Quote Originally Posted by Trigger View Post
The quest to represent everyone equally will have a negative effect on the future for all of us.

By actively looking to balance out race in the workplace, or hiring a certain gender here or someone who represents lgbt there then you are overlooking other, possibly more skilled people based on their gender, race, sexuality. Just seems odd.

Just be open for everyone and hire who the best person is. If that's 5 old white guys or 6 black lesbians then so be it.
But for recruitment, I think there's some logic. How do you become the "best person" for the job? By getting experience doing it.

We're hard wired to feel more affinity with those similar to us, be it age, gender, nationality, race. It's subconscious. If a company has three black lesbians on their recruitment panel and they have five new graduates with the same degree and no experience, they are more likely to feel affinity with the black lesbian and hire her. Five years later and she's on the panel and the pattern repeats itself.

It doesn't mean it's happening for racist reasons. People just need help to avoid it. I've worked in county councils in the UK which were 95% white and in no way representative of the towns they were in, and I've worked abroad where I was a minority and missed out on jobs because of it. I doubt any of it happened because of a conscious agenda.

There's two sides of course, you can go too far to avoid negative discrimination and get positive discrimination. It's not easy, but 'best person for the job' is also something that is usually not obvious.