Compact Magazine : The Lost Generation https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
Arguably the best article published this year.
If you struggled to break into IB, PE, CO, or Tech (really any industry) between 2014–2024, this piece explains why.
It is not possible to understand the world of the last ten years until you have read this article.
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Great read
Was looking for this
Minority male group head. Lot of friends with similar backgrounds at top seats in IB / PE / HF who started with me - all international students, privileged but not so rich back home that finance wasn’t worth it, top schools, top pedigree.
The view when we were starting out late 90s / early noughties was that we would have to work twice as hard as the privileged kids from Andover / Exeter to make it, and many of us did. Just look at the top ranks of your top banks or Apollo, Blackstone etc. We were also self aware enough to know that while we had it bad relative to the WASP / High Jewish elite, we had it good relative to the working class white guy or run of the mill US born minority.
What’s sad is that the working class white guy and run of the mill US born minority still gets screwed, and the new beneficiaries are upper middle class women and minorities. I don’t feel bad for the rich WASPs, they’ve had it good for a long time, but the current situation is no more fair and that explains the anger.
I’m lucky that my team is successful enough that we do our own recruiting and no one tells us what to do or who to hire. Ironically, that makes us more diverse than most others without forcing it
Good comment, but cool it with the "High Jewish Elite"
I can see how that comes off badly in the current context and apologize. For what it’s worth I meant the old line “out crowd” merchant banking families and their offspring.who are a genuine Wall Street cultural phenomenon.
Good book below
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Crowd-Great-Jewish-Families/dp/0060103388
DAFAs dating someone from the ACLU...
Met and know a bunch of guys from Nigeria, Ghana etc. over the years. Even more pale Latinos/Latinas from rich families. Mid talents if we're not adjusting for race, pretty rich back home.
I'm met no white guys from 50%+ of US states in my 10+ years on the street. I may not even have met any white guys that paid their own way through college. You're 1000% on the nose here.
It's all so dumb the way it's constructed.
The corollary to the previous point is that in IB at least there are a lot more seats than before and lower entry standards. I still remember a recruiting meeting from the early 2000s when the MDs in my team were freaking out because we made an offer to someone from Duke (because it was Southern and seen as a basketball school). Now all sorts of randos get in DEI or otherwise because the industry hires too many juniors (which is why pay is depressed).
Wouldn't say this means the entry standards have changed; the job is the same but people are on average higher human capital today (more educated, etc). The average Harvard admit of 1980 wouldn't even get into Dartmouth today. Yet Harvard has the same amount of spots. This is the reason that your school brand matters less and less as we go on; as admissions gets more competitive you see smart individuals at worse and worse schools.
I completely agree with you. I also think this adds to the feeling of competition; good people can come from anywhere.
Millennial here who hit the desk in the early/mid 2010s. Only had time to read the intro paragraph for now, but it was spot-on. I witnessed, with my own eyes as an analyst/associate, at more than one firm, hiring decisions made with race/gender as a determining factor. To even hint that this was unethical at best, or outright illegal at worst, would be a career-ender back then.
It boggles my mind when I see the gen-z college kids here say shit like “lol dei isn’t real just work harder.” Of course they think that - they simply lack the life experience of having a seat at the table to witness it. The grew up online and not in the real world.
Personal anecdote, but I was going through MBA recruiting in 2022 at a BB satellite office. Smaller office of roughly ~30 bankers, and the head of the office introduced me (we had a previous relationship prior to recruiting) to basically the whole office. Was invited to every event, got along with everyone great (head of office told me so not me BS'ing), didn't get a superday invite. VP who I was close with said everyone wanted me on the team, but they only had 3 ASO spots and each one had to be a DEI hire.
Again, my personal experience at a satellite BB office, so I can't imagine the HQ and how bad it was.
