What if Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Making Us More Biased?
We were already pretty biased to begin with
Let’s start by recognizing how ridiculously biased all of us are. It’s our stupid brains’ fault; we all make inferences and assumptions based on what we think we know. If I’m being honest, when I see a big, muscly dude, I don’t think “heart surgeon”. When I play pickup soccer, I listen for who’s not speaking English and then try to get on that team. This isn’t good or fair, but our brains are wired to tie Thing A to Thing B. This happened when I was a kid: I viscerally hated Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years and didn’t know why, until I realized that Kevin Arnold’s adult voice is one of the burglars from Home Alone.
One point on which Ibram X. Kendi and I agree is that bias is all around us. None of us are completely aware of our biases, and can’t be even if we try. Of course, I think Kendi’s view of how bias works is simplistic, and I have gigantic problems with his method for measuring it, but we agree that it’s always there, a low (or sometimes not-low) static distorting everything. You can’t eliminate it; you can only work to recognize it within yourself and try to course-correct.
Over the years, I’ve come to think that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — or “affirmative action”, to use a slightly-passé phrase — are a disastrous policy. I’m not against them in every case, I think there are a limited set of circumstances in which lightly-applied policies make sense, but I think that most of the time, they’re divisive and unfair. I also know that they’re extremely unpopular — they poll worse than “defund the police” and get hammered at the ballot box even in diverse, deep-blue states — and I think that important parts of the Democratic agenda like social spending and election reform are being sacrificed to policies that a majority of Americans of all races don’t want.
These policies might also be making us more biased. They’re adding a new source of bias that we probably all recognize, even if we’re too polite to talk about it. At the same time, most DEI initiatives displace policies that would reduce bias. It’s a disaster; I think we’re responding to a thing with actions that intensify that thing, much like how conservative parents in the ‘90s would try to “cure” their gay teenager by sending them to a camp full of other gay teenagers. That is…the opposite of what will work.
This week, author Jessica Nordell had an op-ed in the New York Times about bias, specifically sexism. To make a long article short: She thinks sexism is bad, and she thinks its effects compound themselves over time. And I completely agree.
Nordell talks about bias in the traditional framework, i.e. men being sexist against women and white people being racist against nonwhite people. It’s easy for me to picture those environments; I’ve been in them before. But, as Nordell presents evidence for bias in different contexts — in academia, in medicine — it’s impossible for me to not draw on my own experiences to identify one probable cause of that bias. One cause, in my experience, is programs that give some people a leg up over others.
Let’s start with a fun example: I went to college with Ivanka Trump. This is true; we were at Georgetown at the same time, and she was in my biblical literature class. We didn’t hang out much; you see, the thing is, in college, I was very cool. Maybe my Model UN friends and I were cliquish, but we never invited Ivanka to watch Battlebots with us or join one of our all-night Settlers of Catan tournaments. Honestly, I don’t think Ivanka was quite ready to run with the fast crowd.
What was my perception of Ivanka? My perception was that she was not very bright. Hard to believe, I know. Now, I don’t think I felt that way because of person-to-person interactions between Ivanka and myself, of which there approximately negative zero. I think I felt that way because I figured she got into Georgetown because her dad is rich. Most people at Georgetown, especially the non-athletes (and “non-athletes” is a great description of my social circle) had to get good grades and test scores. But, obviously, if your parents are rich and powerful, you can waltz into a top university even if you’re a five-star dullard. And if Ivanka isn’t history’s best example of that reality, then her husband surely is.
Was my snap assessment of Ivanka fair? On one hand: no. Maybe she could have gotten into Georgetown without special favors, and remember: I was judging her before she wished happy birthday to an eight-month old, so it was easier back then to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I would also argue that I would have to have been incredibly dense to not consider the possibility that she was subjected to a lower admission standard. Admission benefits for the rich and powerful are a real thing, and that’s true even if your dad is not yet as powerful as he will be and is maybe lying about being rich.
