[kache_]

This ends up hurting females and L/G/B/T people in our industry because people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit.

To bring it back to the article, imagine being a black harvard graduate. People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placement in that university.

[opportune]

This is one of the things about affirmative action that bothers me the most. If it's known that people in X subset of students are held to lower standards, then in a Bayesian sense it hurts the people in X subset who would have got in if held to the same standards.

Harvard is notorious for glade inflation, but at other institutions the same phenomenon can hurt people's ability to complete harder degrees. I remember reading a paper claiming that affirmative action resulted in lower minority graduation rates/higher transfer rates in STEM because it put people in academic environments that they weren't prepared for; they could have likely had more success completing a STEM degree if they had attended an institution where they fit more of a median student academic profile

[filoleg]

>People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placement in that university.

Sure, but that one is difficult to quantify and express in numbers, while the former is very easy, so let's just slap the sticker "solved" on this one and go along, am i right? /s

[adolph]

In the South, even at Holy Cross, Thomas thought that he could force his way into the meritocracy by the power of his intelligence and will. At Yale, his accomplishments felt divested of their authorship. “As much as it had stung to be told I’d done well in [high school] despite my race,” he later wrote, “it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-rad...

[mywittyname]

> people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit.

Said people have those perceptions regardless.

[wendyshu]

Is there a study on this?