Google’s being sued by an ex-recruiter and part of the suit is the claim that the company discriminates against white and Asian people during the process. Our own intutition is that, dependent upon how accurate you wish to be in your use of language, the company definitely does do so. On the simple grounds that it’s not possible to discriminate in favour of one group identity without discriminating against others. There is rather a large amount of mealy mouthed obfuscation around concerning this point of course, but that is still reality. Even if it’s true that American society (or capitalism, The Man, whatever) discriminates against certain groups it would still be true that anyone themselves discriminating in order to correct these injustices is still, well, discriminating:
The Alphabet Inc. unit had “irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” according to the complaint filed in state court in Redwood City, California.
Arne Wilberg, who worked at Google and its YouTube unit for about nine years both as a contractor and an employee, claims he was terminated in retaliation for complaining to human resources about the company’s hiring practices.
Well, yes, we know, it’s a suit and an allegation in one to boot.
The critics of Google’s effort to promote workforce diversity now include one of its own former recruiters, who claims in a lawsuit he was fired because he didn’t toe the line on rejecting white and Asian male job candidates.
Whether they did that and whether he was fired because of it isn’t our point here at all:
Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano said the company will vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.
“We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” she said in an emailed statement. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
Well, yes, but. If increased diversity means that equally qualified candidates (to be as polite as we could be about it) are discriminated among on the grounds of under-representation of race, gender or anything else, then that’s discrimination. It may well be positive in favour of members of one group but it’s equally negative against those other equally qualified but not so diverse. There’s really not any way out of this logic.
Sure, there’re attempts, as with the allegations of racism. Those oppressed cannot be racists because only those with the power can be so. It’s a common enough statement that and it’s also nonsense through and through. So too is the idea that discriminating in favour of one group isn’t discrimination against those others. After all, what is the historical allegation in the first place? That everyone had positive discrimination in favour of white males if memory serves.
Are modern hiring practices discriminatory? Sure they are, discrimination in favour of under represented groups, in favour of diversity, it’s still discrimination. Whether it’s the right thing to do or not, it still is discrimination.
Surely Google has both a policy to hire on the basis of merit and to seek out qualified minorities, as though both could be the primary criterion. This whole Affirmative Action business started out as a plea that, “When all other things are the same, we hire the Negro.” That is, whenever personnel departments forget what their real job is, or can be persuaded to subordinate their real job to executive posturing and PR. Of course you cannot favor some without disfavoring all the rest. (Of course, suing your employer for policies that theoretically discriminate against your race but evidently… Read more »
At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.” The evidence that diversity helps cultures or products is mixed and probably false. https://ceo.usc.edu/files/2016/09/1996-16-t96_16-Teams.pdf By all means let them be unapologetic about searching for Black astro-dynamists or whatever. I totally support such searches. Indeed if there is an enormous pool of talented Black computer geeks out there, Google has a positive duty to search them out and hire them. But we know there aren’t. If they want… Read more »
Back to my Taxi Licensing experience again. What you do is target your advertising, not discriminate in your recruiting.
A business hiring on race, whether white supremacist or ‘progressive’ affirmative action will lose out. Let the market deal with both of those clowns.
A business hiring on race, whether white supremacist or ‘progressive’ affirmative action will lose out. Why do you think that when the weight of evidence is to the contrary? To ask Steve Sailor’s question, how much faster do you think Google and Facebook could have grown if they had hired more Blacks back when they were young? The evidence seems to be that team work requires open, free and fair communication. Which can only take place among very homogeneous groups. As soon as diversity rears its head (that is, even before Diversity becomes official policy) that team work drops off.… Read more »
The aim of socialist evil to cause collapse by spreading dissension. Hire whoever is qualified to do the job and sack them the very instant they show–in works time/context– as having anything whatsoever to do with the proggie agenda. That is what they did –in reverse–with James Damore. The same standard should apply to leftists. You have been hired to work in a business not engage in leftist agitation. Businesses run by leftist bullshit have considerable questions over their ability to thrive in the marketplace. A self-solving problem ultimately as those more interested in politics than money will fail in… Read more »
SMFS. Sorry I don’t understand your point. I don’t think ‘hiring more blacks’ would help. I believe judging people as individuals on their merits is the best way whatever colour the skin is. If that means a team full of white males so be it.
I think I remember reading that Eric Holder at Dept of Justice had civil rights lawyers threaten companies with lawsuits if they didn’t hire more women and black people. I wonder what happens when federal lawyers make companies break their state’s anti discrimination laws and then they get sued like this example.
smfs’s point jogged something in the memory about diversity, IQ and team work in a couple of podcasts on |Economics Detective Radio I’d listened to last year or maybe 2016. Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999;… Read more »
Hmm, blockquote tag doesn’t seem to working or I go them all wrong 🙁 Time to get the register facility going, Tim.