Comment by Manuel_D
40 minutes ago
DEI wasn't demonized because it tried to fight bigotry. It demonized itself because it routinely became a dishonest two-faced movement that public denied to be discriminatory, but then privately implemented policies that explicitly discriminated on the basis of sex and gender.
When your leaders publicly condemn the idea that your company is discriminating on the basis of sex, but then privately institutes a system of reserving headcount for women, that'll make most people real cynical about DEI.
And those in power who went out of their way to demonize DEI, is that why they didn't like it? I would argue strongly that no, they had their priors already set, and anything help black people or poor people (the new proxy for hating black people) was bad and they'd lie through their teeth about the impact to get anyone on their side.
Yes, they did dislike it because it was discriminatory, not because it helped poor and Black people. I don't know the views of people you've met, but in my circles the opponents of DEI are mostly tech workers in SF and Seattle - not exactly a conservative demographic. I can't count a single Republican between us.
The course of our relationship with DEI was pretty similar: in university we earnestly believed that women were discriminated against in tech hiring. One of us even built a prototype anonymous interviewing platform. Once we entered the workforce, there was pretty big whiplash when we started getting visibility into our own companies' hiring pipelines. Many of us - including myself - found ourselves actively carrying out discrimination on the basis of sex and race. Mostly sex, though - while our DEI advocates often invoked racial disparities to emphasize the need for these discriminatory policies, the actual beneficiaries of these policies were mostly white and Asian women.
Does this make me any less likely to support better school funding, and other public benefits that help poor people and Black people? I don't think so. The discriminatory practices of tech company hiring is pretty far removed from these issues in my view. Why would should an underserved school not receive better funding because some tech companies preferentially hired an Asian female over an Asian male? I see no connection between these two.
Can you cite any companies which violated federal labor law in this way?
Three out of the four companies I've worked at, for one.
YouTube was sued for directing one of its recruiters to exclusively advance diverse candidates for a period of time, and eventually settled with the recruiter [1].
Intel [2] and Microsoft [3] both tied specific percentage quotas to executive's compensation. If saying "reach this racial and gender quota or I'll penalize you financially" isn't discrimination, I'm not sure what is.
Perkins-Coie explicitly excluded applicants from its diversity fellowship program if they didn't meet certain racial, sexual orientation, or other requirements [4].
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...
4. https://www.reuters.com/legal/second-major-us-law-firm-chang...
YouTube was never found guilty of anything, they just paid to make the argument go away. In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas. These companies wanted more diversity in their staff, which is a valid and laudable goal, and they were willing to pay extra if that was achieved.
Would you like to try again?
edit: your later addition of Perkins Coie also was settled/dismissed and never adjudicated, and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].
The real takeaway is that a lot of people are very mad about what they imagine DEI to be.
[1] https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-...
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i like how when a company obviously discriminates against women and minorities by hiring almost entirely white guys that's fine that's to be expected but if you try to fix that discrimination it's an evil conspiracy
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