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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.

Most managers I've asked told me they face no pressure to hire for diversity.

There's enough examples now of a) hiring managers being explicitly told not to hire white men, and b) hiring managers' bonuses relying on meeting diversity hiring requirements that I have a very hard time believing this.

Is the pressure bimodal: extreme in some extremely converged companies and totally absent in others? Or are people just reluctant to admit they're under pressure?

I haven't spoken to many senior managers, mostly mid-level managers. My impression is that senior elites and execs in companies pay more attention to diversity so it would make sense for the public service to match that as well.

I'm very interested in cases where managers in the canadian public service had bonuses tied to diversity requirements. Do you have any examples you can link to?

Ahh yes, performance agreements. My experience with these is that people don't commit to targets they can't already meet. After all, these objectives are mostly self-imposed, and the exercise is more of a formality. That said, I'm sure it's sometimes the case some execs have to work hard to meet their diversity targets. Thanks for sharing.

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