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IBM Sues Microsoft's New Chief Diversity Officer To Protect Diversity Trade Secrets (geekwire.com)
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that IBM has filed suit against longtime exec Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, alleging that her new position as Microsoft's chief diversity officer violates a year-long non-compete agreement, allowing Microsoft to use IBM's internal secrets to boost its own diversity efforts. A hearing is set for Feb. 22, but in the meantime, a U.S. District Judge has temporarily barred McIntyre from working at Microsoft. "IBM has gone to great lengths to safeguard as secret the confidential information that McIntyre possesses," Big Blue explained in a court filing, citing its repeated success (in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017) in getting the U.S. government to quash FOIA requests for IBM's EEO-1 Reports on the grounds that the mandatory race/ethnicity and gender filings represent "confidential proprietary trade secret information." IBM's argument may raise some eyebrows, considering that other tech giants -- including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook -- voluntarily disclosed their EEO-1s years ago after coming under pressure from Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus. In 2010, IBM stopped disclosing U.S. headcount data in its annual report as it accelerated overseas hiring.
There are huge profits to be made from diversity.
Diversity policies can help companies fill positions that they would otherwise struggle to, and retain staff for longer. It can help them develop better products, e.g. the recent story about facial recognition that doesn't work with dark skin.
In IBM's case it looks a lot like they are trying to cover up offshoring and the use of skilled worker visas (H1B in the US). Not really anything to do with diversity, except perhaps that she knows about using this trick to make the numbers look better while also cutting costs and quality.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If they are secretly doing something illegal, for diversity reasons, that would be something they would want to keep secret.
I'm not really sure how a diversity policy helps anything unless you've got a bunch of racists in HR or upper management that are actively refusing to hire minorities and the company is missing out on talented hires because they're discriminating on some basis other than competence. Unless you believe those statistics about women or minorities only making some fractional amount as much as men and assuming they're less expensive to hire which results in this huge profit, I don't see where these huge profits supposedly come from. Perhaps you think consumers care about diversity and will go out of their way to award companies that have diversity policies, but I don't really see that happening either as consumers tend to go for what's cheaper. I suppose if you want to count off-shoring or using H1-B candidates as increasing diversity, then yes it works, but that's just a factor of cost.
Otherwise I'm not sure how someone's skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or any of the other characteristics that typically get lumped in with "diversity" allow a company to develop facial recognition algorithms that work better for darker skin colors. It sounds more like the testing or QA team didn't use a good sample of images when testing the product. Or they did and were aware of it but would rather get the product to market sooner.
Yeah, this should not be about a corporate competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society.
That's admirable sentiment but let's be real. As a general proposition, corporations only care about the betterment of society insofar as it also helps their bottom line. You can make a pretty good argument that a diverse workforce chosen for their capabilities will increase chances for corporate profits AND also better society. But if a corporation's management perceives (true or not) advantage in having a work force that isn't diverse then they are likely to oppose diversity efforts and just pay lip service to diversity for PR purposes. The people in the company might mean well but the pressure for profits tends to drown out even well intended other priorities.
Diversity can be a huge asset. There is plenty of evidence that having people with different backgrounds and ideas results in better outcomes for companies. If everyone looks the same and has the same background there is a strong tendency towards group think and important ideas get overlooked. The bigger the company and the more diverse the customer base the more important this tends to become. I know I've learned a lot from my colleagues who come from different backgrounds and cultures and I'm more effective in my job because they bring me a different perspective that I might not have considered.
I'm not really sure how a diversity policy helps anything unless you've got a bunch of racists in HR or upper management
Then allow me to explain.
Data out today shows that a lot of employers have pretty regressive policies towards women and particularly mothers. That makes it harder for them to hire women and to retain women, which means they have a smaller pool of available talent to draw on.
Another example is lack of understanding about disabilities. A lot of people worry that having a disabled person work for/with them will be costly, that they will need a lot of time off sick, that they will be unproductive or that they might suddenly get worse and go on long term sick leave. A bit of education and understanding goes a long way. Once a disable person is hired a bit of support (which is legally required anyway in many countries) can help retain them.