Come to Canada and see how bad it is. Our MD laid off perfectly functioning VP to make space for a white woman. HR is a party to this crime and is usually fully onboard. Don’t for a second think these slimeballs are ethical. DEI metrics are integrated into MD comps and they will manipulate them to keep their bonuses flowing.
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Helpful to hear everyone's anecdotes on here. The funny (and depressing) thing is that finance has been one of the least affected industries. Journalism, creative fields, political orgs all started DEI earlier and pushed much further than anyone in finance did. People complain that 40-50% of IB analyst seats went to women/DEI in recent years. In other industries it was more like 90%. Crazy to read stat after stat about how a specific demographic + age group was essentially wiped out in certain workplaces and heavily marginalized elsewhere
Even if this is true, you can only control what you can control, so quit bitching and roll up your sleeves.
Totally agree with this sentiment
Yeah bro most of us did, that's why we'll still retire quite wealthy compared to the national average.
The eternal boomer
People with your mindset are part of the problem.
you're telling people to just settle for less and enjoy getting the short end of the stick? sounds bad to me
I grew up upper middle class and the middle class white bois are some of the most uninspiring group of ppl I have ever met. Maybe the constant media bombardment of white guilt has something to do with it. Incredible sharp contrast to the prep school upper class white kids in finance.
I mean yeah that's pretty much what happened. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of this garbage came into the mainstream as soon as everyone had a smartphone in their pocket, bombarding them with this propaganda 24/7.
Identity politics, and the ills spawned from it, were 100% pushed directly to the masses via hostile anti-American actors (China, Russia, Iran, NK etc.) and I'll never be convinced otherwise.
I have a lot of problems with this article. For one, it points out a ton of statistics, without ever bothering to establish an actual causal relationship. The fundamental problem remains that this article misinterprets a broken market with a rigged market. What are the primary areas he cites as industries men are struggling in? Journalism, Academia, and Hollywood. All 3 of these have had shrinking hiring patterns for decades.
I have a very specific point, with this Brown study:
"To give a sense of what this meant on the ground: In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the humanities at Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the process the male share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent male, the short list 42 percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made it to the interview round were male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were ultimately offered to men. A similar dynamic played out in the social sciences: 54 percent of the 722 applicants were men; 44 percent of the shortlist was male, and just 32 percent of job offers were tendered to men; in the physical sciences, women were 23 percent of applicants, but received 42 percent of job offers."
Okay, seems valid. Well, the journalist conveniently left out the fact that the areas in which women earn the most PhDs, namely life sciences and humanities, were the primary areas of PhD hiring for the university. It also conveniently ignores the fact that while women were hired into more tenure track roles, the overall hiring of the university skewed heavily male, and administration roles were more male dominant, which also just so happen to be higher paying.
It's journalism like this, which picks numbers while ignoring the larger picture, that causes many young people to become so divided against each other. There's so many points to nitpick. The author notes white men dropped from 31% of medical students in 2014 to 20.5% in 2025, yet ignores the fact that young white men are making a smaller percent of both the US population AND a smaller percent of college students. Both of those are likely confounders on this percent.
Here's another poor example:
"The program had achieved its intended effect. At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent). "
Seems damning on the surface, until you dig any deeper than the surface level. But there's so much wrong with this. White men at Berkeley are only a lower percentage because of the massive increase in International PhD holders and Asians holding PhDs. This tracks with the overall population trend. The number of Asians holding PhDs in the US had massively increased in recent years, and this tracks with the overall percent decline. The Irvine statistic conveniently leaves out that the vast majority of new appointments in the medical, law, and engineering programs remain men.
It's honestly rather shocking to me that no one bothered to explain the base rate fallacy to the author here, or the idea that this is actually some damning evidence.
I'm not acting like there aren't obvious issues with DEI, there are. But this whole article makes incredibly easily refutable points to anyone that bothers to dig a little deeper than surface level.
