How about all the qualified applicants that Harvard rejects in favor of legacy and athletic admits? And why hasn’t Harvard’s enrollment increased in step with its endowment?
Since you wrote the "pink" analogy and this post too, I can respond here:
The issue of anti-asian quotas at major american universities is absolutely a legitimate one that needs addressing.
Here's why it's a little bit more complicated than just: "Let's just remove all criteria for university admission besides high scores. That won't discriminate against asians and be a true meritocracy".
Because then, the amount of poor people getting into university would absolutely plummet, and the socioeconomic divide between the classes in the US would only grow further. Being able to do well on tests is a privilige based on having time to study, the money for tutors, and other factors. There is obviously a pure raw talent aspect, and the geniuses of the world might get in regardless of their race or poverty level. But there is not enough geniuses in the world. Most University student bodies are average and slightly above average humans. There has to be some way to promote balance in the student body - racially, economically, culturally. And right now, Asians are disproportionately pay that burden. It should be worked on, and improved.
But you should in no way conflate this problem with university admissions with "pink quotas" for hiring diverse groups of talent. The companies that are the most promoting the idea of improving their diversity through initiatives are the largest and richest tech companies. They do so not just because it's beneficial to the bottom line, but also because they can AFFORD to be choosy.
Joe Blow Software Co and Fizz Buzz Sandwiches aren't putting in diversity goals in their hiring strategy. They wait for people to come in to apply for jobs, and hope that they can get someone to cover a shift before the end of the week that isn't a drug addict.
Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft do it because they know that on any given day for any given position they're going to get 100 resumes, and they have what can only be described as a "loosely scientific" approach to weaning them out to 40 that can be phone screened, 5 that will come onsite, and 1 that will be hired. (Numbers are made up but are close to the real ratios).
Everything from the phone screen onward is data driven, meticulous, and kept to a strict quality bar. But the intake process has a lot of randomness, a lot of flexibility, and THAT is where the companies focus to say "Why don't we actually try to interview more women, and minorities for a change. What's the worst that can happen? We phone screen 50 people instead of 40, and so our "onsite efficiency ratio" drops from 12% to 10%.
There is no quota. There are goals to improve these numbers. But there is no quota in the professional world.
To be clear I'm not arguing for or against the merits of any particular policy. I continued with the quota example because that's what started this branch of the thread. I agree the issue is complex, and my one sentence response doesn't do it justice at all.
My point is more that, it should be ok to question current practices; both those propagating societal issues, and those attempting to solve them. Currently on many topics, even slightly questioning the current remedy risks getting one labeled negatively.
> There is no quota. There are goals to improve these numbers. But there is no quota in the professional world.
You're simply misinformed on this. I have direct primary source information from recruiting personnel in "Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft" that there are significant specific quota'd positions. These programs leaking to non-woke press is going to be an outrage.
This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity).
You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can't ship buggy messes.
And you can't hire substandard employees. There are mechanisms ("bar raisers") in place to do this, at least at Amazon.
I suppose I can't speak for Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. But I'm pretty sure that it's exactly the same and what you're getting is a game of broken telephone where an ambitious goal in a high stakes environment gets re-interpreted as a quota.
BTW, you're supposed to fail ~20-30% of your goals at Amazon, or you didn't set ambitious-enough ones.
You're suggesting I'm playing broken telephone game, yet you're the one extrapolating your company's experience to all the other hundreds.
I can't speak for Amazon's policies. But there are companies that have headcount for N people, and N/X slots will be for Y identity.
Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards:
"Our vision for the future is clear.
50%.
At least half of our global workforce will be women.
25%
At least a quarter of our US workforce will be under-represented minorities."[0]
Key word "will", not "would like." How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?
Honestly I can't wrap my head around how Twitter believes 45% men / 55% women is the ideal and 55% men / 45% women would be unacceptable.
Most of the large tech companies have similar hiring policies. It’s not unreasonable to think what goes at Amazon is fairly similar to what goes on at Apple, Google, etc. There’s a reason the FAANG acronym exists.
Also, if your takeaway from “at least half the employees will be women” as a goal, at a time when the breakdown is 43% women, and has been a lot lower for the past decade, is that “55% women is ok but 55% men is not”, it’s pretty obvious you’re arguing in bad faith.
It’s pretty obvious that’s a goal that at least half the workforce will be women in fewer than 4 years. What that actually means is that Twitter is likely gonna barely cross the 50% mark, if they are even gonna meet it.
The reality is that the moment they hit 50% they will ease off on the effort to recruit more women than men, which, thanks to structural factors that have led to the current unbalanced distribution of employees, will only make their hiring easier ans allow them to continue hiring equitably.
I worked at Google and was interviewing twice a week for years. They had "goals" then too. They made the same claims, that it wouldn't affect employee quality, and I believed it at first.
But the goals were incentivised with money and what happens when you do that? The system was bent in all sorts of creative but illegitimate ways to try and get there. Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway. They were given the best interviewers that were preferred by the hiring committees, and men who were mis-interviewed were simply dropped on the floor instead of re-doing the process or filtering the bad interviewers out. I was told they were doing this by the recruiters themselves. They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.
