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> We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully

Whatever term you pick to describe a concerted effort to overcome the tendency to bigotry, they'll just hijack that, too.

There's a whole industry built around this, and the media is so receptive to the right-wing that they'll openly describe how they'll do it[1], will execute the plans in public, and the mainstream media will act as their stenographers.

[1] https://xcancel.com/sykescharlie/status/1396844806547050499

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Do you mean there’s a whole industry built around DEI? Or that there’s a whole industry built around countermessaging the DEI industry?
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> the DEI industry

isn't really a thing so much as it's a collection of principles that can be implemented. To the unprincipled, this needs to be converted into a literal enemy that can be vilified, because any attempt to force them to adhere to principles is an attack.

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No DEI industry you say? https://web.archive.org/web/20240710195414/https://time.com/...

>The lucrative industry shows few signs of waning–from the spike in well-compensated diversity consultants and czars; to online courses and degree programs at prestigious schools; to professional organizations and conferences; to the commissioning of ever more studies, task forces and climate surveys. The buzzword is emblazoned on blogs and books and boot camps, and Thomson Reuters, a multinational mass-media and information firm, even created a Diversity and Inclusion Index to assess the practices of more than 5,000 publicly traded companies globally.

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DEI wasn't demonized because it tried to fight bigotry. It demonized itself because it routinely became a dishonest two-faced movement that public denied to be discriminatory, but then privately implemented policies that explicitly discriminated on the basis of sex and gender.

When your leaders publicly condemn the idea that your company is discriminating on the basis of sex, but then privately institutes a system of reserving headcount for women, that'll make most people real cynical about DEI.

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And those in power who went out of their way to demonize DEI, is that why they didn't like it? I would argue strongly that no, they had their priors already set, and anything help black people or poor people (the new proxy for hating black people) was bad and they'd lie through their teeth about the impact to get anyone on their side.
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Yes, they did dislike it because it was discriminatory, not because it helped poor and Black people. I don't know the views of people you've met, but in my circles the opponents of DEI are mostly tech workers in SF and Seattle - not exactly a conservative demographic. I can't count a single Republican between us.

The course of our relationship with DEI was pretty similar: in university we earnestly believed that women were discriminated against in tech hiring. One of us even built a prototype anonymous interviewing platform. Once we entered the workforce, there was pretty big whiplash when we started getting visibility into our own companies' hiring pipelines. Many of us - including myself - found ourselves actively carrying out discrimination on the basis of sex and race. Mostly sex, though - while our DEI advocates often invoked racial disparities to emphasize the need for these discriminatory policies, the actual beneficiaries of these policies were mostly white and Asian women.

Does this make me any less likely to support better school funding, and other public benefits that help poor people and Black people? I don't think so. The discriminatory practices of tech company hiring is pretty far removed from these issues in my view. Why would should an underserved school not receive better funding because some tech companies preferentially hired an Asian female over an Asian male? I see no connection between these two.

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Can you cite any companies which violated federal labor law in this way?
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Three out of the four companies I've worked at, for one.

YouTube was sued for directing one of its recruiters to exclusively advance diverse candidates for a period of time, and eventually settled with the recruiter [1].

Intel [2] and Microsoft [3] both tied specific percentage quotas to executive's compensation. If saying "reach this racial and gender quota or I'll penalize you financially" isn't discrimination, I'm not sure what is.

Perkins-Coie explicitly excluded applicants from its diversity fellowship program if they didn't meet certain racial, sexual orientation, or other requirements [4].

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...

3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...

4. https://www.reuters.com/legal/second-major-us-law-firm-chang...

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i like how when a company obviously discriminates against women and minorities by hiring almost entirely white guys that's fine that's to be expected but if you try to fix that discrimination it's an evil conspiracy
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The fact that the company is majority white does not make discrimination legal. If the Perkins Coie wants to do things like anonymize its interviews, or send fake interview packets to its recruiters and looking for disparities in call back rates then that would be a genuine attempt at identifying potential discrimination.
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the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.
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> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating?

This is untrue, though. The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population is not evidence of discrimination.

In fact, you can end up with disparities much larger without discrimination. It's even possible to actively discriminate against a group, and still have that disadvantaged group be overrepresented by a factor of 3 or 4.

That was the case with the Harvard admissions lawsuit. Even though the university was actively discriminating against Asian applicants, the undergrad population was ~20% Asian, despite ~6% of the applicants being Asian.

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>The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population

i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.

you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.

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Yes, it is possible to have an 80% white organization without discrimination. Perkins Coie is ~80% white but is gender representation is much closer to parity [1], so I'm not sure why you're referring specifically to "white guys".

The relevance of SFFA vs. Harvard is to demonstrate that it's possible to have a substantial overrepresentation - over 3x in the case of Asians at Harvard - despite actively discriminating against the overrepresented group. Whites are only ~1.2x more common at Perkins Coie relative to the general population.

You can keep repeating the line that because a company has X% of Y race it must be evidence of discrimination as many times as you want, repetition doesn't make it true.

