That opinion assumes the people who weren’t being hired due to discrimination are less capable. Which is the kind of thing people use to justify discrimination.
Let me explain it with a theoretical example: you are a company and the field you’re hiring in consists of 90 women and 10 men. You need 10 people for the job and want the most capable. Statistically that would mean hiring 9 women and 1 man on average, giving you the 10% most capable employees. But since you want equality you want it 50/50, so you hire 5 women and 5 men. That means that for the women you hired the 5,6% most capable employees, but for the men you hire the 50% most capable employees. So you get less capable employees this way, assuming both groups are equally likely to be capable.
Let me stop you here: You seem to lack the pre-requisite knowledge of laws, and the understanding of what HR departments and DEI departments do.
What you’re describing is absolutely, totally, illegal and has been since the 1970s. This was decided in Griggs v Duke Power Co. The phrase you can look up is “Disparate impact” and in particular the “adverse impact” and tests.
DEI has big problems, but most of them stem from businesses just slapping in a 60 minute micro aggression course from a third party service and calling it done
For example, a purposeless unconscious bias training required for all employees is almost certainly less effective than an unconscious bias training deployed specifically for decision-makers like hiring managers or supervisors, to increase their familiarity with newly implemented bias-interrupting practices like hiring panels and scoring rubrics after an audit found evidence of bias in hiring and promotion processes.
Are all of the people qualified? Then everything past that is likely to be subjective as to what ‘more capable means’.
If so, odds are pretty high that what the hiring person thinks are more capable are just people that fut their preconceived notions of who is likely to be more qualified. Generally that is tall, white men.
Not to mention there is a lot more to being effective workers, like communication and collaboration. A more diverse workforce tends to increase communication and collaboration when being diverse and inclusive are goals.
Not to mention people can grow as they get experience. So even if they aren’t the most capable at the time of hiring, they might be in a few years. And if people don’t get any experience, they will always have a disadvantage against even less capable people who have more experience. It is a feedback loop that makes even a small amount of discrimination have a mush larger effect.
That opinion assumes the people who weren’t being hired due to discrimination are less capable. Which is the kind of thing people use to justify discrimination.
Let me explain it with a theoretical example: you are a company and the field you’re hiring in consists of 90 women and 10 men. You need 10 people for the job and want the most capable. Statistically that would mean hiring 9 women and 1 man on average, giving you the 10% most capable employees. But since you want equality you want it 50/50, so you hire 5 women and 5 men. That means that for the women you hired the 5,6% most capable employees, but for the men you hire the 50% most capable employees. So you get less capable employees this way, assuming both groups are equally likely to be capable.
Let me stop you here: You seem to lack the pre-requisite knowledge of laws, and the understanding of what HR departments and DEI departments do.
What you’re describing is absolutely, totally, illegal and has been since the 1970s. This was decided in Griggs v Duke Power Co. The phrase you can look up is “Disparate impact” and in particular the “adverse impact” and tests.
DEI has big problems, but most of them stem from businesses just slapping in a 60 minute micro aggression course from a third party service and calling it done
https://hbr.org/2022/12/the-failure-of-the-dei-industrial-complex
What DEI is supposed to do is stuff like:
Are all of the people qualified? Then everything past that is likely to be subjective as to what ‘more capable means’.
If so, odds are pretty high that what the hiring person thinks are more capable are just people that fut their preconceived notions of who is likely to be more qualified. Generally that is tall, white men.
Not to mention there is a lot more to being effective workers, like communication and collaboration. A more diverse workforce tends to increase communication and collaboration when being diverse and inclusive are goals.
Not to mention people can grow as they get experience. So even if they aren’t the most capable at the time of hiring, they might be in a few years. And if people don’t get any experience, they will always have a disadvantage against even less capable people who have more experience. It is a feedback loop that makes even a small amount of discrimination have a mush larger effect.