How about we hire and promote people who are correct for the job, regardless of their gender or race?
As long as you’re on board with systemic racism, sure. DEI programs were created to address historic discrimination against minorities.
I would argue that if your goal is to fix systemic racism, a much more effective approach would be to target the pipeline problem early on by focusing on improving education systems in poor/racial minority communities. Their difficulties in competing later on in life stem directly (and I would argue most strenuously) from disadvantages they experience early on. If companies see improvements in the resumes of racial minorities, they will naturally be more likely to hire them; I would argue that their greed for having the best employees will override the racial biases of White CEOs and HR managers.
Better resumes are good, but there are plenty of studies showing bias towards the name alone on a resume and that a white-sounding name gets more bites than names more associated with a minority race.
People have biases, conscious or not. Did you know that women’s positions in orchestras increased greatly after switching to blind auditions? And I can’t find a legit source in 2 min of searching, but there’s also been indication that the sound of high heels affects hiring outcomes even in blind auditions.
Example studies on names and hiring outcomes: 2004, 2023, 2024 (even the “best” companies still showed a 3% bias towards white candidates vs 24% for the worst), 2016
So yeah, there are a fuckton of steps to addressing systemic racism and starting early in the process is a critical step. But the narrative that an equivalent resume is all that’s needed to close the gap is false and dangerous.
