Dismantling DEI is a Step Backwards for Diversity and Progress

Kamala Harris’s performance at last week’s debate proved she belongs in our 2024 election. But I doubt it will quiet the “DEI hire” epithet spewing on social media or reverse the crescendo of recent lawsuits that has led many companies to dissolve their DEI efforts.

Getting rid of DEI in favor of “merit-only” practices is a mistake.

We’ve never had a meritocracy. Even if we did, it’s impossible to define what “merit” is for most decisions.

U.S. history is rife with white men handed opportunities not available to women and people of color. Those of a certain age remember newspaper want ads divided into “Male” and “Female” categories. Many industries refused to hire anyone but white men, even over equally or better qualified women and minorities.

Women were excluded as airline pilots and military aviators until 1973; it wasn’t until 1993 that women could fly combat aircraft. As one of these women, I had a front row seat to this progress.

These non-merit personnel practices created exclusionary cultures at many organizations that persist today: fewer than 5% of U.S. airline pilots are women. The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute says culture is the biggest barrier to entry into science and engineering career fields for women and minorities, who are interviewed and hired at lower rates, and when hired, are often not welcomed by peers and receive less mentoring and guidance from superiors.

The concept of DEI was created to help underrepresented groups overcome cultural barriers. But the opposition believes this is unfair, that everything should be based on “merit alone.”

“Merit-only” sounds good in theory, but in practice selection decisions can’t be reduced  to a spreadsheet. As an Air Force officer and senior civilian who sat on dozens of selection and promotion panels, spreadsheets were useful for scoring resumes to reduce the number of candidates interviewed. But things were more subjective after that. We often used interview panels with a “whole person” concept to determine our “best qualified” candidate. I saw many candidates with the highest scoring resume go down in flames during interviews while a “lesser” candidate wowed us with fresh ideas.

It’s like the Super Bowl.

The team with the best record in football doesn’t always win the Lombardi Trophy. Instead, the NFL playoff system recognizes that a team with a lower record might have had a tougher regular season, lost a key player, or just had bad luck. Sound like life itself?

The playoffs level the field, giving all teams above a minimum qualification a chance to compete for the championship.

DEI does the same. As an example, I was on a civilian hiring panel where a candidate was a young minority woman. Her resume had scored toward the low end because she lacked experience in one area. But she was good enough to “make it into the playoffs.”

She had by far the best interview. During selection deliberations we realized her lack of experience in the one area would bring a fresh perspective to our organization. We didn’t discuss preferences, skin color, gender or anything else.

She became one of our superstars. I hate to think someone might accuse her of being a “DEI hire” because a spreadsheet score ranked her a bit lower than the competition. Like the team that stumbles into the playoffs, we simply gave her a chance to compete. She proved she was the best person for the job.

Best practices exist to help level the field. These include simple things such as casting a wide net for applicants, interview panels that include at least one member from outside an organization and asking all candidates the same questions. Many corporations now have standardized hiring practices that reduce discrimination.

But the anti-DEI crowd thinks leveling the playing field, just as many sports do for playoff entry, is somehow discriminatory. They would have us keep exclusionary cultures in play, even though studies have found that companies with exclusionary cultures don’t make the best decisions and are less profitable than more diverse organizations.

It’s time to level the playing field.

The now radioactive term DEI may need to die. But for the United States to be competitive, the concept needs to live on.

Eileen Bjorkman and Beverly Weintraub will be giving a presentation on “The Path to Equality for Women Military Aviators” at the Udvar Hazy Center in Fairfax, Virginia, on September 19. Click here for more information.

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The post It’s Never Been a Meritocracy: Like Sports, Let’s Level the Playing Field appeared first on DCReport.org.

In the wake of another would be assassination attempt of Donald Trump we get this nagging question. Obviously, there are any number of rabbit holes we could go down here. A quick moment in both right wing and left wing echo chambers will show us all of these rabbit holes. I saw one on the right that saw this as some sort of Black Rock deep state kind of thing. The ones on the left question whether this was manufactured to distract from the fact that he got his butt kicked on national television. For the moment I am going to dismiss both of those. It’s not that I necessarily think neither is possible, but I think the simplest of explanations is more probable.

