Flashback - Discrimination

[Here is a posting from June 2011. The original title was Age Discrimination, but the idea is broader.]

Recent news articles presented the fact that the older unemployed are finding it harder to reenter the workforce. In one television interview a man told the reporter that one company directly admitted to him that he had all the qualifications and experience and if he were 20 years younger, the job would be his. This is not only illegal, but a distinct failure in the dimension of critical thinking. It’s illogical and probably a disservice to the owners and customers of the company.

Consider that until recently it was not unusual for a company to have a turnover rate in the area of 20% - much higher in some cases, slightly lower in others depending on the work.  [Today (2019) it might be higher than that considering the number of job openings available to any disgruntled worker.]

At 20% turnover the company is losing it’s entire workforce, on average, every 5 years.  Even a person 55, who expects to retire no earlier than 62, would have a longer than average tenure.  In any economy it's likely that a 55-year-old would remain a loyal employee for those seven or more years until retirement with a company willing to give him or her a chance.

Furthermore some studies have shown that older workers spend more time on the job, with fewer sick days, no lost time due to maternity leave, fewer interruptions with calls from the daycare or school, etc.  Add in the mentoring potential, and arguments in favor of age discrimination become even weaker.  (Here are links to just a couple of articles supporting this position.) Furthermore, older employees have not grown up with all the technology. Those who are successful have shown that they can learn and adapt on the fly.

A company that ignores these realities exhibits behavior based on unwritten policies, past practices and gut feelings. That is both irrational and not in their own best interests – a failure in the dimension of critical thinking.

Reflect on this:  how many other laws are in place, including all other aspects of illegal discrimination, that would be unnecessary if company executives made sound (critical thinking) decisions instead of letting their prejudices short-circuit their brains?  And how many tax dollars could be saved on the development and enforcement of those laws and regulations if people just acted sensibly?

Silicon Valley Diversity II

In previous posts I have mentioned what I call “trigger words.”  These are words that fire off an automatic judgment in our brains as either good or bad.  We have been conditioned to react to these words.  Words like natural, green, organic and sustainable automatically draw a favorable review.  Words and expressions like chemicals, carbon, big business and radiation automatically make us scared or less trusting.  Although everyone learned in school that the entire universe is made of atoms and compounds, also called chemicals, and it’s common sense that nicotine and snake venom are all natural; many people still have the predictable gut reaction to these words.  Advertisers and advocates use these automatic responses to draw us on board, hoping that a trigger word will get us to act before we spend too much time thinking.

Another trigger word is diversity.  When it is thrown into conversations and arguments, it carries an automatically favorable connotation.  Another assumption about it is that you can tell by looking at a group of people whether or not it is a diverse group.  Diversity, we are told, leads to more creativity and better solutions in all cases, sometimes even when the pursuit of diversity supersedes the pursuit of competence.  If these are facts rather than beliefs, I would like to see the data on those studies.

Mohamed El-Erian in his book The Only Game In Town devotes several chapters to the advantages of diversity for companies and governments to meet financial challenges in the near future citing several experts on the subject.  Even after his high praise for the power of diversity he warns:  “This is not to say diversity should be pursued at the expense of competence…it is about getting the right mix.”  But there may be another issue.

A couple of summers ago the big crisis of the month was the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.  There were too many white men and not enough men and women of color, or women in general.  My conclusion was that to reject anyone because of some prejudice against his or her physical appearance, whether conscious or unconscious, is wrong.  Likewise to favor anyone for the same reason is to risk producing a substandard product.  I would rather that the applications on my computer not crash than to feel an inner glow knowing the programmer was hired based on his or her ability to represent some victim class and thereby help even up the score.

With all the fuss at the time, there was no mention that all Americans might soon become underrepresented.  Look at the tables below.  The first shows the proportion of graduate students in several graduate STEM majors in US universities. The second shows the number of US colleges with a majority of international students and their overall proportions in graduate electrical engineering and computer science programs.  These numbers do not reflect well on America’s continued leadership in this area, nor do they proudly represent how well our school system is doing.

Perhaps if the country spent more time educating students and preparing them for difficult courses, and less time worrying about things like diversity, problems would sort themselves out.  We’d have qualified and interested men and women, blacks and whites, and everyone else.

Window Dressing

This point was not inspired by a particular news story.  It is more of an accumulation of observations over a long period – OK, I’ll admit that it’s a pet peeve.

I am getting pretty tired of hearing people presented in the news as a representative of some category, as if that were one of their most important qualities.  Take for example this website that lists firsts in America.  It covers about 70 categories and almost half of them are based on a person’s outward physical characteristics:  first woman, first African American, first Hispanic American.  It includes a reference at the bottom:  for more information see first Asian Americans.  Other lists of firsts are similar.

In some cases we have people who qualify in more than one category.  Where do these lists of firsts leave Loretta Lynch?  She is neither the first African American Attorney General nor the first woman Attorney General; but wait, she is the first African American woman to become Attorney General!  Will we just continue to add categories and combinations?  At some point will it begin to seem pretty silly, like we are stretching to create a way to celebrate a person’s appearance, ancestry or preferences.

