>recruiting/HR department no longer considered Asians of any ethnicity a minority and lumped them in with white males.
Why does HR even need to keep track of ethnicities? Is this a US thing?
Here in my EU country you're just employee/applicant #3215, that's it, nobody asks or enters your ethnicity anywhere to even be able to keep tabs on how many are of what ethnicity, since everyone is considered equal by default and judged exclusively on performance (in theory at least, in practice there are still biases, but tracking ethnicities won't fix that, since that's human nature).
What you're saying would even be against the law here since then it opens the door to bias and potential discrimination.
> (in theory at least, in practice there are still biases, but tracking ethnicities won't fix that, since that's human nature)
That’s what we’re trying to fix (or at least mitigate) in the US. You say it is just human nature, but we’re a pretty diverse country, so we have a strong incentive to proactively try and see if we can make it work.
You still haven't answered how employers keeping track of the ethnicities of employees helps against discrimination in any way.
To me that's exactly what helps lead to discrimination versus not knowing ethnicities and treating employees as anonymized numbers which would be fair to everyone.
Nope, and I won’t. There are a lot of programs, and with various levels of effectiveness, and I don’t particularly want to dive into the nitty-gritty details of whether or not each one is working well. We haven’t got a perfect solution. But, I think it is self-evident that without collecting any data, we are just… hoping it’ll all work out? That’s not a plan.
Currently in the US, businesses don’t actively have official policies of bigotry. If they did, collecting that data could be harmful. But instead we have bigotry as a sort of soft social thing, a compounding of many little challenges, “bad culture fit,” that sort of thing. Because it is subtle, we need to keep it from slipping under the radar.
Handwavy answer with zero substance - sounds like an HR reply. I encourage everyone reading to lie/fib about race/ethnicity data. Also, make up a pronoun/gender identity. Waste these suckers time.
It's because of the history of racial discrimination in the US. While there's talk of affirmative action in the news, I suspect plain'ole racial discrimination is probably far more common.
Taht still doesn't answered how employers keeping track of the ethnicities of employees helps against discrimination in any way.
To me that's exactly what helps lead to discrimination versus not knowing ethnicities and treating employees as anonymized numbers which would be fair to everyone.
The history of racism in the US is long and complex. In essence we keep track of this sort of thing to try to prevent ongoing systemic racism. "You can't fix what you don't measure" and all that. It also doesn't need to be systemic racism per se. People tend to hire people like them due to unconscious biases so if your company is mostly "X" there are is a good chance it will continue hiring "X".
Why does HR even need to keep track of ethnicities? Is this a US thing?
Here in my EU country you're just employee/applicant #3215, that's it, nobody asks or enters your ethnicity anywhere to even be able to keep tabs on how many are of what ethnicity, since everyone is considered equal by default and judged exclusively on performance (in theory at least, in practice there are still biases, but tracking ethnicities won't fix that, since that's human nature).
What you're saying would even be against the law here since then it opens the door to bias and potential discrimination.