Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by random314 1310 days ago
Sounds like a crap survey.

Literally, every company has been training staff to not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, national origin etc because it would run afoul of Civil rights law.

Is this a new bogeyman like the evil Jews who were conniving against the majority Germans in the 1920s as per Nazi propaganda.

3 comments

Supposedly, it's all about don't discriminate. In practice, however, discrimination is measured by diversity. The safe path is to choose the diversity hire. It's pretty hard to get in trouble for not hiring the white male.
> however, discrimination is measured by diversity

No law measures discrimination by diversity. However, the law punishes actual discrimination by race and gender. This however does not ameliorate the victim complex/ mentality that a nations most powerful group experiences. Statistically speaking, in American society, this group is typically the white Christian male.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-the-mi...

The law punishes "actual" discrimination--but determines discrimination by disparate results, not by observing actual discrimination. Thus the de-facto result is you're punished for not meeting quotas.
> In practice, however, discrimination is measured by diversity.

How?

Doesn't make much sense to me.

measuring diversity is the equivalent of filing the workers, which is illegal, at least in my country.

What the law says and what happens in the courtroom differ.

It's illegal to discriminate, but in practice that means it's "illegal" to have a workforce skewed too far towards the white male. Businesses are simply obeying the law as enforced, not the law as written.

We see the same thing from both sides--look at the recent cases where hospitals have refused to perform life-saving abortions. They're not going to jail if she dies, they might go to jail if they save her. Hence despite the law saying they have to do it they don't.

> What the law says and what happens in the courtroom differ.

I'm not from US, if it wasn't clear.

that difference doesn't exists here.

But most importantly, if it's illegal, it shouldn't be permitted

Classifying worker based on some personal attribute is illegal here and it's punished by the courts.

Because it's the law.

You can't measure diversity, the best you can do is separate male workers from female workers because it's used by the national institute of statistics to calculate the official unemployment rates by gender.

And that's all the diversity you can measure.

Other forms of diversity are measured through not so reliable polls or authorized studies.

It's not something companies can do on their own.

Instead of giving examples of abortion, can you give examples where the court has punished businesses that hired white males, contradicting the race and gender protections offered by the civil rights law.
I’m inclined to believe it’s a crap survey:

“All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace.”

Manage 25% of total company hiring? So what, they’re tiny companies with big fat DEI programs? Who actually got interviewed here?

You don’t know much about companies if that’s what you think.
Having been in hiring committees for 10+ years and working in the industry for 20+ years, I have learned to dismiss glib statements outright, as the only purpose of glib statements is to make the author look smug.
The only glib statement in this conversation is yours. You're trying to dismiss someone's point on the grounds that it doesn't align with your political views.