Comment by Manuel_D
1 hour ago
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...
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
The fact that the company is majority white does not make discrimination legal. If the Perkins Coie wants to do things like anonymize its interviews, or send fake interview packets to its recruiters and looking for disparities in call back rates then that would be a genuine attempt at identifying potential discrimination.
the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.
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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-...
Yes, the lawsuit against Perkings Coie was dropped, after the law firm agreed to stop engaging in discrimination. As per the case, Parkins Coie did explicitly require that applicants to its diversity fellowship be Black, Latin, or a member of the LGBTQ community. The lawsuit was dropped after Perkins Coie agreed to expand eligibility to all applicants, regardless of race and sexual orientation.
What about the Perkins Coie lawsuit serves to highlight the notion that DEI is often implemented through discriminatory manners? Do you deny the eligibility criteria that Perkins Coie set for its diversity fellowship.
> and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].
This judgement is largely unrelated to their discriminatory fellowship requirements. The lawsuit about the fellowship was resolved in 2023, before Trump took office. This was a judgement against Trump's executive order - it is not a judgement of Perkins Coie's employment practices before he took office.
They settled out of court, YouTube didn't prevail in court. The evidence speaks for itself. Did you not read the emails that plaintiff's manager sent, explicitly telling him to cancel all non-diverse applicants' interviews?
You can read the complaint itself: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf
> Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups.
> We are still pre-Goodburger roll out, so that means the only candidates that need pre-allocation are L3s. And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups.
Engage with the evidence of the lawsuit before proclaiming that it's meritless because YouTube settled with the plaintiff, rather than going to court and losing. If these emails were fabricated YouTube would have a slam-dunk case against the plaintiff. But they chose to settle.
> In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas
The incentives were implemented in the form of quotas. You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things, when they're not.
"Your salary is $110,000. If you don't meet a quota of 40% women, I'm docking our pay by $10,000 as a penalty for failing to meet this quota."
"Your salary is $100,000. Because we want to make the company more diverse, we're giving a $10,000 bonus for reaching an inclusion milestone of 40% women."
This is exactly what Intel did, from the Atlantic article:
> But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas.
> Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities.
> Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.
> You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things
That's how the law sees it.
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