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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
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Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on August 23, 2022, 09:56:58 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 23, 2022, 06:11:27 pm ---Don't be silly, of course they would miss out of majority of suitable candidates.  My point is, any company that is stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot, is already dying.  You cannot compete in todays global economy and marketplace, if you hobble your own workforce like that; and any company that did something as stupid as that ought to fail rather quickly.  You do not need to teach successful executives to not do that, because they already know that it would be a waste of resources; it would be the equivalent of rejecting profit.

Let me throw the question back to you: Do you seriously think any decades-old company is today pre-filtering resumes to keep only the males under 40 with western sounding names?  I do not, exactly because they're learned how business works.  If they hadn't, they'd gone under already.

--- End quote ---

You may be underestimating the sheer inertia of large corporations. It seems as if almost every major corporation, at least a few years ago, had some sort of diversity quota program, it was extremely common almost to the point of becoming a meme.
Yes it will eventually bite them if it impacts that talent pool, but that could take a very long time.

--- End quote ---
True.  I did not consider the Pareto effect on the overall output, in a large organization.  (That is, something like 20% of workers produce 80% of the results.  So, if you have a fifth to a quarter of really capable workers, and the organization is large enough so they do not clearly see themselves as carrying the rest on their backs, the rest could basically do nothing with a minor impact on overall productivity.  It's when you lose those capable workers when you crash.)

However, I still stand behind my claim that no owner would let an executive limit the talent base to say males under 40 with western sounding names, because that obviously excludes too many productive employees for no reason other than that executives social preferences.  Maybe in a family-owned business?
But in most Western countries that kind of discrimination is already illegal; definitely so here.  (Only "positive" discrimination, i.e. discrimination against white male Finns, is legal in Finland.  Even though our constitution says every Finnish citizen is equal.  Some are just more equal than others, I guess.)
tszaboo:

--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 24, 2022, 05:40:14 am ---
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 23, 2022, 10:04:10 pm ---How about the EU corporate board quota: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-08/eu-set-to-adopt-gender-quota-requirement-on-corporate-boards#
These sort of quotas go directly against merit and choosing the best candidate.

--- End quote ---

Looked at the mentioned article and thought "the fight is about equal rights and opportunities" with the emphasis on equal but the demanded quota of 40% woman is still not equal. Further more it states "non-executive director" positions, so executive director staff is still free of it.

They do quote “There are plenty of women qualified for top jobs: they should be able to get them.” which indicates the jobs need to be filled with qualified women, not just women.

In a way it is sad that legislation is needed to force the world into some equality.

--- End quote ---
So maybe the assumption is that "qualification only is required to so the job" is wrong.
Take for example a used car salesmen. The qualifications needed for that is let's say elementary school or high school diploma. Would you hire someone based on qualifications alone? Or are soft skills are necessary?
How about disagreeableness as a necessity to become a CEO of a company? You need to be able to negotiate deals, and be able to say "no. Being a CEO or board of director requires this personality trait, and by the looks of it, a lot of it. Studies show that 12% of CEOs show psychopathic traits, and something like 80% of psychopaths are men.
I put the relevant statistics below, that explains why the difference. It's a small difference in the distribution, resulting a huge difference at the extremes. And that's where you hire CEOs, engineers, oil rig workers, but also at the other end nurses or elementary school teachers.

paulca:
A controversial view point, but the problem with diversity and equa(l)ity is they are can be mutually exclusive or at least contradictory.

The fundamental problem is you cannot say that woman as a demographic have differences in skills based on gender.  Even if that is true (when inclusive of upbringing and cultural alignments).  Even if you can prove that with study after study after study.

So IF you are looking for a particular skill set, picking a woman over a man, may actually BE selecting the right candidate for the job.  But you are unable to do so.

This over-arching issue with this is, it's a campaign to make INVALID any point of diversity.  We are being told that by having a diverse employee base, the diversity will benefit you. But HOW?  If we are picking up latent skills by diversifying our employee base, what are those latent skills, where do they come from and if we want more of them where do we look?  It's a bit hand wavey.  Let's start trying to concrete define WHY it improves the work force and allow us to select for those qualities?  Or.... is that what the world is afraid of?

