Tim Levier, by his own admission in a Devil’s Advocate mood, gifted Ethics Alarms readers with the a bold defense of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the anti-merit fad that has kept affirmative action on life support quite a bit after its expiration date. If EA had such a designation as “The Silk Purse” award, this would win it. I applaud the effort, so here it is, the Comment of the Day on the post about an absurd word salad extolling DEI in Georgia. I may be back after Tim has his say…I haven’t decided yet.
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“Diversity involves recognizing, including, celebrating, rewarding and utilizing differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age and thought – sweetening and often strengthening the pot.”
I don’t know what mood I’m in but I’m up for a little “Devil’s Advocate” today. Let’s give it a go.
I have many thoughts regarding the DEI space – but one point I’d like to make clear is that the concensus often focuses on how to measure and demonstrate improvement on a quantitative scale when DEI often, in my opinion, is more important from a qualitative standpoint.
In the rush to “prove” and “show results”, the drivers of the movement are seeking and promoting changes in outcomes rather than the root causes related to opportunity. In so doing, they may “move the goalposts” to arrive at a certain outcome. Reasonable people know instinctively that this is bad, as articulated in Charlie Kirk’s hypotheticals about adding white Americans to the NBA or whether black commercial airline pilots demonstrated the same skill, knowledge, and experience as their peers or were they a beneficiary of reduced expectations. The “rigging” of the outcomes complicates perceptions of DEI and creates negative emotions among the opponents of the measures.
However, I would contend that DEI has its place in the world, and its efforts need to focus early at development, at opportunity. When diversity exists in a group, the group can leverage more experiences, more knowledge, more understanding. How many “how could this happen” corporate marketing oopsies have we seen because no one in the marketing meeting had the brain cells to say “Wait, what if this is a bad idea?” Visibility of diversity can be equally important as it can inspire future generations from an early age to see themselves in that position.
These are some of the benefits. To reap these benefits, you have to include diversity. To include diversity, you need viable participants. To get viable participants, inspiration and opportunity have to happen at a young age; but you also have to go to the places where diversity exist. In a corporate environment, you would have to seek applicants from all walks of life. So many companies put up a job posting and they have 30 applicants by the end of the day. Which 30 were just lucky enough to see the posting? How many were serious? How many were generated by a programmed bot? How many were from existing employee social networks?
Companies aren’t necessarily even advertising their opportunities – so if their pool of applicants is a little bland, the effort needed is to seek applicants by advertising to new and different pools. Present the opportunity more widely, and maybe the applicant pool will provide a truly excellent candidate.
What about equity? It’s not something I’ve mentioned yet, but it’s the one that generates the greatest pitfalls for DEI warriors. I won’t get into the pitfalls, but I believe the proper utilization of equity is to ensure, as a provider of an opportunity, that proper weight is given to relevant factors. A company might need to fill five positions to answer phones. Is giving all five positions to white men who speak in a slow intelligible cadence the best for business? Was consideration given to whether support for additional languages is needed? Perhaps the best outcome could be having a position filled by various people of various communities who speak and understand the different plights of the customer and maybe speak additional languages, even if their english is a little rough on the edges.
“Diversity involves recognizing, including, celebrating, rewarding and utilizing differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age and thought – sweetening and often strengthening the pot.”
- Diversity is the differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and thought that can add value.
- Recognize the differences and the opportunities they represent.
- Include those differences, because if you aren’t listening or creating opportunity to hear the value, then you are potentially missing out on much larger opportunities.
- Celebrate those differences because if people are not encouraged to be their authentic self, they assimilate into the bland group-think you already have.
- Reward those differences because if people are bringing fresh original ideas, they should be rewarded. This encourages more people to “think outside of the box” and bring their own mix of diversity, which might be as simple as “ethics”, “legal understanding”, “morals”.
- Utilize those differences. Leverage the contributions of others to seize those opportunities. Don’t just have window dressing, engage those diverse viewpoints to build your best opportunity.
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It’s me, back but briefly to suggest that if the author meant what Tim lays ingeniously out to translate her argle-bargle, I would assume that she would have said so.
Ethics Alarms 
congrats on COTD Tim
I am curious why diversity is actually important and what benefit it brings to any of the hard science based non-research fields. I hail from an engineering background, and diversity seems like an unneeded factor.
The Chemical Safety Board discusses how to handle GOHT ammonium bisulfide management. Everyone in the field knows that if you don’t have stainless steel and water wash, you will blow up your fin fans and quite probably kill people. The CSB has put out videos on people who ignored this fact. We had a guy who was trying to “think outside the box” and decided we’d have carbon steel with no water wash. Surprise, surprise, we blew up our fin fans and missed killing people by the skin of our teeth. Another time, we had carbon steel in hydrogen embrittlement service. It is well known that if you do this, things will go boom, and there are recorded instances of this killing thousands of people. Again, diversity of thought decided to think our way around the problem. Reality exerted itself and those “different experiences” meant nothing to the shockwave that knocked cameras off walls over a half mile away and the fireball that took down millions of dollars worth of equipment.
