Changing Tenor in HR Departments

[Batt Boy]

What's the board take on this?

Quote:

"Discrimination is wrong. Yet from 2014-2024, discrimination was rebranded to “DEI”, and most major companies normalized it.

Racial and gender quotas were forced and measured from the top down. I heard people say things like “this hire must be [insert race or gender].” Or "we have too many men/white people on the leadership team."

The Lost Generation

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.

www.compactmag.com

Merit or do the data from only three narrow industry segments (journalism, tenure-track faculty hiring, and the creative room in Hollywoood), not warrant conclusions from the particular to generalizations?

 

[finesse]

What's the board take on this?

Quote:

"Discrimination is wrong. Yet from 2014-2024, discrimination was rebranded to “DEI”, and most major companies normalized it.

Racial and gender quotas were forced and measured from the top down. I heard people say things like “this hire must be [insert race or gender].” Or "we have too many men/white people on the leadership team."

The Lost Generation

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.

www.compactmag.com

Merit or do the data from only three narrow industry segments (journalism, tenure-track faculty hiring, and the creative room in Hollywoood), not warrant conclusions from the particular to generalizations?

How closely on the spectrum of how, for lack of a better term, DEI employees are treated and advance do these fall? The closer they are in style, the less the inferences mean. Same for the percentage of the population they represent.

Don't think much of the idea, starting with the bald, but highly debatable assertion that DEI is discriminatory. It's not that it's not worthy of debate but don't ask me to accept it as a premise without one.

 

[Calheel]

What's the board take on this?

Quote:

"Discrimination is wrong. Yet from 2014-2024, discrimination was rebranded to “DEI”, and most major companies normalized it.

Racial and gender quotas were forced and measured from the top down. I heard people say things like “this hire must be [insert race or gender].” Or "we have too many men/white people on the leadership team."

The Lost Generation

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.

www.compactmag.com

Merit or do the data from only three narrow industry segments (journalism, tenure-track faculty hiring, and the creative room in Hollywoood), not warrant conclusions from the particular to generalizations?

Do you and/or the author of this piece think companies started putting an emphasis on hiring/promoting minorities in 2014? Or just that it was rebranded in 2014? Because this has been part of HR practices since at least the 1970s, when disparate impact cases began succeeding.

If the relevant minority population is x% and you employ x-y%, then there is pressure to get your percentages closer to x. This is not a new thing.

 

[NYCBlueBlood]

Meh... DEI was a blow to average performing white guys who expected to move up if they paid their dues (i.e., hung around doing mediocre work).

 

[1moretimeagain]

What's the board take on this?

Quote:

"Discrimination is wrong. Yet from 2014-2024, discrimination was rebranded to “DEI”, and most major companies normalized it.

Racial and gender quotas were forced and measured from the top down. I heard people say things like “this hire must be [insert race or gender].” Or "we have too many men/white people on the leadership team."

The Lost Generation

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.

www.compactmag.com

Merit or do the data from only three narrow industry segments (journalism, tenure-track faculty hiring, and the creative room in Hollywoood), not warrant conclusions from the particular to generalizations?

I watch quite a bit of CNBC and throughout this time period and still today, white males still appear to be well represented on the leadership team.

 

[NYCBlueBlood]

Sure, there was a narrow band of mediocre white male college grads who had to deal with a slight whiff of what it was like to be a female job seeker... nothing close to what it was like for a black job applicant. But still, for a brief period of time there were a limited number of roles/ industries where white male applicants were not heavily favored.

 

[superrific]

I actually read that article this morning. I had mixed reactions, but it was better than I thought it would be.

1. The article is talking only about media and academia. Media, I think, because that's the author's field; academia probably because he has friends there. I do not recall the author claiming validity anywhere else.

2. It is not a balanced article. The author made no attempt at all to talk "to the other side." It's a piece told entirely from the perspective of young white guys. That's not necessarily disqualifying for an opinion piece in a mag, but it does require a caveat with respect to its accuracy.

3. The article is also not about white people generally, but young white men. The framing is millennials versus Gen X. It claims that white Boomers and Gen Xers had nothing to worry about and were not impacted. It was the millennials who bore the brunt.

4. There is one fundamentally excellent point that the piece makes, and I have to think there is some empirical validity to it. Basically, the story being told is of white organizations trying to get darker, without any of the white folks at the top leaving. And if you're trying to do that, the arithmetic is terrible. Let me use a stylized example.

Suppose you have 100 people at your company. 10 are minorities. You want to get to 20% minority, and you aren't going to do it by replacing anyone. If you hire 20 new people, you can only reach your target if 14 of them are minorities. If you hire 10, you can't get there at all even if all of them are minorities, but you can get close. Still, we are talking about near cessation of white male hiring with these numbers. Again, highly stylized.

