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Last week, my company released its 3rd annual DEI report. It consists of a laundry list of DEI achievements, some questionable statistics, and inspiring messages from very well-paid executives.
Performance reviews are another feature of this time of year. Conventional wisdom holds that getting a good review depends on meeting your pseudo-self-defined goals for the year—and, by implication, on setting achievable ones. With that in mind, our executives set measurable, sensible goals with every expectation of meeting them.
That was a joke. The goals were 1/2 women and 1/3 people of color. We were reasonably close on the latter, not that this required any particular change. But our goal for gender parity was hilariously out of line with the ~1/4 we currently have. I could propose various reasons why an engineering- and manufacturing-heavy corporation that makes devices for killing people might not employ so many women, but that’s not really the point. No, this is not a serious goal. It’s advertising.
My company is not particularly woke. It repeats some of the phrases and buys into the aesthetic, but it’s clearly not ideologically captured. If there are true believers, they sure aren’t in charge. DEI is valued insofar as it keeps us from alienating potential talent and potential customers—and no more. At the end of the day it’s not going to shoot itself in the foot in service of equality or equity.
I believe this is true of the vast majority of corporations in the US! Identity politics are a small part of the business signaling that goes on every day. It’s directly proportional to how much the product is a cultural symbol rather than a material good. Apple products or Amazon media or Super Bowl ads are more likely to publicly proclaim their diversity because they’re selling an idea. It does not require true believers, though they help with credibility. The idea itself is what benefits from woke signaling.
This has implications for the trajectory of DEI. Debating whether woke ads are going to increase or alienate support is missing the point. That sort of identity politics is downstream of the culture war, and should not be used to make predictions about “peak woke.” It represents corporate ability to score points off the prevailing winds, not ideologues’ level of infiltration into corporations.
Defense contractors are wildly biased towards veterans. Our hiring is more likely to involve some sort of aggressive patriotism; their scruples are more likely to support selling drones and bombs. Sometimes this even has an advantage of rapport with customers. But this is an end, not a means. It would be a mistake to predict growing evangelism for veterans due to our obvious ideological capture. Likewise, reading DEI reports as a foothold in the culture wars is missing the point. They are a specific form of advertising, and follow the popularity of idpol rather than driving it.
In a prior post talking about discrimination against conservatives in online dating we discussed almost this exact question as far as the value of signaling political beliefs in an asymmetric way.
In the same way, it doesn't require that a company is "woke" or even that they want to signal "wokeness" to choose to advertise in that way. The company's officers merely must "know" that woke is the objectively correct answer in terms of how to advertise/signal. That's the way that the fashionable folks signal, so if you signal that way you are signaling that you know what you're doing and that you are aware of the social mores in question. Doing otherwise indicates that you are either ignorant of those social mores, or so incapable of hiding your politics that it would be pointless to try. Neither are good looks, in dating or in corporate marketing. The socially accepted provision of a "correct" answer makes using the incorrect answer a sign of stupidity or extremism.
But isn’t the goal in dating to find a partner; not appeal to the modal partner?
So differentiating yourself even if it turns off the modal user may maximize chance of matching with relevant partner. Could be the same in business.
IMO with Online Dating the amount of stuff that'll be an instant killer when you're one profile of 100's and not to be too big a deal when you've got some actual traction/met in person is huge. Down to the gender dynamic and the lack of communicative nuance, really.
I’ve never done any online dating (met my wife in college). But just seems like there could be different strategies between maximizing dates and maximizing potential mates.
As someone who has dated online, I think this is a bit naive.
I went on about 20 first dates but only a handful of second dates and met only one potential long term partner (my fiance). Online connection != real life connection so it's necessary to cast a wide net.
I was lucky and was able to get lots of dates. Many men are not. Removing themselves from consideration at the first stage of a long funnel would be an unwise dating strategy.
Essentially my point. A lot of stuff that a girl might nix you for on paper will be fine with some in-person chemistry and vice-versa.
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For the average heterosexual man, it's probably best to lean hard into a particular niche; a perfectly reasonable, inoffensive profile of an average man who would be fine in the real world has nothing to offer women over the dozens of similar profiles of very attractive men. There has to be something to make a woman choose your profile. The default is not being in consideration at the first stage of the long funnel, and you've got to place yourself in consideration.
Attractive men are probably best off being generic, getting a suitably wide funnel, and filtering out based on in-person compatibility. Prefiltering by leaning hard into a niche doesn't improve the quality of the matches nearly enough to counteract the lost opportunities and the battered Elo score (so you won't even be presented to compatible matches who would like your non-generic profile).
Ugly men are pretty much SOL on online dating, no matter their strategy, and should mostly focus on real life and becoming more attractive.
Sure, but it has to be a niche that exists. There is no unserved market of single, conservative women who are looking for a conservative man to hook up with. 61% of women identify as Feminists {higher among the young women mottizens are actually looking at} while 53% belong to a church. Obviously these are non-exclusive, some religious women describe themselves as Feminists; and for that matter some religious women are interested in hookups and some Feminists are conservative. But for the most part, marketing yourself as conservative on a dating app is marketing yourself to women who are neither religious nor Feminists, which is a vanishingly small portion of the dating market. In my lifetime, I can count the number of women like that I've known on my hands. For the most part Feminists will not be interested in a man whose niche is being obnoxiously conservative, while religious women will not be interested in hookup apps and will marry young to someone they meet in real life. Actively excluding the majority of young women from your dating pool, in exchange for nothing, won't help you. Picking an evolutionary niche is great, picking one that doesn't exist in your environment is a path to extinction.
To bring it back to corporate, referencing my own prior comment:
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Corporations get very little benefit from going hard right, among the competitive classes of employees that companies need to attract. This is worsened by Rightists being, broadly, Capitalists by belief, and family men by inclination. Rightists are going to prioritize making money, both personally and for their families, and not making a political point in their choice of job. Making signaling Left the "correct" choice.
Also frankly from hanging out with such circles, young female conservatives are in a pretty insanely good spot to meet people 'organically' but also tend to be sensible to date up in both age and resources.
Anecdotally I'd say there's a very limited market for young male conservatives who aren't plugged into families with means. Conservatism trends very masculine to begin with, and the rare young females who trend that way can suddenly have their pick of the litter with both males of the same age and males who are older.
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