Somewhat tangential, but who is the right kind of person for a diversity job? What does a job well done look like? Changes in hiring? Changes in company culture?
I'm skeptical of roles with a "my job is to care about X" kind of definition. That includes, for example, "customer advocate" and similar, especially someplace as complicated as google. I don't think they can have much success beyond the surface level.
EDIT: lets maintain a presumption of good faith. Assuming that you actually care about diversity...
The purpose of the role is to be able to show that you have a diversity officer. Whether or not that actually helps diversity, or helps at all--is secondary.
It kind of is. He talks more about things like corporate lawyers etc which fit the name "goon" more, but I think the more general point is people you have to employ because other companies employ them. What category would you put it under?
Diversity training may help change people's attitudes, but you're right on the nose about actually hurting.
The real reason enterprises spend money on Diversity Training is because it provides Faragher-Ellerth protection from damage claims— even if racist conduct within the company has been accepted by the court.
By having diversity training, corporations ensure that victims of racism do not receive financial restitution.
"Diversity and inclusion" as a separate function is mostly an exercise in giving the rest of the company cover. In my experience the people in these orgs have very little power to do anything, they just recieve the complaints, empathize, and then nothing happens.
As an example, I went to our head of D&I with a complaint about HR violating human rights law in our jurisdiction. They said "oh that sucks" and I never spoke to them again. I could have gone to a tribunal and argued about it, but instead I ignored HR, and shortly after left the company because I kept having to fight them about what seemed like baseline "inclusion" stuff. The D&I staff were mostly busy making promotional materials about the few successful marginalized people at the organization, despite our terrible stats.
Good point. But a serious company in which everyone is a nice person could still have D&I specialists like a training expert in charge of improving the masses or a statistician/manager in charge of monitoring and reports.
It starts with an acknowledgement that the company has a problem with X. That's actually incredibly hard, because there's nobody in the company willing to say "I'm anti-X". If they did, you'd just fire them and call it a job well done.
Instead, you need to realize that the problem with X is that it's no individual's fault, but the cumulative effect of a lot of little things. Each of those little things is easily dismissed as irrelevant. The job of the X Officer is to care about all of those things at once.
That doesn't make their job easy. Simple changes rarely fix the problem -- if they could, you'd have already done them. They require large changes that often seem antiproductive, especially when you've defined "productive" in ways that you're convinced are objective but just happen to systematically be anti-X.
A common example: coding tests. "We don't exclude women. It's just that men happen to be more on both ends of bell curves, so it's just too bad that far more men pass this test than women. The test is objective, after all." Except that the test doesn't really test what you do for a living. So why insist on it? Is it because you're sexist, or just lazy? I'm tempted to call it the latter, but if it's pointed out by an "X Officer", they'll be accused of affirmative action, misanthropy, etc.
A diversity officer will lose more battles than they win, so it's hard to say what a job well done looks like. In a lot of ways they're doing their job well just by making people actually oppose them out loud. Their best victories look like things other people consider discriminatory against them, because the things that discriminate against them are intolerable while the things that discriminate against other people are just things that happen.
The hope is that collectively they'll put enough people in enough positions of authority to be able to gradually diminish the constant throb of small injustices that collectively have brought about an overwhelming white maleness to all authority positions. Even a large company is only a tiny fraction of society, so it takes the full cumulative effect over decades to actually achieve genuine success.
I hope that answers your question. It's not an easy thing to describe, and it's easy to dismiss the problems they're trying to fix and not worth solving.
My question was more tactical than anything. Coding tests and hiring are a good example. Is a general purpose "diversity officer" likely to understand hiring, coding tests and such to improve on this?
An understanding of abstract issues, like bell curves and bias in testing generally is one thing. Getting into the nitty gritty, dealing with objections and finding alternatives is another. Don't you need someone that understands coding tests, coding, technical hiring and such to make a difference? A nondiscriminatory hiring method is objectively better, even if you don't care about diversity.
A person in authority, but removed from the actual task at hand seems like a recipe for box ticking, to me. I believe it could work for blatant, simple misogyny. For deeper issues like hiring process, don't we need subject experts?
Leaving workplace diversity aside, say the issue is application design. An application doesn't work well for people of different cultural or educational backgrounds? Don't we need someone with both an understanding of UIs and an understanding of those needs? I don't see how authority can lead someplace good. People who have never dealt with UIs have terrible ideas about how to improve them.
>I hope that answers your question. It's not an easy thing to describe, and it's easy to dismiss the problems they're trying to fix and not worth solving.
I appreciate you wading in. Most of the other comments have been quite depressing. I think what we need is more presumption of good will, and to try and carry less baggage from previous experience. People can be wrong but not bad people. They can come around. There are multiple routes to getting where we want to go. That's not to say no one is ill willed.
Lastly, I think not seeing a solution often leads to not seeing the problem... even though it's logically backwards. I also think that a deep awareness of problems leads to seeing solutions. I don't think you can use authority alone and force people to find solutions to problems they don't care about, or believe in. The problem they'll actually try to solve is "how do I me this person leave me alone."
Can you explain what this mythic “throb of injustice” is that keeps the white man in power?
What I experience today is:
* government policy that is openly racist against white and asian men (affirmative action)
* Racist “diversity” campaigns today that are veils for “we want less white men but can’t straight up say that.”
* Hate from people of color, since the narrative is my “white male privilege” is the only reason for any success in my life. Every other major contributor to it is sidelined.
I have also still not found someone able to explain why white male leadership is a problem when it well reflects the entry workforce 40 years ago. Current diversity metrics for new grads will feed up management chains in 40 years and so on.
These are tangible policies and sentiment I can point to that directly and overtly discriminate against me because of my identity. Your comment tries to paint a rosy picture of doing so. There is no thought to my economic background, how hard I’ve worked, etc. Just you’re a white privileged man so you deserve less opportunity for leadership positions.
It seems incredibly and overtly racist to me, but I’m open to changing my mind.
I'm skeptical of roles with a "my job is to care about X" kind of definition. That includes, for example, "customer advocate" and similar, especially someplace as complicated as google. I don't think they can have much success beyond the surface level.
EDIT: lets maintain a presumption of good faith. Assuming that you actually care about diversity...