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"

Some people do lie about their ethnicity either to avoid being discriminated against on the basis of being white or to gain the benefits aimed at a specific ethic group.

https://www.intelligent.com/34-of-white-college-students-lied-about-their-race-to-improve-chances-of-admission-financial-aid-benefits/

Some people do lie about their ethnicity

If you can "lie", there has to be an objective measurement of ethnicity.

All of this diversity pantomime started in order to get away from objective measures of ethnicity.

Also, I have never once committed my "ethnicity" to any of these stupid forms. And I look forward to the mother of all battles the day someone else tells me what my "ethnic origins" are. It's a fight I have been spoiling for for the best part of half a century. Ever since the NUS pestered me for it in the 80s.

Janice Turner has written about it in the Times

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britains-instincts-trump-the-diversity-clerics-0pkc9d7d0

https://archive.ph/FZ5xA first against the paywall

With DEI i'm reminded of what allegorically paves the road to hell.

If you can "lie", there has to be an objective measurement of ethnicity.

Well yes this is the issue isn’t it? My understanding is that you can test genetically to identify the ethnic heritage of individuals but obviously for many of us (especially in the UK) the result will be a complete mishmash of 10% of this and 25% of that. So at what point do you become non-white? Should it just be a visual judgement (if you look non-white you are non-white) or perhaps a case of self-ID (since that has gone so well with “gender”) or perhaps we start subjecting people to genetic testing (which is 100% guaranteed to end badly).

But is there evidence that it works?

Not just that you think it works.

How can we ensure that there isn't a hidden resentment building up because of it?

Just yesterday DH was talking with a couple of friends.

One is a very open minded guy and his wife is just about the most accepting woman I know. They are both dyed red voters. They hosted a Ukrainian. They both volunteer.

But even they are signing their daughter off from school on diversity days because they are so authoritarian in nature and are discouraging critical thinking. Their jobs requires them to think critically.

Another friend commented that his son - who is a lovely kid - was resenting being blamed for racism purely because he was a white male. He doesn't get the objective of the days. He is definitely resenting them but he's a good kid who won't kick back. I can well see a different reaction in another kid.

I think part of the issue is there are people who believe in diversity training and just think it's great but treat any sort of criticism of them as being racist in its own right. It's just a lazy excuse to not step back and examine the evidence. They are just relying on their own anecdotal experiences and see blind to others seeing it differently.

Genuinely we need proper research to remove this 'feel good, virtue signalling' bias and to see if it advances are more to do with cultural attitudes to education than diversity training.

No fighting in the war room !

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/53c81208-24c8-4297-8f27-663a46c16444?shareToken=cbeff0b8a88c44012f9c861cc8bb41f6

Share token - broadly agree.

There is a lot of focus in schools on improving educational attainment of white working class boys.

What I don't get is why the academic outperformance of girls at school isn't translating into better opportunities at work?

DS is completing a PhD in the US so recently came on "the job market" a sort of UCAS on steroids, where English speaking academic jobs worldwide are advertised through a single platform. All anecdotal but his experience may have provided a snapshot of international attitudes to recruiting "the white male". He applied for about 250, of which half may not have been a great fit. I think a standard haul then might be 40 zoom interviews, 10 second interviews ("fly-outs") and perhaps two or three offers. Lots of comparison with peers, especially those in the same rather technical field, on how they were doing.

The consensus seemed to be that it was not worth bothering with Canada, and probably not with California. One of the Universities with Californian system managed to produce an extraordinary job description calling for some sort of empathy with the Latinx community, that had you wondering whether the university's Latinx community would be better served by being taught by the best qualified applicant, one who would be open and supportive across diverse demographics. (DS did not get an interview!) He did far better in southern states than northern ones, and surprisingly well in Asia, who may have been looking to improve their own diversity by adding a European to their department. That said, one Asian University he was particularly keen on, only interviewed their own nationals, and there was a similar pattern in both Europe and Latin America. Oddly, and of no advantage to DS, UK Universities appeared to be one of the most open in terms of who they would recruit.

He got his job and is happy and can be reasonably confident that he was recruited because of his skills rather than his ethnicity. He will have an advantage over many women in that he was able to consider jobs worldwide, and, when he has some experience under his belt, fully expects to move again for better opportunities.

Was he discriminated against? Its difficult. There was a very preferred UK job for which he was very qualified, but whose host organisation is making a big fuss over their push for diversity. The organisation is small so the quickest way they can achieve this is via recruitment. Others though it was strange that DS was not offered at least an initial interview. In life there are swings and roundabouts. Mother tongue English helps, and in his field, though probably not in Universities as a whole, white male applicants may well be a minority. There is always an element of luck when applying anywhere.

What I don't get is why the academic outperformance of girls at school isn't translating into better opportunities at work?

Because (obviously) people aren't hired for their ability ? Never have been. Never will be.

@NNeedmoresleep interesting you say he'll have an advantage over women in that he was able to consider anywhere. Surely these days women have that option also.

BigFatLiar Do you think that is always the case?

I have known a a few frustrated female academics tied to London because of their husbands London based careers, so not able to put the years of mobility in that might have allowed them to compete for top jobs. The same is true for medics, where more than ever you need to move for training and good Registrar jobs, or scientific research where you move every few years depending on where the funding is. I know women who have made great sacrifices to build their careers, living away from home during the week. It can be done but I would argue that men, on average, seem to be more mobile. And, anecdote rather than research, I can see a couple of DS' very able female peers already making compromises.

Ethnicity isn't just skin colour so you can't judge ethnicity on that only.

Janice nails one of the biggest issues of EDI training where it reduces everyone to the concept of 'oppressed' and 'oppresser'.

I find it really bizarre.

I am doing mine and DH family history and have done a hell of a lot on both sides.