This constant issue with DEI and diversity is just misrepresented anger. It's articles like this that convince people that their enemy is the 3 minority hires rather than the 15 nepo hires. Because as it stands, we're in an economy so heavily built on who you know rather than what you know. Nepotism has never been such an issue as it is right now.
This issue of blaming minorities rather than nepo hires exists across the board. People railed on universities for AA, while seemingly ignoring the much larger advantage given to legacies. In hollywood(a place our author decides to point out), it seems like people are more angry about diversity actors instead of being angry at untalented nepo babies. And on wall street, people are more angry at banks for having a few DEI slots than the massive amount of nepotism that exists through "Networking". We just accept this system of having the elite and rich have such a strong advantage. And you might not even realize that the reason you can't find a good job is because of this. Because the elites have successfully managed to convince the common man that his enemy is the poor workers around him rather than the elites controlling the system. As Mamdani said during his victory speech, the elites have convinced the person making 30 dollars that his enemy is the man making 20.
If you want someone to blame, blame the nepo hires who only made it into these elite schools, only made it to these internships, only made it to wherever they made it to because their family name. Because there are a whole lot more of those than true DEI hires.
Edit: A lot of people are making a false assumption of nepotism, that is is only direct hires. That is not the case. Nepotism exists because of the institutions that feed into high finance. If your family is wealthy and connected, chances are you go to a private high school(maybe even a prep academy), live in a well off area where you don't need to worry about life getting in the way, likely go to an elite college, and generally understand how to navigate college to maximize your odds at IB or other elite careers. FGLI students and other groups coming from average backgrounds do not have that privilege. The Harvard Crimson asked graduating seniors "To what extent did your family’s socioeconomic status inform your post-graduate career plans?", and 30% said greatly affected their decisions, with a whopping 30% knowing they would be receiving financial support. At Ivy+ schools, plurality of students come from the top 10% of household incomes. If you really don't think that's generational nepotism, then you're blind to the facts.
I'm not saying DEI is perfect; far from it. DEI has so many flaws that I commented on in this thread. My issue, however, stands with the article itself. It is a poorly written, poorly made piece of journalism that fails on so many levels due to the journalist's predetermined idea to paint DEI as the only reason you can't get a job.
People see through this stuff, not gonna work anymore. I’ve been in multiple round table discussions where after we were explicitly told by HR we couldn’t hire the “non diverse” candidate. The extreme biases in academic hiring are very well known and discussed, it goes far beyond this one article. Your responses mostly rely on chalking things up to “broader trends” without considering the extent to which the factors he mentions are also driving some of those broader trends.
“Nepo hires” are a total distraction, almost irrelevant in most fields that aren’t Hollywood directing or coaching college football.
This is, at best, empirical evidence. It says absolutely nothing about hiring trends. But, to your point, I didn't directly pull data from banks. So, I decided to do so. I pulled the hiring and DEI reports of the largest banks I could find online, namely the BBs. So MS, GS, JPM, Barclays(using some European banks because they still have more open DEI policies) and a few others.
Despite women making up 60% of college students in the US, 52% of all intern classes are made up of men. At European banks, such as Barclays, it's 64% men at the entry level.
And it would seem mathematically impossible for this not to follow the law of large numbers to the general population. Goldman receives over a million applications a year. With numbers like that, you'd expect to see an analyst class roughly in line with population demographics, which is exactly what you get. Roughly 50/50.
I get pretty sick and tired of people saying this stuff and never backing it up with anything past "Well everyone knows this!" The numbers just don't support that fact. Also, past the entry level, something like 3/4ths of all higher level positions are held by men. 75%, on average. If the system is so rigged, how could you possibly justify that ratio?
Academia is one of the most overcrowded spaces out there. On average, Brown receives 728 applications for just one spot. Most of those applications are from very highly qualified PhD holders from top schools with top research. At that point, whoever gets that spot is basically random. And more often than not, those spots are going to Asian and international candidates who specialize in certain areas that universities are looking to expand on. Asian holders of PhDs in CS, life sciences, and other areas that NIH funding has been more abundant in have far outpaced white holders.
