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Let's say you have a company in Warsaw full of lovely people who want what's best for the company. They have an opening for an infrastructure engineer and need somebody with particular skills, but are willing to interview candidates who don't have those skills but show aptitude , interest and a willingness to learn. They throw the doors open wide and interview everybody who applies. They only get white males applying for the job.

If they're measuring the diversity and inclusion of the pipeline, they'll still end up failing. Warsaw (one of the most diverse Polish cities) doesn't have a significant black population. They might get a handful of Chinese or Vietnamese applicants. The bulk of the "foreign" population are Ukrainian (by a wide margin) followed by European.

The trouble with any metric used to prove DEI credentials is that the org starts changing behaviour to boost that metric.

Perhaps the metric should be aligned with availability. No idea how that would work in practice though.

You don't have to practice American-style DEI. Removing blockers for women and people from working class backgrounds is IME far more productive.
Well the first thing to do would to acknowledge that the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".

The second thing to do would be to ask why only white makes are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that. That might involve some changes at the company, but more likely would require changes in the broader society.

The third thing to do would be to note that essentially no serious advocate of DEI goes beyond the idea that an ideal scenario is on average having work place representation roughly match the distribution in some broader social unit. If you have 0% black people in that broader social unit, nobody but people trying to ridicule DEI would suggest that you need to work towards more black people.

The criteria for what characteristics are considered by DEI efforts in a given context will vary. Gender, religion, "race", language, age ... these are others are all valid things that you might want to try to even up in workplaces to match the broader social context.

> The second thing to do would be to ask why only white males are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that.

But this is exactly what I mean. You can try to make the job and the company sound appealing to females and minorities. But let's say 99.9% of the population around you is white and you just don't happen to get any female candidates applying because the number of females with those skills that are currently looking for work in your area happens to be zero. You could do a bunch of footwork and ask lots of "why". But if your small-to-medium sized company chiefly want to execute on a specific business goal, their focus will be on shipping product, beating the competition, keeping customers and employees happy. Who has pockets deep enough to fix some broader societal problem? How much of the budget should they spend on that? Is it even their obligation? What do the investors think?

This type of wider social problem should be tackled and funded by government: any department with a role in employment, equality etc. Responsibility for social issues cannot be left to private, profit-driven companies.

I said in my opening line:

> ... the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".

Sorry, gotcha. I read and responded while on the move, hence the stupid.