I've been able to trace almost all of DHs family back 200 years.

He has a mix of frame work knitters (from the lace industry - a report from the time found that workers were exploited so much that they were at risk of starvation), canal workers (who research found had half the life expectancy of other workers at the time due to working conditions), file cutters (who literally went mad or died from working with mercury), miners (I don't think I need to explain that one), Irish who fled the country in around 1840 (again you shouldnt need a history lesson on this one), mariners (again not the best living conditions and life expectancy - one of his direct ancestors did die a sea.) and non land owning agricultural labourers who seem to have only been employed causally. One of his great fathers was literally born in workhouse in 1912. There's evidence that a couple of the women upon finding themselves destitute after the death of their husband may have turned to prostitution too.

And yet we are getting this critical race theory from the US being applied to the UK which makes no sense to a hell of a lot of white families who know where they've come from and in many respects also fit this definition of having been oppressed because of a sheer lack of opportunities and historical centuries of economic exploitation.

DHs father is the only one in his family who escaped it - he's pretty much the only one to have gone into a white collar job. DHs maternal side only escaped coal mining through military service. Not all of them lived to escape it though.

I don't think his family are remotely unique. I think there are plenty of families who are fully aware of their family history going back a long way simply because they remain in certain economically deprived communities.

The thing that is frustrating is actually black lives matter had Marxist beliefs - and that black oppression remains largely about socioeconomic issues related to racism but diversity training has largely turned a blind eye to this and how history in the UK differs from the US.

I can easily see how if you came from a background such as DHs family, how diversity training wouldn't remotely connect with your life or family history and there would be a feeling of 'the oppressor' very much being still there in the form of white middle class do gooders wanting to keep the white working classes 'in their place'. Especially if you regarded immigrants as having come from more middle class backgrounds who take lower class jobs and are then able to work their way up with opportunities that aren't available to white working class boys.

This isn't something that's really being discussed when we talk about diversity training and I think it probably should.

We also aren't even touching the sides on just how over represented white privately educated males are in key industries. And we are unlikely to because of the power of those parents. It's white boys lower down the scale who have to budge up to accommodate diversity - not this elite group who remain largely untouched by the training and aren't being dealt with when they don't say politically incorrect things (spot the modern relationship between the elite male leader and the blue collar worker in politics right now in various countries - diversity style training could well be driving this in many respects because of the dynamics of alienation).

We aren't talking about this subject in full and facing difficult issues because virtue signalling is dominating the conversation so much.

It's depressing.

It's up to them. DH gave up several opportunities for advancement to stay in the same job (fortunately one he enjoyed) as he was primary carer for our children, I was the one that did lots of travel to build my career. One of the lads he worked with did similarly as his wife had severe pnd so he took on the more basic roles that didnt expect overtime or external visits/work as they allowed him to be with her and their child.

If a woman is single then the world is open to them if they have the skills to offer. Once married and starting a family then it's something they as a couple really need to discuss.

Girls and boys are also socialised differently and this matters.

Girls are taught to be humble, to fit in and conform and not to boast about their achievements. They are taught to follow the rules.

Boys are taught that individualism is highly prized, exaggeration of skills is to be praised and that blagging is to be encouraged. Regards for the rules is much lower.

Thus it makes sense of research a couple of years back into recruitment.

It found that women wouldnt apply for a job that they had say 7 out of 9 skills for because they were 'underqualified' but men who were scoring lower were applying because they thought they still could talk themselves into a job.

So it comes down to confidence over ability in a lot of cases.

Diversity training really doesn't do a lot to address this.

It begs the question: is diversity training or skills training more valuable.

Then consider which is more expensive to implement.

It's funny but I work in a profession which when I entered it was 95% dominated by women. My training course was 100% female and 100% the lecturers were also female.

The reasons for this were complex but one of the main reasons was that entry to training required work experience and that work was poorly paid and also almost exclusively carried out by women.

More recently there have been many more men entering the profession. This has been achieved simply by making the training courses more accessible to both sexes by removing the work experience requirement and instead requiring a certain level of academic achievement and entry to courses via UCAS. The result of this is that we have a much more diverse profession.

I'm still not entirely sure if the changes are a good thing. We are more diverse but obviously there are fewer opportunities for the women (like me) who once would have been able to progress via the old system.

Where did I say ethnicity is just skin colour?

It found that women wouldnt apply for a job that they had say 7 out of 9 skills for because they were 'underqualified' but men who were scoring lower were applying because they thought they still could talk themselves into a job

I found it useful to give aptitude test for skills where they were needed. Some were citing skills 10 years out of date. I didn't find a lot of difference between males or females in terms of over inflating their experience.

Question:
How would you?

Are you dealing with the women who didn't even apply for a job?

I might have misread but it sounded like it. Sorry.

Yeah. I went through seminars on this and it was still DH who finally broke that for me and pushed me to apply for jobs I didn't 100% fit criteria when I was last looking. Got 3 interviews out of that very quickly!

Nope only those that applied, after all we couldn't check the men or women who didn't apply and how would I know the numbers who didn't apply? I certainly know quite a few women candidates applied on spec, not having all the requested skills. No biggie unless it was vital.

Don't worry I'm obviously not being clear.

I am just trying to ascertain from those people who are advocating for white men to "take the hit" in employment situations, so that we can achieve equality of outcome for different minority groups and women, how practically this can be achieved at interview stage. Obviously it's probably fairly straightforward for sex because this information is clear for anyone to see. But how do you weed out white men without risking discriminating against Romani / travellers / jewish mixed-heritage people etc?

I've always read that the EDI info is not available to interviewers at interview stage to reduce the risk of discrimination. So presumably if an interviewer is selecting between two identically qualified candidates on the basis of ethnicity they must be using visual cues.