Microsoft staff are openly questioning the value of diversity

I think that you should be hiring whoever is qualified, not based on gender&#x2F;ethnicity&#x2F;etc.<p>If you have many people then you will have diversity, because they are different people and therefore they have all different experience and ideas from each other. They should neither to try to only to hire people of same gender nor to try to hire everyone all difference gender&#x2F;skins (doing so can be relevant to a movie set perhaps, but not for a computer programming job).<p>If women are less interested or less capable for this job by average (although I do not actually know whether or not this is true) then by your interviewing to see who is qualify then you can hire someone, by statistics it is likely that less women will be hired and that is not your fault and is not your problem. But you should not try to hire less women, nor more; see if they are competent at the job rather than their gender.

&gt; Many women simply aren’t cut out for the corporate rat race, so to speak, and that’s not because of ‘the patriarchy,’ it’s because men and women aren’t identical.<p>Everytime there is a discussion of this, it gets bogged down because of claims like these. In general, I think that the equality of opportunity people would be more effective at reaching the ears of the equality of outcome people if they skipped over the whole &quot;why are there fewer of some group working in this field&quot; issue entirely, and focused on the harms of not having equality of outcome. I see why they go to these arguments (to communicate that equality of outcome as a value might be misguided if inequality of outcome wasn&#x27;t driven by bias), but people frequently jump ship and stop listening when they hit something like this in the argument.

it is a weird problem.<p>on one hand we want more diversity.<p>on the other i saw companies offer ludicrous offers to people heavily underqualified for the offers because they are a woman. Like a 2 year of experience lady with bad instincts (just lack of experience) but tons of potential. And offering her a senior engineer, same as we&#x27;d offer a 10 year veteran.<p>Point is, from the white male side, it seems insulting. I am not suggesting women are less capable, but they are having money thrown at them in ways males can&#x27;t even approach.<p>But I suppose the price we pay for having so few women engineers.

It&#x27;s a worthy conversation. I&#x27;ve never understood the push for equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. I applaud people for starting that discussion.

I didn’t read that as questioning the value of diversity. But questioning unfair management incentives that openly discriminates on gender and race.

&quot;Women in tech are a hot commodity,&quot; I heard one recruiter say to another.

Sorry, where is the “pseudoscience” from Damore?

You either discriminate without diversity, or discriminate with diversity.

Makes sense. HR firms have known for decades it&#x27;s a net negative. Note that this is generally within departments only, not within the entire organization.<p>&gt; Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economicsdetective.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;costs-ethnic-diversity-garett-jones&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economicsdetective.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;costs-ethnic-diversit...</a>