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What Intel's $300 Million Diversity Pledge Really Means
itwbennett writes Intel's Rosalind Hudnell is responsible for implementing the company's much-publicized $300 million initiative to bring more women and under-represented minorities into its workforce by 2020. But even with Intel's renewed commitment to diversity, the company's workforce will still be just about 32 percent women in five years, Hudnell estimated. Here's a rough breakdown of how the money will be spent: The funds will be applied over five years to change hiring practices, retool human resources, fund companies run by minorities and women, and promote STEM education in high schools.
You are being a sexist misogynist supporting the shit-lord cis-gendered patriarchy. Meritocracy is a sexist tool of the patriarch. Think I'm shitting you? Read feminists in their own words. If people understood that feminists DO NOT WANT EQUALITY (ie, people to be judged on merit), maybe they would finally understand why so many in gaming have had a problem with them pushing their way in and changing things and why Atheism had such a problem with them (see Atheism Plus) and why much of the scientific community has become fed up with them pushing their bullshit there.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Meritocracy
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However, meritocracies tend to promote those who not only have the skills/experience, but are also outspoken enough to let everyone know about it. This pushiness/ego/self-aggrandisement is something that women are generally discouraged from doing.
A number of geek women have blogged about problems with the concept of meritocracy:
FLOSSPOLS, sexism, and why meritocracy really isn't (Nerdchic)
Questioning the merit of meritocracy (Geek Feminism blog)
Geeks, meritocracy, and gender (Scientist Carrie)
Where meritocracy fails (Selena Deckelmann)
you keep using that word (Garann Means)
The journal article "The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations" empirically confirms the hypothesis that an organizational culture which promotes meritocracy results in greater inequality.
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[If you remove identifying information from resumes before they get to hiring managers, diversity goes *up*]
What load of bull. Where do you come by this? Anyone hiring blindly solely based on resumes without interviewing and practical tests has no clue especially in the tech industry as resumes often means as much as politician's promises so your claim seems dubious at best but probably willingly skewed to promote your agenda.
Maybe Dr Manning's Youtube videos are right after all.
Not just that, but as Neil de Grasse Tyson said about being black and in STEM, who was left behind? Who was told, "No don't focus on STEM, go play sports go do something else, you're black, STEM's not for you." So all of the money being invested in education is also going to mean is to try to stop the meme that, "you're a girl you shouldn't get into STEM. Go into arts or history or become a homemaker."
I work in STEM and I'm going to call bullshit here. Nobody I know would ever say something like that - be it about ethnicity, gender or any other characteristic unrelated to ability. Maybe someone is saying that to black kids or women, but they sure as hell aren't from within the STEM sector - most likely the problem exists within the minority communities themselves. I am utterly convinced that the biggest putter off for women coming into STEM, for instance, is all these feminists from outside STEM who go around pronouncing STEM to be an utterly horrible and oppressive environment for women. I saw a (male) "feminist" the other day criticising people for referring to someone as a "lady professor" yet "feminists" are precisely the people who will make a big deal out of someone's gender. The "less feminist" people I know couldn't care whether you have a penis, vagina or anything else so long as you're good at what you do. But no, feminists have to go around scaring people off by claiming that men in un-PC shirts will eat them alive if they go into STEM.
/rant over
Who is doing this "guidance counceling" anyway? Is guidance counceling dominated by white males (not in my experience)? Or are the people so concerned about diversity the ones doing the discouraging--to create a self-fulfilling prophesy which can only be solved by... Guess?
No one should be telling kids what they should do or be interested in anyway. And if the kids are so weak of self respect and awareness that they need someone to tell them what to do, this is a profound endictment of the entire public school system. It simply needs to be abolished.
Guidance councelors should only be providing kids with the honest truth about what needs to be done to accomplish what the kids say they want to do. The only exception might be to show an objective comparison of effort vs. probability of payoff for special cases of very hard to enter fields, such as movie star or NFL player. But even still, if someone wants to be an NFL player and falls short, maybe they can leverage their extensive training experience into a career in physical education, research, etc.
Failures rarely have to be total.
Yes, it could be, in fact. Few companies are on such an existential knife-edge that they can't afford to make a few godawful decisions. If you don't believe that, I have a couple of teambuilding activities and motivational speakers to sell you.
As it happens, I think that companies do rush to hire competent women, and even less competent women due to quite rational reasons (a company's productivity is not simply the sum of its employees skills). It's a supply problem, and it starts long before high school. But whether I am right or wrong about that, an argument that a business sector can't possibly collectively and systematically make poor decisions, is a weak argument.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I agree, and I totally support blinding of resumes, and as much blinding as possible in general. But there's one thing you overlook, which leaves your argument vulnerable:
It's possible that hiring the best and the brightest is not the wisest move. It's possible that it's a good idea to hire those who are similar to us. I don't think so, but it's possible, we don't know.
To take a concrete example, take the study that showed lab assistants were rated more poorly with a female name on the resume. That's solid proof of gender prejudice. But playing the devil's advocate here, we don't know that it's unjustified prejudice. Perhaps the people evaluating the resumes have had tons of lab assistants of both genders, and found a clear tendency that the women performed worse than their resumes suggested, and the men performed better.
Thing is, even if that were true, I'd advocate for blinding. It's not for efficiency's sake that we should end discrimination, but for justice's sake: You didn't choose to be born a woman, you deserve to be judged on individual merits. Even if women on average were awful at this job, that information should be off-limits to use in hiring decisions, because using it would be a great injustice to those who are not awful.
This is of course even more salient in the case of race and ethnicity. Because while it is highly implausible that women should be worse lab assistants, we do have crime statistics, and if people were allowed to discriminate based on those, it's quite possible that a shop owner could "reasonably" deny Roma entrance to his shop, for instance. It will probably reduce shoplifting! But it's also a horrible injustice to those Roma who do not shoplift. It doesn't matter if that is 90%, or 10%. It doesn't matter if there's just one honest Roma in the whole country. No individual should answer for the statistical proclivities of a category he didn't choose to be in and can't even escape.
But this also shows why blinding yourself to information about race and gender can't just be a "best practice". That asshole shop owner who denies Roma entrance to his shop, he's doing a great injustice, but he might well a comparative advantage over more fair shop owners. Being just can be costly, and because of that, it's important that we demand sharing that burden fairly. We can hope that when we do, we find that it isn't so costly after all, maybe it's even a net benefit. But we must never base our demand for justice on such hopes. Justice first, then profit.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
But what if women do want to go into STEM by choice but are put off by the wizards and dragons in their way?
On the other hand, you and the other SJWs vaguely refer to these "gender based barriers placed in their way", and then proceed to "address" them without ever identifying them. What are these barriers? Are they actually real?
The most important part of addressing a problem is identifying the problem. You can't just wave your hands and pretend that the problem is whatever happens to fit your preferred solution the best.