There is a backlash to the heavy handedness of DEI. You can’t freeze out white males simple because they are white males. You need to remove barriers to entry based on sexism and such, but you can’t exclude a whole large class of people because that class had it good in the past. That gets you South Africa.
> You can’t freeze out white males simple because they are white males.
I agree with this. However, I have been working in tech for quite some time now, and I have not seen any place where white males have been frozen out of employment or funding. More typically, in my personal experience, they represent most of the staff and leadership and materially all of institutional funding recipients.
Perhaps my experience is atypical, or my definition of "frozen out" is different.
I have. In April 2019, when I worked at Dropbox, we instituted what we called "Opportunistic Hiring". 20 heads were reserved to hire "opportunistically". What this meant is that when a diverse candidate was hired, the headcount used for that hire didn't come from the team's headcount. It came from the pool of headcount for "opportunistic hires". Unless the "opportunistic hires" pool was already exhausted, then a diverse hire still counted against the team's headcount. The definition of a "diverse" candidate was a woman of any race, and URM men. If this sounds like an overly-complex way of saying "we're prohibiting Asian and white men from 20 headcount" it's because it is. I can provide the exact wording of the policy if you want.
It's not "freezing out" all white males. One, it's also freezing out Asian males. And two, it's only freezing them out of a specific chunk of our headcount. But it still deeply affected me to see a company outright deny employment on the basis of race and gender, even if it was only for part of the headcount.
Thank you for your valuable input. This is one of the most convincing "evidence" I have seen so far regarding the "exclusion" during hiring. I wonder why we don't see such cases written out by people often in these discussions -- most of these are quite handwavy.
Reading your description of the policy, it looks like what it does is say a team can hire from the "Opportunistic" bucket for "free," but does not freeze out anybody else. Is that a correct read?
> 20 heads were reserved
I have not studied Dropbox extensively. In 2019, was 20 hires roughly equivalent to the total overall number of new hires? Or are we talking about a small percentage of overall new staffers? If the latter, how does this anecdote respond to my statements?
It's explicit denial of employment on the basis of race and gender. It's illegal no matter what proportion of the headcount this is.
If I have 100 headcount and I say "20 of our headcount is off limits to white and Asian men" is that ok? If I have 80 headcount and I create 20 "opportunistic" headcount exclusive to women and URM is that acceptable? You're smart enough to understand that these are identical policies.
I'm not reading anywhere in there where it says anybody is denied a job under any scenario. Perhaps if Dropbox had fixed hiring numbers like your hypothetical, but that was not data you submitted.
It doesn't matter if they were hiring 50 people or 500 people. If your policy amounts to "we have N headcount candidates of any background, plus M headcount that's exclusive to X races and Y gender" then that's denial of employment on the basis of race and gender. Regardless of what the values of M and N are - well, unless M is zero.
If a company institutes a hiring policy that amounts to saying, "99% of our headcount is off-limits to Asians" is it correct to say "no Asians are denied a job, under any scenario"? It's technically correct in that Asian applicants could vie for the 1% of headcount that's available to Asians. But how many Asians would have been hired absent this headcount restriction? Probably more than 1%!
Okay, what if it wasn't 99% restricted to Asian, but just 50%? Can a company just say "half of our headcount is off limits to Asians"? Does that lower percentage make it okay?
No, of course not. It's not okay if it's 99%, 50%, 1%, or 0.01%. It's denial of employment to wall-off any proportion of headcount on the basis of protected class.
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In case you need an explicit scenario laid out to see how candidates are denied employment because of Dropbox's "opportunistic hiring" policy, here it is:
The company has already exhausted its non-restricted headcount. An Asian male applied. He gets rejected automatically because the only remaining headcount is restricted to women and URM. A woman applies. She's allowed to interview because the company still has that "opportunistic" headcount, and unlike our Asian male applicant her gender makes her eligible for this set-aside headcount.
If all headcount (including that "opportunistic headcount") were available to all races and genders, our Asian male would have been able to get hired.
The scenario at the end really illustrates how important it is to not evaluate partial policies without accurate and full knowledge. In particular, we don't know how whether this hypothetical situation ever happened (and if so, what breakdown led to them hiring ~480 white & asian men before even hiring 20 women or URM, assuming a 500 annual hiring budget?).
