Are you now or have you ever been a diversity statement?
The Chronicle of Higher Education looks closely at the DEI orthodoxy-sniffing at UCLA:
Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.
At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.
But his skepticism wasn’t (and isn’t) about the value of diversity, it was simply about the efficacy of diversity statements. A difference of opinion on that seems like a mind-numbingly stupid reason to petition the university not to hire someone. It’s like firing a carpenter for pointing out that this power saw doesn’t work.
The situation illustrates how diversity statements have become a live wire nationally, with several university systems and states banning their use in hiring over concerns about their legality or potential use as a “political litmus test.”
What is a diversity statement? Google answers:
A diversity statement is a polished, narrative statement, typically 1–2 pages in length, that describes one’s accomplishments, goals, and process to advance excellence in diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging as a teacher and a researcher in higher education.
It’s not at all clear why an opinion on whether such a statement does or does not advance excellence in DEI should be a litmus test for hiring.
[Inbar] told the hosts of Very Bad Wizards [last Tuesday] that his meeting with the diversity-issues committee was one of several “strange things” that happened while he was on campus. At the end of the meeting, in which the committee asked standard questions about his approach to diversity in his teaching and research, Inbar said he had been asked about a December 2018 episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers.
In that episode, Inbar said that diversity statements “sort of seem like administrator virtue-signaling,” questioned how they would be used in a hiring process, and suggested “it’s not clear that they lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups.”
Well, is it clear that they lead to better outcomes?
The committee asked: Was he prepared to defend those comments now?
“To be honest, I wasn’t, because this episode is like, four and a half years old,” Inbar said on Very Bad Wizards. But he explained his current stance: “The very short version is, I think that the goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.” …
The UCLA faculty members “seemed satisfied” with Inbar’s answer, he said. “Then one of them said, kind of almost apologetically, ‘Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?’” Inbar said he didn’t know what he’d say beyond explaining his views, as he had to the committee.
Not good enough! Ostracize that man!
On Tuesday, during the Very Bad Wizards episode, Inbar said the graduate students who opposed his hiring had missed the nuance in his remarks about diversity statements.
“You can pull out selective quotes that make me sound like I’m a rabid anti-diversity-statement person, which I’m really not,” Inbar said. His main concern is with their effectiveness, he said: “What you want is somebody who’s going to be able to teach and to mentor people from diverse backgrounds. But what you get is somebody writing about what they believe, and perhaps what they’ve done to demonstrate that.”
Saying you’re not convinced X works is a long long long way from saying the goal of X is worthless. Really really long.
I’m glad I began teaching before we lost our collective reason. In spite of my school’s diversity policy, they refused to dispense with using student evaluations of teachers on our yearly evaluations, even after studies were presented suggesting they tended to be racist and sexist in outcomes, and that they weren’t effective. While some have disputed the studies, it seems to me that a school devoted to diversity would exercise caution about their use until they were demonstrated to be effective and non-discriminatory.
When you allow the students to dictate hiring policies, you often get bad results. Fun profs aren’t necessarily the best ones. Profs who promote maximum diversity may neglect teaching, or reduce standards in their eagerness for everyone to succeed. There are as many ways for these things to go wrong as there are students in your school. At UCLA, that is a lot…and 60 students out of more than 1000 students studying psychology there doesn’t seem lie a lot to me. Of course, I did have more than 12 hours of statistics and understand things like sample size, representative samples, random samples, etc.
iknklast, exactly! Why universities want to put the most woke inmates in charge of the asylum is beyond me.
This has been a problem ever since James Damore wrote a reasoned and evidence-based memo about diversity ideology, and got accused of being against diversity and thus fired.
And if you question any part of today’s CRT-based “anti-racist” ideology you’ll be accused of being a racist who wants a society that excludes blacks.
And if you question any part of today’s gender ideology you’ll be accused of being a “transphobe” who hates trans people and wants them dead.
The underlying principle is that you’re not allowed to dissent from any part of woke orthodoxy. And the fact that woke orthodoxy keep changing just keeps you on your toes.
