harvard recommends discrimination against white men cause correlation means causation

Lupercus64 · 2020-05-13T05:22:03+00:00

I can't say I agree with your title, the article does seem to suggest that lay off's during a crisis should take race into account to keep demographics the same. They argue that it is unfair to use job function/positions to determine lay offs because women and other minorities are more represented in industries at high risk of lay offs, mainly service industries and manufacturing. They don't really make the case that any given manager or organization is laying off more women and minorities than white men. Instead they state state:

women and minorities are in greater danger of losing their jobs in troubled times not only because they work in high-layoff-risk industries but also because most companies reflexively put them at the top of their layoff lists.

That 'reflexively' refers to women and minorities tend to fill marginal, low-authority positions, "making the case" that lay offs should be based on demographics rather than position. although they give no source or scale for this.

Go over your lists to ensure that your decisions do not disproportionately hurt women, minorities, or any other group that just happens to be concentrated in the targeted jobs. Follow this expert recommendation: Spread reductions evenly across the board.

They backup that recommendation by citing Nokia's 2011 layoffs as being "fairer" because they used committees to form layoff lists to avoid manager's favoritism or blind spots. There is actually nothing citing that the committees improved demographics or helped minorities retain their jobs. Rather the revolutionary aspect about the committees was that they didn't use demographics at all, and they provided assistance and flexibility to employees they were laying off rather than just restructuring at the first sign of crisis. The committee formed layoff lists on the basis of what the employee contributes, what they expect of the employee, what they owe the employee for their contribution, and what is the employee's potential for innovation. The "fairness" had nothing to do with treating people on the basis of their demographic, rather to treat their employees as humans.

I disagree that HBR outright recommends discrimination, but it is still pretty messed up that they suggest lay offs on the basis of demographics and information that is basis for discrimination in hiring, so that lay offs are proportionate by demographic rather than by the workforce function. So while I wouldn't say they recommend discrimination against white men, they do recommend policy that would disproportionately affect men. Taking away people's livelihoods is not a solution to discrimination no matter how you cut it.

They seem to suggest that critical thinking or strategy for a company in a time of crisis is discriminatory, because hiring processes are discriminatory, which is pretty regularly disputed. Again they do not cite a source or present any scale, they just assert it.

Dunkolunko · 2020-05-13T06:38:28+00:00

Coronavirus causes womento be unemployed. WomenI most affected. Coronavirus leaves women at work. Women most affected.

boundarychimps · 2020-05-13T06:36:36+00:00

TLDR: The article's real headline "Research: U.S. Unemployment Rising Faster for Women and People of Color" is probably about people of different demographics doing different jobs (like the Pew study that's mentioned), and not for the reasons in the author's paper. The recommendation described in OP's headline is implied by one sentence that seems to be immediately contradicted by the following sentence.

From the abstract of the author's paper (which is from 2014):

Building on these theories, and drawing on unique data from a national sample of 327 downsized establishments between 1971 and 2002, I analyze how layoff formalization and actors’ antidiscrimination accountability affect women’s and minorities’ representation in management after downsizing. Results demonstrate that, first, downsizing significantly reduces managerial diversity. Second, formalization exacerbates these negative effects when layoff rules rely on positions or tenure, but not when layoff rules require an individualized evaluation.

So the first thing that jumps out at me, is that 2002 is a long time ago. Would basing layoff decisions on tenure even have the same effect today, or was it just an artifact of shifts in employment demographics that were still recent back in the 70's thru the 90's?

In order for a decision based on tenure to have the same effect today, women and minorities would have to either (1) job-hop more often than white men, or (2) be an increasing-over-time part of the workforce.

According to this report from the BLS in 2018, women do have shorter average job tenure (4.0 rather than 4.3 years; I'd personally assume that taking time off to have kids is a factor in this), and whites do have a higher percentage of 10+ year tenure than other groups (at least partly because they're older, and tenure goes up with age).

This is the first thing I could find going back past 2008. There's a chart on page 5, that shows the difference in median tenure by sex was a bit larger in 2002, and much larger in 1983 (as far back as it goes). So I'd expect any effects like the HBR authors' paper found to be rather smaller today.

From looking at the current paper on sci-hub:

According to accountability theory, if evaluation-based layoff decisions trigger actors’ antidiscrimination accountabil-ity, executives will make efforts to avoid negative effects on managerial diversity re-gardless of possible biases in performance evaluations (Salancik and Pfeffer 1978; Tetlock 1985, 1999). Dencker’s (2008) find-ing that moving from a seniority-based to a performance-based reward system improves women’s promotion rates during restructuring is consistent with this point.