But that aside, we don't know how management would handle the hypothetical. If I need to hire someone today and all I have are the "opportunistic" headcount available, am I allowed to hire an Asian man or am I required to leave the job unfilled? The use of the word "opportunistic" does make it sound as if this is not a hard requirement in all situations. But again, we are on HN and do not have access to anything like the full guidelines presented to management at Dropbox.
Do I seriously have to spend three comments explaining how a policy of "white and Asian men are prohibited from X% of our headcount" is denial of employment, regardless of the value of X?
> If I need to hire someone today and all I have are the "opportunistic" headcount available, am I allowed to hire an Asian man or am I required to leave the job unfilled?
You are prohibited from hiring an Asian or a while male. You can either leave the job unfilled, or hire a woman or URM candidate. The point is white and Asian males are denied that hiring opportunity. It's irrelevant what management would do in this scenario. Whether they'd hire a woman or just leave the position unfilled is irrelevant to the fact that white and Asian males cannot be hired, explicitly on account of their race and gender.
Again, I really find it hard to believe that people are having trouble to understand that a policy of "X% of our headcount is off limits to $RACE and $GENDER" isn't discriminatory and denial of employment on the basis of race and gender. If you're of the opinion that this discrimination is justified on the basis of advancing equity, by all means you're entitled your own opinion. Just don't try and deny that this is discrimination and ultimately results in people denied work because of immutable characteristics.
> Based on 177 like tech companies in Silicon Valley (market research and EOO-1 Diversity Statistics data), the percentage of diverse engineering talent is sparse. In short, 4.7% are latino, 2.1% are African American, and 19.2% are female. These candidates are being targeted with all of our top competitors with white gloves tactics, strategic outreach, and engagement strategies, while Dropbox has yet to systematically establish any of these practices to compete for this top talent and showcase our uniquely inclusive, dynamic, and thoughtful culture.
> Opportunity to market DBX [Dropbox] more broadly:
> Moreover, diverse engineers are the most sought after group of individuals on the market today. While the average response rate to engage is high (37%) the rate at which they are interested in moving forwards is quite low (11%). We interpret this in two ways:
> First, due to the small pool and scarcity of diverse talent, companies are motivated to keep their diverse talent happy, well-compensated, and engaged; prospects are rarely on the market, and when they are, it is a highly calculated and careful search based on existing relationships.
> Second, traditional sourcing engagement methods (email, LinkedIn) do not adequately showcase what makes Dropbox special, and because these candidates are so highly sought-after, it would serve us to highlight our culture early on, and to take a more long term approach to courting them.
> Opportunistic Hiring
> As the business needs shift and open roles become more narrow, it will become difficult to find a home for diverse candidates that we're able to engage and who pass our bar. We feel like it would be a disservice to use in the long-term if we miss out on hiring critical talent for Dropbox because of current headcount constraints. To this end, we propose that Eng VP's withhold 20 heads to hire opportunistically.
> When a diverse/URM candidate is interested in interviewing, regardless of headcount, we will put them through the process. If they pass the TPS [technical phone screen] we will bring them onsite and evaluate based on their skillset.
>If the candidate goes to HC [hiring committee], we will proactively find a sponsor/team home for the candidate, and that team would receive a preciously withheld headcount for that hire.
As you can see, this really is a needlessly verbose way of saying "we're setting aside 20 headcount off-limits to white and Asian men". The fact that these set-aside headcount doesn't count towards the team's initial headcount does not change this fact: we had 20 headcount that were explicitly off-limits to white and Asian men.
What's even more interesting is that as per the company's diversity report, our tech workforces was 23% female as compared to the 19% cited in the policy announcement. So we actually had an overrepresentation of women at the time, yet we still instituted explicitly discriminatory policies favoring them.
I think you're reading a lot into that policy which is not stated. This looks a lot like "opportunistic" hiring as it is described. In any case, this looks like more of an announcement and less of a policy document describing how to handle the edge cases on which you base your hypotheticals. In particular, did Dropbox hit its headcount target and need to use this "opportunistic" bucket? If so, how did it handle that case? Judging management decisions in the abstract is folly.
> our tech workforces was 23% female as compared to the 19% cited in the policy announcement
> So we actually had an overrepresentation of women at the time, yet we still instituted explicitly discriminatory policies favoring them.
I think you and I have different definitions of what would constitute "overrepresentation" of women in a workforce. (Again, keeping in mind that at many/most tech companies, the majority of jobs are not held by engineers.)
