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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Meta ends its DEI program (internal memo, Ars Technica verification). The company is disbanding its DEI team. It will no longer use "diverse slate hiring" (intentional seeking-out of candidates of particular underrepresented minorities). It is "sunsetting our supplier diversity efforts", which probably means that they will no longer privilege minority/women-owned suppliers.

It is ending the perception that it has representation goals. Yes that's convoluted, but how else does one interpret this statement:

"We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it."

The stated reason for the shift in policy:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics.

That is, they expect to no longer be sued based on "disparate impacts", but possibly sued based on preferential treatments. This... makes sense for a company to do. McDonalds is doing it; Walmart did it more than a month ago.

I expect more companies to follow suit (quietly or loudly). My question is: are there any corporate for-profit true-believers who will stick with the DEI initiatives? Ben and Jerry's, maybe?

Yay it's now a tiny bit easier to be hired at Facebook (if you're white)

Why? The white percentage will stay exactly the same or decline slightly, the black and Hispanic numbers will go down, the Asian numbers will go up. That’s how it works everywhere that “stops” DEI / affirmative action.

It depends. For example, when affirmative action was banned in the UC system, both Asian and white numbers went up at UCB and UCLA, and black and latino numbers down, although I forget if it was acceptances, enrollments, or both.

That was in 1996 though, plus the numbers crept up over time (and the white numbers declined significantly) since then despite the ban remaining in place.

The line graph I have in mind went quite a few years into the 2000s—it showed that Asian and white numbers spiked up after the ban, then decreased slightly each year for a few years (as the admission committee tried to pull different non-explicitly racial levers to decrease the white + Asian rate [and increase the black + latino one]), before plateauing for the years thereafter (there’s only so much blood you can squeeze from a stone). During the plateau period both the Asian and white numbers were still noticeably higher than pre-ban.

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