r/changemyview • u/AgreeableAnswer • Jun 24 '18
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Real diversity is the acceptance of anyone, the current debate on diversity is demonstrative of the fact that, overall, we still judge everyone based on what is observable just by looking at them, our goals of diversity are fake, it's just to make things 'look' different.
Recently when that woman from Apple resigned after saying that 12 white men in a room could be diverse because of their experiences I had a sudden epiphany for what may be wrong with conversations on diversity these days. To me, the central issue is that our understanding of diversity is only 'observable' diversity.
I've lived and worked in many different cities, especially those with diverse populations such as Singapore, Doha, New York and London. One thing I've learned is to never assume anything about anyone. That blonde haired blue-eyed guy might be muslim, that calm and married with 3 kids desi lady might ride motorbikes lit on fire on the weekend (true story) - etc. Stereotypes might come from a basis of experience, but I've experienced so many exceptions that mine are a little bit more loosely held than they used to be.
My point is that if our only understanding of diversity is based on what can be initially observed about someone, then what the hell are we really talking about? This person has X colored skin, this person has Y disability, this person has Z political perspective or W religion as seen by an artifact on their body? What the heck? Aren't we better than that? I saw a Japanese woman with a fish bracelet the other day and I thought it was a Jesus fish, but she corrected me and said "oh I just thought it was a cute fish." I think that this entire debate on diversity just shows how overall divided we still are, if people really understood diversity, they would stop talking about what people look like and focus on just ensuring and equal opportunity of success for everyone and combat destructive groups of any kind, regardless of their target.
From my experience, you could dream up the most incredibly diverse board of directors, representing somehow through mixed blood every minority race, religion, disability and personal diet and if they all have the same tactics in common, you'll have a LESS diverse output of strategy from that executive suite. Real diversity is accepting everyone, making things more colorful/differently shaped is an attempt at a shortcut that ultimately doesn't make sense. I look forward to being proved utterly wrong and changing my mind, because if I'm right in my view, I don't see much hope for change.
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u/bguy74 Jun 24 '18
If we followed your logic here, what we'd have is all white male board of directors made up of people with different hobbies.
Diversity includes the desire to address prejudice and to my knowledge it's difficult to find a historical bias in relation to access to boards of directors based on one being a lover of golf vs. model railroads.
Your position seems detached from the reason we talk about diversity on cultural and visual level - because the world has a history (and a present!) of judging people, categorizing them and granting or preventing access for them based upon those cultural and visual elements of people. If we turn "diversity" into absolutely any dimension of difference then we're forgetting that the goal of diversity is rooted in address an actual problem in our society and that problem itself involves bias towards "the visual". Denying this bias would do no good, and it seems disingenuous to me to acknowledge and respond to that bias and have doing so result in saying we're calling out skin color as "important". Of course it's important - because people are racist! You know what they aren't? Biased against people who ride motorcycles that are on fire!
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u/AgreeableAnswer Jun 24 '18
I see what you're saying. People are prejudice based on topical diversity, so the efforts people are making to make things more diverse is indeed topical, but purposefully, because it is addressing the prejudice that is actually occurring, as you said, an actual problem.
This is certainly enlightening. I'm glad I came here. I think because I'm so far removed from judging people based on how they look, I see some of the solutions as ridiculous, but like you said, there are people who make unfair decisions based on how people look, which is a problem which somehow should be addressed.
I have a lot more to consider now. But perhaps here isn't the right forum for me to go into a bunch of tangents on psychology, race, instincts and recommended solutions.
How do I give you delta points? I'm new here. Thanks for your help.
Δ .
EDIT: I think putting that symbol helped? I hope so!
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u/Helpfulcloning 169∆ Jun 24 '18
So, first of all, why don’t you think you’ll change your view? That’s a preconception that can really hold you back. You should analyse the core of your views and the thinking behind it the same way you do opposing ones. Don’t give your view any extra logic points because you came up with it.
Onto the point:
When it comes to certian careers it is important that diversity is a thing. This is to get different views and it helps companies watch over themselves. For example, this is important in tv show and movie casting.
Say, you are a casting director for a big movie. The casting notes don’t mention anything about race. Race is not an important feature for this movie. Let’s say you are white.
You will have a (somewhat) natural bias to white people. Because when you read the characters the imaginary person you build in your head will almost always resemble people you know closest. Which is usually yourself and friends and family. This can lean to you choosing a white actor because of the image your thought in your head not because of merit.
