[tptacek]

That's obviously false. There are over 1.7MM corporations in the US and over 7MM partnerships and sole proprietorships, and you've attempted to characterize all of them by a sample of the 100 hugest of them. There are all sorts of things the F100 has that the median company doesn't, almost none of them owing to legal peril.

[AbrahamParangi]

Hold on, that sample is a sample of the biggest ones! That’s a fair sample! Amazon having a DEI program and mom and pop hardware store not having one do not weigh equally on the scale!

[tptacek]

Cite an example of any company being sued for not having a DEI program.

[AbrahamParangi]

Why do I need to do that to defend the specific, factual point that DEI efforts are common in American workplaces? It’s not a value judgement, it’s just a fact.

[tptacek]

Well, for starters, that's not what we're debating. We're debating the idea that companies have DEI programs out of legal necessity.

[AbrahamParangi]

I never said anything about whether "companies have DEI programs out of legal necessity". The parent poster made a claim about "every Fortune 100 company" and you said that claim was unrepresentative.

That is not true, and that is what I said and all I am saying now.

[nhchris]

They're not sued for not having a DEI program, but for vaguely and broadly defined "discrimination". Having a DEI program is a defense against such accusations.

[tptacek]

That's a conveniently non-falsifiable argument, isn't it?

[nhchris]

It's highly likely. Much likelier than the idea that having anti-discrimination so broadly enforced that a mere IQ test is illegal would not cause corporations to take steps to reduce legal risks.

But you are correct, my evidence is circumstantial, and if you really want to disbelieve such basic inference, you can. I'm sure you apply this degree of skepticism evenly.

[tptacek]

Your argument is that every single company with a DEI program is doing so out of concern for a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening --- or, for that matter, even circumstantial evidence, such as a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits. By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them. These are extraordinary claims, for which you have offered no evidence.

IQ tests, for what it's worth, are not in fact illegal in employment situations. I can name large software companies that were using them as recently as a few years ago. Of course, they're a cringeworthy affectation and a strong signal of a shop you'd never want to work in, but being off-putting isn't illegal, as over 10 years of my own activity on Hacker News should amply establish.

For my part: I am not a fan of institutional DEI programs. But I'm even less a fan of the rhetorical frame that suggests that literally everything and everybody involved in them is operating in bad faith.