[duxup]

Solving social issues by having companies try heavy handed "just hire those people" or "just give them a space" doesn't change much of anything. Companies are not good at social change.

The second order effects are terrible too. People assume someone was hired because they're X, Y or Z (and I've seen companies say exactly that, talk about undermining). These segregated groups as the writer describes are ... segregated. At one place I worked a special group met multiple times a week. Those people weren't working and the teams they worked on had to pick up the slack (this was highly time sensitive work). That created resentment. No matter your policy or how much finger wagging training they did, that resentment did not go away.

There's sometimes a weird add on expectation too. Person A who is type X is expected to speak for all people of type X. In an absurd way that's to some extent why they're there, but that doesn't mean they're qualified to do that, or even right, or would even want to speak up.

I'm reminded of a lot of the sexual harassment cases where HR predictably takes the side of the higher ranking employee (often a man). HR jobs are by a good % often staffed by women, but that as far as I know hasn't put an end to HR siding with the company. Of course it doesn't, because it isn't about man or woman, it's about incentives and demographics don't change that.

Truth is companies aren't good or even competent in solving complex social issues.

[bell-cot]

As the article leads off acknowledging, solving social problems is never the actual objective, for companies doing "Women in Tech" or whatever. The objective is to gain shallow/short-term social approval (& maybe legal butt-coverage) for the company, at the minimum possible cost.

Which is not to say that ham-fisted companies can't make themselves look worse, while spend far too much in the process. Sounds like you've seen that.

[PaulHoule]

I just heard a lot of women students in the elevator who were complaining about how there were very few women teachers in physics, math, and computer science.

I felt a little flustered and blurted out the name of a female professor in physics who (1) I really like but (2) is a nepo baby. (Didn’t tell them that latter) I mean the real equity problem in academia is that almost every professor is a professor’s kid

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/

which was something I had gathered from my own observations and only saw research that confirmed it two decades later. Insofar as we think in terms of certain ‘protected classes’ you can see that the nepo baby who is in a protected class (at least half of them!) is a hot commodity.

Unfortunately we are in an impoverished discourse between woke right NPCs who take it for granted you bellyfeel DEI is bad and those who reflexively oppose them because it is DEI is ‘just’ what every decent human being endorses.

There is the principle that you ‘never let them see you sweat’ and at work I am not so likely to complain about the challenges I’ve had in my career coming from a lower class white family and having an unfashionable and slightly terrifying neurodivergence and I’ve never expected to get a lot of help from HR. When I do talk about those struggles I try to talk about them in a universalized way.

I wish sometimes we could make ‘white’ go away as it comprises groups such as:

(1) myself, from French-Canadian and Polish background who barely exist in media and academia, but boy even the girls in my extended family are cops and firefighters. I get good service from the police because of the way I look and the way I listen they seem to believe, true or not, I will take their admonitions seriously and don’t need to get a ticket or see the judge. I know also it is not that way for black people. Some of those first responder jobs are good union jobs so yeah, maybe some of them are nepo babies.

From that kind of background you could probably break into highly formalized areas such as law and medicine but if you tried to go into less formalized area you’d find yourself in a highly nerve-wracking hall of mirrors and I’m certain black people would have all the same problems and then some.

(2) Jewish people who are I think dangerously overrepresented in some areas (even Ezra Klein says they are behaving in ways now that make people believe the awful things that people have long said about them) and who really were crawling up by their wits against discrimination 75 years ago but are benefitting more from the ‘nepo baby’ phenomenon today. A person like that get disowned by their family for getting a job in law enforcement, and…

… I have felt so cringe sitting in the passenger seat while an upper middle class person argued their way into a $300 ticket which I could have avoided by being a little stupid and sheepish. ‘Sharp elbowed’ can cost you sometimes.

(3) Scotts-Irish people who I think have some biological (might be environment to epigenetic though) predisposition to mental illness and often seem to have

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

and often come across as “white people with black problems”, especially the random encounters with the police that become life changing.

If we have some frame like “women in tech” I think somewhere between 25% to 75% of the problems they have are problems that are not due to their protected status —- and that frame cuts them off from a proper understanding of some of their problems and also from solidarity with others who face those problems.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Nepo babies & Jews are cool because of the sprezzatura effect?

Scotch-Irish are not because observers assume they know where it comes from

Secrets, baby. Social secrets

[PaulHoule]

Exactly. All whites have some privilege, but it's not always the same the privilege! My Italian in-laws almost all do work that is is comically typecast but, it's often good work that has many of them self-employed (Pizza Restaurant, Hairdresser, Construction) or unionized (School Teachers, Construction)

[gsf_emergency_2]

There's something of a tension between the informal institutions (if I may call it that) of the better-off whites and the formal institutions of the less-privileged ones

Rhyming, as I see it, to how laws are either binding or protective.

Somewhere to start thinking about women-in-tech, to return to the topic

To be more concrete, it's the formal rule changes for diversity that attracts most outrage, but the informal ones tend to be more salient. We don't really have good abstractions for thinking about the interactions between factions, institutions, and their structure of rules.

As to the crab mentality.. you've probably heard of the concept of feline pugnacity (intragender jealousy)

To me, it sounds rather like, poorly calibrated system of informal rules beget poorly evaluated system of formal rules

[PaulHoule]

Yeah, formal vs informal is the way to think about it.

Your identity can complicate informality (I’m not afraid of getting a person of the same gender drunk, but very afraid of the opposite) but identity politics tends to center the formal which is a rigged game where victory as most partial as the formal route preclude recourse to the informal.

The informal route is dangerous but at least you have interesting stories to tell in the end. If your co-worker feel like they are being treated unfairly at the expense of a nepo baby, for instance, the adults will likely have too much guile for it to be worth talking to them. Befriend the nepo baby, however, and you might get a huge amount of insider information about what’s going on. I was lucky to have some mentors that didn’t teach me the secrets of informality in certain tribes but rather certain principles of informal politics that my not be universal but that are widespread, such as an Asian woman sysadmin who taught me tactics for getting good customer service from unreliable vendors —- tactics, funny enough, that quit working when central IT at my Uni got more reliable but then I didn’t need them.