Now let’s get me into big trouble: When I worked for the EPA, I had similar misgivings about veterans. And with that, I’m going to put the “subscribe” button here six times in a desperate attempt to generate revenue, because I will obviously never be hired by any respectable organization ever again:
But how could I not be somewhat skeptical of veterans? Hiring for federal jobs is done according to a points system, and you get a TON of points for being ex-military. A TON: If you were convicted of triple homicide and served in the military, you’d still have a leg-up over someone who had done neither. Of course, I worked with many veterans at EPA who were fantastic people who were excellent at their jobs. And I worked with a few who were freak show-level morons whom I didn’t consider qualified to scare away birds at the airport. It’s definitely not fair to lump the first group in with the second, though, honestly, the second group looms large in the psyche.
Now that I’m lying in a 50-foot deep grave I’ve dug for myself, let’s start shoveling in some dirt: I have also, sometimes, wondered if some of the women and people of color I’ve met in comedy were hired entirely on merit. It’s the exact same situation as with Ivanka and the veterans: There’s a major push to hire more women and people of color in comedy, which often entails a different set of standards. That’s especially true in late night — there’s even a tax credit in New York for hiring women and people of color. And it was signed by that famous champion of women’s rights, Andrew Cuomo.
Am I an asshole for wondering if some of my colleagues and coeds were held to a lower standard? You’re free to think that I am. But I would argue that I was put in situations in which I couldn’t help but have those thoughts.
I aspire to not be an asshole (it’s not looking good, but I’ll keep trying). When I’m in one of these situations, I think: “It’s not fair to prejudge anybody. Put aside what you know about the hiring process and do your best to view this person through unbiased eyes.” And I’ll sometimes tack on this truism: “Most hiring processes are pointless garbage implemented by idiots anyway, so all of us are here by virtue of a system so random that they probably would have done at least as well by letting Paul the Psychic Octopus pick new hires. Even though Paul has been dead for ten years.”
I know I’m not the only person who has these feelings. A recent study by two University of Pennsylvania professors found race and gender bias in some situations, especially STEM jobs (and the study is written up here by a guy named Roy Maurer, who is not, as far as I know, related to me, and the fact that he’s gainfully employed means that he’s probably not). Many studies have found similar results. But the hypothesized explanations for some of the findings were interesting. From the report:
Female and minority candidates received less credit for prestigious internships in all fields. "It was quite a big effect," Low said. "Women and minorities only got about half the boost that a white man would have. One possible mechanism for this effect is that employers believe that other employers exhibit positive preferences for diversity, and so having a prestigious internship is a less strong signal of quality if one is from an underrepresented group."
Employers generally rated female and minority candidates lower in "get-ability," meaning they believed those candidates were less likely to accept a job offer. "Perhaps due to the prevalence of diversity initiatives, employers expect that desirable minority and female candidates will receive many offers from competing firms and thus will be less likely to accept any given offer," Low said.
Diversity initiatives might be causing their supposed beneficiaries to be seen as less gettable and lower in quality.
This is, on some level, something I suspect we all know. Let me draw again from personal experience: In my experience, nobody hates DEI initiatives more than people who fall into a DEI category but would have met the standard even if they hadn’t. I have heard many complaints from such people, including my wife, who used to be in academia. Nobody wants to be a token, and nobody wants to be disrespected.
And, obviously, the fault lies with anyone doing the disrespecting. We all need to try to avoid pre-judgement. But on a base level, those feelings are inevitable, because they’re rational. There is not a universe in which I could have met Ivanka Trump and not thought “you’re probably just here because of your dad.”
So, how do we avoid this situation that basically sucks for everybody? The answer is obvious: Make evaluation systems as objective as possible. And, to her credit, Nordell advocates for that in her article:
What works? Having managers directly mentor and sponsor women improves their chance to rise. Insisting on fair, transparent and objective criteria for promotions and assignments is essential, so that decisions are not ambiguous and subjective, and goal posts aren’t shifting and unwritten.
