This post has potential to become controversial and is related to my work, so I need to explicitly state upfront that all opinions here are absolutely my own and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employers or colleagues or anyone else I’m associated with.
I run a rather diverse team. Until my team grew inorganically two months back (I was given more responsibility), there were eight of us in the team. Each of us have masters degrees (ok we’re not diverse in that respect). Sixteen degrees / diplomas in total. And from sixteen different colleges / universities. The team’s masters degrees are in at least four disjoint disciplines.
I have built this part of my team ground up. And have made absolutely made no attempt to explicitly foster diversity in my team. Yet, I have a rather diverse team. You might think it is on accident. You might find weird axes on which the team is not diverse at all (masters degrees is one). I simply think it is because there was no other way.
I like to think that I have fairly high standards when it comes to hiring. Based on the post-interview conversations I have had with my team members, these standards have percolated to them as well. This means we have a rather tough task hiring. This means very few people even qualify to be hired by my team. Earlier this year I asked for a bigger hiring budget. “Let’s see if you can exhaust what you’ve been given, and then we can talk”, I was told. The person who told me this was not being sarcastic – he was simply aware of my demand-supply imbalance.
Essentially, in terms of hiring I face such a steep demand-supply imbalance that even if I wanted to, it would be absolutely impossible for me to discriminate while hiring, either positively or negatively.
If I want to hire less of a certain kind of profile (whatever that profile is), I would simply be letting go of qualified candidates. Given how long it takes to find each candidate in general, imagine how much longer it would take to find candidates if I were to only look at a subset of applicants (to prefer a category I want more of in my team). Any kind of discrimination (apart from things critical to the job such as knowledge of mathematics and logic and probability and statistics, and communication) would simply mean I’m shooting myself in the foot.
Not all jobs, however, are like this. In fact, a large majority of jobs in the world are of the type where you don’t need a particularly rare combination of skills. This means potential supply (assuming you are paying decently, treating employees decently, etc.) far exceeds demand.
When you’re operating in this kind of a market, cost of discrimination (either positive or negative) is rather low. If you were to rank all potential candidates, picking up number 25 instead of number 20 is not going to leave you all that worse off. And so you can start discriminating on axes that are orthogonal to what is required to do the job. And that way you can work towards a particular set of “diversity (or lack of it) targets”.
Given that a large number of jobs (not weighted by pay) belong to this category, the general discourse is that if you don’t have a diverse team it is because you are discriminating in a particular manner. What people don’t realise is that it is pretty impossible do discriminate in some cases.
All that said, I still stand by my 2015 post on “axes on diversity“. Any externally visible axis of diversity – race / colour / gender / sex / sexuality – is likely to diminish diversity in thought. And – again this is my personal opinion – I value diversity in thought and approach much more than the visible sources of diversity.