Tag: diversity

Size, diversity and social capital

Starting off with a “global” statement, life is full of tradeoffs.

When we listen to stories as kids, we think of “battles between good and evil”. When we watch sport, there is “our side and their side”. From stories, we are usually conditioned to “battles” where one side is superior to the other, and there is a clear “favourite” to root for.

Real life is not so simple. A lot of times, you have battles between two sides that are both bad (a lot of elections, for example). And frequently you come across situations where there are two “good” things of which you can only have one (and so the tradeoffs). One of the more famous of these is the “impossible trinity” of international economics.

In a completely different context (which I’m writing about today), two desirable things that are a tradeoff are diversity and social capital. The general theory is that the more diverse a society gets, the lower is the social capital (google is impossible in providing good links on this, so maybe ask ChatGPT).

The theory here goes that you fundamentally trust people like you and mistrust people who are not like you. The more homogeneous a society is, the more there are “people like you”, and so the more you trust. And if everyone trusts one another much more, there is more social capital.

A recent conversation and observations makes me wonder if social capital is also related to size. More specifically I’m thinking of size as in number of people in an institution.

One observation we had when we went for our reunion last week is that the campus is a lot quieter than in our time, and that a lot more rules are followed in letter rather than just in spirit (no, not that kind, but I’m talking about rules about that also).

For example, the basketball hoop in L^2 has been removed. While we pitched up a net and played tsepak in BEFG Square (where we always played it), current students informed us that they can’t play there because playing there is now banned. Students mostly hung out in their wings rather than in the common areas. After our first evening there we assumed all the students were out on holiday, while it turned out only the first years had a term break then.

I still remember my first night in IIMB (in 2004). I stayed in G Block, on one side of the aforementioned BEFG square. A bunch of people were playing Tsepak until late in the night, which meant I didn’t get good sleep (and for the rest of the week we had our “orientation” which meant I couldn’t sleep well then either). A few days later I just joined these people in playing Tsepak and making noise. “If you can’t stop them, join them”, was a perfect way to go about things back in the day.

What I remember is that, with a batch size of ~200, our social capital was pretty good. While there were some students who occasionally displayed elevated levels of conscience, we largely stuck by one another and tolerated one another (and, of course, massively trolled one another). Disagreements and fights always happened, but were largely resolved among us by dialogue, rather than inviting external parties.

With a much bigger batch size now, though, from what we were told, it appears it is not so simple to resolve things using dialogue and mediation. And people frequently take to inviting external parties. And the expected result (crane-mongoose effect) happens.

That some people want to study when others want to play now means that the former complain against the latter, with playing within the hostel being banned. Some people want to enforce the rules on spirits, and they bring in external parties, and the law is invoked in letter rather than spirit.

When social capital dwindles, in some ways, the minority rule comes into play – when there is a small but vocal minority that wants things a certain way, that becomes the way for everyone else as well. (With high social capital, the majority might be able to convince the minority that they need to be more tolerant)

Yet again, this is not a one way street. You can also argue that when social capital is too high, the minorities can tend to get oppressed (since their views don’t count any more), and so a high social capital society cannot be inclusive.

And so yeah, the Baazigar principle is there everywhere. To get something, you need to give up something. To get a more inclusive class, you need to be less majoritarian, and that means less fun on the average. When you have lots of intolerant minorities (a consequence of diversity), those “intolerant rules” get applied on everyone, and the overall payoff reduces.

A few random thoughts to end:

  1. It’s not just the class size, it’s also the fees. We paid ~ ?300,000 over 2 years as tuition fees. Many of us (who sat for campus placements) made almost twice that (post taxes) in our first year of graduation.

    Students nowadays pay ~ ?2,500,000 , so they are a lot more conscious about getting their money’s worth. And being able to study.

  2. In general, cultures change over time, so coming back after 15 years and complaining that “things aren’t the way they used to be” isn’t very nice. So yeah, this blogpost can get classified in the “not so nice” category I guess (not like I’ve ever been known for niceness)
  3. I wonder how much changed during the pandemic, when students were off campus for nearly a year, and had severely curtailed interactions even once they were back. With a 2 year course, it only takes 1 batch to “break culture”, making the culture far more malleable. So again I’m wrong to complain.
  4. All that said, it’s my duty to pontificate and so I’ll continue to write like this

Recruitment and diversity

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.

