It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending you've already achieved it. If current problems are driven by subconscious biases then you need to eliminate those. It seems to me that the best way to eliminate them is to forcibly overcome them until people get used to seeing more minorities in these positions and replace their subconscious biases with new ones.
How is race or sex aware hiring going to help with eliminating subconscious bias?
It reinforces bigotry, because it gives a rationalization for bigots to not respect their minority coworkers, as they can claim that they were not subject to the same scrutiny when they were hired.
What is the historical justification for the effectiveness affirmative action? Certainly, countries like Malaysia and South Africa with extreme disparity seem to have mixed results at best.
I agree that pretending ethnicity/sex are not visible, is not the same thing as making ethnicity/sex invisible.
But actually implementing enrollment and employment laws or policies that hide this information from decision makers could make it nearly invisible.
That's actually not the fundamental problem though. Even if you managed to a perfectly even proportion of middle class stem graduates from 1st and 2nd tier universities represented on your payroll, you'll still end up with a monoculture. Not because of some hard to pin down unconscious bigotry, but because little has been done to eliminate class from society, and social class is a big factor in a persons access to education and the quality of their childhood.
Poor, working class women have less work opportunities than men, as less educated ( religious ) working class people tend conform to traditional gender roles more than middle class people, well paid working class jobs require more physical strength, and unlike middle class mothers, working class mothers cannot afford childcare or help with housework while working or studying.
Like ethnicity, class is almost hereditary so is easily confused with ethnicity in statistics.
Making the statistics look better by hiring proportionally more middle class minorities is a face saving exercise, not a solution.
Who cares what coworkers claim? If job performance is used for evaluations and promotions, then fairness is preserved.
And the assumption that minorities can only be hired by insufficient scrutiny is not a very enlightened attitude. Perhaps the company can look really hard for qualified candidates that help balance the workforce. How about that?
I agree that real progress is the right way to evaluate hiring/ admissions programs. Do qualified people end up in a diverse student/worker population? Then you're doing it right.
I would care if my coworkers were bigots, and I would especially care if they were prejudiced against me, how can you effectively work with someone who doesn't respect you? Pretending bigotry doesn't exist is the same thing as pretending that race/sex aren't visible. You will also have to apply the same affirmative action when promoting people, as a couple of years work experience doesn't erase the generations of privilege you're competing with.
I never said that minorities can only be hired by applying insufficient scrutiny. What I will say is as a group, minorities can only be hired in a proportion that is different to the proportion of minorities in group of qualified applicants if some weighting is taken off the job relevant qualifications, and applied to their membership in minority groups.
If you could come up with a huge list of entirely fungible, interchangeable resumes and interview notes, you could consciously pick minorities first without harming the quality of your recruiting.
What kind of roles would have that weak of a job market though?
If candidates aren't fungible weighting any importance to race/sex means taking some weighting off something else, and it means that bigots will assume individuals from minority groups are less qualified, because of the fact that the group as a whole is less qualified, because of your own policies. It perpetuates both inequality and bigotry.
If you merely know about the race/sex/whatever of your candidates then you're already giving some weight to those attributes whether you want to or not.
If we had some way of scoring candidates numerically, then yes, you'd just pick the biggest number. But I've never heard of a hiring system that worked like that. There's always some subjectivity. You can look at a bunch of resumes and rank them, but a good chunk of that ranking is guesswork and opinion. That gives room for your biases to play, and you'll end up with the "best" candidates tending to match those biases. And don't tell me you don't have any racial or gender biases; you do, everybody does.
You shouldn't give up a 9.9/10 because he's white, and hire a 2.4/10 because she's black. But if you have a bunch of candidates around 8/10, consider hiring the minority candidate who's a 7.9 rather than the candidate who matches the existing demographics of your team and is an 8.1. Your numbers are probably ±3 anyway, so it's not the irrational decision it sounds like it would be in a universe of pure numbers.
So you'll just take a guess at your biases and then try to counteract them arbitrarily?
I'd like to know how you even begin to judge what ethnicity someone is just by looking at them. Sounds like an extremely fraught game to play.
Part of the answer is surely to try your utmost to take all the subjectivity out of the process. I've mentioned it here previously, and people said that they enjoy getting to make subjective value judgments of candidates. I think that is a poor attitude.
This is the kind of process I was thinking:
One person strips CV's of irrelevant info (names, ages, schools, etc). They hand that to another person who decides who to interview.
When the candidate is interviewed, pre-determined questions get asked, and then notes are taken of their answers and any relevant info, and that gets handed over to the person who makes the ultimate hiring decision.
Even that process probably leaks a bit, but it's better than simply trying to guess.
You don't have to guess at your biases. Look at the demographics of your company and you will see them.
Your idea sounds great too. I think there's still room for error there, in how the questions are formulated or answers interpreted. Think a mild version of the old Jewish Problems. But it could certainly make things a lot better.
OK, I can readily believe lots of our problems stem from subconscious biases. But what do you think about the questions I posed? Are we trying to create a world where we don't care about body attributes? If so, do you advocate doing the exact opposite behavior (deliberately paying attention to body attributes and factoring them into decisions) for some temporary period and then stopping?
We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether.
I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at that profession. If you spend your whole life in an environment where almost all the best programmers are purple people, you'll have a hard time overcoming the notion that purple people are generally better programmers. Pretending not to notice color will simply persist the status quo. If we deliberately include more orange people for a time, then we may be able to overcome that.
I don't want to be unfair to you or your argument, but I can't understand what you're saying any other way than that we should build racism and sexism into our policies and processes as a step toward eliminating racism and sexism.
I don't see why you should understand it any other way, done that is in fact what I'm saying. It's like putting wheels on an airplane. You want to be in the air, but you have to deal with the fact that you're on the ground or else you won't get anywhere.
We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.
(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)
Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:
> It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
> you've already achieved it.
What if the goal is to have the next generation(s) achieve a way of thinking by pretending (I'm not ecstatic about that word, but it'll have to do) we think that way now.
Do you think that may have a positive effect?
I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:
I think the next generation will tend to do what we do. If a certain profession has a racial makeup that greatly differs from that of the general population, that will tend to cause the next generation to think of that profession as being typically whatever race is predominant. In short, if you grow up in an environment where almost all programmers are young black women (being deliberately opposite here) then you'll tend to see young black women as being more qualified, all else being equal, and this will perpetuate the disparity.
It seems to me that if you want to get to a state where diversity just happens by not consciously thinking about race, you need to first get to a state where diversity happens, let it sit for a while, then relax it. I don't see how it's supposed to work if you just stop deliberately discriminating against people and otherwise let things take their course. It seems like trying to achieve flight by making airplane noises and thinking real hard about being up in the air.
