[th]

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.

A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):

> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016

Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.

If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.

If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.

Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.

The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.

Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.

In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".

I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote shown on page 28 in this court case: https://www.scribd.com/document/372802863/18-CIV-00442-ARNE-...

[hitekker]

YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte observed the similar racial and sex quotas from the inside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560

IBM's CEO infamously championed DEI-as-quota which led to wave of lawsuits that IBM was forced to settle.

The memory holing on this topic is concerning.

[davorak]

> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte

I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.

I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.

[hitekker]

The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.

I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.

IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

[davorak]

> The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.

Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.

> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms

Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.

I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.

> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;

I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.

Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".

> He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.

Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.

> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...

You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.

> This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.

[virx61]

“Memory hole” is a term that should be reserved for things everybody actually forgets. This is more of a thing lots of people probably remember, but they don’t bring it up all the time.

[SR2Z]

No, lots of people willingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the abuses that were happening. See Brigida v Buttigieg for a particularly egregious example around the hiring of ATC.

The FAA, on an official test that ATC candidates were required to take, would disqualify applicants if they didn't answer questions like "what was your worst subject in school" with answers like "math" or "science." This explicitly was to increase racial diversity, which is both patronizing in the extreme and really stupid.

When I bring this up in SF, people accuse me of making it up. It's not that people don't remember it, it's that political polarization has blinded us to our side doing batshit crazy things. Another similar example was "defund the police" which is a crazy slogan on its face, yet for a year Democrats felt compelled to sanewash it.

I am about as blue and pro-DEI as someone could reasonably be and I think that this stuff is small potatoes compared to a president who has been continuously trying to send the army in to crush Democratic-leaning cities. That being said, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are suspicious of DEI because we do not have a good track record of auditing these programs.

[epistasis]

> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",

Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.

Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.

[rayiner]

> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.

You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.

I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.

So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.

[KPGv2]

> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly

I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"

[rayiner]

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.

[wredcoll]

> The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.

Wow, I am extremely happy to know that all racism ended in 1964!

[CyberDildonics]

Marijuana was made illegal in 1937 and it stopped being used completely for the next 70 years.

[KPGv2]

So in other words, it went on for a few centuries like I said.

[veeti]

Should we be giving Swedish people special treatment and privileges in 2025, or how long until bygones are bygones?

[potato3732842]

>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"

I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.

[renlo]

Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.

[rayiner]

It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.

Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.

[cycomanic]

It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.

So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Hint: if everyone has such anecdotes, they are no longer anecdotes.

[Dylan16807]

It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between.

If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.

[heroprotagonist]

No, they're still anecdotes.

   anecdote   /'ænɪk,doʊt/
   noun
   short account of an incident (especially a biographical one)

[JuniperMesos]

A lot of the contemporary formal scientific process is done incredibly badly, for a variety of reasons including overt political bias on the part of individual scientists working in the academic system, pressure to publish any results including poor ones, and outright laziness and fraud. In general we shouldn't assume that if a bunch of public scientific studies purport to show that some phenomenon is happening, that that phenomenon is actually happening. It takes substantial time, effort, and experience to evaluate whether a claimed scientific result is valid; and all the moreso when that result has immediate political policy implications.

[FloorEgg]

I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.

Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.

I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.

Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.

I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.

[klipt]

That's like saying "the Crusaders weren't real Christians because real Christianity is peaceful"

See also: No True Scotsman Fallacy

[epistasis]

No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.

There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.

Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.

[rayiner]

Your point is well taken. Not everyone was violating the law. But meanwhile Microsoft was setting explicit numeric targets on hiring employees from particular racial groups: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-microsoft-diversity....

Companies were also demanding race-conscious staffing practices at the law firms they used: https://www.wsj.com/business/law-firm-clients-demand-more-bl.... Microsoft offered financial bonuses to law firms for promoting lawyers from specific racial groups: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/If3eb4570033e11eb8e48d387....

[FloorEgg]

> it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law

I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.

[judahmeek]

What are your sources?

[rlprlprlp]

Sure, but you’re god deciding who goes to hell.

[colechristensen]

Illegal stuff happens all the time in the workplace and very frequently goes unreported, underreported, or otherwise results in nothing.

Using claims that something is illegal to discredit an argument is extremely dubious.

[throwaway48476]

Whether something is illegal is only loosely correlated with whether it is common. Eg the war on drugs.

[jchw]

> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.

Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.

Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.

(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)

[alistairSH]

How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.

Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.

I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.

I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).

[jchw]

My thought is, if this sort of problem was happening at a company as big and influential in the industry as Google, that's already pretty bad. The backlash may not be warranted either way but the other position (that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done) isn't necessarily correct either.

