I don't care either way since I'm not concerned but I can shake how bizarre and grotesque the switch to and from DEI were. The very recent example of Zuckerberg going full "masculine energy has been neutered by feminine energy" like he is some kind of Andrew Tate influencer is quite unbelievable for the CEO of a 600 billion dollars company
The rapid switch is indicative of widespread preference falsification followed by a preference cascade. Basically, people where sick of DEI for a long time but stayed quiet about it because they were afraid of reprisal for speaking out and didn't know they had numbers on their side because everybody else was staying quiet about it too. This is a condition which can last for decades, but once the dam breaks it breaks fast.
Eh, I’d argue most people don’t think or care about DEI or go on social media to post weird rants. Most people have better things to do. Social media and the Web can amplify opinions that really aren’t that widespread in reality.
People care insofar as their lives are made to intersect with it.
Zuckerberg in particular most likely cares and isn't being performative when he speaks out against it. I'm surprised that people are surprised he has. The man likes to larp as a bronze age hunter, killing goats with spears in his backyard. He trains in combat sports and wants to have a celebrity boxing match with Elon Musk. He's the father of half-asian children, who are classified as "negative diversity" by DEI initiatives. The man fits the profile for somebody who hates DEI, but until recently he wasn't speaking out against it. If he, despite his enormous privilege, felt cowed into silence by DEI, that speaks to the strength of the social forces driving the preference falsification.
Pale and male is stale. Asians are white and Jews are white post October 7.
The foundation is here —"Apple's Black Diversity Chief Steps Down After Saying White Men Are Diverse, Will Be Replaced By A White Woman" I believe via BET
The vast majority of people aren’t affected by DEI just as they weren’t when it came to CRT. No one wakes up and worries how DEI will impact their day. DEI was used as a wedge issue on the campaign trail and amplified on social media (and right wing infotainment) for the purpose of having a boogeyman to attack.
It was a gesture for preening on the social networks, and now that the winds have changed, they will be trying to buy attention and approval on social networks through something else.
It is also a good indication that DEI doesn't really make money. If DEI was improving the bottom line measurably, as its proponents promise, capitalists would be loath to scrap it entirely. Possibly they would change the name of the program or try to cover it up somehow, but they would keep it, and the people involved, around.
This is what interested me for a long time. The media industry in particular demonstrates very well that DEI content is not only unprofitable; it is net negative to the companies that produce it. The state of the movie industry is such that we have movies that have positive journalist reviews and negative user reviews, yet nobody is watching these movies, and each movie production costs them hundreds of millions. This should have a giant impact on a company that produces such content, yet the company keeps going on producing something that is net negative to it. Obviously, this looks like a push from investors. But why aren't investors interested in seeing more profits?
I understand why CEOs, boards etc. engage in virtue signaling: once you are rich enough, status becomes more important than extra money, and this is a cheap way how to buy status and get invited to the right parties, where you may even be allowed to recite your own land acknowledgment from a podium.
But investors mostly don't care about status, and quite a lot of investors likely come from countries where DEI was never popular to begin with (Saudi Arabia etc.) I would expect them to push against it.
Perhaps the investors felt that DEI programs would produce benefits in the long run? For all the accusations of Wall Street short-termism, the stock market was very patient with Amazon during its reinvest-all-profit years and the Saudis were very patient with Masayoshi Son's Vision Fund adventures.
> It is also a good indication that DEI doesn't really make money
Can't argue with that, but wanted to point out that this (ostensibly at least) wasn't the point. The point of these types of schemes was always purported to be for some kind of social justice.
>If DEI was improving the bottom line measurably, as its proponents promise, capitalists would be loath to scrap it entirely.
This may be true, but if you are going to construct such a sentence you might want to address the fact that the title of this thread is stating that one of the biggest capitalist companies in the world is trying to do just that. The elephant in the room and all that.
