
Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity in Tech - blackbagboys
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/facebook-starts-its-rooney-rule-to-increase-diversity-in-tech
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Nadya
Can someone explain to me how these type of things aren't racist or sexist? I
still don't understand how benevolent preference isn't sexist or racist.
Selection should be merit based - not gonad or skin-color based.

If the rule applies only to "consideration", as mentioned, then that would be
admittance to not following Equal Employment Opportunity laws and they would
be open to a lawsuit as it is implying they didn't consider women and
minorities before instating the rule, which is against the law.

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Retra
If you want organizations to be merit-based, you need the larger social
context to be merit based, so as to provide a 'background of fairness' to
establish what is right or wrong for an organization. To do this, you have to
take actions that drive wider social change, not simply optimize your
organization.

(If you optimize at the organization level, you end up taking advantage of
existing social biases, which is why those subcultures are heavily dominated
by the male majority.)To fix this, organizations must not optimize within the
existing social biases, but attempt to shift the social biases to that their
optimizations are aligned with a merit based-society.

In other words, if you want to hit your target, you have to account for
gravity and aim up a little.

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caligastia
"background of fairness" \- very impressive, maybe social engineering is a
science now!

This is BS - in a normal society, competence rises to the top on its own
accord - people naturally out of laziness defer to those who know what they
are doing, regardless of race.

In the US we are living in a social engineered bubble that does not reflect
reality. Take a look at the current administration, (and the several before,
to be fair) - competence is not even on the radar for consideration of a job -
it's political connections and race first. And we see the results in the news
every day.

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Retra
You're not saying anything. Obviously politics is a matter of politics, the
concept of 'merit' there is corrupt beyond belief. And it's precisely because
people don't have the means to think properly about these kinds of issues.

