Try this thought exercise:
You're in Silicon Valley to pitch a new widget to some tech companies. You've booked three meetings today. You walk into your first meeting. There are twenty white men around the table, waiting to hear your pitch. What do you think about that?
Second meeting. There are twenty people again, but this time, five are white men, five are Asian men and ten are black women. What do you think about that?
Third meeting. This one's a smaller group of eight, and they're all black women. What do you think about that?
I'll offer the most likely answers to the three questions. 1: Nothing. You don't think anything about it, and just make your pitch. 2: "Uh. That's odd. There must be some kind of quota thing here." You hesitate for a moment while you process it and then make your pitch. 3: "WTF?" You wonder if you should bother making your pitch.
Now, here's the thing. Silicon Valley's a big place, and even with the current overall demographics, all three of those scenarios are statistically possible. If you're a tech person who understands probabilities and you also really "don't see race or gender," you wouldn't think anything about any of those scenarios. You'd just make your pitch, because you've got widgets to move.
Now, before you get on here and claim you'd be the one who just makes the pitch to all three meetings, don't lie to yourself. And if you know you're lying to yourself, don't get on here and lie to everybody else.
No, you're right. I would hesitate and think for a moment, assuming say I wasn't marketing this to a particular group like mums or something. I would think, hmm, is this panel made up of some diversity hires? But then again, my engineering class of about 30 people has one girl in it, there's no gender or race bias at play when applying for uni. It's done based on the qualifications you get at school. So if my class is 29 white males and 1 white female I wouldn't be all that surprised if the engineering fields I pursue later on sort of reflect that to an extent.
My sister is a nurse and in her large class of students when she was at university there was a tiny number of males. This is because I presume that most guys don't want to become nurses - I know I have no interest in that and neither do any guys I know. So why is there any need to bring in diversity quotas or whatever for 'underrepresented' white male nurses? There isn't.
This is why I believe it's racist bull****, if the majority of people who are interested in a certain area go into university and study in these particular areas and are made up of a certain demographic then why should they be punished?
Then if you get into it you quickly devolve down to semantics of what percent of whom should do what. I'd rather not go 'oh my country is 90% asian, 5% white and 5% black, thus we need 45% asian men, 45% asian women, 2.5% white men, 2.5% white woman, 2.5% black men, and 2.5% black women' It's stupid, disgusting, in bad taste and not in the real world.
That's why I believe the best way is based purely on merit. CV's should be devoid of names and pictures, keep it as fair as possible and so what if the majority of engineers at Apple are white men? Seriously? Who cares? America is mostly white and most engineers are male? Apple should be more than capable to go after and hire only the best, hiring a VP of diversity is not smart and something I think just leads us down a road of more racism and inequality.
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Life in not fair and never will be. You can not control a single persons thoughts or know what's going on in their head. You will NEVER succeed in creating a fair world...never. Look at nature, that will teach you that life is not fair very quickly. A Chinese female that isn't a good programmer after 4 years of college should not be hired at Apple because she is a Chinese female. Race should have NOTHING to do with hiring. Qualifications, references, attitude, and work history should be the ONLY factors. By appointing people to oversee diversity....you're just forcing unqualified people in the door. That is the mission....to purposely fill spots with non-white males regardless of the qualifications. That is the ONLY thing this type of thinking does. If Apple isn't diverse than either there are not enough diverse people interested, there are not enough diverse people with skill, or Apple's hiring managers are racists. That is it. It can only be those three and I doubt they are racists based on my experiences working for them. Maybe in the UK you still have race problems...but the USA is not an inherently racist country, especially in the tech areas. I've worked with some pretty diverse people in my time and I've never seen a need for "diversity" managers.
Also, why is it always the people in the U.K. trying to tell us (in the USA) how to feel and what to do? You act like you understand America.....you didn't understand it in the 1600's and you clearly still don't.
I can assure you the UK is not a racist country atleast from my 25 years of living here. I feel like people are so terrified of being racist they'll go to great lengths to avoid the idea of it.
I completely agree with what you said.