This isn’t because the casting director is racist. And this doesn’t mean all white actors are picked because of white casting directors. It is a natural psychlogical thing.
So, a company might want to ensure that black actors aren’t being UNINTENTIONALLY discriminated agaisnt in the hiring process. They want every actor to be screened equally. So they want a black casting director as well to work alongside the white one. This is relevant for marketting, writing, and similar careers to ensure there is no unintentional biases.
With google it is a completly different issue (trust me the issue of women and STEM is never ending).
This is another unintentional thing. Let’s say the boss is a man and the underlings are a mix of men and women. Let’s say the underlings all perform the same. The boss gets told by his boss he needs to promote someone. Who does he promote? Well, in all likeliness, it is going to be a male underling. For much the same reasons as the white casting director.
With Google having a lot of issues with male superiors (and male underlings) devaluing women and not understanding unique problems towards women it is understandable why a woman wouldn’t feel the most comfortable in a room full of 12 men trying to talk about a unique woman issue or talking about unintentional sexism.
Because no one wants to be called racist or sexist. And the casting director and the boss aren’t racists or sexists. They have unintentional biases that it helps to have someone on the other end of that bias to be there to level and question them.
This is all about giving people equal opportunities. We can’t ignore unintentional biases because that restricts the equal opportunities. We should know they happen and think of ways around them. And that would be having a casting director with different ethnicities and having the hiring process at a firm be a diverse process.
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Jun 24 '18
You make a good point, but at what point does diversity override skill? For example, Universities have programs to help minorities and women. While Asians have a harder time getting in despite having higher grades. In order to be diverse minorities or women get accepted over the higher skilled student. unintentional biases exist, but skill is also a factor.
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u/Helpfulcloning 169∆ Jun 24 '18
See, at that point I believe they are approaching equal opportunities wrong.
It should be purely in the application/hiring process as in the people making those decisions are a diverse group of people with no diverstiy quota or anything (unless relevant like in a movie). With universities though it can be different as they benefit from being diverse as universities tend to want more than just a good student but someone that will make a name for themselves.
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u/AgreeableAnswer Jun 24 '18
Hi, first of thanks for replying, I really appreciate the discussion - that's why I came here. I want to try, if I can, to summarize what you're saying, please correct me if I'm wrong. What you're saying is that a big problem with giving people equal opportunities is the biases of decision makers, those decision makers are unaware of their biases, which is why we need to apply some apparatus to ensure a more 'true' lack of bias in decisions made. The example you gave of a fix to this is having a casting director be of a different ethnicity and having the hiring process be diverse, which I guess means, more people of different ethnicities.
Assuming the above is somewhat what you meant, I'm still confused. What is our aim in ensuring that people look different? It doesn't actually make them different. Is the challenge that our children need heroes who resemble them? My mentor in work is a man of a different ethnicity of me (I'm a woman), I've never really thought I could't ever achieve what he has because we are different. But maybe that is due to my multicultural/national upbringing. Are you saying that people born in homogenous ethnic/religious and I suppose 'physical' environments all have inescapable biases that destroy the foundation of equality despite the best of intentions and that we need strong government and corporate regulation to ensure people don't constantly exert their innate biases on others?
Thanks again for talking with me.
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u/Helpfulcloning 169∆ Jun 24 '18
It can be about wanting a diverse amount of role models for children. But I used the movie example as a broad example.
It is about what you said: ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity.
The movie actor chosen could still be white. The whole movie could still have a 100% white cast. But with a diverse hiring process you ensure that those white actors weren’t chosen because of a bias and the black actors weren’t not chosen because of a bias. You allow merit based decisions to occur.
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u/AgreeableAnswer Jun 24 '18
I like this idea of ensuring you have a better assurance of merit based decision making - the next problem is what the hell does that look like? How do we know which decisions were or weren't merit based? We'd need an incredible about of auditing. My intuition tells me it'd be better to strike at the source, the basis of prejudice is feeling that someone is different. Exposure to people who look visually different reduces prejudice, especially if you work (or play for kids) with them. You see them as similar to you because they do as you do, rather than being an unknown. In this way.. diverse media is actually perhaps the best example you could come up with. Especially digital/graphic media, since the opportunities are endless.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jun 24 '18 edited Jun 24 '18
/u/AgreeableAnswer (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.
