> It's too bad you see it that way when in a lot of cases it's explicitly about giving equal consideration to everyone rather than giving anyone more favorable treatment. Not every case, obviously, but that shouldn't invalidate attempting to level the playing field.
It's a lot more than just "not every case" though. Every place I've ever worked, we have explicitly hired inferior candidates due to their racial/gender/etc characteristics. I know this not just from intuition but also because of the many times that "adding diversity" has been given as a justification for extending an offer to person X who was clearly not qualified.
I will agree that DEI initiatives are not all bad all the time. The ones that are based around improving communication, and not in the "fire this person because they used the wrong pronoun" sense but the "actually put down a set of principles for what effective communication looks like" sense, have been pretty positive IME. Also at my current company there was some drama several months back where blatant power plays by one of the execs (they fired someone who was beloved by the department presumably so that they could climb the ladder more) got reamed by the head of DEI (happily, for entirely non-racial/etc reasons). So it is nice when the ring is held by someone who's on your side ;)
> Every place I've ever worked, we have explicitly hired inferior candidates due to their racial/gender/etc characteristics.
In another comment downthread, I explicitly say " Don't hire bad candidates. " I'm well aware that there are lots of folks who do DEI wrong or justify bad decisions with it. Moreover, I get why this happens. Lots of people want or need the needle to move, and culturally speaking a company might not be ready yet to actually move that needle. It's growth hacking as applied to DEI, and it sucks. Rest assured that there are people working on fixing this, some in their roles at individual workplaces and others as an industry-wide effort.
> I will agree that DEI initiatives are not all bad all the time.
That's really what I'm going for here. I'm hoping we can all agree that we could do more to make hiring and promotion and such fair, and just in general that things could be improved in a way that benefits us all. Once we're all in agreement and understand the value prop, we can start holding each other accountable and making sure that we're being fair to everyone.
It's a lot more than just "not every case" though. Every place I've ever worked, we have explicitly hired inferior candidates due to their racial/gender/etc characteristics. I know this not just from intuition but also because of the many times that "adding diversity" has been given as a justification for extending an offer to person X who was clearly not qualified.
I will agree that DEI initiatives are not all bad all the time. The ones that are based around improving communication, and not in the "fire this person because they used the wrong pronoun" sense but the "actually put down a set of principles for what effective communication looks like" sense, have been pretty positive IME. Also at my current company there was some drama several months back where blatant power plays by one of the execs (they fired someone who was beloved by the department presumably so that they could climb the ladder more) got reamed by the head of DEI (happily, for entirely non-racial/etc reasons). So it is nice when the ring is held by someone who's on your side ;)