 

More on Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and Inclusion are words that are normally thrown around by people of a certain persuasion. In fact, they were among the key principles espoused by one of my earlier employers as well (to their credit, some of their diversity and inclusion sessions did a lot of help broaden my worldview).

However, as I’ve argued earlier on this blog, in a lot of cases, arguments on diversity and inclusion are (literally) only skin deep – people go big on diversity of sex, sexuality, skin colour, nationality and so on while giving short shrift to things like diversity of thought, which in my opinion plays a larger role in building a more successful team.

I’ve also mentioned earlier on this blog about how some simple acts of inclusion can go a long way – for example, I’d mentioned about how building a pedestrian walkway, or pedestrian crossing with signals, would help make one of the roads in Bangalore more inclusive towards pedestrians (a class of people the usual proponents of diversity and inclusion don’t care about).

I was reminded of diversity and inclusion when the recent hoopla about messaging apps happened. A number of my contacts said they were leaving WhatsApp and moving to Telegram or Signal. Others said they weren’t going anywhere and were sticking to WhatsApp, and that Facebook’s new privacy rules were nothing new.

From my personal point of view, since I didn’t have a view on this messaging apps issue, the best solution turned out to be “inclusion”.

I’m on all apps. I’m on Signal, and Telegram, and WhatsApp, and iMessage, and good old SMS. However you choose to reach me, I’m there to receive your message and respond to you. In that sense, when you don’t have a strong opinion, the best thing to do is to be inclusive.

Of late I’ve realised it’s the same with language. Since I now work for a company that is headquartered in Gurgaon, a number of colleagues instinctively speak in Hindi. Initially I used to be a bit snobbish, and tell them that my Hindi sucked, and when they spoke Hindi, I would reply in English.

Over time, however, I’ve realised that I’m only being an asshole by refusing to be inclusive. Since I know Hindi (I got more marks in Hindi in Class 10 board exams than I did in English – not that that says anything), I should let the people decide whether I’m worth talking to in Hindi at all. I’ll talk to them in my broken Hindi, and if they think it’s too broken they can choose to switch to a language I’m more comfortable in.

And a week ago, Pranay and Saurabh of the Puliyabaazi podcast asked me if I’m willing to go on their (Hindi) podcast to talk about logical fallacies and “how not to use data”. I immediately accepted, not only because it’s a great podcast to be on (they’re fun to talk to), but it also gives me an opportunity to show off my broken Hindi.

The episode dropped on Thursday. You can listen to it here:

I realised while I was recording that my Hindi has become really rusty, and I found myself struggling for words many times. I also realised after the episode dropped that I don’t even understand what the title means, yet I’ve been happily sharing it around in my office! (a colleague kept asking me if I knew this word and that word, and I realised the answer to all that was no. Yet I had made assumptions and gone on with the podcast – another example of my own “inclusiveness”!)

Henceforth I’m never telling a colleague that I don’t know Hindi. However, if I find that someone overestimates my level of Hindi I might inflict this podcast on them. Even then, if they choose to speak to me in Hindi, so be it! I’m going to make an attempt to be more inclusive, after all.

 

Diversity and campus placements

I graduated from IIMB in 2006. As was a sort of habit around that time in all IIMs, many recruiters who were supposed to come to campus for recruitment in the third or fourth slot were asked to not turn up – everyone who was in the market for a job had been placed by then.

The situation was very different when my wife was graduating from IESE Business School in 2016. There, barring consulting firms and a handful of other firms, campus placements was nonexistent.

Given the diversity of her class (the 200 odd students came from 60 different countries, and had vastly different experience), it didn’t make sense for a recruiter to come to campus. The ones that turned up like the McKinseys and Amazons of the world were looking for “generic management talent”, or to put it less charitably, “perfectly replaceable people”.

When companies were looking for perfectly replaceable people, background and experience didn’t matter that much. What mattered was the candidate’s aptitude for the job at hand, which was tested in a series of gruelling interviews.

However, when the jobs were a tad more specialised, a highly diverse campus population didn’t help. The specialisation in the job would mean that the recruiters would have a very strong preference for certain people in the class rather than others, and the risk of not getting the most preferred candidates was high. For specialised recruiters to turn up to campus, it was all or nothing, since the people in the class were so unlike one another.

People in the class were so unlike one another for good reason, and by design – they would be able to add significantly better value to one another in class by dint of their varied experience. When it came to placements, however, it was a problem.