More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.
But that was some years ago. Tech firms became much more extreme since then. A recruiter leaked YouTube's instructions to do biased hiring previously, and nothing happened. Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments, they're constantly attacked by an activist class who insist they do so - what do you think happens? Of course they are discriminating. How else could they achieve their goals? "Encouragement" is a fantasy, there aren't huge pools of women who are inexplicably refusing to apply to major tech firms.
You said a lot of things in your first 2 paragraphs but at no point did you say "And then we hired women at a lower bar than we hired men"
"Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds like it but the next stage isn't an offer - it's the onsite interview. If Google's process is anything like Amazon's, there is a screen-OUT stage and a screen-IN stage.
The screen out stage is primarily there to make sure not to waste the time of the full onsite interview loop. It's highly subjective and you are SUPPOSED to err on the side of letting people go through. You're SUPPOSED to have the most senior engineers on the team do these screens. But people frequently don't. They introduce their own biases, and managers use phone screens as practice for their most junior interviews. The outcome is qualified candidates sometimes don't even get a chance to prove their worth in an onsite loop.
So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No, but there is no way to make this process truly fair at the scale that FAAMNG hires.
So long as the FINAL process is fair, that's all that you can really do and ensure you don't hire unqualified people.
> They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.
That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities. Or HBCU's. Amazon also does "women's only" hiring events. They have lower hire ratios because there is a pipeline intake problem too in our whole industry. But that's okay.
> More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.
I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable. It's extremely hard to get fired from a FAAMNG company once you're in. What you describe happens to all employees (being moved between teams).
> Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments
Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed? Making it easier for women to apply does not make it HARDER for Men. All the initiatives we discussed are IN ADDITION not INSTEAD OF.
You said a lot of things in your first 2 paragraphs but at no point did you say "And then we hired women at a lower bar than we hired men"
You're interpreting this the way you want to. If given an identical interview a man would fail and the woman automatically gets interviewed more, that is bar lowering. If given identical behaviour the man is fired and the woman is promoted, that is bar lowering. What do you think the point of interviewing or firing people is? And for sure the only person who ever generated reactions in my teams of the form "how the hell did this person get hired and why aren't they fired yet", was a female engineer who was the darling of the manager's manager, another female engineer who thought getting more women into tech management was a high priority.
Now, again, that was years ago. There are plenty of people since who came forward and said yes, Google and other tech firms use quotas in hiring. Recruiters, people who would know.
So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth
onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No
It's good you admit this, because that's the core of the issue. Not if hiring can be made truly, perfectly fair (whatever definition is used), but if it's actively being made unfair by gender-biased policies. To which the answer is an absolute yes.
That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities
You claim it's not insidious and then say, well, this type of discrimination goes unpunished elsewhere so it's OK. That doesn't make it not insidious. It just proves the underlying argument: that our society is by this point systematically biased against men despite the theoretical existence of equality laws. Do you think male-only hiring events would be tolerated? Surely not.
I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable
I understand why you might think that, but that certainly wasn't true when I was there and IMHO it clearly still isn't true. There were at least two guys who I directly worked with who got fired for being unproductive. I knew quite a few others who were put on PIPs for various reasons. Google did, maybe still does, operate a policy of "up or out" in which being fired is automatic if you don't get promoted. It was very much possible to get fired there, unless you were a woman, in which case HR would have preferred to sacrifice a goat than fire a woman. Remember, the firm had "goals" to keep the female:male ratio as high as they could, and it was explicitly phrased as a moral issue.
And of course, look at James Damore. Fired and viciously publicly attacked for spelling out the reality of the situation: these firms discriminate horrendously in favour of women and against men, and yet it's not working, that approach doesn't generate a torrent of happy women in tech. It generates angry men who, rightly, feel they're being treated unfairly for genetic reasons.
Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed?
I just gave you a list but maybe repetition will help:
- Men are being banned from senior executive roles.
- Men are being banned from board seats, in some parts of the world, by law.
- When women make an accusation against a man, they are automatically believed and their identity is protected. The same is not true for men. Again, in many parts of the world, this principle is enshrined in law: the law itself in unequitable.
- Men who point out obvious demographic truths backed by plenty of research are fired, like "women are less interested in computers than men". If women make claims directly contradicted by plenty of research, like "women are paid less than men due to discrimination", they are praised and rewarded.
- Men who want fair treatment of other men are routinely banned from "diversity committees", e.g. https://fortune.com/2015/01/23/diversity-work/ (but I saw this at my previous employer too). That's why the concept of diversity is so widely treated with derision. They want an absolute diversity of people who all hold their extremist beliefs.
- Beyond prizes in hiring-related competitions, there are bonus pots at firms set aside exclusively for women. This has been true at least since the early 90s at Microsoft.
