> Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:
75.3% White alone
13.7% Black alone
1.3% American Indian and Alaska Native alone
6.4% Asian alone
0.3% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone
3.1% Two or More Races
19.5% Hispanic or Latino
58.4% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino
I don't want to make too many assumptions here because it's a bit of a minefield, but... perhaps there's an entirely selfish and rational explanation for DEI hiring programs in a tight labor market? If you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate narrative, but I do think it's probably at least part of this (e.g., that all of the best white people were already hired, while many POC people of equal caliber were not or not making as much). The job market was soaring in 2021 and looking for ways to hire new people without having to pay them more would likely be highly attractive. Now that the job market is not so competitive, there's not as much need to do so if you're just trying to find workers.
> you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
In my experience, DEI programs do the opposite. I've seen manager leave headcount unfulfilled because the qualified candidates they found were non diverse and hiring them would put them below their diversity target. If 20% of the workforce is women and your bonus is contingent on reaching 30%, you could recruit at Grace Hopper and try to hire more women. But if that doesn't get you to your quota, you need to hire fewer men to push up the proportion of women.
I suspect the conditions were the opposite at the time: competition for good non-white employees was fierce after BLM, making them harder to find. If I'm understanding the Bloomberg numbers correctly, a random non-white person would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white person at the S&P 100 companies.
Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
I had an interesting experience asking a startup I worked at why they had no female engineers. The answer was they couldn't afford them. They were in such demand that they commanded a significant premium over male engineers at the same level.
This is real. Female engineers are overrepresented in big tech something like 3-4x the graduation rate. There just aren't any left over for startups that can't afford FAANG rates.
And price is determined by both supply and demand.
If there wasn't a demand for specifically female engineers they would cost the same as male engineers regardless of the supply because an engineer should be fungible with gender. Unless you think that women have some innate characteristic that makes them better than men?
To fix this sort of problem a wholistic approach is required. Whatever the approach it should apply to all equally so that the market is fair. Offhand, my historic recollection is that STEM generally is traditionally less appealing to those of the female sex (by Science/Biology definition of the phrase), and that there might (rightly?) be a perception of poor work / life balance and career tracks that don't pair well with fulfilling time limited biological imperatives. My personal opinion is that enforced labor regulation that provides sufficient parental leave, work / life balance generally, and generally promotes healthier recognition of employees as humans would be better for society overall.
I also recognize that we're probably not going to get that until the US gets rid of the 'first past the post' madness and adopts a voting system with literally _any_ form of IRV. There just won't be bandwidth for such an issue otherwise. Of said systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is my favorite, but I'd start with ANY IRV, they're (offhand) all less flawed than what we've got.
When the playing field is tilted you have to put a thumb on the other side to balance it out. This might annoy the ones who were tilting it in the first place.
Because one of them is systemically suppressing the others. The point of DEI is (or at least should be) to counteract systemic bias; how can you do that without looking at the characteristics that are the determining factor of that bias?
tbf this should all start at the education level so that black/hispanic/indigenous girls/gays/whatevers aren't joining CS classes, looking around and thinking they don't belong there, but until that's reality all we can do is tackle it where it impacts people the most - hiring.
> tbf this should all start at the education level so that black/hispanic/indigenous girls/gays/whatevers aren't joining CS classes, looking around and thinking they don't belong there
I never thought that. That part of me was irrelevant to the degree, and I found it great that no one cared and were able to focus on the degree.
Forcing diversity topics in and making them a focus instead would have been hell.
Search for the phrase. Apparently Asians are now white in the telling of these people.
I'm pointing out the inherent racism in these efforts in practice.
The only really positive thing I saw was hiring more from HBCU's.
But that crowd never pointed out white people were underrepresented in tech. And that lots of the black people they claimed they were helping by hiring were actually Pacific Islanders, African immigrants and second generation African immigrants rather than ADOS that they claimed to be helping
No matter what people think the right thing to do is, making any hiring decision on the basis of a protected group is illegal in the US, no matter who is on what side of the equation.
People aren't making hiring decisions based on protected classes. Rather, they're looking for qualified candidates in new areas.
One thing that's common is for people to recommend their friends for jobs. Most of the time, their friends look just like them, because that's the kind of friends that people make. If you base your hiring process around this easy source of candidates, you end up not talking to a lot of people that would be qualified for the position. "DEI" can be as simple as "in addition to employee referrals, we're going to hand out brochures at a career fair".
They actually have been recently; Especially in academia where after racial-based Affirmative Action was ruled unconstitutional, wealth-based AA has been helping economically disadvantaged individuals—even including white men.
Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224