The easiest is incentives to hire minorities (gender, sexual, race, disabled, etc.) to level the playing field first.
This takes away a large part of the privilege that is at play in the tech industry.
As more of these minorities get higher in the industry the implicit biases will begin to disappear.
Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they’re getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.
And in my experience (roughly 20 years) the more diverse a team the better the solutions and diversity in thinking you get.
Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they’re getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.
There are two competing lenses we can view this kind of thing through, and both are valid. First, there’s the macro lens in which groups like women are significantly underrepresented, and most reasonable people believe that to be a problem we’ve created that we need to solve. It’s not that women are bad at this job. It’s that women have been pushed not to participate for reasons we think are bad. Through that lens, an obvious solution is to bias things in favor of women for some period of time to get to a steady state where the system won’t automatically fall back into gender-bias as soon as we take our thumb off the scale. That’s a reasonable theory, and pursuing it does a lot of good.
But there’s a second lens in which individual people with names are trying to participate in the labor market. The fact that men have had a built-in advantage does not imply that any man looking for a job would only be able to get one by leveraging an unfair advantage. If we think talent and hard work are equally distributed through the population, then temporarily biasing things away from men is, to the man currently trying to find a job, exactly as discriminatory as anything that prior generations have faced. The fact that there’s a societal good being pursued doesn’t make that harm go away either. It is unfair, and we should recognize that. We may decide we have to do it anyway, but I’m not a fan of the idea that “let’s mistreat them like other people were mistreated” is inherently a good thing.
It’s just Maslow’s Hierarchy. The person who doesn’t have a job should be egocentric, at least in this narrow area of focus. If your position is that people should prioritize abstract societal benefits over their own security and well-being, I’m not sure what to tell you other than to prepare for a life of people disappointing you.
Disadvantages groups need help to gain equal footing first. Before we can even talk about equality.
What does equal footing look like / mean to you?
The easiest is incentives to hire minorities (gender, sexual, race, disabled, etc.) to level the playing field first.
This takes away a large part of the privilege that is at play in the tech industry.
As more of these minorities get higher in the industry the implicit biases will begin to disappear.
Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they’re getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.
And in my experience (roughly 20 years) the more diverse a team the better the solutions and diversity in thinking you get.
There are two competing lenses we can view this kind of thing through, and both are valid. First, there’s the macro lens in which groups like women are significantly underrepresented, and most reasonable people believe that to be a problem we’ve created that we need to solve. It’s not that women are bad at this job. It’s that women have been pushed not to participate for reasons we think are bad. Through that lens, an obvious solution is to bias things in favor of women for some period of time to get to a steady state where the system won’t automatically fall back into gender-bias as soon as we take our thumb off the scale. That’s a reasonable theory, and pursuing it does a lot of good.
But there’s a second lens in which individual people with names are trying to participate in the labor market. The fact that men have had a built-in advantage does not imply that any man looking for a job would only be able to get one by leveraging an unfair advantage. If we think talent and hard work are equally distributed through the population, then temporarily biasing things away from men is, to the man currently trying to find a job, exactly as discriminatory as anything that prior generations have faced. The fact that there’s a societal good being pursued doesn’t make that harm go away either. It is unfair, and we should recognize that. We may decide we have to do it anyway, but I’m not a fan of the idea that “let’s mistreat them like other people were mistreated” is inherently a good thing.
That second lens is called egocentrism.
It’s just Maslow’s Hierarchy. The person who doesn’t have a job should be egocentric, at least in this narrow area of focus. If your position is that people should prioritize abstract societal benefits over their own security and well-being, I’m not sure what to tell you other than to prepare for a life of people disappointing you.
That sounds good. But what does equal footing look like in hiring process?
You’ve described a steady end state, and I agree that’s a good end state.