Also, these "biases" you state just straight up ignore the fact that most hires in academia remain men. Just not white men. That's because white men are going to college less, and international and Asian students are increasingly getting those spots at top PhD programs in these in demand topics.
This is actually comical coming from someone in finance. Have you never heard of pedigree bias? The vast majority of PhD holders in the US come from families making 200k+ per year. Most people coming from top schools have incredible familial wealth. Schools like Dartmouth, Yale, Duke, WashU, Vanderbilt, and other top schools have a higher percent of their student body with families making more than 600K a year than families making less than 60K per year. Of those in the top .1% of the US population, nearly 40% attend a T25 school, with most going to target schools.
If you think for even one second that nepotism isn't far more common than DEI recruiting, you're willfully ignorant. Ask half the people at any banking firm what their parents do for a living, and the majority are not going to come from working class backgrounds. Most parents will be lawyers, bankers, hedge fund managers, consultants, doctors, etc.
You're effectively using an emotional reaction to try and get people to agree with you without actually citing any real, concrete evidence. People eat this shit up because it gives them someone to blame. But anyone who actually engages with the data sees past the common arguments.
They're not a total distraction lol. There's some nepo kid at my bank whose dad was some regional head and was also coincidentally the only person to get an early aso promotion in like 15 years.
edit: apologies for being a naughty boi
So a comment defends DEI, a system that disproportionately negatively affects Indians (along with whites and other Asians), and your instinct is to call the commenter an Indian slur?
Best of luck to your LPs, because they’re going to need it with a fucking braindead moron like you stewarding their capital. Greatest case study I’ve ever seen to keep you new generation law school retards far away from any serious critical thinking task aside from charging to copy and paste paragraphs in a purchase agreement in 15-minute increments.
Yeah I'm not reading all that
Look, you and I are both aware of the abuses that DEI programs had since the 2010s. We're not playing this game of pretending none of this happened, or ackshually statistics showed it wasn't that bad.
OP here.
I've noticed that whenever DEI hires are criticized for being selected based on skin color or to fill quotas rather than merit, the response is almost always the whataboutism fallacy: "What about nepo babies?"
Let's be perfectly clear about nepo babies:
Stop the gaslighting.
Again lacking the courage to admit that overwhelming majority of DEI seats are allocated to women, in particular white, and instead redirecting the conversation towards skin color to insinuate that PoC benefit from DEI. Banks have clearly outlined in their DEI audit reports that black / Hispanic “men” are the only PoC included in DEI quotas.
This is under the assumption that nepotism is only direct hires. It isn't. If your parents make more than 200k a year, the chances of you going to a target school skyrocket.
I have problems with DEI. I made a long summary argument of my problems with it that I'll copy paste
Historically, the problem with DEI in banks has always been the overemphasis on surface level diversity along with the lack of addressing the real institutional problems that exist. Let me ask you: With all the DEI hiring banks have been going on, have they really moved the needle in terms of their actual diversity? Because in my experience, it's laughable how many actual minorities get hired. That's because of a few reasons. 1) DEI in large corporations is seen as largely performative and not actually achieving a larger goal of creating a more equitable and diverse workplace, and 2) the problem has always been that minorities have less access to the places top banks recruit at, or knowledge of the timelines of many of these companies. In fact, one of the most damaging things banks have done to their DEI pipelines has been moving the recruiting season up so far. FGLI-many of which are minorities-will not have heard of IB likely until their sophomore or junior year when returning interns speak about it, and at that point it's too late to recruit for internships.
If banks want to actually do something positive, it isn't about creating some pipeline for students. It isn't about just interviewing more minorities. It's about fundamentally changing how banks recruit. If GS held events at a Texas, California, or Florida state school, they would likely get a lot more Hispanic recruits. If they held events in Georgia, NC, or HBCU's(which they do already) they could get so many more people applying to their programs.
