[fmitchell0]

Serious response: Framing it as an 'Or' implies the two are mutually exclusive. They are not. Diversity is fact. The world is diverse in a variety of ways (skin, eyes, experiences, gender, language, nationality, etc.). Inclusion is the action. Equity is the goal.

In the OKR framework, being able to measure your progress towards the goal is important. The real question is, which aspects of people who work for your company do you measure to ensure proper decisions around inclusion to achieve the equity goal?

It's easiest to measure by 'skin deep' factors b/c that is what human beings most easily make poor decisions on (fear, bias, stereotype, self-segregation, NIMBY-ism, etc). It is also required for companies to report to the US government on these factors because of our history of poor decisions (to put it lightly). It is therefore easiest to use that as a metric.

Serious question: If implied in your question that the goal should be equity in 'thought', how do you propose that is measured?

[Benjammer]

> If implied in your question that the goal should be equity in 'thought', how do you propose that is measured?

OP mentioned "ideas & experience," not "thought," which seems like an intentional framing as something unbounded and immeasurable.

Diversity of ideas could be measured by the average number of options/solutions that are seriously considered (and investigated/piloted) over the course of multiple projects for a team.

Diversity of experience seems somewhat obvious to me. But if you want clarity on this as well, the idea would be to value various types of experiences in the same way that companies value diverse outward traits like gender, sex, skin color, racial identity, etc. It's a balance. You could hire a person of each gender/skin color combination, but if they all grew up in the New England suburbs and all of them went to either MIT or Harvard, you are generally NOT going to have a diversity of experience, even though everyone _looks_ different. On the other end of the scale, you could hire one person from each type of school, big state school, small technical school, ivy league, "public ivy", liberal arts college, bootcamp graduate, etc. Hire people native to your country/culture, and people who come from a different part of the world. But if they are all white men, you are not going to realize as much benefit.

I think it's important to make an attempt to combine all of these concepts to come up with something that approaches the concept of "diversity of thought."

[fmitchell0]

I appreciate your response and respect your idea of trying to combine a lot of aspects to get the goal. I would challenge you on one point though:

> gender/skin color combination, but if they all grew up in the New England suburbs and all of them went to either MIT or Harvard, you are generally NOT going to have a diversity of experience, even though everyone _looks_ different

Unfortunately, there are many stories, points of evidence, and history that say people who look different, but come from the same place and education level DO have different experiences. Race and gender are exponentially powerful factors that can change a person's experience and outlook no matter how wealthy they are or what school they graduated from.

[Benjammer]

You are correct, I should not have used absolute, either-or terms there ("you are generally NOT ..."). I meant to say that you would not have _as much_ diversity of experience.

[wyattk]

Well stated. Until I saw it, I did not realize how many people went from rich (interpretations vary based on your experience, so "comfortable") suburbs and homes to "good" schools to "good" companies and professions. This is my experience, but that tends to be a common path and results in little diversity of "thought" (meaning ideas and experience).

It's become apparent to me that diversity is an ambiguous terms and its interpretation can vary a lot over many factors and time. I am not discounting any definition of it. When it comes up, it feels like people are on different pages with it. It could more prudent to state the definition when it is said.

[thoughtexplorer]

Precisely. That's what was embedded in the question. It doesn't matter what color people are. It's not meaningful diversity on its own.

What they seem to be doing is judging people based on surface traits, not the content of character. Their approach to diversity is a regression and not good for progress.

[Benjammer]

I would caution you on taking such an absolute, "zero sum" stance here.

>It doesn't matter what color people are.

I hope you realize the absurdity of this statement in isolation...

[ubernostrum]

What they seem to be doing is judging people based on surface traits

Do you believe that a poor black kid from Detroit is only different in "surface traits" as compared to a rich white kid from Orange County?

Or would you be willing to concede that there may be reliable correlations between some "surface traits" and diversity of life experiences and viewpoints? Demographic analysis of things like voting patterns in the US seems to suggest differences of such magnitude that I doubt you'd find another factor more strongly predictive.