[alistairSH]

Agreed, I think.

The solution to "DEI has run amok!" is not "Ban DEI!" but "better define what DEI means and what is within bounds/outside bounds". But, the latter doesn't fit on a campaign poster, so here we are...

[epistasis]

> that everything is fine and nothing needs to be done

That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.

Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.

Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.

[rayiner]

I would estimate illegal DEI was happening at more than half of top 100 firms. I’m not as familiar with corporations, but I would be checked if it was less than 25% of Fortune 100s. The HR folks all attend the same conferences together. And the big corps set the permission structure for how everyone else acts.

[potato3732842]

>I and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.

Gee, it's almost like we're re-learning what the origin of the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety" is.

[TimorousBestie]

Unfortunately, it’s trivial these days to gin up the appearance of impropriety even where there is none.

[the_sleaze_]

I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.

[epistasis]

Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...

[tick_tock_tick]

Who's going to start a lawsuit and get blacklisted? HR is normally pushing for this.

[mensetmanusman]

No one is brave enough to start such lawsuits. Likelihood of winning too low, first mover disadvantage at play.

[analog31]

That's a lot of whites for a roofing company.

[gcanyon]

In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Suppose you were abused by your parent. How much would it be reasonable for you to abuse your child, in order to balance the scales?

[gcanyon]

That's a bad metaphor.

[rayiner]

It’s a good metaphor. You can’t undo racial discrimination against someone who is now dead by discriminating against someone else who is now alive.

[typewithrhythm]

You cannot make a fair system by introducing subjective ideas like historical balance.

A set of rules for fairness require that current decisions only account for individual merit; not special status.

[gcanyon]

I didn't propose subjective harm in the past, why would you suggest that I did?

But in any case, it seems like your answer is zero, right?

[Ohmec]

Inverting the privilege pyramid does not make for a balanced and healthy system.

[xdennis]

If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay.

But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:

1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination

2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination

[gcanyon]

Companies know their own historical data and practices best.

[3oil3]

I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing? Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have. Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it. Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class. Better what makes better.

[gcanyon]

> We need the best for the job

I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.

[amanaplanacanal]

We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.

[kelnos]

This isn't a thread about what's reasonable, it's a thread about what's legal.

[gcanyon]

That means a "what's reasonable" question is disallowed?

[klipt]

"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"

[gcanyon]

Okay, so we've established that your upper bound is "less than thousands of years" but what's your lower limit? Or were you just strawmanning?

[akimbostrawman]

If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.

It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.

[gcanyon]

I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.

[throwawaykf10]

You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-settles-28...

So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!

On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?

My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.

[Thorrez]

Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.

Disclosure: I work at Google.

[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...

[tremon]

Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool. For example, page 64 shows that Google's APAC offices have 90.7% Asian workers, up from 90.4% a year earlier -- at the expense of all other ethnicities. Is Google doing a bad job there, or is this an accurate reflection of the available workforce?

[Thorrez]

throwawaykf10 said:

>On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?

>My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.

I provided data. Not anecdotes. The data shows how the demographics of Google have shifted. The data shows how the professional prospects of minorities have shifted when it comes to Google jobs. The data does not show "no change at all".

A change from 90.4% to 90.7% percentage points I doubt is statistically significant. Phrasing it "at the expense" sounds like it's some terrible decline.

The conversation so far I believe has been about DEI in the US. Why focus on APAC, instead of the the US?

>Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool.

What does that mean? Are you saying that if the fraction of CS grads that are Black+ also increased from 2.2% to 10.0%, then Google's DEI efforts did nothing? That conclusion doesn't hold. Google has a lot of DEI efforts, including ones to increase the number of Black+ people who choose to major in CS.

[kelnos]

> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.

It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.

Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.

(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.

All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.

The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".

Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.

I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.

[cycomanic]

If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires.

It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.

> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.

Have you read the actual article?

[potato3732842]

>If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly.

Because the race based pity hiring programs didn't actually address the pipeline problems.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> Have you read the actual article?

The PSF grant one or a different one? In the PSF one, nobody is getting ostracized and fired for daring to suggest DEI, in fact, they are turning down a grant for a more pro-DEI stance.

You might be in trouble for actually implementing DEI programs, but it's not a taboo topic that can't even safely be talked about. Criticism of any DEI-related practice, whether it's illegal hiring discrimination or presubmits that yell at you for using an ever-expanding list of now-verboten words, was taboo in many places.

[gcanyon]

Did that case ever resolve?

In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?

[roenxi]

I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.

But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.