Personally, I think this approach detracts from a discussion of the person’s great performance or outstanding job qualifications and leads to many questions.  Why are they bringing this up in the first place?

Is it a celebration of the cracking of another (real or imagined) glass ceiling?  If so does it really show competence on the part of the person or is it merely the voters or appointers attempt to advertise how open-minded they are?  Will the person selected always have a haunting feeling about the objectivity of his or her selection?  (When an African American is nominated for an Academy Award next year will he or she think it is for an outstanding performance or perhaps at least partially as a payback in light of the fuss this year?)

Does this type of publication promote a victim mentality among others in the category - the feeling that it’s about time someone like me got a break because I never have?  As such, does it promote the very limiting belief that my role model has to look like me?  Isn’t it difficult enough these days to find people of excellent character and courage for role models without adding hurdles of race, gender or predilection?

 Does this emphasis instead show progress toward some goal; and if so, what is that goal, and who decides when it has been achieved?  Is it when we have some kind of equal representation?  If so, the concentration on categories and outward characteristics persists, and it will become an exercise in accounting rather than objective judgment.

At some point will we as a nation get over this obsession with background and appearance and just be grateful to get an individual most capable of a competent performance?  Or will we continue to feel the need to celebrate and recognize individuals as icons of a certain category of formerly unaccomplished or unrecognized people?  Again, who has the authority to declare which categories are eligible for distinction (and which are not)?

In the end this is a lot like curb appeal for home sellers.  Make your house look good as people drive by so they will slow down and consider buying it.  Plant red flowers, have cookies baking when potential buyers come in the door.  These are all tricks that fly in the face of critical thinking and practical analysis.  Smart people are not distracted and make decisions based on overall qualities – just as they should with other people.

To me, presentations of this kind (e.g., first Native American lesbian?) bring to mind the idea of the old circus side shows, an arrangement of tents with performers whose primary claims to fame were based on unusual or extreme physical characteristics:  tiny or overly large people, bearded ladies, etc.  I think it will be a healthy thing when we can totally drop the labels.

Food Waste

Building on the idea from last week about some people’s false belief that you shouldn’t eat what you can’t pronounce, another problem is that often people refuse to eat some things they can easily pronounce only because it is not pretty enough.  This is a great example of how lack of perspective causes Americans (and many others) to let the superficial outweigh the substantive aspects of so many decisions.

In early 2013, but not for the first time, CBS featured a story about how almost half of the food grown worldwide ends up plowed back under or thrown away.  The reasons cited for this enormous waste were “inadequate infrastructure as well as irresponsible retailer and consumer behavior.”  The infrastructure problems especially in the area of delivery and spoilage were more common in less developed countries, but “countries like Britain and the United States have relatively efficient farming methods, so the majority of waste occurs on the consumer's end.”

The PBS News Hour followed up last week with this video report that began:  “Much of what is grown on American farms never makes it to market.”  It seems there is plenty of produce going to the landfill because of price fluctuations (driven by supply and demand) but also based on a grading system looking at expected and acceptable appearance.  Almost 40% of food is lost all along the supply chain, but a substantial amount never makes it to market at all.  Food that is equally nutritious is not sent to the stores because it is off-color, slightly the wrong shape or the wrong size.  Instead it is plowed under or is trucked to a landfill after final inspection.  For example, peaches have different levels of appearance standards:  some only acceptable to the premium markets, a second tier sent to less fussy retailers and the rest thrown out.

With these farm rejects, the grocery store leftovers and disposal from our kitchens and restaurants, food is the largest category of material found in landfills.  There it rots, producing methane gas.

Now a few farmers in California have a program to donate it to the local food banks to reduce the waste.  Participation is limited but growing, aided by some states' tax breaks to farmers who donate.  In other parts of the US, creative entrepreneurs follow a model from France where they sell “ugly” fruits and vegetables for less.  “A new grocery store in Boston is on a mission to solve two problems: preventing tons of food from going to waste and offering healthy alternatives to families who might not be able to afford traditional stores” by promoting the unattractive produce at a bargain price.  This seems to be a growing trend, though regular grocers, even some that advertise themselves as “green” and “natural,” continue to apply unnecessarily fussy standards that reflect the preferences of their customers.

Bottom line is that waste is bad.  When any part of that waste can be traced to unreasonable behaviors, like rejecting healthy food because it is not exactly the right size, shape or color, it tells of a weakness in the dimensions of perspective and critical thinking.  It is understood that strengthening behaviors in one aspect of a dimension can often overlap into improving other behavior in the same dimension.  Perhaps that means that losing our prejudice about the color and shape of foods will result in applying the same standards and behavior, of valuing what’s inside instead of rejecting based on appearance, in the area of our interpersonal relationships as well.  That’s something to hope for.