I read this as: if layoffs are based on performance, the decision-makers have an incentive to "cook" the results. They'll find an excuse to make sure the unlucky group matches the ogranization's overall demographics, regardless of both measured performance and actual performance (but note the paper itself doesn't consider the possibility of actual performance differences, which of course is its own can of worms).

The outcome of interest, managerial diversity, is measured by three variables: the proportion of white men, white women, and black men/women among managers, as obtained from the EEO-1 reports. Managerial diversity in-creases when the proportion of either white women or blacks among managers increases, or when the proportion of white men declines. In 1971, 50 percent of establishments had 95 percent or more white men among managers; this declined to 68 percent in 2002. White women increased from 1.9 percent in the me-dian establishment to 19 percent, and blacks increased from none to 1.8 percent of man-agement.

That is a huge change over the study period. That means their result isn't driven by steady-state behavior differences (women having kids, or minorities... I don't know, being more likely to leave jobs for some other reason). It's driven by overall change over time, where people with longer tenure were hired under significantly more discriminatory conditions.

That will not still hold today.

It probably won't even hold cleanly across the study period (I suppose it could, since it depends on the rate of change in discrimination rather than the current amount of discrimination), but I don't see any mention of including the year of the layoffs as part of the analysis (ie, the author doesn't think about "do tenure-based layoffs have changing effects on diversity depending on when the layoff was").

Back to the HBR article:

It’s possible that these patterns emerged because, as a recent Pew Research Center report shows, women and minorities are overrepresented in industries at high risk of layoffs, such as retail, hospitality, recreation, and manufacturing.

But there’s more to the story than that. In recent research, I’ve shown that women and minorities are in greater danger of losing their jobs in troubled times not only because they work in high-layoff-risk industries but also because most companies reflexively put them at the top of their layoff lists.

While the research was somewhat recent, the data it looks at is not recent enough to just assume that it still holds today.

It also doesn't support the description "reflexively put them at the top of their layoff lists". Both because that implies motivation, and also because the paper has a nice graph on page 4 (of the PDF, or 112 by page numbers) showing rates of legal review going up steadily, which the abstract notes (not in the part I quoted) reduces inequality effects.

Women and minorities tend to fill the most marginal, low-authority positions and to have the shortest tenures, and so they lose their jobs at disproportionately high rates. That happened during the Great Recession, when 12.5% of women but just 8.8% of men lost their jobs. It happened more recently at Microsoft, which downsized its less-profitable facilities in 2015 and saw the share of women in its workforce drop from 29% to 26.8%.

That sounds like overall rates across all industries (well, for the Great Recession one, but obviously not the Microsoft one) and job functions? In which case, it'd be the effects from that Pew study that's mentioned, rather than the author's research specifically on management.

Go over your lists to ensure that your decisions do not disproportionately hurt women, minorities, or any other group that just happens to be concentrated in the targeted jobs. Follow this expert recommendation: Spread reductions evenly across the board.

That first sentence sounds an awful lot like if you're in a targeted job, being a white male should explicitly put you at higher risk? That sounds like discrimination.

I don't see any connection to that second sentence. The referenced part of the link is about splitting people in the affected positions into demographic buckets and cutting the same % from each bucket. That would hide any differences based on say tenure correlating to age and age to race, but not anything that just correlates to the particular job.

Companies that factor performance into their decision-making, I’ve found, end up keeping their best performers, regardless of gender and race. And in doing so, they better maintain their diversity.

The linked study didn't have a way to measure "keeping their best performers". Maybe there's another study that isn't linked?

Think about what people can contribute, not just what jobs they hold.

Redeploy talent to areas that need strengthening.

Cross-train and upskill workers.

These are the same point. They assume the layoffs are due to things shifting around (ie, you need just as many people, but not where you have them right now). They're all probably good ideas in that case, but won't help much if the problem is that you're suddenly doing a third as much business and can only cover a third as much payroll.

spudmix · 2020-05-13T21:57:04+00:00

Don't editorialise post titles, please.

Title	harvard recommends discrimination against white men cause correlation means causation
Author	Colombian-mra
Upvotes	5
Comments	4
Date	May 13, 2020 1:49 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/gipg7a/harvard_recommends_discrimination_against_white/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/harvard-recommends-discrimination-against-white.1063488 https://theredarchive.com/post/1063488

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