TOMORROW: Nationwide Protest No Buy Day

[Physics Guy]

The arbitrarily selected people are, most often, middle-aged white men, who get hired because they look and talk and act like the middle-aged white men who hire them, even though most of the little details that make a middle-aged white male interviewer think, "This guy has the right stuff!" are irrelevant to the actual job. It's a huge inefficiency and it's only made worse by the fact that all those middle-aged white guys sitting behind the interviewer desks are sure that they're hiring quality.

It's not easy to fix—or at least, it's not easy to fix until you hit on the right approach. According to something I read a while ago, orchestras found themselves hiring quite a few more female musicians when they switched to holding auditions behind a screen, so that the judges only heard the music and couldn't tell who was playing it. Once you try something like that, it seems obvious, but it never used to be that way and plenty of orchestra people insisted (a) that there was no way they were being biased by appearance and (b) that appearance is also worth something in an orchestra because of something blah blah. The orchestras had to try the blind audition rule for a while before they could confirm what a difference it made. They had to fuss a bit, too, with how the auditioners entered the room and sat down to play, so that the different sounds of a lighter body walking across the floor didn't send a cue.

It may not be easy to figure out how to overcome inefficient biases. Fixing inefficient procedures in general is hard.

Blind auditions gave us all better music, though. That's DEI.

[Markk]

The arbitrarily selected people are, most often, middle-aged white men, who get hired because they look and talk and act like the middle-aged white men who hire them, even though most of the little details that make a middle-aged white male interviewer think, "This guy has the right stuff!" are irrelevant to the actual job. It's a huge inefficiency and it's only made worse by the fact that all those middle-aged white guys sitting behind the interviewer desks are sure that they're hiring quality.

What source would you cite for that?

Blind auditions gave us all better music, though. That's DEI.

I think blind auditions is a great hiring tool for music. I believe the best qualified person should be hired.

For general employment you have to rely on past employment history, company business models, experience, certifications and education, perception and appearance, screenings, and other HR tools.

After a short google search of the "blind audition" process, it started back in the late 60's with a much different workforce. But according to you, and the few articles I first read it lead to women growing in orchestra building, however I also read, which the other site failed to mention, is that while more women were being hired, according to a NY Times article " American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions,"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts ... -race.html

Do you still agree that your example is DEI?