I don’t get the hullabaloo about DEI.
If a company wants to use it, let them. If it hurts their performance, then they will have to suffer the results.
If a company uses DEI for unlawful purposes, they’ll get sued.
If a company uses DEI in order to diversify qualified employees to their benefit, good for them.
The issue is outside forces and non-economic criteria. For example:
BlackRock Inc. is the world’s largest asset manager, with over $8.5 trillion in assets…ESG is a type of investing where non-financial factors are considered when making investment choices…
ESG has grown significantly over the past few years, following a push from the United Nations…
In it, he [Fink] said “Behaviors are going to have to change. This is one thing we’re asking companies. You have to force behaviors. At BlackRock we are forcing behaviors.”
DB2
So what. Who cares what Larry Fink wants?
Are you Ok with outside forces and non-economic criteria forcing companies to not use DEI and ESG?
It feeds the narrative about the victim straight, white, man. “Can’t get a job because some equally or better qualified minority got the job instead of him.”
When I worked at the pump seal company, in the late 70s, there was one non-white person working in all of engineering, marketing, accounting and IT, probably over 100 staff. Sort of bucks the percentages, given that Kalamazoo County is only 80% white. And Dick noticed. I heard him comment one day that he was the only black person there.
Steve
Blackrock (and others) control large amounts of money and investment flows. If their choices are economically sub-optimal then 1) their clients (such as pension funds) have lower results and 2) the economy as a whole is slowed.
If they decide, for instance, that investments in fossil fuel companies are verboten then that sector of the economy suffers from underinvestment. Since decarbonization is proceeding at a slow pace, a few tenths of a percent per year, things such as natural gas and oil are still needed in large quantities. Current human prosperity is difficult to imagine without substantial contributions from them
DB2.
I don’t understand why you’re linking DEI policies to investment in fossil fuels. DEI policies focus on creating and supporting diversity in the workplace.
Companies that implement DEI programs do so because they believe that having employees from diverse backgrounds, with diverse experiences, who share diverse ideas will give them a competitive advantage.
The E in DEI relates to equity. It doesn’t mean that everyone in the organization is treated the exact same. It doesn’t mean that a company will invest equally across an industry. If you have 2 carpenters, one is 6’4" and the other is 5’2", you might need to get the shorter carpenter a taller ladder to do the same work. Equity is about setting people up for success, understanding their capabilities and providing support so you can get the best out of everyone.
Inclusion efforts stem from the idea that having a diverse workplace doesn’t really matter, unless people feel included and engage with one another.
Some companies may be jumping on the bandwagon without really understanding DEI. Not all companies manage DEI programs well. Comparing financial implications of DEI must take this into consideration.
Yes, I was going with e as in environmental. That would be ESG (environmental, social and governance). BlackRock is into that as well.
DB2
Thanks for the clarification. When referencing DEI, the E doesn’t refer to environmental. We can’t just plug any E word we want in there.
Not intending to be snarky, but it’s frustrating discussing conservative hot button issues. Half of the time, those who hold strong opinions against things like DEI and Critical Race Theory don’t even know what they are.
If the white legislators (and also alleged "JCs) were being widely and systematically denied opportunities to make investments with good returns, how long would it take for them to initiate lawsuits? LOL !!! Only then do they LOVE “E”.
Yes, but I hope we can all agree that they should stop teaching the 1619 Project in nursery school.
You’re being overly generous in saying it is only half the time.
Pete
Is that a real screamy face, or a sarcastic screamy face? 
… can find another investment firm.
Free market, remember?
When in doubt, go with snarky sarcastic.
In other news which is depressingly the same:
Gift link:
Researchers sent out fake resumes with similar/identical qualifications but with names both obviously gendered or racialized, and the results were - what you’d expect. Racially obvious names got less response and gender obvious names likewise. Interestingly it was “job dependent” (perhaps easy to predict) and also “company dependent”. Some companies responded in almost perfect synchronicity with population estimates for their area. Others, not so much. (The companies are named in the article if you’re interested, FWIW.)
One note: the jobs were “entry level” so as to make the qualifications necessary somewhat equivalent.
One snippet I found particular interesting:
Finally, more profitable companies were less biased, [in line with] a long-held [economics theory] by the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker that discrimination is bad for business. Economists said that could be because the more profitable companies benefit from a more diverse set of employees. Or it could be an indication that they had more efficient business processes, in H.R. and elsewhere.
For the last 3 or 4 years at my company, all resumes arrived to the hiring manager “stripped”. They use a service that strips off the name and other identifying information before it can even be seen. All it has is a resume ID number and the relevant information for the job.
Maybe the more profitable companies can afford to use this service, and the less profitable ones can’t? I have no idea what the service cost us, it was contracted at the recruiting level, likely even via an external recruiting company.
Yes, it must be real expensive to change the names to a number and create a database of them. It must use a massive server farm for this complex task that could otherwise be used to mine bitcoin, train AI models, etc.
Mike
LOL! I think it did more than that, but there’s no way for me to know because I only saw the end results. But when you think about it, there are plenty of businesses that essentially all they do is distill simple data into a kind of database and charge companies a lot for those services. You can’t imagine how much companies pay for payroll and POS companies to use their databases of all US locations to make sure they are withholding and remitting the correct amount of taxes for each location. All that is is a simple database as well.
Back in 1985 I was taking over Liberation Publications with 180 or so employees across two book publishing houses and The Advocate Newsmagazine. Not surprisingly, almost all the employees were “liberal” youngish B.A. holding white gay men who mostly unconsciously quietly but persistently resisted employing (in order of resistance)
blacks
lesbians (the G and the L in LGBQT were long long at odds)
straights
women
immigrants
The AIDS epidemic cut through my employees like a scythe, but also cut through their resistance to equity in employment.
What conservatives going hysterical about DEI forget is that all human organizations, often enough absurdly at odds with what they teach (hello Roman Catholic church), have a stunningly powerful intense usually stupid-in-a-changing-world contradictory-to-their-own-mission resistance to internal social change.
Fortunately, the USA military understood this early enough to get their major DEI groundwork done before our politics went bananas.
d fb
I’d keep my guess simple.
Discrimination based on race, gender, and a whole host of other potential criteria by its nature is going to eliminate some candidates that are better than the one ultimately chosen. This only works with big numbers of employees, since in a really small sample, the best employee just might be the one that survives the discrimination. But given enough trials, you are going to be excluding qualified applicants.
Perhaps that is what is meant by “more efficient business processes,” but I’m not really sure that is the case. You can still use discrimination along side otherwise efficient business processes. And it’s not the diversity itself that matters, it is attracting a wide pool of candidates. A wide pool is probably going to have a decent level of diversity simply because it is wide.
–Peter