“Merit” is defined by what is measured in most hiring it’s just a preference of the hiring body. As with a bunch of places around where I live, young single women, older women, old white guys, young white guys, and everyone else was the preference order…
Aermis@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What about qualified? Is there an argument to be had about hiring someone that is more qualified rather than on diversity?
I’m not trying to be facetious here. I work as a union electrician and we have a diverse group, but majority of our workforce are men. On one project we needed 2 crew to run trench conduit (an apprentice and journey level to stay in ratio) but because it was a government project the hiring required us to also stay in diversity ratio. So the project manager anticipated the difficulty and hire 3. A woman and 2 men. All 3 were working on the trench, but due to the nature of the work (harder physical labor) the woman ended up holding a sign for the remainder of 6 months she had to be there to “fill” the diversity hire, as the original planned 2 man crew ran the trench to stay on schedule.
In this scenario should there be a bigger budget for diversity hire to compensate the additional labor required due to qualifications not being met? Of course it easily could have been a rock of a woman and 2 men who couldn’t lift a shovel too. But if that was the case the unqualified labor would have been rotated out instead of staying to fill a required diversity slot. It could have been 2 people like originally planned and both could have been women who were qualified to do the work. But that means it’s qualification over them filling their diversity roles.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I agree there too. I think anyone thinking that it’s an easy task is lying. Forced top down initiatives suck period. They almost never account for the reality of the work because they aren’t looking at it, but instead abstractions and opinions of people looking at the people looking at the people doing the work.
Personally, what makes more sense is an active monitoring indicators of discrimination and have that trigger a real analysis on why that is the case. What presumption of being a man actually makes them a better fit for the role and maybe just include that (i.e. are they able to put enough force in consistently enough to dig this thing)? The other is, is there an investment to be made to make said task easier so more people could do it?
There is a sect of people that miss what the point of “diversity is our strength” which is that people can be better or worse at things or provide new perspectives. If we don’t allow people to do different things or listen to their perspectives there we aren’t getting more out of it