[JuniperMesos]

I assume that many of those female speakers are transwomen, and transwomen are not underrepresented in the Python or similar programming communities (in some of them, they're conspicuously overrepresented).

[xdennis]

>> (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016

> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.

There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.

If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.

[saagarjha]

You know what encourages women to be programmers? Seeing women be programmers.

[trollbridge]

I didn't become a programmer because I saw other men being programmers. It was something I really saw anyone else doing.

[saagarjha]

Are you a woman?

[seattle_spring]

> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.

I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?

[somenameforme]

You can see this very visibly in things like the Marines combat fitness tests. [1] In any case where strength is directly involved the requirement for a minimum score for men tends to be near the standards for a max score for women. In that particular test the ammo can lift range is 62-106 for men versus 30-66 for women.

Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.

The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.

[1] - https://www.military.com/military-fitness/marine-corps-fitne...

[kelnos]

I'm pretty sure that the effectiveness of a soldier in combat depends on a lot more than just a strength score.

[userbinator]

Look at the FAA ATC hiring controversy.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

[sagarm]

If you want to make an argument, make it here and cite some primary sources.

[kelnos]

Everything I've read (that isn't from a blubbering MAGA source) suggests that the "controversy" is entirely manufactured.

[inemesitaffia]

A fascinating claim.

You do know there were exams leaked to a group right?

[stackbutterflow]

Every single time. You look into the source and realize that there's nothing behind the claims.

It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.

But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.

[kelnos]

> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.

Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.

GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.

> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.

Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)

[fzeroracer]

Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.

The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.

[epicureanideal]

> unusually homogenous communities

Which can be socioeconomic rather than racial..

It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.

[throwaway743]

Imo DEI should have always been based on socioeconomic status over anything else. It'd likely address the other forms of diversity, and would provide way less homogeneity in thought while at the same time providing a sense of inclusion/belonging.

[nroets]

No, it's not hard compared having a good combination of STEM and marketing skills. Many emigrants to the US had no or very few connections: Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, a long list of Indians, Chinese and other Asians.

[yibg]

There is a also merit at the individual level vs merit at the organizational level. e.g. most tech companies are male dominated, but many serve primarily women (Amazon retail, Pinterest, Etsy etc). So having more women in the companies, especially in positions to directly impact the customer experience is important even if we disregard individual merit. Ditto for products that serve primarily minority populations etc.

[Mars008]

> It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.

It has two sides, one promoting, and one denying. Based on race. DEI activists are always talking about the first. How great it is. And never talks about second, to not to ruin the rosy picture. Just recently I visited a hospital in mostly white area. Inside it looked like african consulate. There are still DEI stickers on the wals. What they did they denied jobs to all white applicants.

Looks like Python foundation decided to promote exactly this. Well, you will not get a penny from me till you change the course.

[sagarm]

Mostly white probably means rural. These are undesirable hospital jobs. There are incentives for doctors to work in underserved areas, like rural hospitals, and those incentives are disproportionately used by J1s.

I'd like to point out that this commenter assumed these doctors did not earn their positions purely based on skin color. I don't see how this is functionally different than classic racism. "DEI" complaints often seem to fit this fact pattern. In particular, I've never heard a white man described as a DEI hire.

[IshKebab]

That stat is basically meaningless on its own. It could mean anything from they've done an amazing job on engaging women, to they've bodged the numbers by unfairly discriminating against men, or anything in between.

Annoyingly they actually do have the data to answer which it is, because Pycon's review process has a first stage which is blind, and a second stage which isn't. So if they published how many talks get rejected at each stage, by year and vendor, then we could draw actual conclusions.

I couldn't find where they have published those numbers though so we can't draw any conclusions here.

[endomorphosis]

Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.

[Dylan16807]

Encouraging specific people to submit applications is not illegal. Even based on those characteristics.

[polski-g]

No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.

> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads

[KPGv2]

It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,

Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).

[seattle_spring]

You're asserting that the Fair Housing Act applies to tech recruiting?

[judahmeek]

Securement of a settlement proves literally nothing.

[rjaT25hja]

DEI in practice works like this: You have a ruling class of affluent white males and a Harvard educated Executive Director. None of these have ever been suppressed in their lives.

If anyone points out that fact on PSF infrastructure, you ban them (yes, this has happened).

You create a couple of programs that are mostly ineffective but good for PR.

You never mention any economic or other injustices that could upset the corporate sponsors.

You support and promote job replacement by AI while blogging about redistributing jobs via DEI.

[gatvol]

"The world doesn't run on merit. " Critical systems do.

[userbinator]

And we are seeing a slow collapse as a result of the past decade of identity politics.

[eadmund]

Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.

[roumenguha]

Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.

If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.