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

[AdamRyan]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1879473/kemi-badenoch-diversity-white-men/amp

https://www.independent.co.uk/business/kemi-badenoch-diversity-initiatives-can-be-ineffective-and-counterproductive-b2515403.html

Two links with different headlines but the gist is the same.

White men are disproportionately represented in a number of organisations (including the RAF which Badenoch highlighted). Any activity that increases representation of any other groups including women is necessarily therefore going to come at the expense of white men.

I know KB is anti-woke but I hadn't realised she was also anti-feminist. I cannot get my head round this statement at all. It's all a bit "people, know your place"

Also troll hunting is a breach of guidelines. If you think I'm a troll report me, MNHQ will delete if so.

Purely optional

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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?

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.

"The poor guy who wrote it"??Seriously????

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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?

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.

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.'

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.

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.

I think wanting diversity in a team or industry around sex is different from race.

Because I do think that organisations heavily dominated by one sex are unbalanced and therefore weakened because I think on average the sexes do have differences.

I don't think races are inherebetly diffrent however.
But culture obviously is.

I work in a sector which has become hugely female dominated, and I do think this has is creating some issues around the culture of the sector and we would benefit from more men.

I wouldn't however discriminate against an individual women in an interview sitaution in favour of a man because of the wider industry issues. That would be grossly unfair to the individual who desreves to be judged on their merit.

Also, even in my sector the few men we do have often rise to senior positions beyond their ability comparable with female peers.

This often seems to be because of a lack of social awareness, or a lack of care of what others think. They are usually more interested in theur own achieevemnt than others perception of them. They don't worry about the judgement of going for a position they may not have the expereinec for, or judgement if they don't get it.
Many women however will only go for the position if they feel there is a high liklihood they will get it. Many of the men will repeatedly go for positions they fail to get, but they just keep going until they get one. This would feel unbearable to many wome who would be much more conscious about the judgement of peers and colleagues.

Just another reason we ger mediocre men over represented in management which isn't just about 'discrimination'.
And the answer isn't discriminate in favour of women, it's encourage women to go for positions through things such as mentor schemes.

So far as Densmore's actual suggestions go, at least one, that women want more work/life balance, and making positions with more flexibility will be more attractive to women, seems pretty uncontroversial. It's exactly what many feminists have been saying for years.

Competitive vs cooperative - I think many would agree with that too. If anyone has read Kathleen Stock's essay about changes in philosophy departments over the years, making them less adversarial and more cooperative is something that was also pushed as making them more friendly to women.

Personally, I also think that he is right that on balance, more women want to be in work that involves a certain amount of human interaction, compared to men.

He also talks about women being less likely to pursue promotion and raises a little, which is uncontroversial and something often mentioned on FWR.

One thing that strikes me, is that for those women who do go into tech, as well as many of the men, changes to the whole workplace culture might actually undermine the things they like about that type of work. I studied philosophy at university around the same time Stock did, and then worked in a very male dominated sector for years. A lot of what I liked about working in those places were some of the things that Stock mentioned had changed in philosophy departments to make them more amenable to women.

That doesn't necessarily mean they would be bad changes at a place like Google, but I do wonder about the - I guess you could call them moral or ethical questions? - trade off of people who like to work in certain types of environments (who happen to be weighted towards men), vs less of that personality type but more women.

If we flipped it, and said men on average are less interested in a certain type of work, so we should change it to be more amenable to the average male personality, but this might make it less amenable to some women - would we think that was a good trade off?

Just another word on imbalanced sex careers.

Firstly, if you don't have a 50-50 sex ratio at the application stage, it's hard to argue that the sex imbalance is due to discrimination at the recruitment stage. It's not that female applicants are being rejected, it's that too few are applying.

Then if you interview (say) women at Google about how to make the workplace better for them, that's in itself a noble goal but won't inherently boost your sex ratio of applicants because those are the ones that did apply anyway.

What one needs to do is ask your recruitment pool, in the case of software, perhaps compsci/engineering/physics graduates or soon-to-be graduates. "How can we convince you to want to work here?"

The next problem is, it's far from 50-50 there as well. (Physics graduate here).

The bottleneck is A level choices at year 11. Almost all year 11 girls study Physics and Maths, while few of them do A level. Something a company like Google has little influence over - but they could try.

In any case, EDI "training" would be laughably pointless in this example I'm describing. Forcing employees at Google to use politically correct vocabulary will not increase the available talent pool of female computer scientists. It's laughable. And irritating. And more than a little patronising.

Something I have wondered about this is whether some women are less likely to go into management because they don't like being "the bad guy" in the workplace.

It's something I struggle with a little. I've recently been having real problems with one person I manage, who is just never happy, and boy does it really bother me. This person is never happy and I feel very inadequate and judged, although rationally I know that's not really at the root of the problem. I find myself constantly trying to compensate and I'm very uncomfortable coming down on this person. (Thankfully said person is retiring this month!!!) But I was starting to think I wanted to get out of managing, it was making me so miserable.

I know my sister, who is much more of a big-wig than I am, also finds coming down on her employees when it is necessary about the hardest part of the job.

Someone who is more insensitive is a lot less likely to be put off by that kind of role.

I don't actually think it's necessarily wrong to have any of these personality traits. But sometimes they are useful, and sometimes get in the way of what you need to do.