On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <f...@cisco.com> wrote:> > Yes, diversity is a good thing, and I'm all for it. However, I don't think it > is a > fundamental goal; the fundamental goal is (as Jari said) to get the best > people for the job from the available talent pool. I don't know that > political correctness automatically helps there. >
So, I said this once before on a previous thread, but I still believe that this analysis is wrong. From an organiational perspective, the aim of fostering diversity isn't "political correctness", it's enabling a larger pool of candidates. Here's how I put this before: "I think the analysis here is subtly wrong. If you have two candidates who can clearly do the job, it seems to imply that you should always still stack rank them and pick the higher ranked. But that's a very local optimization. Efforts to increase to diversity are a very different optimization--by making more visible that opportunities are present for all, these initiatives attempt to increase the pool of talent over time. If people who would previously have left a field stay or folks who had not thought of entering a field do so, that field wins. The scale of that win can be the field of "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math" or it can be "working group leadership" or "the IETF". But a bigger pool of talent to draw from is a big win for almost any sized field." Note that this is true for many different kinds of diversity--regional, gender, and company origin all can benefit from efforts to improve the overall pool size of candidates. It's also true long before we get to the point of selecting I* folks--it is just as true for working group chairs and other positions. By picking competent candidates from a variety of backgrounds, we encourage participation by those with those backgrounds; that can be more important than a strict stack rack among the competent candidates. Just my personal two cents, Ted Hardie
