An interesting angle on diversity: we don’t have a truly “blind” hiring process until employees of all demographics are equally mediocre.
Via Yonatan Zunger.
Originally shared by ****
if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task. Whatever the author of the manifesto thinks, Google does not believe this to be the case and as far as I can tell from industry blogs, it isn’t – female employees in tech are generally very good. This would, of course, be consistent with the hypothesis that the current selection process is biased against them.
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If, on the other hand, one had a situation where the writers of windy conservative manifestoes about not getting fair treatment were in fact mediocre whiners who inflated their CVs, then that would be evidence that there wasn’t a bias in the recruitment and retention system, and that in fact there was probably an inefficiency caused by the extent to which mediocrities were able to bump along because their face fitted in a homogeneous techbro culture. The concentration on star engineers, senior executives and Sheryl Sandberg C-Suite geniuses is entirely wrong; the progress of gender equality in the workplace ought to be measured by the extent to which women can get into the ranks of time-serving dead-wood middle management roles.
True equality will be reached when mediocrities of all kinds exist at every level. The fact that minority hires are consistently excellent is an indicator that we aren’t there yet.
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