The woke roll back continues

[Hoardasurass]

Jack Daniels has ditched all it's woke policies and it's lgbtq equality index membership

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/22/jack-daniels-owner-scraps-diversity-targets-amid-anti-woke/

It cannot be a free for all. If Norman held a firm belief that all women should stay at home to the point that he would refuse to work alongside a woman, whatever her role, you would not pander to that belief by sacking women or giving their tasks to men.

If Dave held the opinion that BAME people were evil so strongly that he refused to serve them in your shop you would want to be able to take action against him for not doing his job properly without him being able to claim that his was a protected belief.

If Stella held a firm belief that anything with her name on belonged to her, you would want to be able to sack her from her role in your warehouse for helping herself to crates of beer.

I have a STEM background. Area I am in is a mixture of male/female. Historically of course it was a male dominated specialty. Some areas of science have more women in it than men. However, things like engineering, maths and physics are still very male dominated. I don’t live in UK so it might be different there. The government has put huge money trying to get girls to choose these areas. However the number of females doing those types of careers isn’t changing. I really don’t think sexism is the full answer to why some career choices have a gender disparity.

You are describing various potential manifestations of belief or opinion that are unlawful or discriminatory. Holding a protected belief or opinion does not mean that you can act in a discriminatory or unlawful way but the core belief or opinion is still protected. Obviously some opinions are not protected (like holocaust denial) but the fact remains that often when people discuss DEI they are not that bothered about political or belief diversity and I think that is a problem.

@PickAChew

t cannot be a free for all. If Norman held a firm belief that all women should stay at home to the point that he would refuse to work alongside a woman, whatever her role, you would not pander to that belief by sacking women or giving their tasks to men.

If Dave held the opinion that BAME people were evil so strongly that he refused to serve them in your shop you would want to be able to take action against him for not doing his job properly without him being able to claim that his was a protected belief.

If Stella held a firm belief that anything with her name on belonged to her, you would want to be able to sack her from her role in your warehouse for helping herself to crates of beer.

Well taking your examples:

Norman is free to hold whatever opinions he wishes in the privacy of his own head or home. However where those opinions prevent him from doing his job or where they break discrimination laws then his employer is entitled to fire him and the customer entitled to take action for discrimination.

The same goes for Dave.

Stella again can have whatever opinions she wishes in her own head but is breaking the law by theft of beer and her employer is entitled to both fire her and prosecute her.

Expressing an opinion provided it doesn't break the law or incite violence is permissible even if it causes offence to another person. Or makes them uncomfortable.

This does not seem to be a simple example to me at all.

My guess would be that if you mapped this on to social class, you would see that is the real primary relationship here. There is probably a whole sector of working class people - including people recruited from abroad specifically for those jobs - who are working at the lower levels which require less educational investment.

That would not have anything to do with racism in the NHS. And I can't imagine it makes sense to be pushing people hired from abroad into higher band positions when the reason they were employed was to fill the jobs that are difficult to recruit for.

No - it does not work that way. This is healthcare. You deliver care and then you learn to coordinate the delivery of care and manage people. There is no reason why people from abroad or from any ethnicity or background can not progress. And no one signs up to a role to be stuck there and watch other people (with the main difference being that they are White) enter at their level and progress past them in record time.

And looking at the data - there is intersectionality with socioeconomic deprivation but it doesn't account for much of the difference.

Now I know class in the UK is not based on current income and based on more deeply held values or ancestral background or something - so I cannot comment on how class as defined like that correlates.

Nevertheless, White nurses (of all classes) progress significantly faster than others. And there is also racism claims brought by staff with the NHS paying billions out in claims. So there is money literally being thrown down the drain due to racism - on top of time of sick with stress/harrassment/bullying etc

Also all newly qualified nurses start at Band 5 - they all need degrees - so all come in at the same educational level. And some may not want the responsibility of management or even seniority but it is important to ensure we are not losing people who are talented and passionate just because they are different

I think it would be a shame if we lost all DEI initiatives.
TW in my workplace are often senior men who have transitioned later in life, usually once they have reached a relatively high rank and have lots of experience. I don't think they will be much affected by dumping DEI.
The group I see benefitting most from these policies where I work are disabled people, who are actually reliant on reasonable adjustments to enable them to work- and it can sometimes be a fight to get them, although there has been a vast improvement over the past ten years or so.
The largest numbers of initiatives where I work are for women, and there has been a steady increase in the number of women in senior roles over a similar timeframe. We are also seeing a marked increase in the number of female engineering graduates coming through, possibly thanks to wider societal 'women in STEM' initiatives.
I can't see it benefitting anyone other than mediocre white men if it's all done away with.

I do wonder if now DEI is mainstream, there is a niche appeal in being anti it, to appeal to an audience who want to swig Jack Daniels whilst riding their Harley (or men who'd like to imagine that's what their life is like).
I wonder what the reality is within these companies- whether dumping DEI actually means they've dumped benefits for gay or unmarried couples for e.g, or whether that all quietly carries on.

I think one of the major issues with DEI is that it starts with the assumption that all disparity is caused by sexism/racism/discrimination. Now obviously this is sometimes true but it is not always or even mostly true, and it certainly shouldn’t be assumed to be true with no evidence. This is a major problem because if you fixate on discrimination you don’t address the massive elephants in the room: education, social class, culture, family, preference. It is in the interests of EDI departments to ignore these things because mostly it is not in their gift to address them. If they said, “ actually education is the major issue here”, they would do themselves out of a job.

I think this is pretty clearly the case.

It really doesn't seem that credible that you can have many women being very successful in certain scientific fields, but all of a sudden when it comes to physics the whole thing is so sexist that women can't get a look in. Especially when we consider that the women who do pursue it and are suited can do quite well.