This whole cultural moment reveals the delicate fragility of reasonable society. We’re being shown just how little pressure it takes to turn individuals and institutions into tools of an ideology, even when the ideology is incompatible with those individuals’ and institutions’ long-standing ideals and commitments. It’s almost like rationality and principle are illusory.
Isn’t this guy also quite staunchly anti-abortion? Not that I think that’s ground for not getting a job in a university, but I can see people being pretty pissed about that (it should be disqualifying in high office obviously).
I don’t know, is he?
No, he’s pro choice.
It is a while since I read Damore’s memo. I didn’t recall it being especially evidence based and a brief search shows that while some academics and others supported him and said he had the science ‘basically right’, there were plenty who said ‘well, no.’ Wired, from back in 2017*, sum it up pretty well when they say “The memo is a species of discourse peculiar to politically polarized times: cherry-picking scientific evidence to support a preexisting point of view. It’s an exercise not in rational argument but in rhetorical point scoring.” Those in academia who have published on sex based differences say that those differences are minor, that it’s not at all clear how much is biological and how much is cultural; and more to the point the differences in hiring practices in fields like IT suggest a very small influence from innate sex difference, and a very large difference in outright sex discrimination. So, no Cole, I don’t accept that Damore was fired for “memo about diversity ideology, and got accused of being against diversity.”
The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), in it’s memo recommending tossing Damore’s claim (he dropped his claim after the memo was circulated) also emphasised that Google’s memo read to Damore when firing him said
A relevant excerpt from the NLRB memo…
Damore’s name redacted in original.**
*https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/
**https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4380791/NLRB-Advice-Memo-On-James-Damore.pdf
Inbar is pro-choice, but also feels that some institutions should be apolitical, and thus opposes those institutions making public statements based on political ideology. In the case that was talked about, he specifically said some educational group had no business making an argument for the pro-choice position. Inbar is very much a case of people being unable to process nuance.
As for his position on diversity statements and the reaction to it, I’m most reminded of a particular brand of Trumpian. The Q True Believers, the ones who actually think there’s a massive conspiracy at the highest levels of government to promulgate the sexual exploitation of children, and that Trump was playing 4-D chess to unmask and destroy the conspiracy. Trying to talk reasonably with them is nigh-impossible, because they insist that any effort to criticize Trump is actually motivated by an urge to protect this massive pedophile conspiracy. The fact that Trump did NOTHING while in office on the subject, except a single signing statement*, is largely ignored.
*-Total derail follows: Technically, there was one other Trump-era policy that actually did achieve a little something on the issue of child trafficking, but it only would’ve worked if it’d been implemented with some level of compassion, which of course he was incapable of. A program was instituted at the border where Immigration officials could, if they expected something was wrong, demand that a child and ostensibly related adult take DNA tests to confirm they were related. In about 30% of cases where they did the test, they discovered that the child was not related to the supposed adult family member.
Of course, they then decided that the best solution for these kids was to send them back to the country where they’d been placed in a position to be trafficked in the first place, so… so much for compassion.
He’s pro-choice? I blame Jesse Signal then for misinformation…
Jesse has corrected himself
CV fluff for academics.
@Rob:
You quote those who criticised Damore (yes, you can find lots of them), but you don’t give any quote from the memo itself showing that it merits condemnation, nor do you cite any substantive rebuttal of any part. That is indeed how that controversy proceeded.
So saying that men have a far higher tendency to aggression and sexual assault, and thus should not be allowed to encroach on women’s single-sex spaces such as toilets, is unacceptable and should get you fired?
And saying that, in general, males are bigger, stronger and faster, and that it is unfair if they’re allowed in women’s sport, is unacceptable and should get you fired?
In the past there have been strands of feminism that have argued for this “men and women are identical in all respects” doctrine, but it’s utterly absurd.
A puberty steeped in testosterone produces a body that is different from one produced by a puberty steeped in oestrogen. It also produces systematic, on-average differences in the brain. The 30-fold greater prevalence of aggression and sexual assault among males is one blatant example.
