Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Dalewyn | on: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
You are explicitly considering a man's race, that is racism.
Dylan16807 | parent | next
Are you serious? Measuring something is not discrimination.
Dalewyn | root | parent | next
You are explicitly considering a man's race for something that is irrelevant to that consideration, in this case to answer whether to hire/admit them.

You must consider a man's race if this concerns something relevant to that consideration such as their medical history. This is not one of them; there are actually very few instances where asking a man's race is necessary.

Dylan16807 | root | parent
The person above was just saying that having a closer balance of hires to the greater population was a good thing. They didn't talk about how companies got there. We shouldn't just assume they got there by using race while deciding whether to hire or not. Maybe they did something else, or maybe they found some existing racism in hiring decisions and removed it.
Dalewyn | root | parent
The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis. The only way to force that composition to mirror social composition is to do so explicitly and strictly on racial basis.

A lot of factors go into proper hiring and terminations, most significantly the merits of the individual concerned. Such factors will lead to an employee racial composition that might not mirror that of social composition.

Certain hiring practices like favoring women for flight attendants and black men for basketball teams should be terminated with extreme prejudice, but to force employee racial composition and specifically that one way or any other is racism.

Dylan16807 | root | parent | next
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis.

I put an example of another way in my last post. If you're creative, you can think of more.

Another one is seeking out people and inviting them to apply, at which point they enter the normal unbiased hiring process.

KPGv2 | root | parent
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis

That's ludicrous. If I hire only from Harvard, but then I start hiring from state schools as well, the employee racial composition is highly likely to change.

Dalewyn | root | parent
But is the goal to hire from certain schools or to hire certain races?

The axiom presented is that the employee composition must mirror the surrounding social composition, ergo you are hiring for racial reasons because you must set quotas and then hire based upon satisfying (and not exceeding) those quotas.

As an example, if the social composition is composed of 40% Earthlings, 30% Martians, 20% Venusians, and 10% Mercurians and your workforce consists of 10 men: You cannot ever hire more than 4 Earthlings or 3 Martians or 2 Venusians or 1 Mercurian and must refuse or terminate any excess. If you cannot hire even 1 Mercurian at all you arguably can't hire anyone.

That's racist.

loading story #42664195
undersuit | parent
[flagged]
Dalewyn | root | parent
Man as in mankind.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man

>1a(1): an individual human

>b: the human race : HUMANKIND

>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family

undersuit | root | parent
We're obviously not putting the master branch in charge of exploiting a bunch of slave branches.

And "a man" doesn't refer to mankind/humankind.