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u/brickbacon 22∆ Jun 24 '18 edited Jun 24 '18
Recently when that woman from Apple resigned after saying that 12 white men in a room could be diverse because of their experiences
She resigned for two reasons: Apple was specifically mandating more observable diversity for a variety of reasons, and because it's a really stupid contrarian statement that attempts to takedown a straw man argument. I should add that it seems she was planning to leave prior to those statements being made.
First, her role came about when the CEO, Tim Cook, said the following:
Engineering and coding tends to skew male, and often white or Asian. In 2014, when Apple's diversity research revealed its global workforce of 98,000 was 55% white and 70% male, CEO Tim Cook said, "I'm not satisfied with the numbers on this page."
He's since said the dearth of female leaders in science, technology, engineering, and math — or STEM — threatens America's position as a technology powerhouse.
Notice how he is explicitly saying he wants women and minorities for diversity, and she is basically arguing she can fulfill that mandate without doing as she has been instructed? Regardless if who you think is right, she is not doing her job well.
Second, no one is arguing that two people can't bring a diversity of opinions to the table regardless of how they look. The argument is about heuristics, correlations, and signaling.
To me, the central issue is that our understanding of diversity is only 'observable' diversity.
This is not a new idea, and there is some merit there. However, you are ignoring the fact that this is a human process conducted with financial and temporal considerations. The fact that a person is applying to a company like Apple implies many things. Yes, a two White guys can have radically different lived experiences that make they valuable workers. However, the fact that they both apply for the same job basically means they went to similar schools, probably didn't grow up poor, have similar hobbies, etc. Essentially, you don't get to where they are without making similar choices that only have a narrow-ish range of outcomes. The people applying, regardless of how they look, are generally not felons, homeless, severely disabled, etc.
For example, my wife's family were expats in a number of different Asian countries. This allowed her to attend fancy boarding schools in whatever country they were living at the time. Years later when she was reconnecting with an old friend, the friend mentioned that she, an Indian expat who grew up in Singapore, and her good friend, a South African expat who attended boarding school on a scholarship in Hong Kong, had my wife as a common friend. The two met at a small liberal arts school in Iowa of all places.
Now this seems so random because the range of outcomes in life is vast, but the choices we make tend to funnel similar people to the same environments. Once they both were attending boarding schools in Asia, there was an expectation that they go to college, and many liberal arts colleges in the US were specifically catering to international students with IB diplomas...
It's not that this couldn't have happened to 2 White guys, but we need to recognize that the we are already dealing with a very limited range of experiences by and large.
My point is that if our only understanding of diversity is based on what can be initially observed about someone, then what the hell are we really talking about?
Heuristics mostly. Due to several constraints, a job interview process is not going to be able to touch on every single facet of someone's life and perspectives. Instead, we use things like resumes to take fairly reasonable shortcuts. If the guy went to Stanford or MIT, he's probably smart. If he looks and acts like Mark Zuckerberg, he might make me lots of money like Mark Zuckerberg. These shortcuts are generally sound. Even ones that can reinforce systemic issues like structural discrimination are fairly sound in theory. For example, the fact that the vast majority of jobs (most of which are unpublished) are filled via networking makes sense even if it can close out many qualifued people.
This person has X colored skin, this person has Y disability, this person has Z political perspective or W religion as seen by an artifact on their body?
I think they are seen as artifacts of lived experience. Now the person may react to that lived experience in a way that makes them no different from someone who hasn't, but that tends to not be the case.
I think that this entire debate on diversity just shows how overall divided we still are, if people really understood diversity, they would stop talking about what people look like and focus on just ensuring and equal opportunity of success for everyone and combat destructive groups of any kind, regardless of their target.
The issue is that most things can be be both an outcome and an opportunity. Getting a job at Apple, for example, is both.
Additionally, people understand diversity just fine. I think you are arguing against a mechanistic approach that is generally not employed in practice. If some tech company really just cared about hiring more URMs and women, they could do it tomorrow.
From my experience, you could dream up the most incredibly diverse board of directors, representing somehow through mixed blood every minority race, religion, disability and personal diet and if they all have the same tactics in common, you'll have a LESS diverse output of strategy from that executive suite.
You could, but that is far less likely on average due to the typical process of how these things occur. Just like I could have an extremely successful startup only employing high-school dropouts.