Which is not saying that all men are sexual aggressors any more than it’s saying that all men can swim or cycle faster than all women. Obviously the distributions overlap, but the differences between the distributions are big and real.
I don’t agree. And I think I could do a pretty good evidence-citing job of arguing against this.
Assessing all the evidence today, it seems that there’s a tendency for STEM-capable women to head for fields such as life sciences, medicine and veterinary science, and to be less interested in computer coding or engineering, resulting in sex imbalances in such fields.
(Though, again, that is about group means, while individual preferences in both groups span the full range.)
At the very least, that idea is defendable on the evidence and has not been refuted. At the least, since this does actually matter for policy, people should be allowed to openly discuss this issue without fear of getting sacked.
So then there should be further discussion, right?, not the sacking and shutting down of people on one side of that discussion?
And can you really trust a parade of academics saying Damore got it wrong, in an environment where anyone not saying that is liable to get ostracised?
There’s a reason that, of today’s 100 top chess players, zero are women (the top 3 women today are rated 123rd, 320th and 348th). And partly that’s because women tend not to see the attraction of spending much of ones life memorising chess openings and analysing other people’s games, multiple hours a day, in what is, after all, an utterly arbitrary and unimportant game, simply to be better at it than others. But that’s the sort of thing that males do.
I don’t think we should have a taboo on discussing systematic differences in male-versus-female psychology, any more than we should have a taboo on discussing systematic differences in male-versus-female physiology.
Rather than going by what WIRED said about it, why don’t you go and re-read Damore’s memo and tell us what is so bad about it that it merits instant firing?
@ 10 and 11 – Ohhh right, Singal’s typo; I’d forgotten about that. Dang, I wonder how many people now think Inbar is anti-abortion because Jesse Singal made a typo.
Just gonna note that “evidence-based” and “correct” are not synonyms. One cannot show that something isn’t evidence-based by showing that it’s false. One can draw incorrect inferences from accurately collated data. One can come to true conclusions from nonsense.
Let’s just stick to facts shall we Coel? You said…
Google said…
The NLRB memo recommending his case be tossed unless he withdrew it (which he promptly did) said…
So your statement is not supported on the facts, and the rest of what you say is just blah, blah, blah, smoke, mirrors, confusion, and squirrels.
You say I didn’t quote academics who said he had it right, but I acknowledged that there were those who said he had. You say I didn’t quote specific criticisms of his memo, but then quote bits of my post where I did in fact summarise those concerns and views. You say I should read his memo, but my firs sentence makes clear I have read his memo. Reading comprehension. How does it work?
You say you could do a good evidence based job of rebutting some academics work in the area. fine. Get your work published through a peer reviewed Journal and I’ll be keen to read it. Incoherent self-serving screeds, not so much.From what I’ve read biological differences between men and women may have a small influence on people fitting into certain tasks. The critical word being small. Socialisation has a bigger role. Workplace and industry culture have a bigger role again. The IT and Gaming industry and culture is overwhelmingly dudebro in nature and with a strong streak of sexism. That is what drives a lot of women and girls out/away from it. It doesn’t need to be that way, and should not be. It’s much the same as the way women were treated in many other careers, professions, and workplaces in times gone by. Suppress the worst of that culture, wherever it is, and women do just fine, because biological differences in aptitude are small.
@Rob:
No, I did not say that.
And I quoted that specific bit in my reply. Go and look, it’s there.
Well no, I said you “don’t give any quote from the memo itself showing that it merits condemnation, nor do you cite any substantive rebuttal of any part.”
But that’s not the same is it? You’ve still not given any substantive rebuttal of any part of it.
No, the word I used was “re-read”. Go and look, it’s there.
A reply to that writes itself, doesn’t it?
No, I didn’t actually. What I said I could do a good job of rebutting is a claim by *you*, where you make assertions about what academics have said. I don’t agree that your claim is a fair summary of the literature on this.
I need merely cite already-published studies by academics in the field to rebut your claim.
