The second order effects are terrible too. People assume someone was hired because they're X, Y or Z (and I've seen companies say exactly that, talk about undermining). These segregated groups as the writer describes are ... segregated. At one place I worked a special group met multiple times a week. Those people weren't working and the teams they worked on had to pick up the slack (this was highly time sensitive work). That created resentment. No matter your policy or how much finger wagging training they did, that resentment did not go away.
There's sometimes a weird add on expectation too. Person A who is type X is expected to speak for all people of type X. In an absurd way that's to some extent why they're there, but that doesn't mean they're qualified to do that, or even right, or would even want to speak up.
I'm reminded of a lot of the sexual harassment cases where HR predictably takes the side of the higher ranking employee (often a man). HR jobs are by a good % often staffed by women, but that as far as I know hasn't put an end to HR siding with the company. Of course it doesn't, because it isn't about man or woman, it's about incentives and demographics don't change that.
Truth is companies aren't good or even competent in solving complex social issues.
Which is not to say that ham-fisted companies can't make themselves look worse, while spend far too much in the process. Sounds like you've seen that.
I felt a little flustered and blurted out the name of a female professor in physics who (1) I really like but (2) is a nepo baby. (Didn’t tell them that latter) I mean the real equity problem in academia is that almost every professor is a professor’s kid
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/
which was something I had gathered from my own observations and only saw research that confirmed it two decades later. Insofar as we think in terms of certain ‘protected classes’ you can see that the nepo baby who is in a protected class (at least half of them!) is a hot commodity.
Unfortunately we are in an impoverished discourse between woke right NPCs who take it for granted you bellyfeel DEI is bad and those who reflexively oppose them because it is DEI is ‘just’ what every decent human being endorses.
There is the principle that you ‘never let them see you sweat’ and at work I am not so likely to complain about the challenges I’ve had in my career coming from a lower class white family and having an unfashionable and slightly terrifying neurodivergence and I’ve never expected to get a lot of help from HR. When I do talk about those struggles I try to talk about them in a universalized way.
I wish sometimes we could make ‘white’ go away as it comprises groups such as:
(1) myself, from French-Canadian and Polish background who barely exist in media and academia, but boy even the girls in my extended family are cops and firefighters. I get good service from the police because of the way I look and the way I listen they seem to believe, true or not, I will take their admonitions seriously and don’t need to get a ticket or see the judge. I know also it is not that way for black people. Some of those first responder jobs are good union jobs so yeah, maybe some of them are nepo babies.
From that kind of background you could probably break into highly formalized areas such as law and medicine but if you tried to go into less formalized area you’d find yourself in a highly nerve-wracking hall of mirrors and I’m certain black people would have all the same problems and then some.
(2) Jewish people who are I think dangerously overrepresented in some areas (even Ezra Klein says they are behaving in ways now that make people believe the awful things that people have long said about them) and who really were crawling up by their wits against discrimination 75 years ago but are benefitting more from the ‘nepo baby’ phenomenon today. A person like that get disowned by their family for getting a job in law enforcement, and…
… I have felt so cringe sitting in the passenger seat while an upper middle class person argued their way into a $300 ticket which I could have avoided by being a little stupid and sheepish. ‘Sharp elbowed’ can cost you sometimes.
(3) Scotts-Irish people who I think have some biological (might be environment to epigenetic though) predisposition to mental illness and often seem to have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
and often come across as “white people with black problems”, especially the random encounters with the police that become life changing.
If we have some frame like “women in tech” I think somewhere between 25% to 75% of the problems they have are problems that are not due to their protected status —- and that frame cuts them off from a proper understanding of some of their problems and also from solidarity with others who face those problems.
1. It claims these initiatives help in early career, but seem patronising later on. How and why this mindset shift happens in the beholders is something we can explore: is it about not focusing on gender that would be enough?
2. What are "men in leadership" to do other than having these gender-specific awards removed/renamed on top of developing intrinsic fairness in evaluating and supporting talent?
Don't get me wrong, noticing issues without a proposal is just fine! It's only opening these questions for me, as I would hate to lose that early career support (would rather extend it to more people), but wonder how we can best extend this to mid- and late-career too.
Sort of par for the course based on numbers I have heard thrown around -
Human Adult brain -> ~10–100 meaningful belief updates/year
Institutions -> ~1–10 updates/decade
Plus there is lot of competition about which updates get priority so things take time.
For example, does anyone think that institutions can avoid being held accountable because they have no free will? Can all the remaining free will be offloaded to stakeholders?
100 belief updates, and yet there are generational gaps in social consciousness!
How many of these belief updates are advantage-conferring, and if so, should we keep them secret?
