At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.
During the height of immigration in the US, there was high social cohesion within communities of people who came from the same country while still having great diversity of ideas across the nation as a whole.
Strong claim requires strong evidence, please.
But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.
For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.
Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.
If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.
How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...
I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce the confounding.
Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that diversity makes companies less successful - but being successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack' that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.
Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees.
I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.
Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.
But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.
Ironically, Mindy's brother pretended to be a black man to get into Med school.
Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read
There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1].
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu...
[1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...
The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?
That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation.
I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt.
Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it.
That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.
Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.