My IIMB class was hardly diverse. Some 130 out of 180 of us were engineers, if I remember correctly. More than a 100 of us had a year or less of real work experience. About 150 out of 180 were male. Whatever dimension you looked at us from, there was little to differentiate us. We were a homogeneous block. That also meant that in class, we had little to add to each other (apart from wisecracks and “challenges”).

This, however, worked out beautifully when it came to us getting jobs. Because we were so similar to one another, for a recruiter coming in, it didn’t really matter which of us joined them. While every recruiter might have come in with a shortlist of highly preferred candidates, not getting people from this shortlist wouldn’t have hurt them as much – whoever else they got was not very dissimilar to the ones in their original shortlist.

This also meant that the arbitrarily short interviews (firms had to make a decision after two or three interviews that together lasted an hour) didn’t matter that much. Yes, it was a highly random process that I came to hate from both sides (interviewee and interviewer), but in the larger scheme of things, thanks to the lack of diversity, it didn’t matter to the interviewer.

And so with the students being more or less commoditised, the incentive for a recruiter to come and recruit was greater. And so they came in droves, and in at least my batch and the next, several of them had to be requested to not come since “everyone was already placed” (after that came to Global Financial Crisis, so I don’t know how things were).

Batch sizes at IIM have increased and diversity, too, on some counts (there are more women now). However, at a larger level I still think IIM classes are homogeneous enough to attract campus recruiters. I don’t know what the situation this year is with the pandemic, but I would be surprised if placements in the last few years was anything short of stellar.

So this is a tradeoffs that business schools (and other schools) need to deal with – the more diverse the class, the richer will be the peer learning, but lesser the incentive for campus recruitment.

Of late I’ve got into this habit of throwing ideas randomly at twitter, and then expanding them into blog posts. This is one of those posts. While this post has been brewing for five years now (ever since my wife started her placement process at IESE), the immediate trigger was some discussion on twitter regarding liberal arts courses.

 

Axes of diversity

Companies and educational institutions, especially those that have a global footprint and a reputation to protect, make a big deal about diversity policies. It is almost impossible to sit through a recruitment or admissions talk by one such entity without a mention to their diversity policies, which they are proud of.

And they have good reasons to have a diverse workforce. It has been shown, for example, that diversity leads to better decision-making and overall better performance. Having a diverse workforce brings together people with different backgrounds, and since backgrounds influence opinion, a more diverse team is more likely to have more diversity of opinion which results in better decision making. And so forth.

The problem, however, is that it is not easy to simultaneously achieve diversity on all possible axes. Let’s say that we have defined a number of axes, and are looking to recruit an incoming MBA class. If we want diversity on each of these axes, selection of each candidate is going to rule out a large number of other candidates and we will need a really large pool to choose from. In other words, it is akin to the eight queens problem (where you have to place eight queens on a chessboard such that no two of them are on the same row, column or diagonal). For those of you not familiar with chess, think of it like a Sudoku puzzle.

Since the pool of candidates large enough to achieve diversity on all axes is simply not feasible, firms and schools choose to prioritise certain axes over others, and seek to achieve diversity in these chosen axes. And since they can arbitrarily choose axes that they can prioritise, the incentive is to pick out those axes where diversity is most visible.

And so when you go to a global organisation or school that preaches diversity, you will notice that they indeed have a very diverse workforce/student body in terms of gender, race, and nationality, which are fairly visible dimensions. Beyond this, the choice of dimensions to impose diversity on is a matter of discretion. So you have organisations which seek diversity in sexual orientation. Others seek diversity in age profile. Yet others in educational backgrounds. And so forth.

The result of prioritising more “visible” dimensions to ensure diversity is that organisations end up becoming horribly similar in the “sacrificed dimensions”. Check out this excerpt from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, for example, on the founding members of paypal:

The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek

Now, remember that this was a fairly diverse team when it came to ethnicity, nationality and sexuality. But in a less visible dimension, the team was not diverse at all. And Thiel mentions it in his book as if it’s a good thing that they all thought so similarly.

On a similar note, I once worked for an organisation that made great shakes of its diversity policy, and the organisation was pretty diverse in terms pretty much every visible axis of diversity. And the seminars (some compulsory) they organised helped me significantly broaden my outlook on issues such as race or sexual orientation. But when it came to work, the (fairly large) team was horribly similar. Quoting from an earlier blogpost (a bit ranty, I admit):

First, a large number of guys building models come from similar backgrounds, so they think similarly. Because so many people think similarly, the rest train themselves to think similarly (or else get nudged out, by whatever means). So you have massive organizations full of massively talented brilliant minds which all think similarly! Who is to ask the uncomfortable questions?

