[ubernostrum]

Many people, whenever it is suggested that something is wrong with hiring processes if they produce lopsided gender/race ratios, have a reflex arc which causes them to say something about how changing processes would be bad because you have to be sure to "hire the best". Or, about as commonly, that any change would "lower the bar".

There is no charitable interpretation of this reflex.

The only possible way to interpret it is as a naked statement that groups currently disproportionately underrepresented in the industry, or at specific companies, are made up of inherently inferior people. Otherwise, a process which "hires the best" would hire more of them, and hiring more of them would not "lower the bar".

[escape_goat]

With all due respect, that's not the only possible way to interpret it.

The intuition being expressed is as follows: Say you work at a factory, filling boxes of widgets. Widgets of varying quality stream past you, coming out of the widget stamper, such that you only have time to grab, on average, one widget out of every ten. Your job is to grab the best widgets you can spot, and put them into your bin. that's how the factory sorts widgets into different grades of quality. Further down the line, other failed startup founders toil away at other bins, snagging the ones you miss, from best to worst.

Most of the widgets are sort of a greyish mucky colour, but about one out of twelve will display a splash of original colour from the plastic that was recycled into widgets. You think nothing of it, but one day your pointy-haired manager comes and tells you that the "colourful" widgets are extra-popular and people are trading them. The company can sell boxes with at least 1/3 coloured widgets for ten times the price of regular widget boxes. Your job is now to ensure that at least one out of every three widgets that you grab is "colourful."

As a consequence, the average quality of widget in the boxes that you pack declines.

There are a lot of wrong and simplistic assumptions behind this understanding of "changing hiring processes." The knee-jerk assumption that doing that means implementing a naive quota system is not the least of these, but there are many others.

Furthermore, it is much more likely to be put forth by not-very-tactful people who have nothing to gain (and perhaps something to lose) extraneously, from greater workplace diversity; these are the people who are the most likely to both be sympathetic to, and express, views that seem at best borderline-racist.

This does not, however, mean that there is no charitable interpretation to the 'reflex' you are describing. It is not a cunning excuse to perpetuate *-ism in the workplace. It is what they believe to be a serious and valid objection to "changing hiring processes," as they understand it.

[ubernostrum]

So to try to provide an interpretation in which the previously-excluded group is not perceived as inferior, you... use an analogy in which the previously-excluded group is inferior (because the only way the "colorful" widgets wouldn't be making it in earlier is if they weren't "the best widgets", since the previous process was purely based on widget quality).

I do not think you are going to convince me that way.

[gnosek]

It comes down to proportions. Let's say 10% of widgets are awesome and the remaining 90% are not, regardless of colour. Per parent's post, let's assume 1/12 of the widgets are colourful. So now (rounded roughly):

  - 9,2% -- awesome, non-colourful
  - 0,8% -- awesome, colourful
  - 82% -- meh, non-colourful
  - 8% -- meh, colourful

If you're choosing freely, you'll (hopefully) end up with the awesome top 10% (1/12 of them being colourful). However, if you're forced to make 1/3 of your widgets colourful (and there's only 1/12 of them overall), you end up with:

  - 6,7% -- awesome, non-colourful
  - 0,8% -- awesome, colourful
  - 2,5% -- meh, colourful

The previously "excluded" (or rather, not promoted) group is exactly just as good as the rest, it's just not numerous enough -- if you want 1/3 of colourful widgets naturally (instead of the expected 1/12), their averages have to compete against the rest's best, and that's where the perceived inferiority comes from.

[escape_goat]

I don't have the motives that you seem to be attributing to me, so perhaps you should re-read my comment a bit more carefully if you want to guess at what I might or might not try to convince you of.

I think that it's important to note, however, that the analogy functions without relying on any notion that the "colourful" widgets are inherently inferior. It was this point of your own that I was responding to.