> I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece

That's not "woke", that's just garden variety nepotism.

That's the point, "woke" gives garden variety nepotism a nice shiny ESG approved cover.

If we get rid of everything that some asshole can use as cover, there's not going to be a lot left.

"Woke" is very different that other types of cover. "Woke" gets celebrated and praised, and people have to pretend that hire wasn't hired due to nepotism.

As a manager whose been thru this rodeo, let me tell you what happens.

1. We have to have a mini celebration for "woke but really nepotistic" hire at big corporation.

2. We can never mention that persons skill or the "real" reason they got hired.

3. It gives the "elites" far more power to harass people via HR if they don't like the nepotism

4. The non-nepotism hires can become bitter and resentful, even more so when they have to pickup extra work for no department praise or celebrations if the "woke" hire is bad. I also have to give cover for the "woke" hire.

5. My team starts to collapse, and I have to negotiate all sorts of shit to keep my talented hires.

It's just an absolute nightmare when managing a high performance results required teams.

I agree with everything stuckinhell said as she seems to have some first hand experience with this, but I'd like to add that frankly it's just disgusting to use things like civil rights as a corporate HR move. People marched and risked a lot of real things to achieve the rights that we all have today. Now "wokeness" (which used to be cool btw) has been co-opted by corporations and we all have to pretend that a company hiring an unqualified woman who happens to be related to someone on the C-suite is progress just because she's a woman.

It makes me sick, and I don't understand how anyone can defend this bullshit.

I work in bank fraud and I have seen several articles celebrating 'girl bosses' who are just trust fund kids. Or a gay CEO that embezzled $30 million.

Like yay progress, I guess..?

It's not "garden variety" nepotism, it's woke nepotism, and it's why so many people have issues with diversity initiatives.

It is garden variety nepotism. If it was the CTO's wife's nephew, the CTO's allies wouldn't have argued for a "woker" candidate instead, they'd have pushed very hard on some other basis like the "intellectual diversity" of his different experience or his solid-but-irrelevant academic track record or his supposed credentials as a self-taught programmer or his "leadership potential" or his "strong recommendation from a colleague".

The difference is that if the under qualified relative was justified for one of those reasons people would be less likely to insist the solution to this very obvious nepotism was not to broaden the hiring pool beyond the CTO's relatives, but to chuck all the company's initiatives aimed at attracting career changers, academic-high achievers, autodidacts, leaders or referrals in the bin...

If it was his nephew, then he'd put down nonbinary or some LGBTQ2S flavor. It's not garden variety nepotism because the executives CAN and DO use HR to attack critics of his relatives or allies.

Another reason people don't like diversity initiatives is that whenever you try to have an honest conversation about its problems, you get accused of ridiculous things, like being racist/sexist/etc or thinking nepotism is good.

Nobody thinks nepotism is good (or at least, nobody on this thread does). But there are more- and less- threatening versions of it.

I don't understand what your point is. A company hiring a woman with no relevant experience because she's the niece of the CTO is bad. A company hiring a woman with no relevant experience because she's the niece of the CTO but it's ok this time because she's a woman also seems bad. The former is "garden variety" nepotism, and we all agree it's bad. The latter is the new "woke" nepotism, but it's really the same as the former, with the "woke" part being used as an excuse.

How does that benefit anyone other than the people doing the nepotism?

I don't think anyone is contesting that, but the point seems to be that the people who push these initiatives undeniably think nepotism is, in fact, good because that's what their actions tell us.

Seems like the word "woke" is doing the job of establishing "the kind of critique of nepotism that I find threatening" in your own case...

I've seen commentary that links the idea of elite overproduction to the rise of preoccupation with diversity within business and more generally within the culture.

That's how I took the parent's comment, anyway, and that nepotism was additionally involved in the anecdote just substantiates the elite overproduction argument.

As an example of the shoe being on the other foot, institutionalized nepotism in university is called legacy admissions and overwhelmingly benefits white applicants.

I care about diversity, as I care in equality for all, I'm an egalitarian. However, I think perhaps we should make it more of a blind thing, where you don't get to see or know the person's race/gender etc. All applications come with a # and are essentially jane or john Doe's.

Then the only diversity they need worry about is income diversity, where they need to have equal #'s from extreme poverty as they have from extreme wealthy. Income does trend some in more diverse communities anyways, so it'll happen naturally that this will create more diversity, but it takes away some of the stigmas and angst around it because everyone being accepted is more of a number and acceptance is more based on their achievements etc..