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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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The government instituted a 'volume management strategy' to comply with the government's policy on 'employment equity', and that strategy was to just ignore people with the wrong skin colour or genitals because the government says they (the government) can't do anything else and you see no mention of quotas or hiring equity?

I work in the public service and agree that equity was probably not the (main) motivation for the strategy they picked. Most of what you hear about equity is signalling buzz. Most managers I've asked told me they face no pressure to hire for diversity. Seems like this team just found a hack (which I doubt is common) to shorten their screening process. Mostly likely they don't care who will be hired anyway. People here seem doubtful, but the public service and hiring processes are so heavily decentralized. It's totally plausible for a team to do this without being motivated by equity.

Of course, there is obvious bias because they could never get away doing the opposite strategy (e.g, filtering out equity groups). That said, there are policies which increase the proportion of white workers, like requiring citizenship and the ability to speak french.

That said, there are policies which increase the proportion of white workers, like requiring citizenship and the ability to speak french.

Neither of these things are in any way comparable - the former seems like an obvious prerequisite for a public service job, and the latter actively impacts on the quality of your employee in a country where a significant proportion of the population speaks French as a first language (approx 20% in Canada). The fact that they happen to select for white workers because whites are more likely to possess these desired characteristics is just an unintended consequence of having these policies.

Just because a policy happens to result in an increase in the proportion of a certain demographic does not mean it is analogous to explicitly demographically based policies.

The point is, there are other policies which will impact demographics. I don't want to change the subject too much, but I actually think the french level requirements in the canadian public service lead to worse outcomes than white-male exclusion, even if it were scaled up 100x. It's currently impossible to manage employees or be in a sufficiently senior role unless you speak french, even when the vast majority of francophones opt to read,write and speak in english when working. When my team is hiring, I'd rather work with a "non white male" constraint than a "must speak french" constraint. The french requirements are often unnecessary and make it very difficult to hire talent. As a french speaker, I've leapfrogged colleagues of similar productivity because they were anglophones who couldn't even be considered for a number of promotions.

Still, though, I agree that on the surface one policy sounds a lot better than the other and that they're not analogous with respect to why they impact demographics.

I would say it’s more than just “on the surface”. One policy is based on immutable characteristics, the other is based on the possession of a skill which they would like employees to have. “Any policy that affects racial composition is tantamount to racism” is an extremely tenuous position at best.

You claim that a “non white male” constraint isn’t as bad to you as a “must speak French” constraint, but in spite of your explanation it’s hard to see why this is so. You can make the argument that the French requirement is extreme and should be relaxed since it isn’t integral to job performance, but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment. White men can’t simply assume a different demographic if they want to, and their exclusion isn’t for lacking a certain skill but instead for ideological/diversity reasons. It’s easy to see which condition is far more restrictive and far more difficult to justify.

I didn't say the french policy was racist, just that it led to worse outcomes. I probably won't convince you. You're not a canadian public servant and don't see what it's like. I'm not defending the no-white-male policy or anything. Apologies for the what-about-ism, I made an off-topic comment and now I'm just elaborating.

but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment

Here's a situation I've seen a ton: An employee wants to become a manager, so they go on paid french training, putting their job on pause for weeks or months. When they come back, they inevitably don't use their french because francophones don't care and don't want to slow down important conversations by speaking to a french novice. Once their newly acquired french abilities atrophy, the training cycle repeats. I've seen this happen to a ton of really talented people with passion for their domain.

Also, learning french as an adult is pretty difficult, especially when the public service is not at all immersive. Even francophones usually prefer english because they'd prefer not to learn twice the terminology, check weird grammar rules or slow down communication.

This argument does not seem well considered at all

I see where you're coming from. However the outcomes I've experienced suggest the french-requirements are a worse policy.

That’s interesting. In Texas(which has a similar percentage of Spanish first language speakers to Canada’s French first language speakers), Spanish speakers are generally willing to put up with novices by slowing their conversations down.

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