I understand his words and he has a bit of a point in his context. I question his motives, everything he says and the obvious army of “bros” who are just as bad and juvenile as the blue haired woke ones. It’s sad to see most adult dynamics it’s just high school with money and fatter.
Yeah, I didn’t find that part of the conversation with zuck and Rogan to be incorrect.
Essentially I think he was discussing the generalization that men are biased towards action than women.
There are differences between men and women, each having unique strengths and weaknesses, and it’s refreshing that we can be honest about that fact again.
DEI was so good and righteous idea that it shifted most of the western world to the right more than dozens of islamist terrorist attacks in previous decades.
And ofc. all US corporations would follow this cultural change or they’ll risk antitrust/tax/law investigations from Trump and all EU government that’ll be elected in next few years.
Didn't the exact same companies introduced the exact same changes they now revert not out of firm belief but to demonstrate support? If someone adapts to the environment out of self-preservation then they were never supportive of any cause.
I wish people would stop humanizing big companies.
Inflation caused by the pandemic era policies upturned governments more that any acronym. The U.K. went the opposite of right, for instance. And Orban in Hungary might finally get the boot this year because of economic doldrums.
UK also is moving to the right reform + conservatives are pooling at around 45-60% atm. Labor is only in power cause reform and conservatives split votes
Only place that was in reverse of this trends was Poland in 2022 which shit to the center-right from “populist right” and possibly Hungary but we don’t know yet as Orban was losing pools for like 10 years but never lost election.
If economy is good people won’t care about politics when economy is bad folks start getting political and we see it in whole west France, Germany and Canada are without government and most folks in this countries are shifting more and more right.
The UK stayed basically the same and I think that was due to the fact that the previous government was already the centre-right wing party–and although they tried to move further right–the fact that they had done such a terrible job in government basically meant their goose was cooked no matter how many punitive policies they tried to enact or wars on wokeness they prosecuted.
The right-wing party of the traditional two (the tories) was absolutely slaughtered in the election and they've now elected as the party leader (although not without some controversy–apparently tactical voting gone wrong) a fairly standard right-wing populist in Badenoch.
There is also the increasingly substantial spectre of the far-right, with race riots taking place over summer and Musk's pet favourite Reform party gaining ground.
It seems very possible to me right now that at the next general election the UK will swing seriously to the right. If this does happen it will the fault of Labour as far as I'm concerned. Of course that's still a long way away and we can always live in hope.
Trump's administration proved ineffective last time and there's little reason to think it will be different this time. If he tries to sabotage companies for not abandoning DEI initiatives he'll be bogged down in the courts, it will take more than four years to resolve any of that and by then it will be moot anyway.
Insofar as companies are changing now it's because they no longer feel political pressure to put on performative displays to satisfy the sort of activist government regulators that were typical in the Obama and Biden governments. Companies like Apple which are true DEI believers and not merely bending to political pressure will keep their programs dispute Trump and Trump won't be able to much of anything about that.
>DEI was so good and righteous idea that it shifted most of the western world to the right more than dozens of islamist terrorist attacks in previous decades.
If by "shifting right" you mean people in the US voted for Trump because of DEI, the numbers don't really add up. Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes in 2020. Trump beat Harris by half that number in 2024. More than that, the Republicans ran the same anti-woke campaign in 2022 and yet the Dems still gained senate and governor seats then. It's not like DEI was any better in 2022 for that narrative to make sense.
There was no major cultural shift. Trump won because of the economy not DEI. Hell, I would wager half the democrats who worked in STEM fields thought DEI was counterproductive from the beginning and they still didn't vote for Trump because of it (e.g., pg). It's been debated around here since the days of that google engineer getting fired for his anti non-merit hiring criteria memo and long before that.
In AOC's district, the same people voted for AOC and Trump. People said "fuck this, I gotta put bread on the table. something's gotta change."