So it's more about creating a long term lasting pipeline where students are more aware of opportunities made available to them than just saying "Hey, if you're a minority, apply to our sophomore program" because, well, you're going to get the same base of people hyper aware of IB early and end up doing nothing to actually create diversity.
I have problems with DEI because it fails to accomplish what it sets out to do. But I also have problems with people dismissing the fundamental facts that most DEI candidates don't have some cushy seat to sit down on. The truth is that 90% of candidates for these seats are fighting against each other while ignoring the 10% that waltz in on the back of their parental wealth and connections. That I have a problem with.
And the article itself, moreso, is what I have a problem with. It fails to actually speak to the underlying issues with DEI and with the diminishing jobs numbers many are facing. In a much better recruiting cycle where jobs were more abundant, no one would be complaining about DEI. I remember in 2021, when every bank was hiring like crazy, talking about DEI, and no one really had an issue, because you could easily break in. But now, because the job market is so incredibly fucked, people are angry, and bad actors are attempting to turn people towards blaming groups of minorities rather than seeing that these banks are pulling in higher revenues while hiring less people.
I wish DEI was fixed, because creating more opportunities for people is always a good thing, but I also hope that these banks realize just how fucked their recruiting has become for a lot of (admittedly strong) candidates from a wide set of backgrounds who just so happen to not be DEI.
The nepotism argument is a statistical rounding error. Nepo hires take maybe 1% of the seats. Institutional mandates shape the entire funnel. You are comparing a few favors for the MD's son to a decade of systemic HR filtering.
The demographic drop in elite seats did not track population decline. It outpaced it by multiples. That is not a trend. That is a policy. The Boomers gated the entry level to protect their own tenure. Do not overthink the grift.
It’s significantly higher than 1% lol. And not all nepos are problematic, some are actually smart (sorta makes sense that successful people are smart and likely to have smart children, though the longer the dynasty, the less likely it seems to be).
It’s the idiot nepos who leave messes for everyone to clean up in their wake while thinking they’re very competent and never to blame
shut up libtard we have all experienced and lived through this
FR. I’m a younger millenial who didn’t benefit from DEI. Anyway, I’ve met far more incompetent men (and yeah it’s usually a nepo / office favourite) than incompetent women. Why? There are simply more men. I literally never had a female teammate until my 6th year of work. My analyst class was 10%-15% female.
Since then, I’ve also met an incompetent woman, but she does less damage simply because we all know she won’t be promoted beyond a certain level. Unlike the incompetent men.
It gets even more k00ky if you narrow it to white male Christians / Europeans (~98% of white males in America). Read who they list as the white males at the NYT
Del
This is a very good article, and it should be illustrative on why a lot of people here are against DEI. I don't think anyone is against the idea of equal treatment, but for all intents and purposes, the execution of DEI over the past decade absolutely was not equal treatment.
It's interesting that every ethnic or demographic group is considered acceptable to have an in-group preference except for regular White non-LGBT non-military non-Jewish guys
All makes sense. Except most white men don’t have the courage to admit what banks consider DEI.
Based on DEI audit reports: women (all color), black and Hispanic males, and LGBTQ are the only groups part of their DEI strategy. Internal stats reflect that 90% of DEI seats go to women in particular white women. No asian / brown / arab men are part of any DEI quota.
What white men do is to use DEI as blanket term to malign everyone who is not white. Never for once do they hold white women accountable who are main beneficiaries.
i don't think anyone is under the illusion that dei includes asian americans.
you will surprised, you just haven’t probed them yet. Look how they comment “women + minorities” but nobody clarifies which minorities. In fact most of these include all PoC under the minority term. Some of them even believe that DEI prioritizes people based on their religion.
I agree DEI is bad and should be fully abolished but unless they call out white women as prime beneficiaries of DEI, nothing will change.
