| I'm sorry that this is a controversial topic, but I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable about things going on at my current and previous workplaces and I don't know where to turn for thoughts and advice. It's a subject that's hard to discuss with anyone for fear of being labelled, but I'm feeling increasingly stressed out and concerned about how far things have gone at times. I work in software, and in the last 10 years or so the businesses I have worked for have been very keen to have more women and people from ethnic minorities in their engineering team. Over the last couple of years I've sensed a real change, where any concern about the ethics of discriminating based on gender or ethnicity have gone completely out of the window. Candidates that are doing well are literally being ejected from the hiring process because they don't help diversity stats. On more than one occasion I've seen a hiring manager with open roles tell a recruiter to not bother them with any applications from white males. I really enjoy working with a diverse range of people. I've sensed a mono-culture sometimes in technical groups, often driven by a strict hiring process that only lets in people that think in a very specific way. I prefer to interact with all different kinds of people, although I admit that I'm not convinced that 'different kinds' has to be about race and gender (but it is a part of the picture). Over the last decade I think there has often been an unspoken preference towards candidates that improve diversity, and I don't have a problem with this. It's always hard to find the right balance, to recognise bias and encourage and allow those applications to prosper. The nuance has gone in recent years, and it has become common for interviewers to think nothing of directly and openly identifying "white male" as a negative trait when discussing a candidate after an interview. I feel like we need a bit of a cultural reset, to re-establish the basic principal that truly discriminating against any candidate on the basis of race or gender is wrong. To those that say, "Hey, it's just time for white males to find out what it has been like for women and ethnic minorities", I'm afraid this line of reasoning, that two wrongs make a right, doesn't hold water for me at all. It's unjust to discriminate against a young graduate today, and have them pay the price for bygone injustice. I'm concerned that at some point I will inevitably have to either challenge something, and be labelled a bigot or misogynist, or live an increasingly bizarre existence with things happening around me that I consider to be clearly wrong. So what's your experience? Are you comfortable with this phenomenon and is it a shift you remotely recognise? Should I just stop worrying and embrace this? Have folks that work in other industries seen a similar change? |
At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days.
Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect.
Candidate B: Had never worked in the industry, had only a handful of qualifications, barely responsive. Seemed indifferent to getting the job. Additionally, not too fluent in English, to the point where it was more than a little difficult to communicate.
Candidate A was a white man, Candidate B was a recent immigrant and a woman. The immediate supervisor for the position -- a woman -- wanted Candidate A, as did most others. However, the person running the show said, out loud I might add, that our group already had "too many pale males." I would like to repeat that: too many pale males. A significant glance was then cast at me and the guy in the wheelchair on the hiring committee, both being not-particularly-dark men. Presumably by "virtue" of our disabilities we would automatically be down for the Diversity Squad.
Candidate B was hired and turned out exactly as she was in the interview: disinterested in doing the job, lacking even some bare understanding of how to accomplish many things, always trying to find ways to do her grad school homework while on the job and pushing off her duties on someone else, rather than trying to learn her tasks. Her poor English was a significant barrier. She remained a leaden weight until she went off to be someone else's problem. She wasn't a drag due to her skin color or sex, but she was hired because of those things.
This was over ten years ago, in academia. A friend who worked for pharmacy chain was bluntly told that as a white male, he was not going to get a manager job, no matter how long he held on. Something something equity.
I am not even a little comfortable with it, I know it is there. Frankly, now it is part of the calculus -- if I see a white man in a position, he probably had to work pretty hard to earn it. Anyone else? Welllllll ... they might have been diversitied into the position. And so the cycle continues!