I can see that a diverse set of experiences can help when your temperature is a little too high and you can lay wet burlap on the lines instead of buying a whole new cooler until the outdoor temperature drops below 70, or and certainly such a position is useful to the design crew who decided to make a unit that functions properly only when ambient temperature never goes above 70 in a place that hits 90 multiple times a summer. However, diverse experiences only seem to matter when there isn’t a mathematical necessity for THE correct answer.
If I want to know how long a catalyst is going to last before replacement is needed, or the cost/benefit analysis on nickel verses cobalt in one service of another, it really doesn’t matter what your lived experience and diverse thought gets you. There are only a couple ways to calculate these things, and as long as you have the chemical, mathematics, and computer background to get the data, comprehend the data, manipulate the data, and calculate the result, nothing else matters. Your color only matters if you are blue, because I need answers, not a dead body. I don’t need unique opinions on the tensile strength of concrete, or the maximum load of a bridge. I need the correct calculation. I don’t need diverse thoughts on the effects of hydrogen embrittlement of carbon steel occurring on a valve in high temperature hydrogen service, I need you to research which stainless steel is good at 800 degrees before we put the valve in service or risk blowing us all to kingdom come. This is not the time or place for unique perspectives. This is all about the correct answers, because wrong answers cost millions of dollars and sometimes, thousands of lives. Also, diversity, if it includes people who do not speak the common language of the workplace well, causes many problems. I have had two instances where diverse coworkers caused major issues because they aren’t good at communicating something critical.
Diversity of color, thought, experience, and any other category we can come up with seems useless when reality steps in. I worked on a project with a team of diverse experiences. The old guy who hadn’t left the office in 20 years said, “well, in my experience, there is no need to oxygenate your catalyst because I’ve never seen any type of damaging exotherm.” The field guy who had never pushed a pencil said, “well, even if she specified a 4″ pipe, there is the skinny spot in the line at 1/4″ for six cm, so I can obviously just use 1/4″ tubing.” These two comments, along with my being sent on exhaustion leave (19-12 hour days means they have to give you a weekend off) caused us to barf a fireball 400 feet in the air, torched a truck, and barely missed killing six guys who had just stepped away because they had overheated working on the vessel. This seems to be emblematic, to me, of diversity in action.
And (IMO) a Piggy-Back COTD!
PWS
Right with you, Paul!!
Tim presented an excellent, thought-provoking counterpoint to what I would guess is the pervasive opinion around here, but this statement caught me:
I would venture to say Budweiser could answer that…as could Harley Davidson…as could Gillette (and maybe numerous others), except from the other side. They championed DEI and invested large sums of money in advertising that emphasized it…but apparently no one in those DEI-laced meetings had the brain cells to say, “Wait, what if this is a bad idea?” Those companies paid a hefty financial price for their mistakes.
Sarah provides excellent, real-world arguments to the contrary. I am totally in favor of hiring minorities for any and all positions. But they better have an understanding of the job requirements, have a knowledge of a subject matter, and be able to quickly get up to speed, or bad – in Sarah’s field, deadly – things can happen. When we hire for “externals” rather than “expertise”, we take grave risks.
I would love for everyone to stop saying “minorities”. My reasons are as follows:
I don’t mean to call you out specifically, it’s just a current example where I can piggyback to articulate my point. It’s not my intent to be word police – but I want to be more vocal and help people make better arguments.
Good points, Tim…and no offense was taken at all.
In 2014 race riots broke out in Ferguson, Missouri after a criminal who tried to attack a police officer was shot dead. One of the factors that fueled the riots was the racial disparity between the population of Ferguson (majority black) and the police force (overwhelmingly white). This can be legitimately used as an argument that for certain jobs such as the police the racial makeup should reflect the racial makeup of the population.
CVB
I disagree. To justify that argument you must agree that majority white areas should discriminate against minority applicants to ensure that proportionality is maintained. How is the argument that any different than limiting the number of minorities in a community pool.
The issue whether a white cop can defend against a minority attackers suggests a much larger problem that has been fueled by race baiters not one determined by skin color alone. If one inculcates in the minds of a group that A hates B and will kill them if given half a chance then the it stands to reason that people B will be suspicious of A in all circumstances. One must ask the question why is it that when a Black officer shoots a white assailant riots do not ensue? The answer lies in the fact whites do not use some historical wrong to justify anger against an “other”. No one even protested Byrd shooting Babbitt at the Capitol and he was given a hero’s pat on the back.
No, the issue is not that police should look like the people they protect because that simply reinforces distrust between people. The issue is calling out those who sow distrust to maintain power.
Let’s assume that in a predominantly black city having a police corps that is at least fifty percent black results in better relation between police and population than with an all white police corps, would you still be against taking race into account when hiring police officers as a matter of sacred principle? My take is that hiring practices of any organization should reflect the goals of that organization; if a particular racial makeup makes it easier to reach certain goals then I would not oppose to taking race into account as a matter of principle. (I would note the danger of assumptions however…..but that is not the point of my comment.)
