Affirmative Action and Diversity: Diversity Champions and Toxic Watercooler Gossip

Amidst rapid globalisation and the rise of remote working, diversity hires have been championed as the best way forward towards a utopian future of equal opportunities and diversified companies. However, like most other initiatives in affirmative action, there are complexities that often lurk below the surface. 

For the rest of this article, we will consider a completely hypothetical software company, Morphemes LLC, which has a classic rags to riches story of well-heeled, better-connected founders of the appropriate ethnicity finding unexpected success. Now under pressure to diversify their workforce and ensure they are enforcing an inclusive culture, we will explore some plausible pitfalls.

The Diversity Champion

Casting around their existing workforce, the founders opt to highlight an existing employee or recruiter to the role of diversity champion, making it their job to hire enough people to spare the company the ire of internet mobs and the occasional investigative journalist. This middleman is damaging for the careers of any who join under an affirmative action programme, and every diversity hire may be considered to have been “discovered” by the aforementioned middleman.

Stochastic Diversity

For this particular point, consider an open-source project maintained by our fictional company. Often, certain events are highlighted as being either “newcomer-friendly” or “pro-diversity”. Open source projects have a clear and public record of all contributions. Allowing lower-level contributions during magic events merely sows confusion amongst prospective contributors and does the wider community no favours. In effect, the company has palmed the gatekeeping off to the event managers.

Exhibits and Metrics

A metric often used in diversity is the percentage of “minority” or under-represented groups in a particular job. This, however, is stranger in the context of voluntary positions. For a software company, the question of “why are there not enough programmers from X” must not be the only driving measure as this enforces the belief covered next.

Separate but Equal

Negative connotations with racial segregation in the US aside, the notion of being separate but equal is rather prevalent in the industry. Our fictional example company Morphemes LLC, might offer a “leg-up” program to up-skill programmers from certain groups to make them more attractive hires. The problem, in this case, is that company recruiters might be tempted to undervalue strong talent who would qualify for the affirmative action initiatives.

Concretely, assuming Jill is in the ethnic majority and is slightly less skilled than Jasmin, a recruiter might hire Jill while asking Jasmin to go through the leg-up program so that the leg-up program turns out better graduates and also since Jill is debarred from the aforementioned affirmative action program. 

Forced Evangelism

Having hired themselves a shiny new diversity employee, the employee is expected to not only be under the mentorship of the diversity champion but may often be forced to vocally support diversity. This is not necessarily incorrect or even controversial, however, it is an additional and *unpaid* task whose only justification is that the employee is classified as a diversity hire.

Again, a concrete example; Elena represents a community that is traditionally under-represented. By virtue of being hired, there may be expectations for her to mentor “others like her” and take part and point in discussions on sensitivity and inclusion. This is unwanted attention that Elena may resent, and she ought to be free from the expectation to do more than an equivalent hire from the majority.

Band-Aids and Conclusions

Tokenisms. White saviours. Affirmative action. Middlemen.

These are the evils that need to be kept in mind while considering the impact of any programme meant to increase diversity. By cutting out the middlemen, providing sensitivity training to *all* recruiters, and removing the requirements of hard metrics, the industry will benefit far more than the current measures. An important takeaway is not to remove affirmative action, but to temper them so as to be in addition to the regular hiring process. Honesty and transparency are far better suited to the workplace than forced measures aimed at hiding uglier parts of human nature. Perhaps a good reminder is that if a place has sexist, racist, and/or homophobic management, then it would be best to know so from the get-go, instead of finding out years later during a promotion interview!