Can you share all the sources linking DEI policies to the right-wing shift? Because to me it looks more like a scapegoat post-factum where right-wingers tied themselves to the idea of DEI to fan the flames rather than it being a causal point. It's just another selling point for the hatred-fueled base of right-wingers, not too different from "immigrants are taking your jobs" or "women in the workforce are the cause of unaffordable housing/less well paid jobs", etc.
It's just a mirage to manipulate dissatisfied people, classic populist move.
GP has no obligation to do a literature search for you. This is a discussion site, not a scientific journal, so it is okay to have opinions based on other sources, such as anecdotes from personal life, first principles, or common sense/intuition.
Speaking of which, I see the same anecdotes that DEI policies pushed people to the right.
It's absolutely okay if it's framed that way in their original comment, which it wasn't and deserves push back unless they can sustain their argument. If it started with "in my opinion", "in my view" instead of a baseless factual statement.
If not framed in that way then I will ask for sourcing the bullshit :)
> Speaking of which, I see the same anecdotes that DEI policies pushed people to the right.
Yeah, that's why it's called "reactionaries", I'm sad you live among those people though.
It's okay to ask of course. My statement was that the ask does not have to be reciprocated.
Personally, unless there's specific claims about data proving something, I usually assume claims on discussion sites to be somewhat informed personal opinions, even if they are worded more strongly than this. I find this to be true more often than not. But I may be more skeptical than your average person regarding the scientific rigor in social sciences, as well as the ability of people to cherry pick specific papers that suit their claim, and therefore place less weight on literature citations versus experiences that I see in my daily life.
The thing about DEI is that people seem to think it’s about giving unjust benefits to some specific groups they don’t like, and ignore the fact that it also benefits groups they do like.
I don’t think right-wingers have a problem with being more inclusive of veterans or people with disabilities, for example. But progress made for those groups is the baby that now gets thrown out with the DEI bathwater.
enforced top-down from leaders and decision makers by the "commitment to diversity" and hiring of unqualified people based on diversity representation, not merit.
the most recent example is Kamala Harris: she had the worst primary performance during 2020, but still was selected as VP by Biden and was nominated without primaries again in 2024.
Her electoral results speak for DEI in general, when hiring decision is done by picking the most diverse candidate based on skin-level shallow criteria instead of fair competition (primaries)
We’re talking about corporations, not political parties.
If this enforcement to hire unqualified people is happening, surely there’s lots of evidence? Internal emails and messages regularly get released as part of lawsuits. There must be lots of cases where middle managers at Apple are complaining that they’re being forced to hire an unqualified person because of a top-down edict, as you say.
just look at the LA FD: what are the chances that 3 top leaders in FD are lesbian women?
Given the fact that the rest of the fire dept are white males, the chances of this happening at random are minuscule. This is the proof that people who have DEI factors are promoted to the top leadership, with the predictable poor outcomes
Not OP, but that point has nothing to do with them being lesbians or females. That label distracts from the actual criticism and bias that sadly played a part.
It could just as well have been "obese native americans with amputations" or "foreign born white dudes with Crohn's disease" or "pansexual blue-haired dance majors" or "three sons of Mayor Dalton that approves the fire department's budget". If that property ticks the boxes, and they occur here at a way-higher proportion than the overall population then bingo - you know you've had bias and reverse discrimination for the sake of representation, rather than merit alone. The alternative is just a really really unlikely coincidence.
> The alternative is just a really really unlikely coincidence.
is untrue.
In my real world experience of several decade, in multiple countries, (AU, UK, US at the very least) it is commonplace for comany boards and public service departments to have multiple members with common traits, be that schools, debate clubs, sexual orientation, vacation habits, former employers, etc.
The networking effects that draw birds of feather together are clearly apparent once you actively look for them. Having several lesbians in senior management of a large organisation isn't particularly noteworthy and it doesn't follow that they would be bad at their job simply because they are lesbians.
YCombinator is littered with examples of socially incestuous startups ..
You’re completely discounting networks, yet most of what people achieve comes through them.