CVB, if two candidates have equivalent skills/experience/abilities to do the job, at that point it’s a coin-flip, whether both candidates have the same skin color or no. Then it’s a matter of preference, and skin color can play the (secondary) role in who gets the job, because “the content of one’s character” has been considered before “the color of one’s skin.”
What we don’t want is skin-color being the primary factor, to the exclusion of more important things.
I never suggested that an entire force be white. If a city is predominantly black and it recruits from within, all things being equal, the force will reflect the city’s proportions. But what if it is only able to recruit 40% qualified black officers should standards be lowered to include more blacks to achieve a preponderance of black officers.
If it is necessary to recruit officers from all areas within and without the city then the population cannot be considered as predominantly black. If we assume that blacks should only be able to trust black officers then white officer will never earn any trust in the black community.
As with my original comment, no. Moving the goalposts for one group to reach some arbitrary number can only show that race based discrimination is in play. We have some communities with a lot of Indian H1-B visa holders. Perhaps 5-10% of population, who are not here to be police officers. Perhaps one day their children might have an interest. Does that mean the local PD should mandate hiring Indian heritage as 5-10% of their force? No.
Where there is discrepancy like this, the answer is not to move the goalposts, but to encourage opportunity and development among the next generation. Some part of that 1st generation / 2nd generation will likely have an interest in law enforcement, so doing the outreach and education to make sure they can leap at those opportunities as they present themselves, to work hard to be a quality applicant, that is the true goal of DEI.
In theory at least.
“If we assume that blacks should only be able to trust black officers then white officer will never earn any trust in the black community.”
The operating word in this sentence is the word “should”.
What if the reality is that black communities tend to distrust white police officers? A police commissioner may find that he may have better results by policing this community with a predominantly black police force, even if this requires hiring police officers who despite being qualified for the job are slightly less skilled than white applicants.
Now we can of course all appeal to principles related to racial bias in hiring, but in the end of the day the commissioner wants to see the crime rates in his city to be under control with a police corps that is up to the task. This means that he may have to make a trade-off between the practical needs of policing that community, and officially professed principles (also known as cant) regarding hiring practices.
Building on that, I would argue that connecting and building trust and rapport with the neighborhood communities is a relevant job skill. Officers can have an advantage in that skill not only from their cultural or ethnic backgrounds, but also based on their appearance, similar to how aesthetically attractive people have a general advantage in being hired.
The metric is how well they evoke impressions that ease communications, thereby getting better results for keeping the peace. In the process, they may have the opportunity to train and develop their other job-relevant skills as well.
I also agree with Tim’s point about outreach and education rather than moving goalposts. I think the most reasonable proponents about DEI are concerned about the extent to which those goalposts might have built-in assumptions that unnecessarily exclude people who could otherwise do a good job. The Andy Griffith Show illustrates how some areas need police officers who can talk people down more than they need ones with great aim.
Humans do often struggle with discussing goals and the skills for meeting them, which is why I’ve got a whole toolbox of words to help clarify those discussions.
Sarah’s comments are spot on in occupations that require rigid adherence to known physics. Experimentation in these realms should be done in controlled environments with adequate safety measures in place and never on a fully functioning working project.
I believe that one of the legitimate rationales for affirmative action involved aspects of corporate marketing. The argument at the time was that to reach a given minority audience it would be necessary to gain the insight into how a given minority audience reacts to various messaging. This meant seeking our and recruiting minorities with marketing degrees. This tactic proved useful and did allow firms to gain market share in those minority markets. I believe this is the basis for the claim that diversity is our strength and they point to data that shows sales increases that resulted from such “inclusion”. An evaluation of the evolution of McDonalds messaging is a case study in shifting messaging to capture minority market share.
As with any activity, diminishing returns and ultimately decreasing returns will set in. Over time every group developed an activist organization to push the interests of that group and relied on claims of bigotry to achieve and end goal. Inclusion began to mean bringing every type of difference into the decision matrix which bogs down the process of getting to market. Management, short term goal seekers who seek the path of least resistance, acquiesce to the most vocal minority and allow them to dictate policy without regard to long term growth. There are very few Jack Welch’s anymore in corporate America who would have told most of these to get in line with the corporate goals of creating value for the most number of buyers or get out.
And now we have television commercials populated by seventy-five percent black people? Every couple is mixed race. And a few Chinese looking women are sprinkled here and there. If people need to see themselves in commercials to buy the product, what about the white portion of the population? Are advertisers writing off the majority of their potential customers? And for what?
Recent management developments have not made management better at creating efficient and consumer value creating environments.
Ad people just seem to be lemmings.
There can be a sound business rationale for diversity in advertising. Diversity in advertising can lead to higher revenue, market reach, and brand loyalty. Advertising also needs to take into account the values of its customer base; a targeted customer base of young urban professionals may require a different approach than a targeted customer base of farmers in the Mid-West. Understanding the cultural values of your customer base and being perceived as ethical and socially responsible is therefore important for the bottom line. Misunderstanding the values of your customer base can misfire, as Budweiser, Gillette, and Cracker Barrel have found out.