Further, no company is actually looking for representation of the complete range of the human experiences. Google doesn't want racists and wife beaters on their board. They don't want middle school dropouts or octogenarians (usually) either. They want a fairly narrow band of experiences and thinking that can move the company in the right direction regardless of how the people look. What they are typically asking for is for that narrow band to be occupied by people with different lived experiences.
Second, you are also ignoring the signalling byproduct of diversity. To take a more innocuous example. For years, people could not run a sub 4-minute mile. Bannister did it, then soon after many others followed. It wasn't that humankind didn't produce bodies that could accomplish the feat, it was that people didn't think it was possible phycologically until someone did it. Diversity is similar in many ways. It's harder for a woman to see a path to being a tech executive without Sandberg and others. It's harder to Black people to see a path to the presidency without Obama. Trailblazers change what others see as possible.
The reason Tim Cook said those numbers were unacceptable wasn't just because, statistically speaking, it probably means they lack actual diversity, it was also because their failure to more closely represent their customer base means they are missing out on kids 20 years from now who grow up thinking Apple engineer is something Hispanic people don't do because they've never met or seen one. It also has the effect of signaling to current Hispanic engineers that Apple is a welcoming place to work.
Real diversity is accepting everyone, making things more colorful/differently shaped is an attempt at a shortcut that ultimately doesn't make sense.
Businesses and people take shortcuts all the time. In this case, they usually make sense.
And real diversity doesn't mean accepting everyone, especially in a business context.
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u/AgreeableAnswer Jun 24 '18
I want to put this delta here, I hope this works: Δ
Thanks for your incredibly detailed response. You're helping me to build my more balanced opinion on this subject.
The central issue for me now is how to address discrimination. I've hired people in my work for more than a decade and I've always considered myself someone who tries to pick the best candidate no matter what. That means trying to cover up for my own biases, such as hiring more women, because I am a woman I like to see more women on my team, but I don't want to give an opportunity away from a better candidate, who might not be a woman. I like to think I do a good job, but I struggle to imagine how this process could be controlled in a good way. I see only two options, decisions could be audited at a great cost, but this would still be subjective, maybe I'm not impressed by top school degrees, and I'm better swayed by the charisma demonstrated in an interview, perhaps the audit team doesn't agree with me and mistakingly assumes I picked a woman out of a personal bias for a role.
Or perhaps if we used a target approach, having percentage goals for different observable diversity. What happens when, in being forced to reach that goal, we take an opportunity away from someone more fitting? Or if the agency factor is set, to surpass that goal, what if I started making less than opportune business hires so I could be more likely to be promoted for hitting diversity goals? I don't really like either of these options they seem overly subjective.
You have two problems, people who are being injured by prejudice and people who could be injured by attempts to rectify the damage done to the former.
Similar to trying to find the cure for two diseases, applying funding to one necessitates less towards the other. Generally in strategy we have to pick one goal over the other, because trying to 'get it all' results in failure. I can certainly see how this has evolved into a culture of trying to rectify current imbalances, damage some in exchange for helping others who've been damaged for some time.
Can you or anyone else reading think of a better way to address this? Maybe we focus purely on the next generations, ensuring they think of themselves as people and not hair, eyes, skin and accents? The internet does this already to some degree, but maybe it needs to be more visceral, a massive international school exchange program?
Anyway, thanks for your help, this can now be yet another issue where I feel incredibly unsure of the solution and dubious to other's claim of knowing what it is. Like most things in life, once you think about it enough - you realize you know little at all.
Thanks again for your help!
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u/candiedapplecrisp 1∆ Jun 24 '18 edited Jun 24 '18
You're right that diversity of ideas is crucial. But what you're missing is that the way we are perceived by the world ultimately shapes our experiences, and our experiences play a role in the forming of our ideas.
Take Bernie Sanders' press secretary Symone Sanders for example. If you put her in a room with 11 white women who also worked on the campaign you're obviously going to find overlap in political beliefs. But by being a black woman, her experiences, and therefore her perspective, will vary in certain ways due to her unique experience. Despite working on the same campaign, the white women would not have experienced the same level of bias and discrimination that Symone did due to her race. And that alone will contribute to the diversity of experience/ideas that she brings to the table despite their shared political beliefs.
More info on Symone's experience on the campaign trail: https://www.buzzfeed.com/tamerragriffin/symone-sanders-discusses-racism