This is probably illegal…but it’s happened

[5.56Operator]

Companies also cannot take race-motivated actions to maintain a demographically 'balanced' workforce." — Commissioner at Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Andrea R. Lucas in Reuters, June 29, 2023

"An unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice." — 42 USC § 2000e–2(m) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

 

[5.56Operator]

Article is hidden behind a paywall, but I’ll copy paste it in bits and pieces:

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, tech companies promised to hire more minorities. One company that claims to help them do it is Gem, and although you might not have heard of it, you’ve probably heard of some of its 1,200-plus clients: Reddit, Dropbox, Robinhood, Discord, Zillow, Stripe, Affirm, and Grammarly, just to name a few. Although Gem’s software is primarily used for things like non-race- and gender-based recruiting, payroll, and benefits management, John, (not his real name) — who worked for Gem as a sales development representative through a B2B outsourcing firm from March to July of 2021, told us that the prospective corporate clients he talked to were most interested in Gem’s “diversity enhancing” capabilities. Essentially, they had race- and gender-based hiring quotas and wanted to use Gem’s software to meet them. He said one prospective client, an executive at the Bay Area-based AI and robotics research arm of one of the world’s leading car manufacturers, told him explicitly: “I need more black candidates this month.”

 

[5.56Operator]

According to its website, Gem’s software allows recruiters to track “gender and race/ethnicity throughout the entire hiring funnel.” Essentially, it appears to include a comprehensive race and gender tracking system designed to help companies fill race- and gender-based quotas with precision. For example, in a 2021 diversity webinar posted on YouTube, a Gem employee seemed to explain how the software could show how many candidates a company would need to reach out to if it had three engineering positions open, but didn’t want to hire men for them (in her words: “wanted to give women a chance”). In the same video, she demonstrated how to break down each stage in the hiring funnel by race, and explained (but did not show, probably for privacy reasons) how companies could further track how their recruiters’ own efforts break down along the lines of the company’s race- and gender-based hiring quotas, so that the company may “hold them accountable.”

 

[5.56Operator]

All this requires a lot of data. According to a recent LinkedIn post by Gem founder Steve Bartel, this data can come from three sources:

• Self-ID: the demographic data collection on job applications
• Manual override: the recruiter reports your race and gender based on visual cues such as your LinkedIn profile picture
• Predicted: Gem’s proprietary AI determines a candidate's race and gender based on machine learning (Bartel notes this is only for aggregate/anonymized use, meaning that the UI doesn’t allow recruiters to see which race was assigned to individual candidates)

John told me that, of Gem’s features, its race- and gender-identifying AI was the biggest selling point. “A key part of the pitch was to tell clients that Gem uses AI and machine learning to determine race and gender.” (This is especially ironic, given the panic about “racist AI” that has consumed every discussion about artificial intelligence for years.)

“One thing that cracked me up was that recruiting/DEI buyers at companies would ask, ‘Is this legal?’” John told me. “Not because they were offended by how obviously racist the software was — they loved what they saw. The concern was pushback from their legal team.” He said this question was asked so frequently that Gem’s Chief Legal Counsel had a prewritten response to the question that would be passed along to clients who asked.

 

[5.56Operator]

The "Diversity Recruiting" section of Gem’s website offers a slate of what it calls “Case Studies” — essentially customer testimonials — where companies explain how they used Gem to hire based on race and gender.

In a case study for payroll firm Gusto, Gem seems to indicate the company used its “Candidate Rediscovery” tool to hire based on candidates’ race and gender. In Gem’s language, Gusto used the tool to “unearth talent who is vetted — and diverse — ultimately reducing time-to-hire.” In other words, companies could use Gem’s software to find people with specific racial and gender-based characteristics that meet the position’s requirements and hire them quickly, while weeding out similarly qualified candidates who are, presumably, white or male or both.

In a case study about the telecommunications company Twilio, Gem seems to describe how one of its senior recruiters was able to avoid hiring men with their tool:

Gem’s metrics have also helped [the recruiter] zero in on stages in the interview process where the team is falling short on equitable gender hiring. “For one division, we intuited that we were hiring more women than the average team—and we were! We were prepared to roll off our passive sourcing efforts for that division, but I don’t like to make a move without looking at all the data first. That’s where Gem came through.” [The recruiter] dug through the data in more detail and discovered that the proportion of male candidates was actually increasing quarter over quarter—so much so that, by Q3, they would have made significantly more male than female hires. “If we hadn’t had access to that data, we wouldn’t have been able to identify that trend and strategize on how to allocate our resources properly.”

 

[5.56Operator]

Europe is getting in on the fun as well. I’m just glad I’m retired military and work a blue collar job where we tend to avoid this woke bullshit. Thanks for listening to my TedTalk

 

[Ric-san]

Sounds like DEI run amok…

 

[Longtooth]

Sounds like DEI run amok…

It's in all the white collar jobs.

 

[no woryz]

Where y’all been??? This has been happening for 30 years… I was told in 1990 that I couldn’t have a job because I was white…

 

[IronBeard]

TLDR. DEI is discrimination, but for all the right reasons, so it's really not. Am I close?

 

[IronBeard]

Where y’all been??? This has been happening for 30 years… I was told in 1990 that I couldn’t have a job because I was white…

You are not alone. In another state, and about that time, I had the number 1 test score for the state police exam, and was number 2 for all time in the state for the fitness test, and was still told by a career trooper, none of that would matter if I applied to the academy. They had been directed to hire preferentially, and I was not part of the preferred group.

 

[Carl]

Apathy has a price, but hey we got ours right?

 

[Carl]

Is the DEI agenda the final solution for Americas whiteness problem? Or is it just my white fragility talking?

 

[Welldoya]

Where y’all been??? This has been happening for 30 years… I was told in 1990 that I couldn’t have a job because I was white…

Don’t feel bad Clint. I wasn’t chosen for two jobs that I was highly (over) qualified for due to the “diversity” candidate being chosen.
One couldn’t handle the job and only lasted a month.
HR called me and asked if I would like to interview again. I told them no, I’m done playing their game.