This is just seething racial resentment at white people. Nobody thinks Asian males benefit from DEI and nobody here ever alleges that when the topic comes up. People like Chris Rufo (probably the single most influential person in rolling this stuff back nationally) never frame it that way either. The national debate led mostly by white pundits and politicians and activists on AA (different topic but very tangential) focused mostly on harm caused to Asians.
Good deflection but still won’t change the fact that prime beneficiaries of DEI are white women. Freeloading white Beckies.
It is obviously the case that white males have been disenfranchised. You only need to look at the number of women in finance and the number of programs aimed specifically at them.
It should be clear to anyone with half a brain that there is not the same level of interest among men and women in finance, especially in fields like investment banking. Yet banks still aim for 50% or more female representation through quotas and DEl initiatives.
This, of course, does not reflect reality, and in practice, that has meant white men losing opportunities and increasingly being treated as second-class candidates
I disagree. Yes, it has disenfranchised white men for probably the wrong reasons. It’s a system built by white men to prioritize themselves. If they can’t get in then or promoted then onus is on themselves. System isn’t working against white men. DEI (women) are not taking spots away from them instead they are absorbing spots which usually would have been open competition and gone to some Asian / Brown kid. I been in hiring, promotion, and layoffs meetings and have never seen a white kid being discriminated against because of their race / gender. MDs always end up scapegoating an Asian or Brown kid who not only competed against white men (most privileged) but also DEI Beckies (women).
The whole fuss around whites not being allowed to favo other white is blatant lie. How else do you think majority of wall-street is white. Even 90%+ DEI spots are filled with white women.
Sorry but this is just complete cope
I wonder how much this trend reverses since LLMs and ATS disproportionately favors wasdite candidates.
Nepo hires are deflection point for women as they know they are freeloading with DEI. Nepo hires are like 1% of the candidate pool in hiring and promotions.
Even if nepotism hires were a large problem, which as you said it's such a small number that it's a distraction, it still doesn't make any of the excesses of the DEI era okay
It's like saying, sorry that I robbed a bank, but that guy over there is driving over the speed limit
Agreed and DEI is outdated, especially gender quotas. This will reset the dating market too. A lot of these boss babes will be starting their careers at Starbucks instead of GS.
over/under 50% of commenters in this thread being jews
let's make it 80%
no one pushes the 'disenfranchised white man'/DEI agenda more than jews
PhD in controlling narrative discourse and identity politics subversion
.
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Which races are being prioritized with DEI? Enlighten us.
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Omg, yall are the most want to be victims ever lol. Keep crying and whining all you want but yall didn’t get an offer because you weren’t that special, not because DEI. There are way too many banks and spots for you to blame not getting an offer on DEI. What a lame pity part in this thread.
Yea ngl this shit is just sad. White men have been the most privileged men throughout history. The impact of DEI is like a drop in the bucket compared to history
that’s factually incorrect. DEI has significant impact but it doesn’t constraint white men at all. It’s a system created by them and for them. DEI does hinder men of color though as they have to compete with white men and their DEI Beckies.
Except we don't live in history, we live in the present. How does white boomers holding all the top positions and wealth help Gen Z white men?
Oh ok thanks- because my 4x great grandfather was a farmer who fled the potato famine, I should make my life worse for the benefit of people whose ancestors didn't invent the wheel or written language, and sold each other into slavery
That shit doesn't work on us any more. We've paid reparations in full through welfare, interracial crime, and whole swaths of cities that we've given up that have since been turned into shitholes (see Detroit, S. Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore)
Black privilege is having a fentanyl addict overdose in Minneapolis, so we have to allow mass riots during COVID, throw an innocent cop in jail for life, vandalize hundreds of small businesses, and then mandate propaganda in corporate HR courses and schools that it was actually the other way around.