So essentially because you had a large organisation of people from basically similar educational backgrounds (masters and PhDs in similar subjects), their way of thinking became dominant, and others were forced to conform, leading to groupthink, which might have potentially led to mishaps (but didn’t, at least not in my time).

And what of the Ivy League schools that again pride themselves on (visible forms of) diversity? Here is an excerpt from William Deresiewicz’s excellent 2008 essay:

Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.

So the next time you want to make your organisation diverse, think of which axes you want diversity on. If you are public-minded and want to brag about your diversity, the obvious way to go would be to be diverse on visible axes, but that leaves other issues. On the other hand you could put together a team of people that look the same but think different!

It’s entirely up to you!

 

Deresiewicz, Pinker and the IIT JEE

A few months back, William Deresiewicz, formerly of Yale, wrote a long piece advising people why they should not send their kids to Ivy League schools. He talked about students in Ivy League schools becoming single dimensioned, hyper-competitive, and less appreciative of the finer things in life. He spoke of the Ivy League system being broken, and not close to what it used to be once upon a time.

Now, Steven Pinker (he of the Stuff of Thought and Language Instinct fame) of Harvard has responded, and he has the opposite problem with Ivy League students. Halfway though the semester, the class is half-empty, he cribs, with students more involved in extra curricular activities rather than attending class. This implies that all the effort the university puts in building world-class libraries and laboratories and other facilities go waste. Pinker’s diagnosis is different – he blames the “well roundedness” criteria that universities use for admissions (supposedly initially put in place to restrict the number of jewish students, and then kept in place to restrict the number of asians).

I’m about halfway through Pinker’s article, and I remember reading Deresiewicz’s article in full, and my reaction to both is the same – “IIT JEE rocks”. By having a standardised exam to admit students, the IITs actually take pressure off high school students rather than imposing more pressure – since the criteria for admission are clear – that one examination, a student of class 11 or 12 has her objectives clear in front of her in case she wants to go to IIT – single-minded mugging of Maths, Physics and Chemistry.

With a more “well-rounded” criterion – say one that includes social service and extra curricular activities and sport and all such, the objective function is not that clear, and the student needs to slog towards an uncertain objective function, which is significantly inferior to slogging towards a known objective function.

Some of the cribs that Pinker puts in his post is true of IITs as well – I’ve had several professors lecture to me about the lack of seriousness on the part of IIT students, and how they would prefer students who might be less brilliant but more serious about their learning (an oft touted solution to this was to jack up the fees and make students dependent on education loans they had to repay. Not sure if the IITs have implemented this, but the IIMs have, for sure).

But then IIT Madras, where I studied for four years, and where everyone had come in after passing a rigorous standardised test, had no shortage of characters. While everyone who was in had necessarily shown single-minded devotion to mugging maths physics and chemistry in the preceding year or two, a large number of students there had interests that went much beyond those three scientific subjects. In that sense, if the Ivy League schools want to see a system where standardised admissions process actually lead to a fairly diverse class, they need not look beyond the IITs (a system they are no doubt familiar with since the IITs contribute generously to the grad student population of the Ivy League schools).

One of the frequent criticisms of the IIT JEE is that it can easily be gamed – rather than selecting the “brightest” students or those that have the best understanding of maths, physics and chemistry, the IITs end up selecting students who are best prepared for the standardised exam. An oft-touted solution to this is to make the entry process more “holistic” (in India that means including board exam marks (??!!) ), to make it less game-able. However, evidence from the Deresiewicz and Pinker pieces suggests that even the “holistic” admissions process that the Ivy League schools follow are easily gamed, and that the gaming of those systems is in fact biased towards kids with rich parents.

A while back I was looking at the admissions process of some Ivy League schools – both undergrad and MBA programs. Now, all these schools tout diversity as one of their drawing criteria. But if you look a little deeper, you will notice that this purported diversity is only skin-deep (literally!). While these schools might do a fantastic job of getting students from different nationalities, skin colour, undergraduate backgrounds and work experience, the way their essays are structured implies that the students they get are largely similar in thought – students should have done some social work, they should have exhibited a particular kind of leadership, they should be politically correct, and so forth.

