"Diversity" (Of A Sort) Over Decency
Individual merit dies in the poisonous light of the trendy new policies that end up insulting the people of color they are intended to help.
The message: You can't get to the top unless we yank down people who've earned their way to make a place for you -- or tell more qualified candidates that they can't be hired because of their skin color.
Now it's just a different color -- white (and also, often, Asians) -- being discriminated against. It's still a pox on individual merit and fairness.
Of course, these days, what I call "neoracism" -- racism against a different group of people, but racism just the same -- is the new "equality." To put it another way, discrimination against meritorious individuals who have the "wrong" skin color is the new "fairness."
At Spiked, Paddy Hannam writes:
The politics of diversity is taking a turn for the absurd. This week, one of the world's largest investment firms was forced to publicly deny that it had told managers not to hire white men.The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that, as part of a new diversity policy, staff at State Street Global Advisors would have to get special permission to hire white males. On Monday a company spokesman dismissed this report as 'factually incorrect'. But he did confirm that executives' bonuses will be dependent on them hiring more diverse staff and they will be obliged to interview ethnic-minority candidates for vacant positions. Interview panels will also have to feature at least one woman, and ideally someone from an ethnic-minority background.
State Street is not banning whitey, then. But the fact that its approach to recruitment could have even been misinterpreted in this way shows how bizarre corporate diversity policies have now become.
Moreover, these policies now seem to lie at the very heart of corporate recruitment. State Street's diversity chief for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Jess McNicholas, said that diversity was now 'on every senior executive's scorecard'. 'All of our leaders have to demonstrate at their annual appraisals what they have done to improve female representation and [increase] the number of colleagues from ethnic-minority backgrounds', she said.
As is so often the case, diversity here does not appear to extend to class. State Street's new policy could easily lead to a capable white working-class candidate being rejected in favour of someone from a far more privileged background who just so happens to be black. This kind of diversity is literally only skin-deep.
What, really, are these diversity drives? Hamman nails it: "a means for companies to dress themselves up in the seemingly fashionable garb of identity politics."
A person's race or gender should not determine whether she or he gets a job. But that is the tragic direction corporate diversity policies are pushing us in. They are a menace to genuine equality.
The hidden assumption in all of this is that literally anyone can do any job, that the only reason Mr smith works as a stock analyst is because he is white male. But if you put a random person into almost any job without the skills and experience, they can create disaster. A bad manager can make terrible decisions about products or scheduling or operations, cause good staff to leave, and cost a company literally hundreds of millions of dollars. A bad pilot can literally kill hundreds of people. A bad doctor can injure or kill --like failing to diagnose cancer or doing crap surgery. There are enough incompetent people out there as it is but adding more is not helpful.
Interestingly, a study of places in the world where connections get you a job instead of merit, such as some central american locations, shows that such hiring very much hurts productivity and profit. I know, big surprise.
cc at November 13, 2021 6:28 AM
I think any straight white male CEO that is pushing this stuff should be required to immediately resign or two reasons.
1. Put your money where your mouth is.
2. CEOs that use shareholder's money to push an ideological agenda probably aren't very good CEO's for the shareholders.
P.S. Women own more stock than men, because women live longer, so it is misogynistic sacrifice shareholder wealth for politcal agendas.
Bill O Writes at November 13, 2021 7:51 AM
There is a kind of Diversity that doesn't get much attention these days, and that is diversity of educational backgrounds and personality types.
Hire three Harvard MBAs...one Black, one white, and one Asian...and you're likely to get a fair amount of commonality in how they think.
Hire all extroverts, or all introverts, and you'll have a staff that sees the world in certain ways and misses certain things.
A psychologist advised a company management class as follows: "As an executive, you'll be tempted to hire people who are like you. Don't give in to this temptation, because, if you do, you'll all have the same blind spots and will happily walk off the cliff together."
He was talking specifically about "like you" in terms of personality type.
David Foster at November 13, 2021 9:06 AM
"'All of our leaders have to demonstrate at their annual appraisals what they have done to improve female representation and [increase] the number of colleagues from ethnic-minority backgrounds', she said.
Xi Jinping is hiring too:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/07/30/china/ccp-100-membership-xi-jinping-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
Baker at November 13, 2021 9:12 AM
And why did the Commie News Network run a puff piece that makes getting into the cadre look like a fun-but-scary game of competitive self-abasement? And in the end, everybody won. What a surprise.
Here's a description of how the Red Left behaves_:
" We argue that political screening is a persistent feature and a survival strategy of all Communist parties and that the mechanisms of ensuring political screening are affected by the regime's agendas in different historical periods. Using data from surveys conducted in Shanghai and Tianjin in 1993, we found that measures of political screening were persistently significant predictors of party membership attainment in all post-1949 periods and that party membership is positively associated with mobility into positions of political and managerial authority during the post-1978 reform era. Education emerged to be a significant predictor of Communist party membership in the post-1978 period. These findings indicate that China has made historical shifts to recruit among the educated to create a technocratic elite that is both occupationally competent and politically screened."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2675610
Baker at November 13, 2021 7:16 PM
Forcing diversity has always been absurd.
Diversity only works when it like a river, flowing where it flows naturally. Try to impose it, dam it, or make it flow uphill is just asking for disaster.
ruralcounsel at November 16, 2021 1:02 PM
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