The point is that this diversity strategy requires a huge tilt in the entry-level hiring process. That's the claim the article makes, and it's certainly arithmetically possible.

5. The real problem is amplification. It's one thing if a company is trying to diversify. Don't get the job, white men? Look elsewhere. But what if everyone is trying to diversify at the same time? That's what makes the door feel shut. And I am willing to believe that Hollywood reacted quite strongly to #OscarsSoWhite -- but in exactly the way described. The white people at the top weren't going to quit. The work would get done at the bottom.

6. All of this arithmetic depends on the idea that there's a minority target. Don't take that too seriously; I'm just using it for illustration and the article doesn't claim that there were targets. So the strong version of what I outlined is probably not operative. Still, if you want to make progress in diversifying-through-new-hires, every white man that is hired sets the process back considerably. There will be a temptation to find a subconscious flaw with the white male candidate if the diversity initiative is taken seriously.

7. It's also true that a lot of the DEI initiatives involved reassessing hiring criteria. That's generally not a bad thing. Law schools, for instance, have long put a lot of emphasis on LSAT scores, and I simply do not think LSAT is a useful way to identify promising students. I know, they are supposedly predictive . . . because a lot of what they measure is just intelligence. There are other ways to measure intelligence that are more real-world useful than logic puzzles.

So for instance: maybe companies expand the number of schools they recruit at. Now they go to Howard AND Georgetown. The Hoyas don't understand why they suddenly can't get jobs as well as the people two or three years ahead of them -- but that's organic, not forced. That's just an example. There are lot of other ways that criteria can be expanded.

8. There are a lot of cherry picked numbers in the piece. Lots of organization-specific stats, which are red flags for accuracy.

9. Still, overall, I expected to roll my eyes at the piece but I think it has surprising credibility. The people being blamed are the GenX white executives (though clearly there is a "minorities aren't qualified" subtext). It is much less sweeping than one might expect. And there probably is some truth to it in its limited sphere. I have no idea whether it can be generalized outside of the specific contexts it discusses.

I would not treat it as definitive -- issue #2 is preclusive of that. But it is a solid contribution, I think.

 

[superrific]

Meh... DEI was a blow to average performing white guys who expected to move up if they paid their dues (i.e., hung around doing mediocre work).

Here's the penultimate paragraph of the piece:

It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.

That's a valid point. The job market should work for everyone. It doesn't respond directly to your point, but it does show that the author is aware of that issue. I read it as someone trying not to be bitter, even as their hopes and dreams faded away. That's a good instinct that should be applauded even if the underlying thesis of the article is wrong.

This piece is not the grievance filled diatribe that you might expect.

 

[superrific]

When I was on faculty, we hired mostly white men. Some of the professors really tried hard to hire in critical race studies but the candidate was weak and was rebuffed (barely). One of the white men was outstanding. He's on a fast track to being dean. Another one was fine. There was a white woman (with UNC ties!) who I voted to hire, but I'm afraid I tanked her before that because I found a fundamental mistake in her job talk paper. Of course I did. That, more than anything else, is why God put me on Earth.

The rest of the paper was really good, and she solicited our input as to how to fix it. My colleague said, that's really what you want in a colleague -- taking criticism, listening, not just denying or obfuscating. That's what convinced me to come around to support her, but alas, the damage had been done. She might not have prevailed anyway for other reasons . . .

So my experience does not match what is described in the piece. But that was law school, not undergrad. And of course the evidence presented is cherrypicked, although my experience is no less anecdotal.

 

[05C40]

Yeah, it's going to take a WHOLE LOT MORE that what I have seen to date for me to jump to some sort of "Woe is me, a poor, put upon, white male."

The closest I have ever come to being descriminated against was once when I was interviewing for a job as a law student up north and the interviewer observed that I was born, raised, and educated in North Carolina and then asked about about why the SAT scores in North Carolina were so much lower than those in Iowa. I responded that in Iowa the predominate high school test was the ACT and that the subset in Iowa who took the SAT were probably applying to Eastern Colleges like Harvard and Yale. But in North Carolina, the SAT was the only test offered and everyone was encouraged to take it. So in comparing Iowa to North Carolina, he was actually comparing a representative cross-section of North Carolina to the segment of Iowa applying to the Harvards and Yales of the East Coast. And I finished up by saying that I admired North Carolina's attitude of encouraging everyone to take the SAT because I believed it was indicative of North Carolina's best and brightest asperations for its children. I was not offered a job. But as I had already passed the patent bar exam when these interviews were taking place, I was not greatly distressed by the rejection.

 

[superrific]

I watch quite a bit of CNBC and throughout this time period and still today, white males still appear to be well represented on the leadership team.

