.