Nobel physics prize winners in the 20th century were very often Jewish. And that’s neither evidence of bias for them in the award process, nor evidence of some kind of genetic superiority. The Jewish researchers just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right networks and mentors.
Apply the same logic to the lesbian firefighters. Their leadership positions probably don’t have anything to do with either their genetics or any bias, but their personal qualities and their networks. Being a conspicuous “outsider” in the system may have helped them develop relationships and leadership skills.
Exactly. If the special non-merit criteria were instead "likes trains" or "has a monobrow" it would have the same effect. Not because those traits are negatively correlated with being good at the job, but simply because those traits are unaligned with the job, so statistically its unlikely for the best candidate to just coincidentally happen to also have those special traits.
Some of us like our jobs too much to risk leaking these things from resourceful companies that can ruin away our lives in an instant.
Might be going too far to say “unqualified”, but I have already seen “less qualified” changed to “meets the minimum requirements” specifically changed to push through some hires.
I am not taking a stance, the hired still worked great, but decisions were made, calls were exchanged, interview notes were modified, and I don't think you can defend this position honestly as of ~2020 Spring.
There was a good 3 years where it was not about getting “the best”, but specifically for asking us to lower out bars to “get enough”, and letting HR take it from there.
Was your previous hiring process actually getting you “the best”?
In that case you’re much better at hiring than any corporation I’ve ever seen. I was at Facebook for several years, and the hiring process was 90% noise where everyone pretended very hard that it’s signal.
Definitely not! They let me in, after all, and I know where I’d fit in. Churn used to be high enough I believe they would expect to grind you out if you couldn’t do the work. It was very cruel.
I’d say the SNR was higher than -19dB, though (assuming we are using Volts on this shocking topic). You can’t target the best if you are not open to looking for them but instead start looking for people to make them your best. I think that this fit the overall company strategy pivot from one that encouraged “personal excellence by dealing with excellent people”, to one that pushed “managerial precision through finding acceptable cogs”. Im paraphrasing the exact phrase, but I think thats a fair interpretation.
These are not bad things, they are just the winds of change based on the lungs of whoever is in charge to think whats best for the company. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it blows, sometimes it goes nowhere. The new approached allowed for different people to get lucky, different people to get ahead, and different people to start filling the hallways. Thats gotta be worth something, somewhere. People willing to try at this level deserve a chance, and it’s not my money, so why not.
What changed for me was that previously they could make a claim and cloak the results in facts (maybe because I believed it), but now they were looking to that tweak the claim so that it could be one where you could cloak the facts with results (and were asking me to do my part).
Part of this shift was warranted, part of it was appeasement, all if it felt like you’d just been served a bundled cable TV plan.
>The thing about DEI is that people seem to think it’s about giving unjust benefits to some specific groups they don’t like
Which people think that? You're creating your own narrative and then generalizing it to give it legitimacy without any sources or references: "people think that...".
Also, for the sake of the argument, let's assume you're right and a majority of people think like that then that becomes the reality even if you don't like it as that's how democracy works.
If enough people think like that then you as a company have to conform to the market or go bust, you can't change consumers' thoughts and views even though they sure do try a lot.
I don't quite understand what the conservatives think DEI actually is, because as far as I can tell three women being in leadership positions in the LA fire department is "DEI". It just seems like the new "woke" or "political correctness", and just as vague.
DEI is focusing on the identity of the person instead of the abilities/programs/skills/work related arguments. When the LAFD communicates that the LGBT status of the 3 heads of the department they signals it's the reason they got hired to this position. if you add absurd communication like saying it's better to be rescued by someone that looks like you or that the first thing you'll say to someone you want to rescue is "it is you fault" and let's be honest outright lies by conservative, you have the recipe for a catastrophic drama as soon a the conditions are here
DEI is focused on the identify insofar as that identity has been the basis of discrimination preventing equality on the basis of abilities, skills, etc.
