Kemi Badenoch: Diversity policies should not "come at the expense of white men"

Sprinting/marathoning is clearly different because ethnicity does demonstrably affect physical attributes (eg calf to thigh length ratio). And sex even more obviously affects those same attributes.

However what's not as clear is whether (say) sex innately affects, say, career choices or whether they are societal or a mixture of both and in what proportion.

I haven't read all of James Damore's memo but I've read excerpts and summaries. He did try to cite scientific research, although he may have misunderstood it, or the research itself may well have been unsound. But it's a conversation worth having rather than shutting down.

More recently, Katherine Birbalsingh, the social mobility tsar, said girls generally simply don't like physics. (I'm a female physics teacher). She was roundly condemned. I disagreed with her because she was using that as a investigation ender rather than starter which seems the opposite of Damore; however I do agree that fixation of equality of outcome (rather than opportunity) is fruitless in physics. We won't get to 50-50. We just need to open physics up to girls who want to do it.

We've done a fair bit on this in my school if anyone is interested but I don't want to derail otherwise.

The100 metre Olympic sprint is dominated by black athletes.

Should there be a requirement to have a certain percentage of slower white athletes to improve diversity or should selection simply be based on who can run the fastest?

Of course it should be based on running speed so the selection metric is very clear cut. The challenge in the job market is that the metric on who is the best candidate for the job is less clear cut and can be subjective, plus as a candidate you have no idea of the quality of the other candidates you were up against.

Diversity of experience knowledge skills and viewpoint may be good for teams and organisations but the assumption made that diversity of race is beneficial is, well, racist.

Why would a team of Asian people want to positively discriminate in favour of a white person? (As was suggested earlier would be fine because of diversity?)

It suggests a white person will intrinsically bring something different to the team. Which suggests white people are intrinsically different to Asian people.
Which is the basis for racism.

Employment is discriminatory. You are free to discriminate on qualifications, experience, skills, personality, values, attractiveness.

You are not able to discriminate on race.

Because race should be viewed as immaterial to the person's suitability.

Because different races are not different types of people.

To suggest having a team with different races is in itself a good thing suggests you don't believe that, which is racist.

So much of the diversity rhetoric is underpinned by racism.

It just seems to have been repackaged as 'Kind Racism.'

Yup.

It's like a kind of religious belief that the company needs all the employees to buy in to.

Edited to add: Which when I think about it seems characteristic of identity politics in general.

Not sure what your point is. Are you saying they were 2 candidates of the same sex and race or you deliberately ignored that fact?

I was on an interview panel recently where we had two candidates we considered equally qualified - as a panel we couldn’t tell apart. We put the decision to the person who was to line manage them (one the panel). They were equally qualified but not identically qualified; they each bought a slightly different skill set. The tie brake therefore can down to that - which bought slightly different experience to the team that could be useful. Race/sex/belief didn’t come into it.

He didn't tell them the answers they wanted to hear. On these sort of reports action one is find out what management want you to say and work your report to that end.

I don’t really understand why he was sacked. Even if you disagreed with him he wasn’t being malicious he just has a different perspective on why the tech world isn’t very diverse when it comes to sex. Why are people so afraid to hear different opinions?

He suggested a number of possible approaches that might make their workplace more attractive to more women:

• when possible making jobs more collaborative rather than working alone most of the time.
• reward cooperative achievement more and place less emphasis on a competitive workplace.
• allow for more part time types of positions.
• He also suggested that rigid gender roles for men may affect how they behave in the tech sector.

Most of the document is actually about the training and company initiatives which he suggest are not that effective and possibly causing problems.

I don't see what your issue is, given that as an employee he was subject to all the diversity initiatives they had I think it's pretty reasonable that he should say that he thinks they are not going to be effective and why.

Just what we need another arrogant man explaining how neurotic etc we are. I don't remember his solutions.
' it made all kinds of suggestions about ways to get more women candidates that might very well have been quite successful.'

Please share these examples.

For the record I don't think he should have been sacked but he should have thought twice about his understanding of the issues.

He lost his job for sitting down and actually thinking about why women don't want to work at Google, and proposing solutions. And was publicly shamed for it.

So yeah.

But that is the ideal scenario. That's what it's made for. Ideal scenario. In reality it's VERY rare to have 2 candidates of really equal merit.

It is not acceptable to hire or not hire on the basis of race, it's illegal. If there was a blind cv and interview process, it wouldn't happen, and it's too bad really that would not be possible to implement.

Arguably you could reduce costs by not hiring women too, a positive for the company, that doesn't make it ok to do it.

I'm not sure where you could have possibly conjured up the idea that Dave deserves the job more, I'm not suggested he should be hired based on race or sex either. Are you assuming that Sarah and Ester are actually less competent than Dave?

OK. Imagine a school. You already have 10 teachers doing an excellent job according to Ofsted. Therefore, more than one person can have the requisite skills.

At the end of the recruitment process, you have 2 perfectly good candidates one black, one white. All your current teachers are white. About 20% of the children are black.

In that situation I would choose the black teacher because they have the added potential to be a role model for these children.

I'd say the same about a male teacher in a school with an all female staff.

Jobs and recruitment has an affect over and above the individual candidates. There is a context.

Well you say that but they now may feel bit singled out and having to educate people asking.
Still didn't answer if muslims were asked if they want the great effort or they just want to be left alone to do what they do with one company wide article about Ramad and the following Eids.

I think some people on here are kind of going with "racial/ethnic/swc" diversity will be good for the team. That is not necessarily true. Cognitive diversity can massively benefit teams that's well discussed, however, that comes form not only being "the other" but work experience etc.
I careeer changed. My new teams greatly benefited from my experience in different field, the knowledge and the view that shaped.
My immigrant arse side however was not that amazing to the work matters. It made no difference. Bar "bullying" them into stop saying please and sorry all the time when it was not their fault etc🙈 I made great anti british impact. Oh and used many foreigh sayings... But business decision wise, I would hire on work experience/education combo rather than race/ethnicity/sex

What is so interesting about that Google document is that th poor guy who wrote it made all kinds of suggestions about ways to get more women candidates that might very well have been quite successful. Because he was right about a lot of the reasons women are less likely to go in for that kind of job.

They were innovative and really a clear analytical response to what Google said they wanted - more women.

The bs that they have tried is nothing like as interesting, resolutely ignores many of the reasons fewer women go into that sector, and have notably been unsuccessful.

that poor guy naively thought they really wanted more women, not just some kind of financial advantage for saying they wanted more women, and he suffered for it.

I think the thing that's really clear from this thread is that we seem to have this idea that diversity is a good thing.

However no one really has an answer to what EDI training is trying to achieve or whether it's successful in its goals. Because no one really understands what the goal is.

And no one wants to hear about unintended side effects or what we should do about difficult conversations.

Instead we have certain conversations which have been made 'off limits' because they are transphobic, racist, homophobic etc. Which means that some people don't get to ask questions they need to understand the issues because they don't have the language available to aid their learning. The emphasis is on how not to offend rather than actually expanding understanding or issues.

Do you not understand that race is a protected characteristic for everyone?

It would be a lot easier if race had an objective definition. Which it doesn't.

So your idea of race, may not equate with mine.

Meanwhile e=mc² anywhere and everywhere in the universe.

I think it's clear to me that you have a certain life bubble that is very closed and that you perhaps should talk to more people outside that life bubble.

You time and again are very dismissive of the life experiences of anyone else but yourself.