1. https://perkinscoie.com/about-us

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This is absurd. Why is it possible to end up with a majority black, tall, male, NBA team without pre-selecting on basis of race, height, or sex?
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YouTube was never found guilty of anything, they just paid to make the argument go away. In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas. These companies wanted more diversity in their staff, which is a valid and laudable goal, and they were willing to pay extra if that was achieved.

Would you like to try again?

edit: your later addition of Perkins Coie also was settled/dismissed and never adjudicated, and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].

The real takeaway is that a lot of people are very mad about what they imagine DEI to be.

[1] https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-...

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Yes, the lawsuit against Perkings Coie was dropped, after the law firm agreed to stop engaging in discrimination. As per the case, Parkins Coie did explicitly require that applicants to its diversity fellowship be Black, Latin, or a member of the LGBTQ community. The lawsuit was dropped after Perkins Coie agreed to expand eligibility to all applicants, regardless of race and sexual orientation.

What about the Perkins Coie lawsuit serves to highlight the notion that DEI is often implemented through discriminatory manners? Do you deny the eligibility criteria that Perkins Coie set for its diversity fellowship.

> and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].

This judgement is largely unrelated to their discriminatory fellowship requirements. The lawsuit about the fellowship was resolved in 2023, before Trump took office. This was a judgement against Trump's executive order - it is not a judgement of Perkins Coie's employment practices before he took office.

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They settled out of court, YouTube didn't prevail in court. The evidence speaks for itself. Did you not read the emails that plaintiff's manager sent, explicitly telling him to cancel all non-diverse applicants' interviews?

You can read the complaint itself: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf

> Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups.

> We are still pre-Goodburger roll out, so that means the only candidates that need pre-allocation are L3s. And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups.

Engage with the evidence of the lawsuit before proclaiming that it's meritless because YouTube settled with the plaintiff, rather than going to court and losing. If these emails were fabricated YouTube would have a slam-dunk case against the plaintiff. But they chose to settle.

> In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas

The incentives were implemented in the form of quotas. You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things, when they're not.

"Your salary is $110,000. If you don't meet a quota of 40% women, I'm docking our pay by $10,000 as a penalty for failing to meet this quota."

"Your salary is $100,000. Because we want to make the company more diverse, we're giving a $10,000 bonus for reaching an inclusion milestone of 40% women."

This is exactly what Intel did, from the Atlantic article:

> But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas.

> Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities.

> Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.

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> You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things

That's how the law sees it.

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When has the court upheld a policy of setting a specific percentage racial or gender quota, and penalizing employees financially if that quota is not met? If I told my employees "I'll reduce your pay by 90% if you hire any pregnant women" that's not discrimination against gender and family status? You really think a court would buy this argument? Of course, 90% is a much bigger proportion of salary than the DEI bonuses in the example above, but fundamentally this is no different of a policy - it's still tying compensation to the protected class of hired candidates.

And again, you're still glossing over the other two examples: A manager at YouTube explicitly directed a recruiter to only proceed with diverse applicants. And Perkins Coie did, in fact, restrict eligibility for its fellowship program on the basis of race and sexual orientation (this was settled in 2023 after they agreed to stop discriminating. The 2025 judgement you linked above doesn't in any way defend Perkins Coie's hiring policies, only that Trump couldn't further punish them by banning them from federal buildings).

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> When has the court upheld a policy of setting a specific percentage racial or gender quota, and penalizing employees financially if that quota is not met?

Irrelevant.

> And again, you're still glossing over the other two examples

Two examples is not a pervasive problem in my opinion, so it's super easy to gloss over.

What is a pervasive problem is the tables being very tilted against certain groups of people.

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If the courts haven't found in favor of companies using quotas as incentives, then you have no basis to claim that that quotas are legally acceptable as long as they're framed as incentives. This is directly relevant to your claims.

I find it noteworthy how often proponents of DEI talk in vague, euphemistic terms. You left me to guess what you mean by "certain groups of people". The group that I've witnessed benefit the most from DEI in tech companies is women - not Black people, or poor people. And the experimental evidence on the gender disparity in tech company recruiting does not back up the idea that women are disadvantaged when it comes to applying to tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3946621_cod...

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I think the demonization comes from people resenting the use of authority to restrict liberty, and from conflating the resentment of authority with bigotry. In this case, let private people discriminate freely.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken

I think people should be allowed to make their own choices in terms of whom to hire/associate with, with absolutely no outside intervention. That doesn't make me a bigot.

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It also refers to a wide range of different policies that need to be evaluated on their merits. These policies are not all the same.

It’s become a thought stopping cliche. Modern discourse is absolutely loaded with thought stopping cliches so it’s not the only one by any stretch.

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> We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term woke. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term social justice. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term critical race theory. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term diversity. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

And on and on and on. Why should we stop using terms because bigots demonize them "in the common parlance"? Bigots demonize every term.

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Feel free to use either, but you will be summarily ignored.
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