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ncr100 | on: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly.

Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for DEI, derivatively.

To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social pressure.

I have next to no influence. Still I wonder if I'm naive?

ALSO, awesome work Ibrahim / firefoxd, you deserve to be honored for your experience and celebrated for meaningful efforts to make society better. I would not know about this without you:

> If you are black and take a group picture with your white colleagues [on Zoom] one evening, eventually someone will make the joke that all they see are your teeth. If you are black and hang out with your white colleague, people will always assume you are the subordinate.

kjellsbells | parent | next
An alternate take: there are good DEI programs and poor ones. The poor ones fail because the planners dont really know what they are trying to do, but leadership thinks they ought to have one, and so they metric-ize it. And since (again, no clarity of thought) hard numbers in areas like hiring sail perilously close to large legal rocks, they whiff on the metrics and end up measuring something like "engagement". And, concomitantly, deliver a lot of low value chatter that provides ample ammunition to opponents of any kind of DEI programs, even the good ones.

A good DEI program should, IMHO, be indistinguishable from good management culture embedded at every level in an org.

- It should not be controversial to assert, and product management to insist, say, that products designed for humanity should be usable by humanity: men and women, for example - but we still have medicine and cars tested on male models, and software that is unusable if you have low vision or cant operate a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. That doesn't automatically mean one must hire 50:50 men:women, say (see legal rocks, above), but it certainly starts to smell like a missed opportunity if you don't have a single person on your staff or in your network of consultants who can explain what it feels like to wear a seatbelt when you are 1.5m and 50kg not 2m and 85kg. If you want better products, this seems like a no brainer, but it doesnt seem to happen.

- It must absolutely be a mandate for all managers to avoid cliques. All men? All women? All Indians? All Purdue grads? Close watching needed, especially when those groups hire and promote. Doesn't need a mandate, needs better managers of managers.

Tldr is that no amount of DEI will fix bad management culture.

nradov | root | parent
The particular issues around medicine and cars were more due to regulatory and liability issues than bad management culture or intentional discrimination. Pharmaceutical companies often didn't include women as subjects in clinical trials over fears that if one got pregnant and then had a baby with serious birth defects because of the drug that would be ethically problematic and potentially lead to huge monetary damages in a civil trial. The FDA has since changed their rules to require broader participation in clinical trials.

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/diverse-women-clinical-trials/...

Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that. Now they are using a more diverse set of dummies.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/improving-safety-for-women-...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies

KittenInABox | root | parent
> Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that.

I think I would still blame the management of NHTSA for setting that standard.

golly_ned | parent
That's what I've seen in the metrics. DEI hiring has been an enormous failure. A lot of the concern in non-exclusively-left-leaning online spaces (including this one) about DEI hiring was and is way overblown given how drastically unsuccessful they are in practice. The default like is that "it's bad, but getting better" by showing difference year to year in sectors where the numbers look good, or even just reporting on noise.