The reason I mention this is that “holistic” admissions criteria need not actually produce a student body that is necessarily more diverse than that produced by a standardised test – it all depends upon the axis that you look along!

PS: I happened to have a good day on 7th May 2000, when I wrote the IIT JEE and did rather well, so this post might be biased by that. I don’t know if I would have taken such a charitable view towards standardised tests if I hadn’t done so well in them.

College Admissions

Why does the government require colleges in India to have “objective criteria” for admissions? I understand that such criteria are necessary for government-owned or run or aided colleges where there’s scope for rent seeking. But why is it that “private” colleges are also forced to adopt “objective criteria” such as board exam marks or entrance test scores for admission?

Abroad, and here, too for MBA admissions, admission is more “subjective”. While of course this has the scope to introduce bias, and is a fairly random process (though I’d argue that the JEE is also a fairly random process), won’t it reduce pressure on the overall student population, and bring in more diversity into colleges?

As a natural experiment I want to see a few state governments deregulating the admissions process for private colleges, making it possible for the colleges to choose their students based on whatever criterion. So what would happen? Of course, some seats would be “reserved” for those with big moneybags. Some more would be reserved for people who are well connected with the college management. But would it be rational for the college boards to “reserve” all the seats this way?

Maybe some colleges would take a short-term view and try to thus “cash out”. The cleverer ones will realize that they need to build up a reputation. So while some seats will be thus “reserved”, others will be used to attract what the college thinks are “good students”. Some might define “good students” to be those that got high marks in board exams. Others might pick students based on how far they can throw a cricket ball. The colleges have a wide variety of ways in which to make a name, and they’ll pick students accordingly.

The problem with such a measure is that there is a transient cost. A few batches of students might get screwed, since they wouldn’t have figured out the reputations of colleges (or maybe not – assuming colleges don’t change drastically from the way they are right now). But in a few years’ time, reputations of various sorts would have been built. Colleges would have figured out various business models. The willingness to pay of the collective population would ensure that reasonably priced “seats” are available.

And remember that I mentioned that a few states should implement this, with the others sticking to the current system of regulating admissions and fees and all such. In due course of time it’ll be known what works better. Rather, it’ll be known what the students prefer.

It’s crazy that colleges now require students to get “cent per cent” in their board exams as a prerequisite to admission. It’s crazy that hundreds of thousands of students all over India, every year, spend two years of their prime youth just preparing to get into a good college (nowadays the madness is spreading. A cousin-in-law is in 9th standard, and he’s already joined JEE coaching). On reflection, it’s crazy that I wasted all of my 12th standard simply mugging, for an exam that would admit me to a college that I knew little about. Madness, sheer madness.

Medical Insurance Subsidy

Exactly a year back my mother was in hospital. She was there for three weeks before she died. The bill for the three weeks came to close to four hundred thousand rupees. She was covered under my corporate medical insurance so I passed on the cost to the insurer, who paid most of it. I didn’t really complain, the insurer was obliged to pay, and the hospital was more than happy to receive the fee.

The hospital follows an interesting business model. On one hand it dons the garb of a corporate hospital while on the other it is a charitable hospital. A large section of the patients are treated at extremely low cost, or even for free. The rest of the patients have insurance coverage. Those that have coverage are fleeced, and this money effectively cross-subsidizes the treatment of the poor. All works out well for the hospital. Except..

Do you realize that when you (or, in most cases, your employer) pay your premium for medical insurance you’re not insuring just yourself? That because of hospitals like I just mentioned, your insurance is also effectively paying for the treatment of a larger population? That the cost of treating some random patient in the hospital you were admitted to is paid for by you, as part of your medical insurance premium?

Changing tracks, I think the best thing about India’s healthcare industry is the diversity. You have government hospitals. There are university hospitals. There are large corporate hospitals you wouldn’t think of stepping into unless you had insurance. There are charitable hospitals which treat you for next to no cost. There are the neighbourhood nursing homes which essentially cater to the uninsured middle class. Reasonable facilities but not too expensive. And so forth.

There is no formal system of medical insurance in the country. There is no single large government system. If the current state of healthcare in the country is one of not having evolved much, I really wouldn’t mind it remaining this way. I hope we never get into the kind of equilibria that the US and the UK have gotten themselves into, which appear efficient but which ultimately prove expensive for people.

It is the diversity in the system that keeps the healthcare industry here competitive, and keeps costs low. And of course, you pay for other people too when you pay your medical insurance premium.