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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A measure aimed at boosting female employment in the workforce may actually be making it worse, a major study has found.
Leaders of the Australian public service will today be told to "hit pause" on blind recruitment trials, which many believed would increase the number of women in senior positions. Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of candidates because those details are removed from applications. It is seen as an alternative to gender quotas and has also been embraced by Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Victoria Police and Westpac Bank.
In a bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who have had all mention of their gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs. The assumption behind the trial is that management will hire more women when they can only consider the professional merits of candidates. Their choices have been monitored by behavioural economists in the Prime Minister's department — colloquially known as "the nudge unit".
Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic who oversaw the trial, said he was shocked by the results and has urged caution. "We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist," he said. "We found the opposite, that de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @12:11PM (1 child)
Perhaps any accomplishment requires an amount of push-back? Perhaps things are going downhill for females and minorities exactly because they are actively being spoiled (at an feedback-loop-action-induced constantly increasing rate). Positive discrimination is necessary to break the ice, to get everyone to accept members of those groups who were previously completely prejudiced against (like, "impossible"), but after there has been a change in society, it is always bad favor (in the long run) to any group to make things artificially easier for it. When positive discrimination is well known and expected, members of positively discriminated group can never be regarded as truly merited, and they are conditioned to maximize their personal success in life through more assertion and more exploitation of correction of alleged bias against them, then through proving themselves against the bias.
Now, the problem is that such state of affairs introduced a new (admittedly lighter, not "worthless" as before, but "sub-par") prejudice, which could mean that with removed positive discrimination, previously overprotected groups could come under excessive burden of scrutiny. In a way, society has got hold on a tiger's tail, and now it can't let it go.
So what I'm proposing is to do things the proper way:
First, stop digging. Remove all small doors for underrepresented.
Keep standards high and same for all groups, but provide additional help, training and mentoring to underrepresented groups to get more of them to the level of competitiveness. Don't make of them (suspected) fakes and phonies.
The reality will put everything into proper place ("The truth will set you free").
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 11 2017, @09:04PM
There are many activities like clubs and hobbies that are open for anyone. Still there's very little women and minorities in those places. In a video on prepping, a black guy doing just that noticed that there were almost none of the same ethnic group. I think what makes the difference is traits like curiosity, novelty seeking and grit. Note that this are not factors like IQ or creativity.
Another factor is the acceptance from peers to do things different without getting ostracized for that.
Many large corporations in fact will have little tolerance for curiosity, novelty seeking and creativity. So they need to buy smaller firms to keep up with development.