> they signals it's the reason they got hired to this position
That does not follow. When an organization communicates that Obama was the first US president born in Hawaii, that does not signal that he was elected because he was from Hawaii.
The local paper had a short article last year that for the first time the entire crew of three people on a truck were women. The article added that the scheduling was happenstance, and not deliberately done.
A couple of years ago, Teri Eidson and her daughter, Nicole McAllister made the news because they were the first mother-daughter team to co-pilot an international flight.
Neither of these should be interpreted to mean that those women were hired specifically to get that reported result.
Sergei Volkov was the first second-generation cosmonaut, that is, his father was the cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov.
When that made the news, did it also signal that the son got the position not due to abilities, skills, etc., but because of his father?
And so on, and so on, and so on.
It also does not follow because you have to know if there are complicating factors.
For example, if other cities discriminate against LGBT department heads while LA does not, then the population of qualified potential department heads would be higher for LA than other cities.
Each presents different ways to make selection and each has intrinsic biases which are in tension with one another. Neither one can be the end all be all solution because each leads to unhealthy endpoints if carried on for long enough. I suspect Sergei Volkov did in fact benefit from nepotism but maybe that's not a bad thing on its own?
If discrimination is on that triangle, where do you place efforts to counter discrimination?
You suspect because it fits with your worldview, or you suspect because of your knowledge of the cosmonaut program, and their willingness to have less-than-the-best in what is otherwise a very competitive field?
Do you consider slavery, the Trail of Tears, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the restrictions on women from serving in combat or some juries as discrimination?
In many states, it is okay to discriminate based on political views. Here's an example of a socialist working at Goodwill who was fired for being a socialist - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/07/can-your-boss-fi... with the quote: “The law is pretty clear that a private employer can fire someone based on their political speech even when that political speech does not affect the terms and conditions of employment.”
Is that form of discrimination either DEI or nepotism?
Some US veterans get preferential employment in the Postal Service.
Is that form of discrimination DEI or nepotism?
The Freedmen's Bureau assisted only former slaves. Was that discrimination? Was it DEI?
Japanese-Americans who were interned or their heirs received payment as reparations. Was that discrimination? Was it DEI?
Feel like we are talking past each other honestly. I don't think its worthwhile to label something discrimination without a clear motive behind it.
Nepotism == My tribe > other tribe
DEI == Diversity > mono-culture
Meritocracy == job skills > political skills
Note there is no prescribed method how you balance those forces for "peak results" because there is no generic "peak result". Maybe I should have stated Meritocracy is also a form of discrimination but one where its "common-sense" standard. Restrictions on foreign influence in war time would be meritocracy and nepotism at the expense of DEI for example. Can you see any use in the above definitions or would you add another point to the tension graph? Or is there no use in considering these in tension with one another?
You asked "What kind of discrimination isn't covered by motives of nepotism or DEI?"
One of my examples was how women couldn't be in combat roles until recently.
Is that 'Nepotism'? No, not unless you have a very strange definition of "tribe" such that men and women are in different tribes.
Is that 'DEI'? No, not unless you have a very strange definition of culture such that men and women are in different cultures.
In both of those strange definitions, where do you stop? How does the tribe of "American" overlap with the tribe of "woman" overlap with the tribe of "State U. graduate" overlap with the culture of "Southern" overlap with the culture of "menopausal" overlap with the culture of "home owner", and so on.
And to be clear, discrimination is not always bad. We have bona fide occupational qualifications, like how a church can discriminate on the basis of religion, and a strip club is not required to accept male strippers. We have age restrictions, like how the president must be at least 35 years old. We can fire people with excessively foul body order, even if they have the right job skills.
So when you ask "What kind of discrimination isn't covered by motives of nepotism or DEI?", the range is quite large.
These are far from the actual definitions of those words, to the point were I have trouble making sense of it.
