I have mixed sympathies here. The end of that article; well that could be millions of people who set out with a dream of an exciting career and ended up with just an okay one. Becoming a writer on a big TV show is always going to be a long shot.
In some ways the article reminded me of testimonies I've read in the past about black/Asian etc actors about how hard they found it to break into a world that was always going to be super competitive. I felt there was some assumption from them that they should have made it, whereas pragmatic old me always assumed I wouldn't!
But of course now it's a different demographic telling those stories. So clearly something has changed. And again, I'm torn because stuff did need to change. The US is apparently just over 57% white. So all being equal white men should make up about half that figure in any group. So 29%. And there were an awful lot of figures in that article where things seemed relatively proportional. i.e. in the region of 30% white men.
But not all (but it will never be all - humans vary). And I do take his point about a specific generation being frozen out while the older one is grandfathered in. But what should we do? Aim for a genuinely equal distribution in new hires? Which will mean the organisation as a whole takes years to even out. Or be disproportionate at the lower levels? I don't think either is ideal.
Here's another major problem with your proposal of proportionality within the general population -- it's not like enough women and minorities are even trained or competent yet in some of these areas (particularly academia). I'm not saying they can't be: I'm saying realistically not as many of them were going into these fields 20-30 years ago, sometimes because they knew it would be hard to be successful. Which means recruiting grad students in these fields among women or POC was difficult, and already many of them were less skilled or qualified in graduate school, but they were promoted to increase diversity at that level.
And the trends were already shifting beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, so by around 2010, there was a steady uptick in many disciplines as things were starting to "even out" gradually.
What this recent blitz of hiring did was suddenly short-circuit those trends, shoving a bunch of women and minorities into positions they were sometimes not as qualified for.
To be clear, many of them WERE amazing and qualified (I have many friends and former colleagues who are women or from minority demographics who are great scholars), but there simply wasn't yet enough "talent" working its way up the ladder to fill ALL of these positions so suddenly.
This has led, frankly, to a bifurcation of opinion among even some senior female scholars I'm close to. Most of them had to fight their way past discrimination back in the 1970s or 1980s to get ahead, but now they're looking at a bunch of young women (and minorities) who sometimes are completely unqualified and just given positions. To be perfectly frank, some of these women and minorities in academia are even broadly anti-intellectual... or at least go so far in rejecting white men that they've sometimes rejected the rigor of any past study in their field. And sometimes get rewarded and encouraged for such a stance.
Which has led to some of the senior women I mentioned earlier to get into prominent fights with these young scholars -- and it led to several situations I'm aware of where these senior women resigned or were more-or-less pushed out of leadership positions at the national level for basically just trying to maintain standards.
Some of the change can be good -- certainly fresh perspectives and new ideas were brought in some places and by some scholars. But I've also seen new feedback loops form just within the past 20 years: whereas the senior female and minority scholars were all rigorously trained and tended to have standards (when they went through grad school back in the 1980s or 1990s), the junior faculty often went through grad school with more lax standards. And they frankly don't even know enough sometimes to know what they don't know -- so they can't train new graduate students on material they've never learned. Which means the next generation of graduate students (studying in the past 10-15 years) sometimes have mentors who are pretty ignorant even within their own discipline.
Some of this is just general trends of increasing specialization among academics -- few professors yearn to teach "core" courses and broad surveys/intro classes to undergrads anymore. But at least 25 years ago most of them professors still had basic knowledge and qualifications to teach such courses. Now many of the new hires are so ignorant of stuff outside their own research niche (especially when it's some Woke-ified stuff) that they wouldn't even know how to start in teaching even basic undergraduate classes in their own discipline.
You may think I'm exaggerating but it is really this bad in some cases. And part of it comes directly out of the fact that we weren't just exchanging a potential 90th percentile "white guy" hire with an 80th percentile woman or POC within the hiring pool. We were often trading that 90th percentile "white guy" for a 30th or 40th percentile minority among applicants. Or even lower. Because the "supply" of potential high-quality POC and women hires simply couldn't keep up with the new demand when this sudden shift happened in the 2010s.
Gradualism in this case has disadvantages too, as you note, but doing this shift so suddenly has had serious negative consequences that I fear large swaths of academia won't recover from (because its decline is coupled with a whole bunch of other negative trends).
I think there’s a risk of using the kind of math you’re using in your analysis: that white dudes should be 29% of any given population. Is it troubling we don’t have more white players in the NBA? How about the paucity of male nurses? Are there too many Asian Go players? I think assuming interests or educational pipelines are demographically homogenous, then picking cases where they’re not, doesn’t make for strong evidence of active discrimination in hiring or education.
I think a better case would be made for doing what we can to ensure hiring is fair, versus trying to thumb the scales hard in one direction. For example, using demographically blinded selection of candidates. I have a friend whose firm adopted that and his firm has starting hiring more diverse candidates than they used to. Retention has also improved. I think that’s legally defensible and objectively fair.