This is just empty claims, backed up by no citations. Damore did a way better job than you, citing lots of literature.
And you’ve still not pointed to any actual thing he actually said that merited him being fired. (But then criticism of the Damore memo has always been like that.)
If you do think that the different men/women ratios in roles such as primary-school teaching and nursing, versus, say, construction work, being a lumberjack and computer coding, are all about socialisation and very little to do with biological differences, then, well, I think you’re wrong.
At the very least, people shouldn’t be fired for arguing the case.
It would help things immensly if we were looking at this in an environment where socialization was neutral, but we’re not. I think it’s far too early to rule out socialization. Horribly naive in fact. Even without the subtle (and not so subtle) coaching and influence of even the most well-meaning and enlightened parents, there’s still the rest of the world to deal with outside the small bubble of progressive parenting. The classroom, the schoolyard, the shopping mall, the internet, all have their lessons to pass on, some overt, others less so. You can’t prevent children from seeing and absorbing these influences, however good and non-sexist a parent you are. You can teach your kids how to swim, but they’re still going to get wet. The values, attitudes, and expectations are out there, and will have to be countered and reacted to; even if resisted successfully, it’s still a strain, a burden and yes, an influence all the same. It’s all “socialization,” even if you do not adopt the unacceptable mores in which you find yourself immersed. It’s still a current you have to swim against, one that requires effort, focus, and energy that could have been directed elsewhere had they not been pushing against you. Sure struggle can “build character,” but needless, pointless, bloody-minded idiocy can be a fucking drain, too. The current is wide, and it is constant, and it is strong. Pink Lego is is not value neutral. It’s a physical manifestation of the cultures demands and expectations, coded into a toy. But sure, let’s just dismiss socialization as a factor that has an impact on the sex ratios in jobs and careers.
Women haven’t caught up with men in so many ways in the “developed world” and if you look at the situation from a global perspective, things are even more tenuous for women. Until women get equal pay, equal access to and possession of property and wealth, reproductive choice, supportive childcare, and girls get equal access and provision for education, nobody will be able to run the experiment. We still have cultures where some adults would rather let girls die rather than escape a burning building without modestly covering their heads, that would kill their own daughters if they “dishonour” their families, that will let women die before aborting a doomed fetus, where the police put more effort into prosecuting tweets and limericks than rape. What messages does this send to girls and women in these socities? When do we level this playing field? How free are women in any of these cultures? Maybe we should work out this kind of life and death calculus before we decide that we can safely disregard the influence of socialization in a woman’s decision to become a teacher rather than a lumberjack?
But wait, ther’s more. now women are having to fight a rearguard action against the encroachments of trans activists before they’ve achieved parity with men generally. Another current to fight against, another drain on time energy, and attention. The very word “women” has been declared up for grabs by men claiming it as their own and huge swathes of government, media, and industry are helping them. Children are lured into life long medicalization, stunted development and sterility, again with the enabling hand of powerful, influencial institutions paving the way. Telling kids they can change sex is “socialization” too. Too many kids, and their parents are falling for these blatant lies before we’ve even stopped telling the more subtle and pervasive lies of sexist, patriarchal sex roles that start with pink or blue baby booties. We haven’t acheived justice yet, but are all too eager to swallow madness. These are sex roles with a vengeance. Again, girls are learning lessons in real time about their worth and value as human beings from school boards, universities, sporting bodies, the media and more, who all allow and encourage male invasion of female sports and facilities. It’s a wonder there aren’t more girls trying to flee femaleness when they can see that their rights are so easily violated and cast aside in the interests of male feelings. And if they dare to say “No?” Welcome to pariahhood, Karen. Who wouldn’t rather be special and lionized than worthless and vilified? Not everyone has the strength to fight this kind of battle, to swim against this current. Children shouldn’t have to. But sure Coel, let’s pretend that we can just say that it’s all down to underlying, biological, sex-based preferences, and stop worrying about the the wrongheaded belief that occupational outcomes have anything at all to do with the influence of the cultures that kids are brought up in.