- Job assessment is routinely biased against white men in ways that are obviously illegal, but again, men have no protection and SJW activists are so confident about this they actively boast about it in public. Consider this quote from an interview with someone at Atlassian on their new HR policies:
"A huge component for us was de-biasing the assessment process. There’s been a lot of talk and testing on de-biasing and we worked closely with our design team to remove bias from the process. What we realized were that systems weren’t designed to be anti-racist, for example, which isn’t the same as non-racist. We wanted to be actively conscious, for example, of being anti-racist"
This sort of list could go on all day. I know you really don't want to believe that because it undermines so many other beliefs that go along with the whole package, but women are lionised in our industry, men are second class citizens and the sexist/racist discrimination that occurs is all done by people who most loudly announce themselves as "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". One day this whole ideology will be recognised by all as the dark evil it truly is. Until that day we have to point out its hypocrisies, every day.
I got halfway through your post counter-arguing point by point, but I had to give up because I realize I disagree with so much of what you say that my response will be unmanageable for you to discuss in return. I don't think we're going to agree, and I don't think we are changing any part of each other's minds.
I fundamentally live in a different world from you if you believe that men are second class citizens in our industry.
Well, I understand that feeling. I nearly gave up half way through my prior comment too for the same reasons. I hope at least you understand the experiences and reasoning behind the viewpoint, and see that it's not mere reactionism but motivated by things happening in the real world, even if it seems remote from your world or if you take away fundamentally different conclusions. That is perhaps enough.
Just "setting quotas" is more than slightly missing the point. You can tell HR to hire more POC for senior level positions, which is what my last job essentially did, but it doesn't actually bring new diverse talent in.
I would like to see some more information about the amount of poor people getting into universities plummeting. It’s my understanding that many of the Asian quotas are keeping poor Asians out of prestigious universities and replacing them with average upper middle class students. If you have sources, I would love to read them.
It is certainly discrimination. Evidence has been collected and judgements made, e.g. that African-Americans are severely discriminated against, and special provision be made for them to compensate.
This is specifically trying to be fair, rather than trying to make access equally difficult. I don't know why that is hard to grasp. I don't think 'righting injustice' is bad way to explain it.
Harvard is also discriminating against Asians because there are 'too many'. This seems quite likely but is a separate issue. The historical injustice is present, but cannot be said to have the same character. I don't think criticism of other minority AA programs is justified, but you can have your own opinion.
Earlier in the 20th century, that reasoning was used to limit the admissions of Jewish students. The issue was cast as their being admitted at a disproportionately large rate as compared to the general population, so corrective measures were implemented.
Back then, there were zero black students at Harvard. The admissions process can’t become more fair by failing to correct for the vast injustices imposed on African-Americans. Arguing that Black students are taking what rightfully belongs Asian students is just as racist as Harvard’s anti-Jewish policies.
I realize your heart is in the right place, but I just want to call out that what you're saying is actually propagating the stereotype of Asians scoring high / other PoCs not scoring as much in exams. This can create undue expectations which can lead to feustration, anxiety, and depression amongst people that are stereotyped to be high performers. Add to that the layer of being systemically discriminated against, and it gets rather bad.
Again, I'm not questioning your heart, but I do think that words are powerful and words are how the society group think evolves.
As if admission into Harvard (and most other elite schools) is solely based on test scores (and even grades). Give me a break.
For reasons folks may or may not agree with, most elite schools look at a wider range of factors than just scores and grades. Does this lead to there being room for discrimination? Yes. Does it guarantee that discrimination is happening? No.
Just as a simple example, there are plenty of non-Asian folks with high scores and high grades that get rejected too, often for similar reasons — namely, being narrowly focused on academics and not even being world-class at that.
I think it would be much better if admission into elite schools were based on objective test scores. It's easy to see how racism seeps into "Your extra-curriculars just aren't Harvard enough" or whatever subjective judgment call would be used to evaluate in-person interviews, extra-curriculars, essays, etc. It's a lot harder to see where the racism is coming from if the admissions criteria are "Higest X scores get admittance, random lottery to break ties." There is also transparent racism in the current system that says some races have to score higher than others to be admitted.
I am very aware of the details of the accusations. My personal belief, backed with some actual detailed real life knowledge, is that most people who think that discrimination is going on don’t understand one of two related things:
1. How elite school applicants are rated. Most folks seem to think it’s just test scores and maybe grades. It’s not.
2. What successful applicants at elite schools look like on paper. Most people think that elite school student bodies are just a bunch of brainiacs with near perfect grades and scores. While grades and scores are certainly high, the defining characteristic of the core admits are that they have done something of note at the regional, national, or international level (not always true of fringe admits, but that’s a different story). Sometimes these people don’t even have near perfect test scores or grades (frankly, some come across as not terribly smart at all), but they are able to get compelling things done.
I recommend reading Cal Newport’s book on elite school admissions to get a better idea of how to get in.
Also, it seems like two courts have said that Harvard in particular did not discriminate against Asians.
I think you’re making a lot of assumptions of the average readers’ views on the admissions policies of elite schools.
I’d say I have a pretty solid view of how the admissions process works.