To help recruit minority candidates a bit of understanding about why questions like "where are you really from?" are inappropriate goes a long way. Again, it's not really overt racism... The technical term is "microagreession" but that seems to trigger people (oops), so it might be better described as "don't ask the same daft questions they always get asked and respond to with no, really, I'm from Birmingham."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
From my experience with companies, "diversity" means getting people of a specific race/nationality who live overseas, either by offshoring to them or getting them via H-1Bs, or at one place I worked at, B-1/B-2 visas, and paying the rather infinitesimal visa fraud fines when it gets found out. (They rotated "tourists on training" every 3-6 months to US offices by the hundreds.)
In a perfect world, it means diversity. Realistically, it is a way to do immigration fraud and get bargain basement workers who will get deported if they make a single mis-step.
Data out today [equalityhumanrights.com] shows that a lot of employers have pretty regressive policies towards women and particularly mothers. That makes it harder for them to hire women and to retain women, which means they have a smaller pool of available talent to draw on.
It's funny because Damore made exactly the same observations about Google's workplace being unfavorable to women and how to improve it to better retain women in his memo, but for whatever reason you seemed to want to rake him over the coals for it. I'm also not sure that the article you cite applies in the U.S. as it's illegal to ask if someone has children or even if they're married. The same holds true for "where are you from" questions as well. I'm rather surprised that the UK apparently doesn't have such laws. Alternatively I would think that they do and that they just need to be enforced.
Also, I remember when microaggressions used to be called pet peeves, with the implication being that they were rather silly things to get upset about. I've had people ask about my ancestry before based on my last name. It's not really difficult to tell someone that "I grew up a few states over, but that my grandparents came over from Poland" or that "I'm from Birmingham, but my father is Iranian" or whatever the case may be. Maybe it's another British thing where people are sensitive about it for some reason, whereas in the U.S. almost everyone is from somewhere else ancestrally.
However, I still don't see this potential for huge profits as people who are being spurned from one company are being hired at another. If everyone were recruiting purely based on talent with no biases at all, then some companies that are doing a better job would actually be worse off since their competition isn't ignoring candidates any more and they can't get as good of a deal. Similarly, companies who ignore that which is profitable for too long tend to be out of business quickly.
I think that you also have to admit that diversity efforts can go too far in the other direction when quotas get imposed which are almost a guarantee that there's a smaller pool of available talent to draw on or that in order to maintain the same level of quality it would be necessary to pay more to only hire the absolute best individuals from some category while hitting some quota.
It sounds dumb, but maybe they've worked out some formula for finding diversity hires or filtering out *good* diversity hires. I'd imagine the latter would be very useful and probably controversial.
My guess is that one challenge with wanting to do diversity hiring is that many diversity hire categories may be broad but shallow talent pools. Not that the categories have dumb people, but general social forces may result in them having weaker educational backgrounds or work histories. Filtering through this to get good candidates when conventional signaling metrics (schools, work history, etc) aren't sufficient would really be a meaningful HR trade secret and probably broadly beneficial for finding high-quality prospects in all backgrounds, as it's not like every MIT grad is a perfect hire and it's not like IBM couldn't cut its compensation load by hiring really talented people not demanding deep six figures because they had high-end degrees.
And no doubt highly controversial -- you can just see the headline "IBM rejects more $diversity_category candidates than it hires" when the reality may be that they are hiring well above the industry rate. It may even open themselves to lawsuits when $diversity_group feels like they were filtered out because of their group membership rather than actually being subjected to a superior hiring methodology that ignores the kinds of traditional qualification signalling. Or the reverse, white/male candidates being upset because their part-time state college degree was a rejection standard but some black woman got hired because they had an algorithm that looked differently at her.
Then there's just generally sensitive information, like IBM has bad discrimination patterns or whatever.
Actually, based on some of my experiences with Quality Managers, the purpose of the Diversity Officer is to find a way to cover up the ways in which you discriminate against certain groups. I have recently discovered that the purpose of a Quality Manager is NOT to ensure the quality of your production. Rather their purpose is to put into place systems and procedures designed to disguise the fact that you don't give a crap about quality. I saw a situation where the Quality Manger did not CARE that the products going out the door were terrible as long as all of the boxes on the proper forms were checked and the right people had signed them. The fact that following those procedures failed to catch the quality defects was irrelevant. It was the Sales and Marketing guys who insisted that people change what they were doing in order to make sure that the stuff going out the door would perform as the customer expected. The Quality Manager fought them on those changes because they would make it harder to pass the Quality Standards audits.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison