> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do
This is an odd phrasing. These are exclusive categories that cover the possibility space†; it makes sense to say that "women are favored over men", but it doesn't make sense to say "men face more discrimination than women". Any number you come up with for "discrimination against men" is necessarily defined relative to the outcomes for women; you can't assign cardinal numbers to both groups.
† Not quite. The possibility space also includes children. They face far, far more discrimination than either men or women do. For example, hiring them is a serious crime.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
This is a coherent claim, but it can't be summarized as "men face more discrimination than women do". Neither (1) nor (2) is an amount of discrimination.
It could be the case, for example, that there are twenty times as many jobs in male-dominated industries as in female-dominated industries, and that men and women apply to these in perfect proportion to their availability.
(Your more specific claim, women do not face any negative discrimination in male-dominated industries, will mean that the amount of negative discrimination faced by women is lower than that faced by men regardless, but this isn't a necessary part of the way you've constructed the question.)
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
This means more women working these roles with the same capability as men, it doesn't mean replacing men with women who are worse at the job, which ironically is an attitude making up part of the reason efforts like this have to be made.
> This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).
Citation needed. Certainly neither of those is "clearly".
> If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.
And if it's the opposite, as the best available evidence (not that there is any really solid evidence in this space) suggests?
I'm all for ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance that reflects their skills and experience, regardless of personal characteristics. As far as I can see DEI initiatives are working against that.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
Anonymizing names and such is fine/good but the whole push for equal net worth, etc is IMO bad. Granting assistance exclusively to people below the median is equal to punishing those above the median. And if you start adding race, gender, etc it gets even worse. And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
The status quo benefits me, but I also don't see why I owe X to Y. My parents worked hard to get me educated. Their parents worked hard to get them educated. Their parents worked hard to get them their own house. You can stretch it and say they were able to do that because Ys grand...parents got exploited but it's honestly not my problem at this point. We still exploit kids mining in bumfuck nowhere and making phones, everyone cares mostly when they can make an extra buck unless it's straight up death camps.
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant..
The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime? This is what the people looking for reparations are arguing, no wrongs were ever righted because the responsible at no point considered it their duty to do so.
This means they have been generationally disadvantaged compared to you. It means they have had worse social mobility. By the time Obama rolled around there had only been four black US senators in its history.
The US's historic (and ongoing!) poor treatment of its people based on skin colour is so obvious from the outside that I struggle to understand how you don't see it. The government can snap into action for Florida but cannot find its energy for New Orleans, and many other such interesting coincedences.
> done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
> Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime?
In a way, yes. Of course, it's different nowadays in that if I don't like how country X is treating me I just move to country Y so I won't touch that too much. If we make it equal to where I get sold (how did I become property? Debt? War? Kidnapping? The country just decided to cover some debts?) to go plow fields in bumfuck nowhere, I likely won't be happy, but that's so outside of modern life I have no idea how I'd feel since people are kinda weird under stress.
The thing is that it wasn't morally or legally wrong for a long time. So it's just holier than thou modern people judging people of the past and wanting retroactive punishments for legal actions to people who have nothing to do with said actions. Sure, it could have happened faster, it also could have not happened at all.
And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
> The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway.. This is covered clearly as of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So anyone who had an issue with it could sue based on it. It's how the system is supposed to work. Not via redistribution systems based on "reverse" racism/sexism/etc.
> And again, the people who'll be punished by a retroactive application of a law will punish mostly people who had nothing to do with it.
It's better to feel punished now when your illfound gains are equalised to the people who lost out for you to have them, than to continue punishing the people who lost out forever because you don't have the humility to say "yeah my ancesters were probably wrong about this"
> No clue if that's true, apparently two high schools in Cleveland got merged in 2017 due to segregation. Anyway..
"No clue" might be the best I'll get, if you want to look it up and learn it's Duval County, Florida which integrated in 1999.
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?