> In particular, did Dropbox hit its headcount target and need to use this "opportunistic" bucket? If so, how did it handle that case? Judging management decisions in the abstract is folly.
This is explicitly spelled out in the policies I sent you: the opportunistic hiring bucket is exclusive for women and URM. If you want to use the opportunistic hiring bucket, the candidate has to be either a woman or URM. What is hard to understand here?
> I think you and I have different definitions of what would constitute "overrepresentation" of women in a workforce. (Again, keeping in mind that at many/most tech companies, the majority of jobs are not held by engineers.)
The "opportunistic hiring" was exclusively for engineers. Also what do you mean by "overrepresentation"? Representation relative to the workforce is what's relevant. In a field that's 80% women and 20% men, having 50/50 representation would mean that women are one quarter as likely to be hired as men. This would require vastly disadvantaging women relative to men.
You haven't said a) whether this hypothetical actually happened or b) how it was handled. That leaves all this in the realm of rage-bait hypotheticals.
> Representation relative to the workforce is what's relevant.
You're defining "workforce" narrowly to exclude people who do not currently work in the "field." This is unnecessarily narrow because e.g. there are people who work in tech who do not work at pure-play tech companies in Silicon Valley (this is where the policy pulls its stats). So setting a low bar and barely clearing it.
There's also likely the possibility that they are conflating "engineering" and "tech" roles. Female CS majors are indeed ~19% in the US, but "tech" jobs often include lots of people on product teams who are not engineers: QA, UX, etc. I don't know whether Dropbox counts a UX person as "tech" or not tech. I also don't have good stats on e.g. gender balance in UX, but I would wager that it is not the same as for CS grads.
Incidentally, Dropbox non-tech is only managing 43% women. This includes roles like marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc. where the excuse of the college pipeline is not operant. (For example -- women are the majority of accountants in the US.)
It absolutely did result in people being hired under discrimination. If I have 80 headcount for men and 20 headcount exclusive to women, and 90 people were hired total then 10 hires were made with the deliberate exclusion of men, explicitly on the basis of gender. Creating situations like these is fundamentally how "opportunistic hiring" would shift company demographics. The only way it doesn't have an effect is if nobody ever taps into the "opportunistic" pool. And yes, there were teams who hired above their allocated headcount. And yes it was pretty awkward for the women and URM hired to realize that aspect of how they landed at the company.
> There's also likely the possibility that they are conflating "engineering" and "tech" roles. Female CS majors are indeed ~19% in the US, but "tech" jobs often include lots of people on product teams who are not engineers: QA, UX, etc.
It's for engineers.
> You're defining "workforce" narrowly to exclude people who do not currently work in the "field." This is unnecessarily narrow because e.g. there are people who work in tech who do not work at pure-play tech companies in Silicon Valley (this is where the policy pulls its stats). So setting a low bar and barely clearing it.
The figure of 20% comes from the number of people who put "software developer" on their tax returns: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm it's not just counting the "pure play tech companies" whatever that's supposed to mean.
If you put up a job for a software developer, count the number of men and women who would potentially be interested in the job the former is going to be about 4 times bigger than the latter. If you have a different way of measuring this proportion, you can make that argument.
> Incidentally, Dropbox non-tech is only managing 43% women. This includes roles like marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc. where the excuse of the college pipeline is not operant. (For example -- women are the majority of accountants in the US.
HR is 70-75% women according to Google. So if a company is hiring 70-75 women in HR it's not evidence of any discrimination. Same with all the other roles you listed. We'd have to inspect each role one by one, and comparing Dropbox's representation. Furthermore, the discriminatory policies were specific to engineering. So I'm not sure why these other roles are relevant. Did Dropbox discriminate against female accountants? I have no idea. But how does discrimination against male coders somehow make up for potential discrimination in other fields?
You clearly have a lot of privileged background information you have not shared yet (for which I do not blame you). So it's going to be very difficult to pre-but some of this. For example, the BLS report you linked also shows women "computer system analysts" at close to 40%, and this is a job title often given to programmers. But you know that the appropriate compare is the row that's 19%, presumably because you have the inside background knowledge I mentioned.
In any case, the debate is stale because the folks who want to keep tech extremely male have won and these types of efforts are being relegated to history. So tech has gone back to broadly not considering qualified women and URM and this debate is mostly historical.