Like, the history of racism in the Americas recognizes a lot of different cultures, and even puts a hierarchy to them, typically with Blacks and Native Americans at the bottom, along with terms like mestizo and quadroon to describe different combinations of intermixing. A lighter-skinned Black slave is more likely to work in the house, while a darker-skinned one works the fields. A "swarthy" Italian might be white according to the law, but of lower social standing than other whites.
Let's suppose I had a mestiza mistress, a mulatto manservant, a dozen black fieldworkers, and a Chinese wash woman, and a white wife, all under a white supremacist patriarchy.
Sounds pretty diverse, yes? It certainly is not mono-culture. Does that diversity make it part of DEI?
"Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability."
we can see that the mistress, wife, etc. are not able to engage in full participation like I am.
I therefore conclude that DEI is not simply the idea that 'diversity > mono-culture'.
Is there any definition you would use for "my tribe == other tribe"?
Many people on the left complain about the “old boys club” where “white men” hire each other and control all the power without merit for their authority, and DEI seems to be a way to smash the patriarchal old boys club and enforce the new regime where women, and minorities are in control.
Shouldn’t the people be wary of any type of authoritarian cabal?
Speaking as part of a video that aired during a commercial break for the FOX show 9-1-1 about firefighter capabilities, Larson said, "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place"
DEI means, thinking about your hiring practices and looking hard at yourself if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population.
DEI can be implemented badly, but that doesn’t mean that DEI is bad
> if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population.
why it should be in proportion? This argument is flawed as it ignores that not everyone in general population has the same abilities.
You can look at the roster of any top performing NBA team and tell me if their players population represents general population.
Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population.
In fact the only case when both population would be equal, is if hiring decisions are based on random chance
> Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population.
This is an assumption, not a fact. Companies hire less-qualified candidates all the time through nepotism.
I have a mixed opinion on this. There are cases when nepotism fires back via poor job performance and quickly self-corrects itself.
But there are cases when nepotism is a job requirement, as in being connected to a powerful network is job description. You can find it in investment banking, big law, VC, sales when people are hired because they know the right people and can get the right results through back-channels/established network.
You cannot make the same argument however in favor of hiring lesbians, unless being a lesbian is a job requirement
> DEI can be implemented badly, but that doesn’t mean that DEI is bad
I really doubt that DEI per your definition above can be implemented for a general benefit. Fundamentally you need to show that not hiring the best candidate is best. This is typically squared by saying that group dynamics and output improve with diverse viewpoints, which I actually agree with within limits (the limit being that if nobody agrees nothing gets done). But here we made a sleight and equated diversity based on innate properties to diversity of viewpoints, which are different things and it’s actually rather stereotypical to equate them.
we can go from the other side. If you want to hire the best, you need to stop looking at skin-level shallow factors and stop hiring decisions based on skin/race/sexual identity/ethnicity.
Just fair competition and pick the best candidate you think will do the job best. If you see the population is unbalanced (too many males or whites for example) => you go to the root of the problem and address the underlying root cause, not try to cover up the discrepancy by reverse discrimination at the end of the hiring pipeline.
There are a lot of societal problems in America and under-represented minorities absolutely have it worse than the generally well-off white population. But this is the argument to go and fix the root cause: income inequality, education inequality, lack of jobs, housing, etc.
The moment America decides to improve poor people's lives, not just promote and hire rich people with the "right" diversity traits, is when the whole country will improve in terms of outcomes
Hiring will always have a subjective aspect to it, which is just the nature it. And I do agree that techniques like being conscious of bias and trying to interrupt it are useful.
But yes, I do have an answer, which is that excluding factors that do not relate at all to job responsibilities is strictly better than including those, even if the result is still subjective.
Can I mathematically disprove that if I take the Lagrangian of the standard model and combine it with with Einstein's field equations, and chase down emergent complexity over many levels, that the properties that DEI selects for are actually what makes a great SDE (in my world)? No I cannot. But we're getting silly here.
I will settle for the most salient factors if that sounds more precise to you. I will interpret that as a large number of sigmas, but we don't have to agree on the exact number of sigmas here!