Or it's stabbing a White teenager at a track meet in Dallas, then having hundreds of thousands of dollars get donated to him, and let him graduate high school and start taking college classes because you threaten a race riot otherwise
Or it's stabbing a Ukrainian refugee on a train in Charlotte and having the city council cover it up for a month since it might hurt people's feelings
Yeah this stuff doesn't work anymore.
I didn’t need to read an article to know that DEI is a load of crap and purposely puts down white young males in professional world, we’ve already experience this for years.
And of course your post gets 10 monkey shits because the DEI warriors and H1B visa scammers are upset the world is waking up and doesn’t want or need this in our lives
If America is so racist then you are more than welcome to go back to your own country!
America first
Ok fair enough. DEI should be eliminated.
Why don’t you clarify what counts as DEI based on your understanding?
You have Google, you can search what DEI is if you don’t understand what it is
No school admission, scholarship, employment, promotion, etc should be considered at all based on race or gender
It just shouldn’t be on the application at all, it should be completely unknown to the admissions committee and be completely based on merit only
You're not confused as to what DEI is. You don't need a definition. You just hate White guys. Why not just be honest and say that?
Wow its almost like the nose people who believe their messiah wont come until the white christians are wiped off the face of the earth were serious and meant it!
My vote is to get rid of all the old people in power. They're the ones coming out on top no matter which way the pendulum swings and are the biggest blockers to upward mobility for anyone within an organization.
yes and this retardation of western countries has also spread to my third world shithole - India, I am actively living in an apartheid state which has been multiplied by DEI hiring.
Ok pajeet relax. No need to release your scent
I
Savage's article, like many others that rehash his take, should be understood as symptomatic of a larger "feeling" of disenfranchisement of middle-class white men. Data does not back up any of his claims, as dissected in this thoughtful response (https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/what-does-the-census-da…). For a group that is as concerned with merit and the objectivity of numbers, like this forum and the rest of finance professionals who decry these programs, it's funny that many of you choose to completely disregard the "facts" in favor of your "feelings."
Also worth noting that the careers he hones in on are "creative" careers that are notoriously difficult to break into and even harder to sustain a career in. Arguably those fields (journalism, academia, acting) are shifting their hiring based on market signals. Demographics and capital are shifting. As other demographic groups gain purchasing power and consume more media, or demand for their knowledge/tastes increase then it makes sense that the hiring trends in those fields will also change. Similarly, on this forum we're talking about analyst and associate positions that number in the (maybe) hundreds in the country.
From this article
White men are slightly less likely (2-3%) to be in the top percentiles of their income range
White men's employment in the media or arts has not changed.
I guess prop trading firms (or i guess anything that is privately held) are the solution to this in finance. I've been on multiple hiring committees for a range of applicants and I don't think DEI was ever brought up as a thing. If you're right for the team we hired you if you weren't we didn't. It was a pure measure of aptitude.
As much as I made my line of work out to be great I honestly don't believe most of these articles beyond the sympathy's of people that struck out and weren't ever going to get in.
Why are multiple people saying nepo kids are "a rounding error" or "less than one percent" of hires?
My fund offers a summer internship, and it's entirely made up (literally, every single kid) of nepo hires or DEI hires. I guess people are more discrete about it whereas being a minority is something that's visible?
Comments clearly show why it is tough to rid of DEI.
Demographic which created and supported DEI - ideological old white men. Mostly with no male heirs or LGBTQ. You will be shocked how many so called girl dads are protagonists here.
Demographic which hates DEI - mostly men except black / Hispanic who benefit from it
Demographic which benefits most from DEI - women (all but mostly white), black / Hispanic men, and LGBTQ.
Demographic which is penalized by DEI quotas - Factually Asian / Brown / Arab men mostly. Arguably poor whites too but not much evidence as no systemic barriers exist since their clan runs and dominates both Wall Street and Govt (nothing wrong with that as it is a white country).
White men’s preferred method to criticize DEI - Attack inclusion of black / Hispanics while ignoring the allocation of seats to women. Knowing well that 90%+ DEI seats go to women in hiring and promotions. All these attacks on DEI are warranted but the motivation seems more racial than a sincere effort to equalize the field for men.
