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A personal anecdote relevant to this point: at a previous temp job, I was responsible for helping to organise the interviews to find my eventual full-time replacement, and one of the interview questions was about the candidate's experiences with diversity. (brief thread)
It was a question I'd encountered a few times before in job contexts, but on this occasion, as I was an administrative front of house, I ended up meeting all the job candidates and copying their documents - and almost all of them had brought their passports as ID.
From memory, there were about ten candidates, only two of whom were born in the country where we were working. And I realised, as these people all came and went for their interviews, how skewed towards white people most diversity questions are.
When you ask a job candidate something like, "How have you helped to foster diversity in the workplace?" the framing assumes diversity is an *external quality*. It's meant for white/straight people to explain their allyship, not for marginalised people to reply, "By being there."
Which, somewhat ironically, makes it a much harder question for diverse candidates to answer in the expected fashion. For instance, if their advocacy for diversity has related *to their own past mistreatment by employers*, this is far more fraught at interview than allyship.
Merely existing as a diverse person in a workspace is not considered as noble or good as being an ally who champions such people, or who can mouth lip-service about having done so in an interview whose questions are framed to best advantage such answers.
Particularly for low-level jobs like this one was , the question itself becomes a kind of reverse dogwhistle derived from org-wide box-checking: at best, they're asking if the candidate is an obvious bigot, and at worst, they're gatekeeping for your knowledge of jargon -
- which, again ironically, is much more likely to trip up marginalised candidates for whom English is a second language, who have less formal education, who are new to officework, or who come from lower-class backgrounds.
In this way, asking candidates about their commitment to diversity becomes a purely performative act: a way for interviewers to put the burden of proving diversity on candidates so that they don't have to question their own assumptions and biases about who "fits the job".
When I had this realisation at the time, I expressed it to my (white, straight) manager in the context of how diverse the candidates had been. She looked briefly appalled, and noted that they'd hired one of the only two white, native English speakers.
This isn't to say the person they hired wasn't competent - I wasn't privy to the interviews themselves, so I can't speak to that aspect of things. I also think it's important that my manager acknowledged the problem once I pointed it out, however belatedly.
But, yeah: we need to collectively rethink those 'commitment to diversity' questions, because in so many contexts, they're premised on diversity as something the candidate should *encourage* but not *possess*, which is antithetical to the desired outcome.
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