To those who argue for hiring based on "merit"

If you think DEI is silly and companies should just hire based on merit: I understand. But please take a few minutes to consider another perspective.

I'm going to take a moment to engage in good faith with the anti-DEI crowd, because I believe there are sincere, well-meaning people who think the question is "should we hire based on merit, or hire for diversity?", and who think the answer is therefore simple. If that's you, please take a moment with me to try to consider another perspective.

Fundamentally: That is not the question at hand. The Information's Jessica Lessin put it well yesterday in Why Women are Disappearing from Tech: "You don’t have to lower your bar to attract female talent. But you do have to work harder."

Let's take an example. Imagine there are two candidates for a software job - we'll call them A and B.

Candidate A has been coding their whole life. Growing up, they went from playing with Legos to building Lego robots to writing small programs on their TI-89 calculator. Their parents and teachers recognized and encouraged their aptitude. As a teenager, a friend of the family hired them to build a website. They went to a top-tier college and studied computer science. Due to family connections and past experience, they did a few summer internships.

Candidate B spent their childhood sketching and writing poetry. But they liked math, too, and performed well at it, even in the face of teachers saying that people like them weren't good at it. Eventually, they took a high school computer science class and excelled at it. They also studied CS in college. though they struggled to get work in their early years of school. However, between their junior and senior year they did an internship at the same company Candidate A did, and performed just as well.

Which of these candidates is the better hire? In their most recent work, they performed equally. Candidate A has more experience, but arguably, Candidate B reaching the same job faster and with less support shows determination and quick growth. They’ve had different opportunities, so it’s impossible to tell who has more fundamental aptitude - assuming that’s even a thing.

However, in the reality we live in, Candidate A has a more traditional story, a stronger resume and a stronger network, so they are much, much more likely to be hired. Candidate B might not even get an interview.

If we had a magic scrying ball that could quickly give an objective rating of someone's aptitude for a job, then you could argue for pure hiring based on merit. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where hiring operates on a biased sample set and makes decisions based on incomplete information that is in itself biased by other selection processes. This is a hard problem to solve, but that's what DEI efforts attempt to do - by focusing on recognizing a diversity of experiences, providing equal access to opportunities, and not excluding people just because they don't match a familiar pattern. Not even attempting to do that just perpetuates biases further.

Finally, please consider the implications that claiming a meritocracy has in the face of the state of the industry. Only around 10% of senior technical leadership positions are held by women, and women-founded companies only get around 2% of VC funding. Why? Do you think women are fundamentally that much worse at the skills needed for those positions?

(Evidence does not suggest this is the case. If you encounter advocates for DEI getting furious when you innocently suggest that companies should just hire based on merit, consider how insulted you would be if someone implied that the issue is simply that people like you are dramatically worse at your job.)

Or, is it more likely that examples like the ones I described above are systemic, and that the effects compound over time? There are going to be plenty of people like Candidate B who don’t get the job, and who continue to fall behind Candidate A as they get further in their career. And there are plenty of people who didn't even get that far, for reasons that have nothing to do with fundamental aptitude - who were discouraged at a young age, who didn't have the resources for the same education, or who had an experience bad enough to put them off it entirely. And of course, there will be people who decide the whole thing just isn't worth it, perhaps partially due to dealing every day with people who think they are fundamentally bad at their job.

I do understand the appeal of the meritocracy argument. It would be nice if there was a simple solution that was clearly fair to everyone. Unfortunately, reality is more messy than that. It would be nice if more of the smart people in the world could agree on the problem, so we can continue working on effective solutions.