I mean there is no point hirering a diverse work force, if they then install a set of corporate values where NONE of those diversity factors are allowed to have the slightlest bearing on anything for fear of discrimination and non-inclusive work culture.

Either that or make all interviews double blind with no face to face and voices played by actors.

However, this won't work, because people are not stupid and we are playing with many millions of years of evolution and I'd expect most people would work out the gender of the other party fairly quickly.  Thus, even if we did do it completely black-box, blind it would not remove the accusation of selection bias based on gender.

Also, lets play parallel to other sectors.  Nursing is allegedly 90% female.  Health Care in general is something like 78% women.  What is happening there?  Is nursing turning away women and artificially expanding their applicant pool and intake to 50/50?  I don't see it, do you?  (Sarcasim: Are MEN being subconsciously biased OUT of the workforce!?  It's a war on men I say, it's discrimination, clearly the nursing profession is profiling us, it's a bunch of matriarchically totalitarian bigots.   We should FORCE them to employ 50% men!)

What about "pair" hirering, as an extreme example of "cancelled out" discrimination.  For every man a company hirers for a position, they must hirer a woman for the same position and v.v..  Of course there are single position roles, but that can be tweaked.  That pretty much puts an X through the whole gender discrimination thing entirely.  It would be interesting to see the results, as long as the review process was conducted openly and fairly to see who rises, who falls, who leaves, who stays, who excels.  However, if 70% of the women subsequently leave stating they just didn't enjoy it, the message will be put that it's because of men and we didn't like women invading our space and we drove them away.
paulca:
I remember getting into a heated argument with a senior engineer over a projects direction.  There were many points we didn't see eye to eye on, we worked out most of those were because of management directive, not engineering decision.  But one we continued to see in two completely different ways.

My point was, if the goal is working software and the primary tools we have are the people we have, then we should keep the project simple as possible to allow best development based on the tools/people you have.

The fact that my own engineering methodology is one of make it as simple as it can be and only as complex as it has to be, did not align with his was part of the problem, he was of the mindset that every problem should be infinitely expanded in complexity to try and make it more and more generic, abstract and extensible.  My problem with that approach is it creates horrible, generic, abstract, academic code which excludes 90% of engineers with less than 5 years of strong OOP working.  It makes the code hard to follow and those lower level OOP abstractions should be wrapped tightly in a separately managed framework component and the engineers using that framework are the customers of the ones writing it.  This balances the two off each other in my view.

However it does demonstrate were a "practical" engineer will include people factors in the methodology used to progress.  Simply because, it's completely undeniable that without the people, you have nothing.

Pure engineering, for engineerings sake, ie, engineering a problem until you simply cannot find another single thing you can add, is best kept in university and hobby space.  We have work to do.  Of course that does not mean through away the vast majority of engineering standards or anything, just focusing on "working software", instead of "academically correct engineering", requires you include the people part of the equation.
pcprogrammer:

--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 24, 2022, 08:33:41 am ---So maybe the assumption is that "qualification only is required to so the job" is wrong.
Take for example a used car salesmen. The qualifications needed for that is let's say elementary school or high school diploma. Would you hire someone based on qualifications alone? Or are soft skills are necessary?
How about disagreeableness as a necessity to become a CEO of a company? You need to be able to negotiate deals, and be able to say "no. Being a CEO or board of director requires this personality trait, and by the looks of it, a lot of it. Studies show that 12% of CEOs show psychopathic traits, and something like 80% of psychopaths are men.
I put the relevant statistics below, that explains why the difference. It's a small difference in the distribution, resulting a huge difference at the extremes. And that's where you hire CEOs, engineers, oil rig workers, but also at the other end nurses or elementary school teachers.

--- End quote ---

Sure you have a point there, but there are still women capable to do the job and should be given a fair chance.

The need to be able to say "no" could be seen as a skill. I, a heterosexual white male, did not have it in my skill set for a long time. It was one of the reasons I got a burn out long ago. There are other skills I lack to become a CEO, and I now that. And maybe that is the problem in this world. That people don't know their limitations and want what is not in reach and then start to moan about it.
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