I also think that jumping to conspiracy theories becomes a nasty habit. We normally decry this thing on the right, so we want to make sure we are not simply doing the same thing on the left. The most plausible explanation is that these were two deranged souls that had their own motivations for doing this. Again, this is where each silo manages to put their own spin on it. Shooter number one wore a Trump hat in school, but had also donated to Democratic causes. The second voted for Trump in 2016, Vivek Ramaswamy in the last primary. However, he also supposedly donated to Democratic causes. Everyone is an enigma if we go back far enough and pull all of the evidence. So, again I’m not making any definitive statements here.

We can’t even say that they were activated by hateful rhetoric on either side. What we can definitively say is that one side uses hateful rhetoric far more often than the other. It is not even close. For J.D. Vance to call for cooler heads to prevail less than 48 hours after admitting that he made up a story about migrants eating pets is outrageous even for him. He put thousands of lives in peril as right wing violent actors went to work essentially destroying a quiet community that may have had its issues (who doesn’t) but was seemingly getting along just fine without his “help.” Essentially, the Vance argument is that we should not call a fascist a fascist and we should not repeat or quote the things he has actually said because it will make him look bad and might cause some people to target him. Got it.

The truth is fairly simple and most sane Americans know it. This is a case where the arsonist is blaming the victims for the fire he has started. Anyone that wants to look at the numbers are free to look them up for themselves. Don’t simply take their word for it. Who is responsible for most of the violent rhetoric and actual political violence? I an already tell you because I’ve done the research. What I also know is that the cult either doesn’t hear the rhetoric or remember it as violent. When I’ve talked to friends and family that are MAGA they will pretend that dear leader has never said the things he has said.

This isn’t hard to understand. We have seen it happen to numerous demagogues throughout history. Was George Wallace an innocent victim or was a hateful bigot that suddenly became a victim of his own vitriol? I know many of you know for sure. While we can’t convince MAGA of these inconvenient facts, we can rest assured that we are on the right track. They want us to stop saying things they know to be true. They want us to be afraid to say the things that are actually making a dent. We can’t convince MAGA but we can ignore them.

A class of a practical sequel (or, if you prefer, sequela) to my previous post on this topic. The great modern advocate of applied (as opposed to theoretical) Straussianism, is Tyler Cowen. Plausibly, Straussianism provides a skeleton key to his recent posting, and a solution to a great mystery. Why is it that a scholar who has spoken eloquently of his commitment to the liberties apparently discovering that he has so much in common with those who oppose them? The answer – of course! – is that he is writing in the Straussian mode, saying just the opposite of what he believes, but in so outrageously exaggerated a manner that the cognoscenti will surely detect the true message.

Thus, when Tyler complains vociferously about J.D. Vance couch/sofa joke culture, and how “most intellectual commentators seem to be embracing it or at least tolerating it,” he is secretly offering an apologia for his own embrace/toleration of Elon Musk, and the ludicrous conspiracy theories and vile slanders about Black people and immigrants that Musk spews daily. The very title of the post – “I’m Tired of This” – gives the true game away. When Tyler responds to J.D. Vance’s and Donald Trump’s lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats with a rambling post about Haitian food, and a coda about Chris Rufo’s bounty program for videos, the sheer ridiculousness of the post is the giveaway. It’s the intellectual equivalent of someone in a hostage video pulling weird faces as they read out their assigned script. And when he denounces “Scholars in support of the Moraes Brazil decision against X” as advocates of censorship, he is tacitly communicating his unhappiness with how Twitter/X is spreading anti-democratic lies, and indeed his ferocious opposition to the entire Rufo censorship agenda of firing faculty with the wrong political views.

I suspect that some shorter post or another in his voluminous output is an anagram for something like “Help! I am being kept captive by a clique of anti-democratic Silicon Valley billionaires,” but I don’t have the deciphering skillz to be sure of it. Has anyone checked in on the situation in George Mason University econ department recently? I’m getting quite worried.

Oh, to be a celebrity in 2024. So many decisions to make. And with a public that demands that you like who they like, and vote for who you vote for, those decisions must be enormously difficult for some.

And a no-brainer for others.

Brittany and Taylor: BFFs

Witness poor Brittany Mahomes. OK, she’s not a major celebrity in her own right, but she’s married to one: Patrick Mahomes, her husband, throws footballs for the Kansas City Chiefs. That she is a supporter of Von Shitzenpantz came as a small surprise to a few, those who cared, anyway. Mainly because she is besties with Taylor Swift, whose bf also plays for the Chiefs.