No, I'm making a claim that a sloppy argument was made.
You are focusing on factors that you consider obvious, which is exactly my point, using your subjective judgement doesn't give you a framework that isn't subjective.
Everything involving human judgement will be subjective, yet we still can distinguish between good and bad decisions and discuss tradeoffs about being less wrong while being subjective
I don't think it's a straw man. No one has actually solved hiring, "best" isn't defined.
Like people are freaking out about any sort of DEI factor even getting considered and then actually hiring based on how Phil vibes with the candidate. Good stuff.
> Efforts to strengthen diversity in nursing have not targeted race alone. That is because the nursing profession also lacks gender diversity, with the vast majority of nurses (over 87%) being female (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). In addition, the racial demographics of faculty reflect a body of academicians who are 82% White, 9% Black/African American, 3.4% Hispanic/Latino, 2.9% Asian, and 93% female (NLN, 2021). Ideally, the nursing workforce should closely align with the racial, ethnic, and gender makeup of the U.S. population.
> DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males
Women are perfectly capable of working in firefighting, the military or police. I've personally seen a female police officer of barely 1.60m throw a drunk 2m Russian dude on a rampage in a bar fight onto the ground and tie him up alone, about a solid third of the volunteer force in my THW unit are women, a good friend of mine is a trained volunteer firefighter at about the same height as the police officer, and the IDF has women in active fighting roles since the 70s, and fully equal to males since 2000 - and look where the IDF is, they are without question the top dog in the MENA region, despite all the cries about women threatening the fighting capability.
"DEI" means opening up the gates for everyone on actual merit. For women, it can sometimes mean having to rely more on skill than on brute strength (as in my first example), but in the end it doesn't matter much.
I’m not sure you read this part of the comment you’re replying to:
> "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place"
You’re making points that women can be physically strong. Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong.
> Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong.
Yeah and that's where the last sentence with the skill I wrote comes into play. Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back, and anyone too heavy for that will also be too heavy for most male firefighters (bodybuilders are rare, especially in volunteer corps most people will be of average strength and body stature). That's also one part of why firefighters always go in pairs (besides providing backup for personal safety) - you never know who and what you come across.
Besides: Carrying a person in front of oneself is a movie cliche about firefighters, it's extremely rare to see it in practice and banned outside of actual life-and-death emergencies because it's dangerous as fuck - trip over a hose or debris and suddenly you're falling with the full weight of you and your gear onto the already injured person, possibly injuring yourself in the process. Not nice.
The case of the two policewomen which ran away from a shooting and left their male colleagues to fend for themselves caused quite a stir in Germany. During the trial they said they were deadly afraid and didn’t see how many shooters there were and from where the shots were coming.
Got in their car and left.
I tried to find an equivalent male example, but every newspaper was writing about this particular case.
Thanks for the link. It looks like in your and the sibling poster’s link the police didn’t protect the public because of cowardice and/or incompetence.
In the case I link, the trial was about abandoning their fellow policemen in danger, not the public.
They probably view things differently when they themselves are affected.
Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men.
Which makes efforts to recruit as many women into firefighting as possible a sad ideological travesty, and people are perfectly right calling it out. There is a difference between emancipation and group delusion. There are meaningful physical differences between the sexes, and everyone knows that, even people who try to engage in sophistry when it comes to this topic.
BTW the IDF, which conscripts women out of necessity, tries to keep them away from the most dangerous combat roles, and employs them mostly in support roles. Your description is very misleading. The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies. IIRC only about 1 in 20 of the "enemy-facing" IDF soldiers like helicopter pilots are female.
> Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men.
My point is the need for this ability is next to zero because it is extremely dangerous, and yet women are judged by that on their inability to be a firefighter at all? That's bullshit, pardon my French.
> The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies.
A lot of the men that got taken hostage or got found dead on Oct 7 were raped as well. And yes, IDF tries to dissuade women from enemy-facing action, but if a woman decides she accepts this risk, she can go for any role she wants.
