It doesn't seem well known - I can't find any many claims prior to the Summer of 2020.

I found one quote in passing from 2005 - note this in regards his working time frame from 1979 to 1995.

  You got an MBA at night a few years later. This should have put you right on track for a boss-type position at the bank. What happened?

  Well, one day, my boss called me in, and said they couldn’t promote a white male because there was too much attention on the fact that there was no diversity in senior management. She told me I didn’t have a future with the bank. And so I put my resumé out and went to Pacific Bell. A couple of years later, [Pacific Bell] told me exactly the same thing. And that’s when I started looking at cartooning as an option.

and

  You were placed on a series of doomed projects at Pacific Bell as punishment for mocking a boss’ memo in your cartoons. Did that actually work to your advantage by providing better grist for your cartoon mill?

  Well, it certainly made me angry, which is good. There’s a correlation between anger and humour. The angrier you are, the funnier you can be. You can drive things to the next level. But as far as material goes, I didn’t need any special bad projects to give me material – there was plenty.

I urge you to read the full interview - I suspect his lack of promotion may be more related to him as an individual than his race or gender.

https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/escape-from-platos-cub...

Given he is the only source for this claim, I dunno what you want or expect me to say.

> Well, one day, my boss called me in, and said they couldn’t promote a white male because there was too much attention on the fact that there was no diversity in senior management.

Good find. He was telling the same story 15 years ago.

Absent some other evidence, it seems the main reason to be skeptical is simply that it's not a pleasing thing to hear.

I guess - I would also guess that one not getting promoted might also be related to the lack skills at leadership, etc.

Given his thoughts on leadership:

  Well, my theory is that all leadership is a form of evil, because the whole point of managing people is getting them to do stuff they don’t want to do on their own. You don’t need a manager to tell people to eat chocolate chip cookies, because they want to do that. But you do need a manager to tell them to work extra hours for the same amount of pay, and I’m not good at that. If managing were truly a case of win-win scenarios – you give me more and you get more out – I could definitely do that. But the “best” managers are not like that, [according to real-world corporate behaviour]. The “best” ones are the ones getting you to do stuff and giving you nothing in return. 

I can see that he might not be promoted due to skill and ability.

If that were the reason, then why would his boss tell him it was about race?

Correction:

  Why would Scott Adams say that his boss told him it was about race?

That is the assumption of this discussion.

To me, we're beyond whether his race was a factor in promotion - he by direct provided self description is probably not a good candidate. But I'll guess beyond that.

Maybe his boss wanted to keep him in his current position but needed a scapegoat to blame as a factor beyond both their control. Keep in mind this would have been more acceptable to suggest in 1970s/1980s than 2022.

Maybe Scott Adams is making this all up or taking a partial comment and constructing his own flawed narrative around it, or, in the very least, neglecting key context to fully understand it.

Again, I don't know what you want me to say here. I never brought up the origination of Dilbert nor understand where you are driving this discussion to.

Discriminating on the basis of color and gender is illegal and managers are explicitly trained to not make such statements.

I have a hard time believing such a conversation happened.

Memory is not infallible, and I find it more plausible that Adams is remembering his (maybe fair, maybe unfair) inference as an explicit statement.

It is well-known that Adams claimed that long after the fact, which is somewhat different from it being known to be true.

A woman can allege she was sexually assaulted years or decade after the event, and still be presumed to be stating the 'truth'.

Yet Adams' claim - of discrimination for being white and male - is somehow presumed to be 'different' from the 'truth', just because he "claimed that long after the fact"?

The truth does not change depending on the age of a claim.

Is it implausible that a corporation that wants to be viewed as progressive, would favor more diverse candidates?

> Evidence would be interesting, but unsupported accusations don't add anything to the conversation.

Yes, that's exactly how I feel about his long-delayed claims of explicit cut-and-dried (with decades of on-point precedent at the time he claims it occurred) illegal employment practice by his previous employer.

You're actually allowed to have skepticism about someone else's personal claims, offered decades after the fact, without any corroborating external facts.

What's the basis of your skepticism here? Is it rooted in fact, or in bias?

Its rooted in the fact that this behavior is illegal and managers are explicitly trained to not make any such communication.

By your reasoning everyone who reports a crime should be presumed to be lying.

We do in fact require more than a report before meting out punishments. Whether that means "everyone who reports a crime should be presumed to be lying" or "everyone accused of a crime should be presumed to be innocent" is a matter of how you want to spin it.

There's a material difference between a public, open forum and a court that can mete out punishments. Though people tend to confuse the two these days.

> You have no idea

Exactly my point in regard to the upthread question:

“Is it now well known that Dilbert exists solely because Scott Adams was told - as a young executive - that he would not be promoted further because he is a white male?”

I have no idea if that occurred or if it is why Dilbert exists, though I certainly know that is part of the story that Adams tells about it.

> Evidence would be interesting, but unsupported accusations don't add anything to the conversation.

Seeing as how Adams has no evidence whatsoever that a large corporation whose HR department would be well-versed in what they can and cannot say (as well as what they should and should not say) to employees I think the burden of proof rests on Adams.

Presumably an HR department or executive would also be smart enough not to put such a statement in writing.

I will drop this apropos of nothing about the time that Scott Adam's created numerous sock puppets to influence discussion about himself on a "popular with the technorati" community blog - https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos