"The average impact of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is zero and some evidence suggests that the impact can become negative if the training is mandated."
—Roland Fryer (Harvard, Econ) 🧵
2/
"'Statistical Snapshots,' which describe how employee outcomes differ by demographic, are another popular tool. These #s cannot provide proof of bias. Simple averages often mislead; importantly, crafting strategies based on misleading data often does more harm than good."
3/
"Our intuition for how to decrease race and gender disparities in the workplace has failed us for decades. It’s time to stop guessing and start using the scientific method. Here is a three-step approach that can turn earnest intentions into good science."
4/
(1) "Understand disparities: For decades, social scientists have shown that raw gaps in employment outcomes like hiring or wages misstate the amount of actual bias in an organization. This data omits many factors that are key to personnel decisions...
5/
"One of the most important developments in the study of racial inequality has been the quantification of the importance of pre-market skills in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between Black and white workers. In 2010...
6/
"...using data on 1000s of individuals in their 40s, I estimated Black men earn 39.4% less than white men & Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. Accounting for 1 variable–educational achievement in teen yrs––reduced that difference to 10.9% (72% reduction) for men...
7/
"...and revealed that Black women earn 12.7% more than white women, on average.
Neal & Johnson in 1996: 'While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus...
8/
"...on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill.'
I worked w/ hospitals determined to rid their organization of gender bias. The basic facts were startling: Women earned 33% less than men when they were hired and their wages increased less than men."
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"Yet, accounting for basic demographic variables known about individuals prior to hiring, these differences decreased by 74%. A problem remained, but it was an order of magnitude smaller than the unadjusted numbers implied."
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(2) "Find the root causes of bias: Social scientists categorize bias into 3 flavors: preference, information, & structural. Preference bias is old-fashioned bigotry. If co. A prefers group W over group B then they will hire & promote them more even if similarly qualified."
11/
"Information bias arises when employers have imperfect information about workers’ potential productivity and use observable proxies, like gender or race, to make inferences (gender stereotypes are a classic example)."
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"Structural bias occurs when companies institute practices, formally or informally, that have a disparate impact on particular groups, even when the underlying practices are themselves group blind. Employee referral programs can fall into this category."
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"With the aforementioned hospitals, the data pointed to a structural bias in scheduling. Women & men who worked the same number of hours earned exactly the same wage, but men worked more hours due to how the company assigned schedules, not women’s desire to work less."
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"This is the key step missing in every DEI initiative I have seen: a rigorous, data-driven assessment of root causes that drives the search for effective solutions. In other aspects of life, we would not fathom prescribing a treatment without knowing the underlying cause."
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(3) "Evaluate: We must evaluate what works & what doesn't. The cardiac test–you 'feel it in your heart'–is not enough. Once we know where potential biases exist, determine what caused them, & curate a set of solutions to test, we must evaluate what’s working and what’s not."
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"Solutions that yield measurable results can be [put] into company policy, those that don't, discarded. In the case of the hospitals, once a small change was made to the structure of their scheduling, gender differences were reduced. The solution was hidden in plain data."
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"More corporate leaders should be trying to solve diversity challenges in the same way they solve problems in every other aspect of their business: through intelligent use of data, rigorous hypothesis testing, and honest inference about what is working."
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"This will seem heretical to some—but it barely scratches the surface of what's possible with a data-first approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion."
"In December of 2022, I published on our university library website a research guide consisting of a bibliography of black writers with heterodox views. By May of 2023, five months later, I had been labeled a racist, placed on administrative leave, and targeted for firing."
3)
"The bibliography was created and compiled by folks at an organization called Free Black Thought whose mission is, in their own words, to represent the rich diversity of black thought beyond the relatively narrow spectrum of views promoted by mainstream outlets. Although their website contains a variety of resources, my librarian’s eye was immediately drawn to their bibliography, which they named the Compendium of Free Black Thought (). They presented it as an open access work and encouraged folks to use it as they see fit.bit.ly/36FTtDQ
"How could it be that the university is zealous about policing pronouns but blasé about the advocacy of hateful violence?"
Roland Fryer's latest for the WSJ, "Anti-Israel Protests and the ‘Signaling’ Problem," reproduced here in full. 🧵
2)
"The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores. Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as 'violence.' One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone 'misgender' someone else.
3)
"Definitions of 'harmful' speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism. In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers. Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.
"I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:
1. There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.
2. If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.
🧵
2)
"The first principle sometimes takes the 'weak' to mean 'whoever has the least power,' and sometimes 'whoever suffers most,' but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals...
3)
"t is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. Young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.
The Wide Awakes was a youth "marching club" formed in 1860 to support Abe Lincoln.
Slave-owners feared them: "One–half million of men uniformed and drilled, and the purpose of their org to sweep the country in which I live with fire and sword."
2)
Wide Awakes—the ORIGINAL original "woke":
Our cause is Abolition,
And for the Nigger we do cry;
For we do love the Nigger,
And will love him till we die.
'Tis honest Abe and Hamlin,
We want to rule our nation,
And for the Nigger we do claim
Equality of station.
"In February, 1860. Cassius M. Clay [an abolitionist] spoke in Hartford, Connecticut. A few ardent young Republicans accompanied him as a kind of body-guard, and to save their garments from the dripping of the torches, a few of them wore improvised capes of black glazed cambric. The uniforms attracted so much attention that a campaign club-formed in Hartford soon after adopted it. This club called itself the 'Wide-Awakes'."
"By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom."
—Randall Kennedy (Harvard Law) 🧵
2)
"DEI statements will essentially constitute pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else."
3)
"Playing ball entails affirming that the DEI bureaucracy is a good thing and asking no questions that challenge it, all the while making sure to use in one’s attestations the easy-to-parody DEI lingo. It does not take much discernment to see, moreover, that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions.
"Tonight, I learned the name of Alderman would be removed from Alderman Library. I became a student scholar at Alderman Library. ... This is not the first time a part of me, my cherished memories, have been 'disrupted' by ideologues.
—Winkfield Twyman 🧵
2)
"When you change parts of my memory, you are sending a message to my generation. You are signaling the awesome positive race stories of the 1970s and 1980s are less important than dishonoring 18th century slaveholding families and segregationists before the Civil Rights Era.
3)
"For the Soviets, changing the names of places and landmarks and memories was about a restart of history. It was a brute force show of propaganda. Names more befitting ideology were slapped onto the side of buildings. The aim was to influence local identity, create a unifying identity and impose a totalitarian regime."