Some give the explanation that it is because girls are not encouraged to go into those areas, but then, we see all kinds of efforts to do just that indifferent places, and it doesn't seem to make much difference.

One area where I think there is a kind of gap is that in my observation, women in the sciences will tend somewhat toward areas that are more easily combined with balanced home life. So my dh works in the civil service as a scientist. Women aren't really dominant in his area, but there are a lot of them in government sections. His view is they tend to go forthosejobs because they have reasonable, regular hours and good benefits, maternity leave, and so on.

I don't really see that as a bad thing either though. I don't think having every work sector completely mirroring the population is all that important.

So you are saying these are all people in the same roles, with the same kind of education?

Because "healthcare" includes all kinds of different roles that require totally different types of education. Which did not seem to indicate you meant people in the same roles.

The example up top is about nurses and when the data is analysed it is analysed by roles. So demographics of nurses across all bands, separate to physiotherapists separate to doctors etx

It is certainly most stark amongst nurses but similar patterns across many healthcare roles in the NHS.

And most of the data is public and available.

I still think we'd need to look carefully at a much further breakdown of the populations to have anything very useful to say about what's going on.

One of the things that is worst about the DEI lens is that it almost always uncritically accepts disparities as having their origin in some kind of discrimination, and the fact is that is very often not the case, or it's far more complex set of relations. In this case my first question would be about nurses who have not been brought up in the UK, and also possibly where they were educated. I'd want to see the age breakdown and median ages of the cohort. But also things like the type of career trajectory would be very worth looking at.

Unless there are attempts to do such a granular analysis, I am very disinclined to accept claims around causation, for me these kinds of initiative have lost any assumption of good practice statistically speaking, and fair play as well.

I'm afraid you are talking to a researcher who does analysis for a living and the Race and Equality Standards teams are made up of Professors and statisticians who delve into the granular details. At least for the NHS.

There are also multiple peer-reviewed academic papers published on the granular detail

In the case of the NHS (and healthcare in many Western jurisdictions) - the analysis is granular. Based on this, there is now a team within NHS England dedicated to supporting internationally qualified medical staff and separately for internationally qualified nursing/midwife staff. Some of the solutions that are being incorporated include bespoke induction programmes and mentors to ensure they embed etx. This is because these individuals have a higher rate of verified bullying and harassment and unjustified referral to regulators. Of course the teams delivering the induction and mentorship and some of the other solutions being rolled out are being paid. Racism is expensive

And if you are truly interested - Google NHS Workforce Race Equality Standards and the various reports since 2014. Insert racism in the NHS in Pubmed - and you will see the multiple academic papers on the topic. Good bed time reading. Famous for the wrong reasons.....

https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/23598990.moorfields-eye-hospital-racially-discriminated-worker/

This is a case where the senior imaging lead would imitate Filipino and other accents and movements when speaking

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/discrimination-is-the-biggest-career-obstacle-for-women-of-colour-in-the-nhs/

This is a commentary on racism and career trajectory that highlights the lack of granular data on a systems-wide basis until 2022. Individual specialties publish their own detailed demographics and career trajectory in the academic literature.

I won't be commenting further because this isn't really about convincing you or anyone else. The UK suffers from systemic discrimination and racism that are embedded and will take time and concerted effort to sort. The data is there for those that care and want to contribute to well-thought out solutions

Totally agree with you. From my experience it's a TRA shindig.

The Race and Equality initiatives in the NHS do use data but they are still underpinned by a lot of ideology that does not always get examined. Eg assuming that IMG get more referrals to the GMC because of racism (rather than because of cultural or communication issues). The NHS is also very focused on race and gender/gender ID and really struggles to look at social class.

Again your attitude is emblematic of some of the issues with people working in EDI. “I won’t be engaging further because I’m not open to the possibility that I am looking at this from an ideological standpoint”, ie that ‘systematic racism’ is the problem.

Yes of course there is racism and sometimes it is terrible. But you can’t state as fact that the NHS is systemically racist.

But none of that has to stop just because you don't have a dedicated DEI department at work. That's just a company that listens to employers.

Just as closing DEI departments doesn't mean there will suddenly be more discrimination. The Equality Act and employment law hasn't changed.

In my company all the DEI team do is arrange "allyship" meetings where people go and eat cake together. And send emails with rainbows on during Pride. They have no influence over whether manager X is a chauvinistic pig who doesn't hire women or employee Y is being sexually harassed by a colleague in a corridor.

This! DEI is working well in my organisation though there is still work to be done, of course.

Yup - I can't. But the government can. Academic can. Hence the set up of the
NHS race and health observatory to enable long term transformational change. Because they, to their credit, choose to face facts and do something to address it.

https://www.nhsrho.org/

Many DEI specialists have completely bought into critical theory to explain inequality. CT is self-affirming, whereby objection and disagreement is interpreted as evidence that the theory is correct. This renders the theory infalsifiable. Any theory that immunises itself against any form of criticism is likely to get push back.

People who have experienced discrimination and unfair treatment are likely to find a theory that provides 'an irrefutable explanation' for this compelling.

Those who do not buy into the theory (in part or whole) are likely to be sceptical about it being self-affirming and react strongly to being 'called out' as a bigot for expressing doubts.

I cannot see a future for DEI approaches based on the above.

Bur there is a tendency to shout racism at any problem and that can get in the way of addressing problems that are also significant and possibly more easily remedied. So the emphasis on the poor maternal outcomes for black women was all about getting people to listen. Listening is important but so is ensuring easier access to services near home and ensuring black women are more aware of the need for diabetes checks. The shouts of systemic racism were preventing the data analysis. Daring to suggest you actually investigate the contributing factors is itself deemed victim blaming and racist. There needs to be more studies like that looking at jaundice in newborns, less emphasis on changing words.