The issue in the past has been that unconscious bias in favor of considering "looks like me" as part of "merit" has made it harder for qualified women and minorities to get past that unrecognized filter.
For quite awhile after passage of our employment laws looking to make good on "equal opportunity," many firms have continued to elide the problem of unconscious filtering out of people who don't "look like us" when hiring people. Now we're not dodging the issue so much any more. Why? Because it became clear that the laws weren't enough. Because our minds and maybe our hearts didn't capture the spirit of the laws. We're better than our track record. That's what Apple's saying, taking it out from behind the HR walls and showing the world ok here's what we do, here's where we are, we're trying, we're making progress.
Now we're talking about it, and really trying to change up how we hire, and a lot of people are practically up in arms about it. And they are, predictably, white and fairly often but not always male as well. I chalk a lot of that up to discomfort with change, not necessarily to overt racism or sexism.
Even good change makes us uncomfortable at first.
That's the thing about institutional prejudice, it's not necessarily overt, aggressive, even conscious. It's just there. It's there because it's "always" been there, like that S curve out on County 14 that used to go around someone's outbuildings in the 19th century. Most of us are comfortable with it only because we had to get comfortable with gearing down to 30 or ending up in some guy's pine trees. Someday someone will get killed taking those things at 55 and then they'll take down the 30 signs and call in the engineers... well the USA called in the engineers in 1965 because enough of the country was finally uncomfortable always gearing down for those S curves that kept good people from advancing --or getting hired for a good job to begin with-- and we're still trying to build a better road.
Our brains are lazy, they can make us like things the way they are. But we're in charge, right? It's ok to be uncomfortable in service of getting used to the dash on a new car, though, eh? We can see the benefit. Otherwise why get the new car? Well, it's also ok to be uncomfortable while getting used to trying to identify and ditch those filters we may have stashed away on who's "meritorious" of getting hired when we need to staff up. The benefit is making the most of our human potential sooner than we may be doing now.
There’s a reason engineering firms may still shuffle resumés looking for STEM-qualified kids who grew up on a farm and were handing their dad the right size wrench from the time they were big enough to be trusted not to eat the stuff in the toolbox. They got that 3-D wiring activated in their brains when their brains were most receptive to development of capacity to understand spatial relationships. There’s absolutely no reason to pass by a resumé like that if the kid happens to have been a girl. Unless…. she doesn’t look like a guy?