Taylor, as you know, announced her support for Harris as soon as they shut off the mics at last week’s presidential debate.

All of that would have been copasetic had not the Orange Julius would-be Caesar posted on his social media website “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”

Now what is Brittany Mahomes going to do? Her preferred presidential candidate HATES her BFF! The Daily Mail reports that she has decided to be less obvious in supporting TFG. No more “liking” TFG’s social media posts, for instance. Well played, Brittany.

Nicky Jam. Not a chick.

But then what about Nicky Jam? That poor guy. Nicky Jam is a rap vocalist who supports Don the Con, and was at his recent rally in Las Vegas when he was called out by The Man himself: “Do you know Nicky? She’s hot.”

Many believe TFG thought he was calling up Nicki Minaj, who IS hot. But alas, Nicky Jam is a dude, and TFG misgendered Mr. Jam as a result.

And because of that, Nicky Jam spent the weekend quietly deleting his post of support for The Former Guy, and just to make sure, closed the comments on his preceeding post. though it was not even about The Don.

And don’t even ask about the uproar with the pro-Harris Mexican rock band Maná, with whom Mr. Jam has been collaborating. I have no words!

These are the real issues we have to deal with here in 2024. How will we ever survive?

After 9 years of incendiary rhetoric, inciting actual violence, and personally threatening dozens of perceived enemies, TFG has certainly demonstrated that he can dish it out, but sure can’t take it.  He has spent years vilifiying everyone from Haitian immigrants to Dems to Taylor Swift, but when someone starts shooting at him, he’s shocked and appalled when the tables are turned.

Let’s be clear – violence is NEVER appropriate in any instance, political or otherwise.  But this monster of escalating violence has been wholy created by TFG and his sycophants repeating his vicious lies about everything from “the deep state”, to immigrants, and to anyone who happens to disagree with him.  He’s even inciting violence against schoolkids in Springfield, Ohio, FFS.  His social media accounts drip with hate, authoritarian declarations, threats, and lies against millions of people and entire classes of society, fabricated from whole cloth.  He even incited thousands of knuckleheads to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

I find it pretty rich that TFG and Vance are now denouncing the very violence they’ve been inciting, but only because that violence has been turned on him.  If they want a reduction in violence they need to start that at home and turn down the heat, but I’m not expecting any of that.  A little self-awareness would be useful right now.

Welcome to “What Trump Means For,” a multi-part series I’ll be publishing over the next several weeks as the 2024 election creeps closer. I’ll break down what Donald Trump and his current and probable future teams have said about how they will govern and exactly what they will do while in office. If Trump wins, he may not accomplish everything he pledges to do. But he will no doubt do a lot — and it’s worth taking seriously what he says and plans.

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When it comes to rights for LGBT people, Donald Trump has been pretty quiet, at least far as the LGB as it concerned. On trans rights, he and members of his team have been much more aggressive (and much more demeaning). A key thing to understand about conservatives and LGBT rights is that much of the hostility to gay and lesbian rights stems from the same kind of traditional-values misogyny that animates their opposition to abortion: They believe that there is only one acceptable way not just of forming a family, but of being a person in the world, and what’s acceptable is fundamentally determined by one’s sex. Their whole vision of an ideal nuclear family is one that fundamentally hinges on hierarchy, with a man in charge and a woman as his helpmeet, with reproduction as her primary obligation. This model extends beyond the home front — it’s also why you see men dominating conservative politics and conservative religious institutions and conservative organizations. The idea that men are natural leaders seems to seep into every area of conservative life.

LGBT people, by their very existence, challenge this idea that men and women are made by God as fundamentally unequal but naturally complementary.

Here are few of the things Trump and his likely future team have suggested they will do:

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• Prosecute librarians, educators, and other adults who recognize the existence of trans people and make them register as sex offenders. I wish this were a joke, but here is exactly what Project 2025 says about librarians who include on their shelves literature that recognizes that trans and gender-nonconforming people exist: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” It’s hard to overstate how terrifying this proposal is: Whatever some right-wing bigoted prude decides is “pornographic” — a list that in recent years has included Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and kidnapping survivor Jaycee Dugard’s memoir A Stolen Life — could become criminal to stock on library shelves. And books about gender identity are among the most controversial.

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