I couldn’t agree more. None of us can be trusted with our bias. With the proviso that any measurement is only as good as its precision, subjectivity needs to be removed from the process as much as possible. Job applications should be anonymized. I’m not advocating so much as pleading: Please, please end the reign of terror by our racist, sexist brains.
But, tragically, the trend in left-leaning circles is in the opposite direction. Harvard is going to the Supreme Court to defend subjectivity in admissions. California has scrapped the SAT, defying the recommendation of a panel that found that the SAT is a better predictor of college success than high school grades. Standardized tests throughout the New York City public school system are facing similar opposition. Blind auditions were implemented to reduce bias in orchestras, but now some people want to end them. Similarly, blind submissions were once fashionable in comedy, but have fallen out of favor. The word “objectivity” itself is viewed by some as racist coding.
Why are we going backwards? We know why: It’s this poisonous, totalizing ideology that deems any inequality in outcomes between groups as unacceptable. It’s this fatuous, illiberal bullshit that views us all according to our ascriptive traits and then assigns those traits maximum salience. It’s why we all keep being forced into maddening and undignified situations in which race and gender are shoved to the front of our consciousness in deeply-unhealthy ways. We should be moving away from that type of thinking; we should be searching for ways for those traits to matter less. That’s how you reduce discrimination based on race, gender, and, though I haven’t mentioned it, physical attractiveness, because — hoo boy! — that one’s actually the biggie, isn’t it?
It doesn’t have to be this way. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” could mean “removing barriers to access” (and occasionally it does mean that). Those barriers are real, especially economic barriers, which often get zero weight in DEI programs. DEI could start with proactive efforts to make sure people from outside the usual pipelines are able to apply (this is very relevant to comedy), and would do away with things that favor the rich like networking, needless credentialism, and internships.1 That still leaves room for objective processes designed to find the person best able to do the job. And I think this goes without saying, but advantages for Trumps and Kushners in college admissions have got to go.2 Give Ivanka’s spot to someone who deserves it more, like Paul the Psychic Octopus. Even though he is dead.
None of what I’ve written is, by itself, an argument against most DEI programs. It’s part of the argument; it’s something to keep in mind. I think most of us know about the unfair-but-unavoidable pre-judgement caused by DEI policies, but we don’t want to talk about it because it’s so fucking uncomfortable. I think that leads us to downplay its importance, even though its effects — I believe — are damaging and large.
Nordell is right that if a person is seen as less-capable because of their group, that will follow them throughout their career. Blunt DEI programs make it likely that a person from a group that benefits from DEI will be seen that way. We can say “that perception isn’t fair”, and in many cases it won’t be, but if the person was, in fact, hired according to a lower standard, then an a priori assumption that they’re less capable is rational. There’s no getting around that. We can push back against racism and sexism by prioritizing objectivity, and we should do that, because our brains will jump at any chance that we give them to make biased assumptions.
Some might respond to this by saying: “SATs favor the rich, and a minute ago you touted SATs as an example of an objective process.” It’s true that children of rich parents do better on the SATs, but that proves correlation, not causation. The question of how much studying for the SAT helps has been hotly debated for years; it was big news a few years ago when one study found an advantage from studying of 115 points. But the “studying” in that case wasn’t some high-priced course — it was free online software. My synthesis of everything I’ve read on the topic is that studying helps some, but the difference in effect between low-cost, widely-available studying techniques and fancy-pants, outrageously expensive tutoring is small.
So: I’m not sold on the idea that the SAT greatly favors the rich. And, though I certainly wouldn’t favor a process that gave the SAT too much weight — it should be far from determinative — it makes sense to me to have some standard measure to counterbalance the highly-variant information provided by different grades in different courses from different high schools. Moreover, eliminating the SATs would emphasize parts of the application like recommendations and essays, which I think are at least as likely to favor wealthy students as the SATs. They’re also highly subjective; I honestly think that undergraduate essays are a useless metric and should be eliminated entirely.