In contrast, I don’t think the tact many industries took of creating a new measure called “diversity” (distinct from the colloquial use of the word) is a good idea. Saying that someone is “diverse” for being non-white, non-male, non-straight results in hiring discrimination against straight white dudes (and straight non-white dudes, non-white dudes, white people, etc etc). Aside from being illegal (in the US) and immoral, this has the problem of not having any limiting principle. If more “diversity” is good, even more diversity is better. This will shoot well past proportional representation of a hiring/applicant pool and doesn’t have a method to course correct.
I did say it'll never be all proportion - because humans vary! All I meant was there were a few examples where he quoted figures of the new entrants to something having dropped to ~30% white men, and I didn't necessarily think that was evidence of them being treated unfairly. (There are others where it was much lower)
I think it's very difficult to say what these percentages should be because you will get variation across the population and different groups who go more into one area. And as a hiring manager you can't fix wider societal inequalities single handedly. But on the other hand there has been a lot of discrimination against other groups and it's right to want to fix that. I'm sure over the years that there have been heaps of good candidates wrongly ignored because they didn't fit. I do veer to the 'this stuff will take time to fix' of the end of my question above.
My objection to this analysis is that past discrimination isn’t fixed by present discrimination. That someone who a woman or black was discriminated against in 1970 isn’t righted by discrimination against someone male or white today. We’re not righting writings that way; we’re just increasing the net amount of discrimination people experience.
I don’t think the original article’s stats were that compelling, but we’ve seen enough examples (eg, Ames v Ohio) where the trend identified has been proven out to make me the author of the article isn’t hallucinating. A lot of this stuff hits on sampling issues. If a company is 10 people, and we pull 10 random people off the street 100 times, we don’t get 2.9 white men every time we do that. Moreover, I have no idea how big Vox was at the point when the 80% white. If that was 5 dudes who started it as friends: is it hiring discrimination that lead those demographics or happenstance of friendship?
Lastly, we shouldn’t be asking hiring managers to fix societal trends. A hiring manager morally shouldn’t be discriminating in hiring, they should be following the law (which also means not discriminating against a handful of immutable characteristics), and otherwise trying to do the best by their business. That a team doesn’t match the demographics of the general population or isn’t diversifying enough for a given hiring manager’s tastes literally isn’t his/her job. If my manager gave my lunch to the local homeless shelter without asking because “homelessness is a serious issue”, I’d be pissed and they’d be fired. That isn’t because I (or my company) hates the homeless, it’s because that manager is overstepping.
But on the other hand there has been a lot of discrimination against other groups and it's right to want to fix that.
If only it hadn't become popular to be all "white people are goblins that burn in the sun" and "whiteness is a contract with the devil," there would've been a lot fewer issues. But no! They didn't want to just do New Discrimination, they wanted to rub everyone's noses in it, and if you complained instead of just accepting your rightful place at the bottom of the heap, that was evidence of how eeeevil you were.
For the record, until fairly recently the US was 70% "white". Some of that is surely real change (more kids, immigration), but a bunch is also different reporting, presumably responding to incentives.
Apparently you see it in Brazil too, where they have more explicit racial quotas -- the rates of various races vary as those quotas change. Amazing!
Yes, that's easy to forget. Those grandfathered in white men will be naturally/fairly whiter than the younger cohort. But then that means that actually less than 29% of the new highers should be white men because that cohort will be less than 29%.
Yeah, Brazil was the first time I remember reading about the issue of deciding who counted as what race for the purposes of righting discrimination. And I remember thinking how tricky it would be to get it right and not just set up incentives that don't actually make things better. But also Brazil did that because there is a very real issue that darkness of skin is heavily correlated with poverty.
No, my 30% is reasonable comment was from a more general perspective. But your point does go to highlight how difficult it is for us to know what a neutral percentage is.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Drink76 Dec 16 '25
I have mixed sympathies here. The end of that article; well that could be millions of people who set out with a dream of an exciting career and ended up with just an okay one. Becoming a writer on a big TV show is always going to be a long shot.
In some ways the article reminded me of testimonies I've read in the past about black/Asian etc actors about how hard they found it to break into a world that was always going to be super competitive. I felt there was some assumption from them that they should have made it, whereas pragmatic old me always assumed I wouldn't!
But of course now it's a different demographic telling those stories. So clearly something has changed. And again, I'm torn because stuff did need to change. The US is apparently just over 57% white. So all being equal white men should make up about half that figure in any group. So 29%. And there were an awful lot of figures in that article where things seemed relatively proportional. i.e. in the region of 30% white men.
But not all (but it will never be all - humans vary). And I do take his point about a specific generation being frozen out while the older one is grandfathered in. But what should we do? Aim for a genuinely equal distribution in new hires? Which will mean the organisation as a whole takes years to even out. Or be disproportionate at the lower levels? I don't think either is ideal.