Rereading my post above, I’d like to apologize in advance to Coel for my rhetorical excess in ascribing to him an all or nothing, either/or nature/nurture argument which he has not. I still think he’s far too dismissive of cultural influence, and I think we’re a lot farther from having any sort of control group than he thinks.
YnNB, I think that is well stated. Socialisation works in all sorts of weird and interactive ways. Remember the satanic panic? A couple of well publicised (and likely misguided) accusations of male teachers abusing kids resulted in a distinct flight of males from the pre-school and primary-school sectors in New Zealand. That created an even more marked gender imbalance than previous and has a legacy that these are now seen as female dominated sectors that are less acceptable to men. Similarly, I’ve seen sub-disciplines in STEM and Law where women graduates have started to dominate incoming cohorts, and within a decade or so the industry has also started to see it’s remuneration slide compared to similar sub-disciplines.The differences are not wholly explained by career breaks for child raising.
For all its place in other circumstances I don’t think socialization explains the extreme lack of women in wargaming… Gross nerds and pinup figures (which are considerably rarer these days) are utterly inadequate to explain it. This cannot extensively apply to coding.
@Your Names not Bruce?
Thanks, I appreciate that. As you say, arguing for a strong influence of underlying biology does not discount equally strong influences from socialisation.
[It’s also worth pointing out that socialisation can also be heavily influenced by biology, especially where it is common across most cultures. Boy play tends to be more aggressive/competitive than girl play across human cultures, and pretty clearly has a biological underpinning.]
Scandinavia these days is pretty egalitarian with women given open opportunities to make their life choices as they see fit. They are half the workforce and make up more than half of those getting degrees.
But male/female ratios for roles such as lumberjack and manual worker on a construction site are not converging towards 50:50, they’re not even heading that way slowly and gradually. They are hugely unequal (98:2) and not budging.
The problem with this conversation is that people think that the sex ratio in any role “ought to be” 50:50. That’s the morally virtuous ratio that a society “should” be heading towards. Thus The Guardian can declare: “Gender diversity in the construction industry is shockingly poor”. But what actually is wrong if women tend to prefer to be primary-school teachers rather than construction-site workers?
These things are only a problem if the individual is constrained by the stereotype, disallowed or discouraged from pursuing what interests them.
We should care about equal opportunities but not care much about outcomes. Men and women are actually different in their typical choices and attitudes (though of course individual preferences span the full range), and a just and equal society will therefore have markedly uneven sex ratios is different roles. There’s nothing wrong with that.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Are you now or have you ever been a diversity […]
No control group is necessary to point out flawed assumptions. For example, it’s incorrect to assume that all preferences, attitudes, and behaviors are shaped by biology. By the same token, it’s incorrect to assume that all preferences, attitudes, and behaviors are shaped by society. That in mind, it’s also incorrect to assume that the natural or optimal distribution of preferences, attitudes, and behaviors is equal between the sexes. Rather, we grant that the natural ratio could be anything.
It’s not only incorrect to assume a 50/50 split; it demands saying that women’s values are wrong. When we see that fewer women express a desire to enter a particular field than do men, we’re forced to say that women are wrong to favor other fields and that they should have other desires. That is, women ought want to have other wants. Saying that should give us pause, because it’s exactly the premise of patriarchal socialization. Ah, you might say, but we are virtuous, and we know what women truly ought to ought want to want.
Once you get into second order wants and “oughts”, ethics gets intractably messy, as many normative judgements don’t depend on justification. Our ability to hold the concepts in our heads breaks down. I’m not even sure what it means that we ought to ought to do something. If we ought ought, then surely we simply ought, but if we don’t ought what we ought ought, then we ought not ought what we ought and ought ought what we not ought, but … And so on, without yet even introducing any wants.
Dammit. Patriarchal, not Patrick. What the bleeding hell?
Uh oh, patrickphobia.
@17 ‘construction work, being a lumberjack and computer coding’
Funny you should pick that last one.
https://programmedinequality.com/