A person well-versed in how colleges work might respond to this by saying “It would kneecap our endowment if we did that.” And yes, it would. I’ll probably write a column about this at some point; I’ve come to the opinion that this is a cost worth paying for a more meritocratic system.
When I got a job at $TECH_COMPANY, I called my mom to give her the news. Her first response was "Wow, they must really want $MINORITY engineers!"
This, of course, was a total buzzkill, but it would be a lot easier to shake off if the company (and the entire industry) wasn't so open about how right she was. They like to make a big deal about how they're trying to improve their representation numbers, and every time I think "so, am I here because I'm good, or because I make your numbers look good?" This is a constant awareness, and it sucks ass.
I'd like to think I'm one of the people that could've gotten in without the diversity program benefit, but it's hard to tell. After all, I know there are other minority people in the company that don't deserve to be there (I have spent a lot of my time rolling my eyes at them), so am I just Dunning-Krugering my own competence? If I say something and it turns out to be wrong, is that evidence that everyone screws up sometimes, or that I'm just there to push up a diversity metric a small bit? All the impostor syndrome talks in the world won't fix the problem, because all the people giving those pep talks have a vested interest in lying to me so I stay around and keep pushing up those numbers. (and sure, that might be conspiratorial thinking, but when there's no objective source to rely on, what can you trust? I'm not brilliant at my job or anything, so even at best I'm pretty firmly average. Or at least, I like to think so.)
Most of the discussion about DEI programs comes from people that don't have to worry about this - it's all about what some hypothetical person might gain or lose. What those people think, if they know they're there to be diverse or not, never comes up. Let me tell you that while I definitely appreciate the paycheck, the self-respect hit fucking sucks.
Jeff, thanks for writing this, because it’s a convo we all need to start having more frankly. There are a few places where I see things a bit differently- not disagreeing necessarily though.
1) Objectivity. The wholesale dismissal of objectivity *as a goal* is completely toxic. I do think it’s worth discussing how it can be almost impossible for a person to actually achieve due to, you know, all that bias you discussed so eloquently! Ironically the best way to get close is to have *diversity of thought* on your decision-making team. People are all biased in different ways and when you get a good mix, we call each other out on our bullshit. Of course, The Discourse is so broken that someone disagreeing with IXK is ipso facto racism, so it often backfires. But people aren’t wrong when they point out “Hey, your school rule against wearing cornrows may be getting implemented objectively, but that doesn’t make it fair.”
2) Unconscious bias. I agree that affirmative action or other policies that offer favor based on things other than “merit” (to the extent that “merit” is something objectively measurable, see above) will backfire and make biases worse. Here’s the thing though… I believe reflecting on your unconscious biases obsessively makes them worse too. It’s called Ironic Processing Theory, check it out! “Don’t think of a white bear.” The more you meditate on “women are not stupid. Women are not incapable,” the more you associate “women” with “stupid” and “incapable.” The more you take that IAT and feel awful about being 0.05 seconds faster at associating a sweet Black child’s face with the word “bad,” the more your brain fortifies those neurons. In that way, I think the DEI true believers (and I speak from experience) have wired their brains into strange knots, strengthening biases then building a reverse loop to undo it, and going around assuming everyone else is as biased as they are. (Robin DiAngelo is a great example of a white woman who assumes all other white people assume black people are dangerous and stupid, bc she does!)
3) Pipelines. The messed up part is that corporate affirmative action is legally required to *just* be the pipeline part. Reaching out to populations without the connections to get into your organization and making sure they feel welcome. And development programs for employees within to get mentoring networks they might not have. It’s still illegal to actually consider race or gender in the hiring decision! But it’s telling that no one knows that, or assumes it’s old fashioned and doesn’t apply any more. But if we were more explicit about how AA is supposed to work, we might help mitigate some of these biases.