> Why physical characteristics like gender or ethnicity should be important in the management selection?
To be clear, the below is not taking into account the allegations in the article, but just seeks to explain the thinking without judgement (as I'm frankly not sure which side I fall down on).
There's a school of thought that some degree of weighting helps to redress systemic issues by changing incentives, justified on the basis that there should be an equally capable pool of candidates in the underrepresented demographics.
The thinking then goes that e.g. if promotions at certain levels are biased, the argument for allowing that bias to continue is often that the pool to promote from leaves too few capable candidates of the underrepresented groups.
The problem with that, is that if (to take extreme numbers for simplicity) 100% of people being promoted from VP to SVP in a company are white men, then a lot of women and non-white people will either self-select out or not get promoted at lower level because it's a strong signal they're not valued and have no future there.
That in itself can make it a goal to diversify companies at higher levels irrespective of the current talent available for promotion at the level below.
As a concrete example, in 2006 Norway added a legal requirement for at least 40% of either gender at board level of a public limited company (ASA; usually listed companies as only ASA's can be listed, though they don't have to be) and in some other situations (e.g. companies with significant government ownership), and during the debates over this change, this was part of the arguments:
If there weren't enough qualified candidates, that was itself considered evidence of a systemic bias that making the change was hoped to help address. Both by giving women an incentive to stay on track towards board seats and give companies an incentive to address other biases to ensure there was a capable pool. Over time, it was also hoped that getting women onto boards would further strengthen the pressure from boards on companies to address the, as well as further develop a pool of women with growing board experience.
It was explicitly acknowledged by many proponents that there was a chance that it'd be hard to find suitable candidates initially, but that was seen as a sufficiently temporary problem to be addressed by companies through training and mentoring, not a justification for not changing the incentives.
A cursory look at the way DEI policies are applied shows the claimed justification to be a blatant lie.
If we were actually concerned about tipping the scales properly based on actual income data, white men would not be the primary targets. We would be going after Brahmin Indians, Taiwanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, men over 6 feet in height, men with facial features that are shown by studies to be associated with "leadership", men born to well-connected families, and any number of other by-birth associations that are actually demonstrated by the data to have high correlations to income level.
"White men" are fairly average when it comes to income in the United States, yet we are gunning for them far more for income equity than we are for their obvious statistical superiors.
This, alone, demonstrates the lie underpinning equity efforts.
This argument is missing the results of the regulation. Otherwise it's a bit circular: gender is important in management selection because it is important for management selection in Norway. :)
2006 is 17 years ago. There should be some results by now. What was the failure criteria for the legislation? Did it fail/succeed according to the criteria? Did anything change at lower positions?
Thanks, this is a great explanation. And combined with OP's last question, raises for me the question, why not incentivize other marginalized classes, like people who are highly unattractive?
Note this a question of curiosity in reasoning, not one of judgement.
The challenge with applying this too broadly, I think is that it becomes a dual problem of objectively enough defining who fits in the marginalised class, and of defining a class that is big enough that you can try to accommodate it without harming other groups, marginalised or otherwise, in an unreasonable manner.
With respect to gender it's fairly simple. Already with respect to ethnicity it starts getting tricky to define objective rules.
It's also a tricky problem to apply at too small scale. E.g. in a small enough team or in a small enough niche, pure chance will end up with some small groups that are not diverse by pure chance even in an idealised setting with no biases. Trying to prevent that all the time could be potentially highly detrimental. Figuring out which imbalances and at which scales are by chance, and which are down to biases is a hard problem.
I can agree with your points, but I think this is happening in one way, at least for my experience.
I have worked for a big defense company and they try to hire as much as women as possible, even if it's not easy to find women in that field (let's say 1 woman over 3 man). Women had also a special career growth path and other advantages.
In front of our building there was the headquarters of one of the most famous luxury brand in the world and more than 80% working there were women. According to people working there they don't care a shit about diversity.
I am okay with diversity (even with some concerns), but why don't apply diversity also in the fields where women are more than men?
To be clear, the below is not taking into account the allegations in the article, but just seeks to explain the thinking without judgement (as I'm frankly not sure which side I fall down on).
There's a school of thought that some degree of weighting helps to redress systemic issues by changing incentives, justified on the basis that there should be an equally capable pool of candidates in the underrepresented demographics.
The thinking then goes that e.g. if promotions at certain levels are biased, the argument for allowing that bias to continue is often that the pool to promote from leaves too few capable candidates of the underrepresented groups.
The problem with that, is that if (to take extreme numbers for simplicity) 100% of people being promoted from VP to SVP in a company are white men, then a lot of women and non-white people will either self-select out or not get promoted at lower level because it's a strong signal they're not valued and have no future there.
That in itself can make it a goal to diversify companies at higher levels irrespective of the current talent available for promotion at the level below.
As a concrete example, in 2006 Norway added a legal requirement for at least 40% of either gender at board level of a public limited company (ASA; usually listed companies as only ASA's can be listed, though they don't have to be) and in some other situations (e.g. companies with significant government ownership), and during the debates over this change, this was part of the arguments:
If there weren't enough qualified candidates, that was itself considered evidence of a systemic bias that making the change was hoped to help address. Both by giving women an incentive to stay on track towards board seats and give companies an incentive to address other biases to ensure there was a capable pool. Over time, it was also hoped that getting women onto boards would further strengthen the pressure from boards on companies to address the, as well as further develop a pool of women with growing board experience.
It was explicitly acknowledged by many proponents that there was a chance that it'd be hard to find suitable candidates initially, but that was seen as a sufficiently temporary problem to be addressed by companies through training and mentoring, not a justification for not changing the incentives.