[Dylan16807]

The person above was just saying that having a closer balance of hires to the greater population was a good thing. They didn't talk about how companies got there. We shouldn't just assume they got there by using race while deciding whether to hire or not. Maybe they did something else, or maybe they found some existing racism in hiring decisions and removed it.

[Dalewyn]

The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis. The only way to force that composition to mirror social composition is to do so explicitly and strictly on racial basis.

A lot of factors go into proper hiring and terminations, most significantly the merits of the individual concerned. Such factors will lead to an employee racial composition that might not mirror that of social composition.

Certain hiring practices like favoring women for flight attendants and black men for basketball teams should be terminated with extreme prejudice, but to force employee racial composition and specifically that one way or any other is racism.

[Dylan16807]

> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis.

I put an example of another way in my last post. If you're creative, you can think of more.

Another one is seeking out people and inviting them to apply, at which point they enter the normal unbiased hiring process.

[KPGv2]

> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis

That's ludicrous. If I hire only from Harvard, but then I start hiring from state schools as well, the employee racial composition is highly likely to change.

[Dalewyn]

But is the goal to hire from certain schools or to hire certain races?

The axiom presented is that the employee composition must mirror the surrounding social composition, ergo you are hiring for racial reasons because you must set quotas and then hire based upon satisfying (and not exceeding) those quotas.

As an example, if the social composition is composed of 40% Earthlings, 30% Martians, 20% Venusians, and 10% Mercurians and your workforce consists of 10 men: You cannot ever hire more than 4 Earthlings or 3 Martians or 2 Venusians or 1 Mercurian and must refuse or terminate any excess. If you cannot hire even 1 Mercurian at all you arguably can't hire anyone.

That's racist.

[Dylan16807]

Using quotas like that would be racist.

But the idea of quotas is something you pulled out of nowhere. It was not part of the conversation until you showed up.

It's a strawman.

Also the post up above was talking about statistics with error bars a thousand people wide. The idea of having a demographic match with 10 employees is... also a strawman.

[Dalewyn]

I agree life is seldom as simple as the examples, the small numbers are just for sake of brevity.

In any case, none of that takes away from the crux of this conversation that programmes like mirroring surrounding demographics and others are discriminatory and have no place in free and civilized societies today.

[Dylan16807]

It's a good idea to measure the imbalance, and sometimes it's a good idea to try to do something to work against it. It requires a lot of care, but it's not inherently wrong. When there are a bunch of bad actors, everyone else trying to be completely neutral leaves things quite unbalanced.