alt Hacker NewsThere are two ways to do diversity - the first is to put a brutal skill filter and take everyone that passes it no matter their skin color, body weight, religion or politics. The other is to reduce people to their demographics and push for (in)visible quotas. One of them leads to crappy results.
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The meritocratic delusion is that you would be in the "have" pile, rather than sitting in the back of the bus with the rest of the "have nots".
Of course, its statistically most likely that any individual would belong to the much larger latter group but stats like that only apply to other people, right?
Worse, its a zero step thinkers solution. Step zero is a merit based system, step one is for the people with motels on Boardwalk and Park Place to ensure they can never lose again by rigging the system to ignore merit in favor of capital.
I just want to be clear that these are not the only two ways to do diversity. Even if you're just focused on hiring (which is a myopic way to view diversity, even at the most simplistic level you need to think about retention) hiring is complicated and I've seen people try a variety of things to get a wider pool of qualified candidates in the pipeline (offering remote work, better paternity/maternity leaves, outreach with local women in engineering groups, etc). This isn't at all my area of expertise and I've seen a lot of things outside of the dichotomy you described.
Also, idk why people view quotas as all of "diversity". I've literally never worked at a place that considered this but I see people mention them all the time on the internet.