[prepend]

“Equity is the goal.”

I don’t think this is a good goal. Unless you mean equity of opportunity. Equity of outcome is a ridiculously foolish goal in that outcomes will vary substantially and trying to have equity at the end on arbitrary human factors with easy to measure biases (gender, race, etc).

So the goal is not 45/45/10 for gender distribution for all roles. As that is obviously impossible as roles change and then people would need to be redistributed ad infinitum (eg, project managers have “perfect” gender diversity of 45/45/10 today but now the role is changes and split into product owner and product manager. Does this mean that the roles must include the same gender mix?)

[skedaddle]

Equity and equality are different. Equitable means fair, just, unprejudiced, considerate of all involved, etc. Equality means evenly balanced, identical on both sides, measurably indistinguishable.

I think we want an equitable outcome and that most people (regardless of any other opinion) would actually agree that equality of outcome is not necessary.

[prepend]

I appreciate you making the distinction, but I still don’t think outcomes are the place for equity. My gender example still stands using your clarified definition.

Is it fair that now a sub population has different gender distributions? Is it fair that 90% of programmers are male? Etc etc. I think it is counterproductive and too late to making meaningful changes based on outcomes.

Perhaps if you get to a high enough macro, but even then, I see logical weaknessss in opinions comparing income based on gender because outcome does not, necessarily, mean bias. It’s just easier to measure.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

Apologies for my ignorance but what does “45/45/10” mean?

[CamTin]

From context I'd guess he means 45% male, 45% female, 10% non-binary.

[albertgoeswoof]

Is that a real policy for anywhere? How / where do you find 10% non binary from? I don’t think there’s enough people to go around even if you hired every single non binary person in a given city.

[prepend]

I did mean 10% as non/binary, but my numbers were just notional. I should have been more clear.

I think, especially with improved technology, that 10% will be more common. Cynically thinking, it will be easier if there were some specific quota. Gender is probably the easiest protected class to change after religion, so it’s especially sensitive to outcome quotas.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

Oh, I see! I wasn’t familiar with this term.

So, this system is used in the United States, right?

[meowface]

The poster was suggesting a hypothetical situation where that is a policy. Very few places in the US have 50/50 gender quotas, and I doubt any have quotas which include non-binary people. I believe they were mocking the idea.

[prepend]

I was not mocking the idea, but giving an example where a reasonable quota led to bad outcomes. While I’m against outcome quotas, I’m firmly against discrimination (including mocking) of people based on who they are.

[dannyw]

Male, female, non-binary.

[mebreuer]

With a high enough sample size, shouldn't equity of outcome reflect equity of opportunity?

[naasking]

Not at all. For instance, if there are innate gender dispositions to certain subjects, then those fields will have a much larger proportion of that gender. There's evidence this may be the case in STEM for instance, which would explain the so-called gender equality paradox.

[prepend]

Perhaps, but it wouldn’t be useful for companies since even google’s 20k population wouldn’t be big enough to clear out all of the confounding variables.

[ed_balls]

from all websites I'd expect HN to NOT read OR as mutually exclusive

[rendall]

"Does the Chief Diversity Officer include diversity of ideas and experience? Or is it just skin deep like it sounds?"

Well, to nitpick even further, those propositions are logically mutually exclusive.

"Does the Chief Diversity Officer include diversity of ideas and experience [as well as surface traits]?" Or is it [only surface traits]"

Abstracted, could be "(p and q) OR (p and !q)" which is literally mutually exclusive.

No, I'm not usually so pedantic, I just thought it was interesting.

[PurpleBoxDragon]

I think that English OR is Logical XOR and logical OR is English "A or B or both" or "A and/or B".

Oddly enough, my use of or seems to violates the very rule it is used to describe.

[mrguyorama]

OR being mutually exclusive is pretty typical in the english language, for better or worse.

[fmitchell0]

I see what you did there. Well done.

[PavlovsCat]

To the degree something is deep, it is not shallow, and vice versa. That something is easy to measure does not per se make it less or more shallow.