My point is the need for this ability is next to zero because it is extremely dangerous
That is an absolute non-sequitur. Yes, it is dangerous to carry a person out of a fire. But it is still an expected, though infrequent occurrence during duties of a firefighter. By deliberately striking this capability from list of demands, you are also deliberately restricting the total life-saving capabilities of the firefighting crew, all for checking some ideological boxes.
I am absolutely against this and I want firefighters in my city to be physically capable of doing such tasks. It may happen that my life or life of my loved ones is actually at stake, and such capability will make a difference.
On the other hand, I couldn't care less about diversity checkboxes. The idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more women is as weird to me as the idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more Taylor Swift fans.
> On the other hand, I couldn't care less about diversity checkboxes. The idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more women is as weird to me as the idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more Taylor Swift fans.
Fact is, volunteer corps are already struggling with obtaining and retaining volunteers. Excluding women excludes 50% of the potential force.
So, an overall unattractive activity, and for some reason, we need more women stuck there?
If volunteer firefighting is a people repellent now, the "repellent" part needs to change, unless the "everybody needs to be equally miserable" hairshirt version of equity applies.
Nobody thinks women being in leadership in the fire department is DEI. Three lesbians being leaders at the same time though (as happened a few years ago) given the small portion of lesbian firefighters seems indicative of bias.
And by this same logic, the Nobel Committee for Physics has an obvious historical bias towards Jews, right? What else could explain 37 Jewish physics Nobel winners in the 20th century?
People can simply be good at something. Maybe lesbian firefighters actually work very hard to overcome the expectations against them.
Nobel prizes are strongly correlated to the educational institution (research school, supervising PI) where research is done. The best predictor of winning nobel prize is whether your academic supervisor/lead have won Nobel prize previously and you are continuing his line of nobel winning research.
The connection of Nobel prize to race/ethnicity, as well as a claim that jews are supposedly smarter than everybody else (to the extent of dominating nobel nominations) is incredibly racist and is false.
Its basically the same ubermensch/untermensch argument made by adolf hitler in Mein Kampf about "superior Aryan race" but this time applied to jews as ubermensch.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3190562/
Exactly! Getting the prize had nothing to do with them being Jewish, or that such bias was in the process. They were simply excellent researchers in the right place at the right time.
And similarly we have no evidence that lesbian firefighters who gain leadership positions got there through either genetic predisposition or bias. Maybe they just had the right attitude and the right mentors, like those researchers.
>And by this same logic, the Nobel Committee for Physics has an obvious historical bias towards Jews, right?
No, because Ashkenazi Jews have been demonstrated to perform significantly better on IQ tests on average, and performance on IQ tests is associated with various intellectual outcomes like winning the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, lesbians haven't been demonstrated to perform better on any kind of metrics associated with success at firefighting, and the greater difficulty women face gaining muscle mass puts them at a disadvantage.
Rabbinal Judaism has existed for nearly 2000 years, and prizes debate and logical examination.
Jewish people, particularly those that left the Middle East during diaspora, tend to have high IQ when measured, and tend not to marry outside their group. The brain is not special and different groups people differ in that organ the same way different groups differ in their muscles and blood.
Finally and quite sadly many Jewish people have been targeted viciously by individuals and governments and invading systematic execution requires a certain degree of wits.
It's whatever each company makes of it, which is why definitions vary.
It can range from explicit efforts to actively reach out to candidates from schools with students predominantly from historically-disadvantaged groups, to outright "no hiring of white men this quarter" (which is one of the more egregious documented cases, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...).
What I think most conservatives think it is: When choosing between a more qualified white cis man and a less qualified "diverse" candidate, some companies will pick the latter specifically due to DEI policies. I am very sure this is actually happening (see also e.g. the above source).
Turns out people don't like being explicitly discriminated against, even if they're from a majority group.
