What is wrong with the statement "We won't lower the bar"? Some people criticize that that statement is racist, but they aren't thinking about the context. When people ask companies to do something about diversity, they're normally asking to carve out more quota for certain minority group, just like how universities carve out certain portion of their student quota for people who donate large amount of money to get in. I guess it works for universities, but a company like Twitter which desperately needs focused group of talented employees, why would/should they do this? It's stupid that someone saying what's right gets taken out of context and is criticized by all the idiots on the internet. Also, isn't asking for this kind of treatment racist/sexist/whatever in itself? I am appalled by this idea as much as I am appalled by the idea of universities accepting students from rich families via donation.
If you (try to) eliminate race from hiring, you don't lower the bar. You raise it, because suddenly there's a group of so-so engineers who now can't get a job just because they're white.
If that feels uncomfortable, replace "white" with "MIT student". Or any other in-group.
If you almost exclusively hire from a single group, at some point just being part of that group makes it easier for you to get a job.
As far as I can tell, nobody is asking for hiring quotas based on profile. What people are asking for is an equal chance.
For pretty much any group that's not white/asian male, tech has an issue. The percentage of the minority group in the general demographic is higher than the percentage of people in that group graduating. The percentage of graduates is higher than the percentage of people hired. The percentage of people hired is higher than the percentage of people promoted.
All this diversity thing is asking for is that we take a look why the percentages are decreasing.
E.g. for black people: They're 12% of the general work force. 4.5% of CS bachelors are black. 2% of SV tech employees are black. 1% of Fortune-500 CEOs are black.
There's constant attrition going on, while the number of the main demographic increases as you go up the ladder. (This general relationships hold for other minorities as well, but I don't have numbers handy right now)
That's what diversity asks for - stop the steady attrition of anybody who's not in the majority group.
That's an interesting perspective. I say this because I have personally encountered people who argue that the value of a presumed-novel viewpoint should be expected to outweigh a sufficiently small difference of technical skill or similar in hiring decisions.
Anyway. Are you sure it's a good idea to compare numbers like recent grad percentages and Fortune-500 CEOs? These two in particular strike me as separated by several decades in which society has changed. Perhaps not the most useful comment on current society.
> What is wrong with the statement "We won't lower the bar"?
1. Assuming hiring a more diverse workforce would lower the bar.
The statement precludes that a more diverse workforce would implicitly lower the bar. This makes no sense. Increased diversity means increasing the many ways one can look at a problem, which improves problem solving and improves creativity. If the very first thing this guy thinks about is that hiring more women or black people would lower the bar, that's fucked up.
2. Assuming non-diverse workforce would not lower the bar.
If you hire shitty people, you lower the bar. There's plenty of white male tech workers who could lower the bar; keeping your workforce from being more diverse does not guarantee you won't hire a bar-lowering white male.
So at the very least it's inaccurate and misleading, and at the worst it is classist, racist, and sexist.
> Some people criticize that that statement is racist, but they aren't thinking about the context.
People who haven't had the advantages of white males have a harder time getting the same job, so an attempt is made to 'level the playing field' for someone who probably has exactly the same job competency but not the same socioeconomic advantages. That's the actual context.
> When people ask companies to do something about diversity, they're normally asking to carve out more quota for certain minority group, just like how universities carve out certain portion of their student quota for people who donate large amount of money to get in.
It is illegal in the United States for any employer, university, or other entity to have a quota for a certain race. Furthermore you're also assuming that donations preclude acceptance, which it doesn't inherently. The fact that the kid's parents could afford to pay for the best education up to that point gets them farther than the money alone.
> What is wrong with the statement "We won't lower the bar"?
The implicit assumption in that statement is that the current hiring process is not discriminatory, therefore the only way to hire more people of <group X> would be to lower hiring standards. Many people believe the hiring process is discriminatory - and, indeed, there are studies which support that claim.
Leaving aside the issue of discrimination, though, what's curious is that it's widely accepted that hiring in tech is broken. Companies complain that it's extremely difficult to identify talent. Larger companies are willing to risk turning away many qualified candidates if it reduces their risk of a poor hire. It turns out that it's very difficult to reliably identify who is above "the bar" and who is not. There are startups out there trying to solve this problem right now. It's a problem that effects everyone in the industry, too, not just individuals from <group X>.
So, if we lack a reliable way to determine if someone's above "the bar," how on Earth can we say that the reason we don't have more employees in <group X> is because there aren't enough applicants from <group X> who are above the bar? We can't.
The only problem I see with a statement like 'we won't lower the bar' is you might accidentally set the bar at a very difficult to achieve level. If it's based on the number of startups you've worked at or which ivy league school you went to etc. then candidates who are technically just a qualified (or could learn to be in very short order) may get passed.
The fact that the VP's first reaction to the author's question was to assume that hiring more diverse candidates somehow directly equates to lowering their hiring standards is what's wrong with the statement.
What is wrong with the statement "We won't lower the bar"?
It is the legacy of the famous Griggs vs Duke Power case.
Requiring IQ tests to filter employees was found to have "disparate impact" with respect to different identifiable groups.
Silicon Valley does a lot of different IQ test proxies in order to filter their prospective employees in a hopefully-not-racist way: programming tests, seeking college degrees, etc.
The consequences of Griggs v. Duke more complicated than that: the problem with IQ tests is that they are slippery. An employer can say "we want the best and brightest." And they can decide that a degree from Stanford meets that criteria, even if the impact is disparate.
But if they use an IQ test, suddenly there's a slippery slope: Why is the cutoff 130? The error range on IQ tests is non-zero, so what if a black candidate with 129 comes in? How do you defend that disparate impact in court? You can't.
