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I just first want to say kudos for having a well reasoned point that you're defending with logic, patiently and consistently, with respect for all.

That's rare on the Internet, and Lemmy in particular, which is severely prone to the group generally deciding on one "right" position and mercilessly punishing dissent.

All that said, I think I broadly agree with you, and further, think that all of this DEI stuff is essentially "affirmative action for a new generation".

It's so hard to nail it down and defend it because (it seems) proponents don't like to explain so much of how it works (and how it works differently from not incorporating it), and rather tend to answer with what it accomplishes. In theory at least.

The problem, of course, being that this subtly shifts the criticism and defense from DEI itself to its goals.

You can say "DEI means that the company is better by getting the best employees and also helps historically disadvantaged demographics get better jobs" without at all describing how that happens, and suddenly disagreeing on the merits of DEI gets misconstrued as "companies should only hire white guys and maintain the status quo", at which point they're more easily targeted with ad hominem and lumped together with true bigots and racists.

Regarding the issue itself, from everything I've seen, DEI should be less "this is an initiative we're doing and have a team on it and track it's metrics" and more just, "We'll hire the best person for the job."

Because ultimately, anything other than "We'll hire the best person for the job." means, by definition, "We'll pass on the best person based on their, or the other candidates' race, gender, religion, etc."

If that means an overwhelmingly white male workplace, that's a social indicator, not a problem for the company to fix. Also, hypothetically, what's the desired end goal in terms of workplace diversity? To match the local area as closely as possible? If so, what happens when the most qualified candidates happen to be overwhelmingly from a minority? Are they going to start hiring less qualified white guys to balance it out? They shouldn't. But they also shouldn't hire a less qualified woman just because they only have one other woman in the whole building.

Ultimately, the only extent I could see a DEI policy actually having merit and being worth talking about would be something sort of like the Rooney Rule. A company saying, "For any position we post, we're committed to interviewing at least X candidates from historically underrepresented minority demographics. We may still end up hiring a white guy...but this will ensure that we don't get so used to seeing nothing but white guys that we forget to look elsewhere."