| Diversity hire is a dog whistle. If you are a low performer in the in-group, you are label as a low performer. If you are a low performer in the out group, you are labelled as a diversity hire. Even if you are not low performing, you’re still under constant pressure to prove you’re not a diversity hire. People usually don’t have the designation of “diversity hire” officially bestowed on them by a company. They are just given to people who are in the out-group by people in the in-group. In your story, it sounds like a company explicitly was searching for a woman as a manager or the CEO got that impression. I don’t know American laws but where I am the exemptions for explicitly hiring a job based on a protected category are very limited and need to be intrinsically link - think things like requiring a woman for a female role in a movie or requiring a member of X cultural group for an outreach role focusing on that group. Obviously this is very hard to police, and people do consider protected categories in hiring practices, sometimes in favour of an in-group and sometimes in favour of an out-group. You might argue that the existence of diversity quotas, targets, policies or programs is the cause of the the different treatment, but it is not. Even if the company had a very explicit “best candidate wins - no special treatment” policy - you can’t escape in-group vs out-group politics. It is just that the dog whistle used will change. Even if a company has no diversity policy, the laws exist and so the whistle will change from “X is diversity hire” to “they can’t fire X because they’re afraid of lawsuits”. Most people in out-groups will just end up adopting a persona that is acceptable enough to the in-group in order to survive. But this also does bad damage to a person’s identity. Ironically, one of the best ways to prove yourself as a member of the in-group is to blow the same dog whistles - as the female CEO did in your example. |