[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.

[TimorousBestie]

Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.

[smohare]

You’ll notice that most people arguing against DEI rarely perform meaningful analytics. Because when you do look at the data it tells the tale that the same centuries old systemic biases are still in play.

This is obvious to any adult in the room. But the benefactors of said biases do not want to acknowledge it since it lays bare their utter mediocrity.

[rayiner]

Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.

[amanaplanacanal]

How else are they going to balance out all the legacy admissions?

[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.

[rayiner]

There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?

The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.

[Dylan16807]

As mentioned a couple comments up, something like this: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A-Discri... is way more impactful then some CEO choices.

I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.

[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?

[xdennis]

Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".

There was a trial. The government lost. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/21...

[epistasis]

That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.

That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.

[FloorEgg]

The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...

[judahmeek]

Then it shouldn't be hard for you to say something other than 'do your own research'

[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.

[jchw]

> 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.

My point is just that it seems to be a real problem worth discussion and consideration, not just something made up for concern trolling. Whenever you have potential incentives to violate the law, there is reason to be somewhat concerned. It doesn't always manifest, but sometimes it does.

(P.S.: It is true that nobody is advocating for illegal hiring practices, at least not in good faith. Still, disregarding the apparent connection between DEI initiatives and illegal hiring practices they can incentivize just terminates the discussion.)

[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.