I think you raise some good points, and I think there are ways to handle DEI hiring well, and ways not to do it well. IMHO, when it's done well, DEI hiring isn't about filling quotas or giving anyone an edge, but it's about making sure that everyone has an equal chance. I've been part of DEI hiring at a couple companies, and my role has been much more about answering questions and making sure that candidates start the process on a level footing with everyone else. All of the candidates are fully qualified for the roles -- I wouldn't be talking to them if they weren't.
Not a native English speaker, but my understanding is that the word "equity" is now used specifically to mean "equality of outcome", which is incompatible with giving everyone an equal chance. I found an article[0] explaining the difference:
>Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
> it's about making sure that everyone has an equal chance
How does that look in practice? In most companies it seems that means that under-represented people get green lighted at the resume screen step at a much higher percentage than over-represented people. But the bar is the same at the interview stage.
But don't you see how that is a big dis-advantage for the median over-represented applicant?
If the bar is sufficiently high, the median applicant, over- or under-represented, won't get the job anyway. I've heard from people who work at companies (specifically big tech) that have diversity interview quotas (but not hiring quotas). In practice, you just end up interviewing more people: the candidates you would have interviewed anyway, plus some diverse candidates with closer-to-the-median resumes. And then you end up hiring the people you would have anyway, because interviews are much harder to pass than resume screens. It's a fairly pointless exercise that mostly disadvantages the interviewers, who have to spend more time interviewing, and the "lucky" candidates, who almost never outperform expectations in the interview.
If you're doing this at selection time, you're already late.
* Make sure you have a campus presence on a diverse set of universities. I'm not American, but as I understand it that could mean Historically Black Universities, and not just the Ivy League or a place where the current workforce went
* In line with that, think through which organizations you partner with. An employer that traditionally hired from/sponsored fraternity-like organizations that are mostly white, could also work with student associations that represent a broader spectrum of potential talent, or that specifically represent underrepresented groups
* One job ad I saw had a line "Did you know women are less likely to apply if they don't meet all criteria, whereas men are more likely to apply when they meet a few? If you think you can add value to our team, we encourage everyone to apply". I thought that was helpful.
Anyone can still apply, and the best candidate gets picked. Just not the one that happens to come from a specific background.
I've sat in on group interviews where we usually have a side chat discussing the candidate. Wouldn't you know, every time a candidate of color was being interviewed one guy on our team would take much longer to convince they knew what they were doing.
White women and men, got an ok much more quickly.
I asked my boss if he noticed this, and he said he did not, but when I asked another PoC on the team, he definitely noticed.
This is the way things usually go.
That's not really DEI, though, that's equal opportunity. DEI is about putting your thumb on the scale for groups higher on the progressive stack, to redress the lack of social capital they've had due to systemic oppression and/or because if you just select for talent, experience, and drive, in certain fields like tech the candidate pool will just skew white/Asian anyway because of the established good ole boy networks.
I'd really rather it stop at equal opportunity also but the world of finance -- where it really counts -- is all in on DEI, and companies demonstrating insufficient virtue will get clobbered on their ESG scores and hence, stock valuations.
I think it would be impossible to conclusively say people have an equal chance without having objective, quantifiable, measures of performance. Otherwise, it's easy to use subjective measures, even subconsciously, to make a biased decision.
> when it's done well,...it's about making sure that everyone has an equal chance
If that's the measure, then I think it's not done well in a lot of places (possibly most). Some places are biased one way; other places biased the other way; relatively few are dead-centered.