The point of the article is that the white men at the top did not want to hurt themselves in diversity initiatives. They kept their jobs and skewed the hiring of young entry-levels. That's the argument anyway, so this particular critique doesn't land.

 

[sunnyheel]

As a father of sons, I’m sensitive to the notion that “affirmative action/DEI” has placed white males at a systemic disadvantage, but in the end I find the argument unpersuasive for the following reasons:

1. This account is scant on the data as well as cherry-picked and overreliant on anecdata that conforms to the writer’s bias. Lay out the overall demographic data, and the story almost always emerges: white men at the top with a more demographically accurate portrayal at the lower rungs. In view of that, it’s not surprising that firms are seeking to diversify.

2. I’ve been following the work of people like Richard Reeves and Prof. Scott Galloway who have chronicled the decline of boys and advocated for efforts to lift them up. Social media and gaming (morphing into gambling and meme investing as career options) have sorely affected their social, educational and employment prospects. And I have my own anecdata to verify. I have been hiring law students as clerks for over 30 years. Of course I’ve witnessed the rise of the female demographic- reflecting both ambition and achievement- and my hiring record reflects that. After years of doing this I can confidently tell you that the female students, as a rule, are far more conscientious, better organized and harder workers. The male students (I am loathe to call them men) on the other hand were far more demanding, often expecting that when an assignment was successfully completed, plaudits and rewards would soon follow. In other words: a sense of entitlement. I literally stopped hiring the boys during the last ten years (so sue me!).

3. As far as I know anti-discrimination laws still exist and given the makeup of the courts, males would likely be perceived as a protected class. Prove you case.

Yes, boys are all kinds of messed up. My message: bootstraps.

 

[Bobfripp]

Bunch of whiny white male millenials. Harden the fuck up.

 

[superrific]

Yeah, it's going to take a WHOLE LOT MORE that what I have seen to date for me to jump to some sort of "Woe is me, a poor, put upon, white male."

You should at least read the article.

Here's the rub: we've always known this would happen. There's no such thing as a policy that helps everyone in every way. There are winners and losers. The fact that there are losers doesn't make the policy wrong, but we do an injustice if we can't even hear the losers out.

For instance, free trade has long been great for the US, but NAFTA and then China-> WTO did have an effect on some portions of the labor market. There were workers displaced by trade. Treating them as if they don't matter is wrong.

Diversifying is always going to create winners and losers. Now, you can say maybe that it actually just sorts winners from losers more effectively than before, but there still are people harmed by the policy. "Mediocre white men" still matter, and if we act as though they don't, then it gives MAGA a legitimacy it should not have.

Is it better that the winners and losers be spread out racially, instead of being concentrated among minorities? That's actually a tricky question, but let's say you answer in the affirmative (a perfectly reasonable response, though not the only one). Still, that doesn't change the experience of those white men who are now losing. We shouldn't be hard-hearted toward them.

I think the piece calls for more empathy, and in that I agree completely.

 

[superrific]

Bunch of whiny white male millenials. Harden the fuck up.

Try reading the piece with empathy. What the author describes is the dissolution of his career (or dissolution before it ever got a chance to solidify) That deserves consideration. It really isn't as grievance filled as you might think.

 

[Bobfripp]

Try reading the piece with empathy. What the author describes is the dissolution of his career (or dissolution before it ever got a chance to solidify) That deserves consideration. It really isn't as grievance filled as you might think.

My empathy is in short supply these days.

 

[lawtig02]

I agree with super on this one. Whether one agrees with it or not, the author describes a very real source of frustration among young people. It was FAR easier for me to get a great job than it will be for my kids. They don't need to be coddled, but it would do us well to listen to what has them frustrated about the job market. Same thing for the housing market.

 

[05C40]

Another aspect as to the "rainbowing" of Corporate America is that I believe that most American businesses want their employees to "look like" the customers they are serving. And as the customer base gets more diverse, the hiring corporation would be absolute fools if they failed to be sure that their employees "looked like" the customers they were serving.

 

[Geisterfahrer]

What's the board take on this?

Quote:

"Discrimination is wrong. Yet from 2014-2024, discrimination was rebranded to “DEI”, and most major companies normalized it.

Racial and gender quotas were forced and measured from the top down. I heard people say things like “this hire must be [insert race or gender].” Or "we have too many men/white people on the leadership team."

The Lost Generation

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.

www.compactmag.com

Merit or do the data from only three narrow industry segments (journalism, tenure-track faculty hiring, and the creative room in Hollywoood), not warrant conclusions from the particular to generalizations?

Fucking stupid?

 

[superrific]

My empathy is in short supply these days.

Mine too, but that's something we should strive to correct.