And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios. Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.
I think if we could somehow do "blind auditions" for any kind of work, that would be the ideal case of non-biased hiring. But if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.
I really disagree with this. Obviously there are the extremists on the far end of the spectrum which this accurately describes, but the vast majority of people who support these types of programs arrive at it by observing 1) the literal centuries of examples like the one above and 2) the numerous visible day-to-day examples of racism/sexism one sees directly (not talking about silly microaggression shit)
It doesn't take an extreme viewpoint to come to the conclusion there are knobs that might need to be turned a bit more deliberately in our society to bring it closer to the blind evaluation model.
It's a shame how much of our discourse is people in the middle of the bell curve arguing principally against people on the far ends of it (or observing such arguments and wisely choosing to stay out of it).
One is reminded of the famous debacle when GitHub canceled ElectronConf after using a blind review process to select talks, and ended up with al male speakers.
That anecdote is widely shared but inaccurate: https://reason.com/2019/10/22/orchestra-study-blind-audition...
They studied the effect of telling people that they had an unconscious bias and it worked in eliminating it.
I would like to see that reproduced as it seemed like only certain demographics followed as you would expect; and primarily not the one you would like to hear. But it would be good to do something actually effective that doesnt introduce racism to fight racism.
Fire vs Fire style.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...
and the claims about the orchestra also didn't replicate.
Actually DEI promoters hate blind hiring and usually try to kill it because when implemented it always raises the number of white men being hired - there is racism and sexism in society, it's just in the opposite direction to what DEI programmes claim, and it's not unconscious.
An interesting example of this kind of meltdown was the one attempt to organize a conference for Electron developers. They decided to select speakers using blind reviews of abstracts, because they believed the non-replicable pseudo-science you're repeating here. When the results were unveiled it turned out every speaker they had selected was a man (the expected outcome of blind auditions), so they cancelled the entire conference in fit of anger. The whole community lost, because the organizers had believed in these lies told by social studies academics.