Conclusion - white men are too afraid to confront gender quotas as that would upset white women and view DEI mostly through a racial prism as it suits them. They can’t come to terms with the fact that corporates deprioritized them to benefit white women and would instead go after black / Hispanics who don’t get more than 10-20% DEI seats and promotions.
Dear white men - make up your mind. Do you dislike DEI in principle or you just don’t want to see black / Hispanics on Wall Street.
Notable mention - smart white men at top know system is exactly how it was intended to be. Use DEI to promote women who mostly pose no threat to them, and conveniently use DEI to not promote / hire competent men who they dislike or think could be a threat. Sooner or later DEI Beckies will take off for greener pastures and/or have kids so no real impact. DEI is amazing, made the white bosses look inclusive while pandering to their racist bias against men of color by pushing them out using DEI.
In the past few years I have seen colleagues and juniors pushed out only for MD to fulfill his political fantasy of having a woman VP & above, only for that woman to quit within months after getting the role. Now that woman is shitting on the team culture wherever she interviews. What an own goal. We had advised our MD not to promote that woman over the male colleague who we all D/VPs rated better but then again our MD is on a generational run to ruin the business. We have the largest balance sheet in our coverage and still are lying low in league tables.
There are kids making millions dancing on tiktok you're here crying about DEI.
Anyway DEI = white women. Until you call that out, you're mostly cowards.
Correct. Countless DEI posts on this forum and rightly so but none have the courage to call out white women who are 80%+ beneficiary of DEI. Seems like these posts are racially motivated and have no real intention to fix the problem. Gender quotas need to die!
The real question y’all should be asking is what incentive is there for banks to not do DEI. It expands the pool of elites to women and a small number of socially acceptable minorities while protecting banks from the vicissitudes of social change. Makes sense to me.
And anyone thinking that DEI means banks are missing out on game changing talent misses the point. It may be true on an individual level but it’s not true on a collective level.
An analyst cohort at Goldman has 50 people hypothetically. One will make partner, three will make MD, three will be clients one day that will be remunerative to Goldman. The other 43 are there to process work until they move on or get canned. It’s likely the first seven will survive a DEI screen anyway so we are just figuring out who the 43 workers are and it doesn’t make that much difference.
Smaller firms where every hire matters have different considerations - that’s why Dyal and BDT and Qalayst recruit differently.
But for most large firms, DEI is good business sense and while some of the ridiculous extremes will go, I don’t see it changing.
The other consideration is out of that 50, 1-2 will be married to someone important down the road.
Comment by a DEI Beckie disguised as MD. Not one reason is legit. DEI’s main enablers are femcels in govt who takeover finance committees and mandate pension funds to implement DEI. Pension funds force this upon institutional investors like BlackRock who then pass the buck to BoD of companies where DEI targets are set and tracked.
You are a miserable lot and will do anything to retain the free loading. No matter how little dignity that leaves you with. From outright claims of misogyny to avoid accountability to eventually sleeping with MDs claiming it as a special relationship I have seen it all. 90%+ of DEI today is gender quotas which shouldn’t exist.
It's funny how much Blackrock et al backpedaled once Texas and other states pushed back. Whether it was this or the insanity of trans surgeries on kids who cannot do informed consent, I'd say 90% of all social dysfunction over the past 10-15 years was purely just because of good people who didn't want to rock the boat and say anything. COVID lockdowns woke a lot of people up that saying nothing isn't an option anymore.
Here's something for you all to chew on. The way this debate is framed is incomplete. The debate is framed as if there are two sides:
The thing is, there is actually a potential third side:
3. Give favoritism to White men
If that makes you feel uncomfortable, I'm not really the most comfortable with it myself. But the de facto rules for the past several decades since the Civil Right Act of 1964 is that only White men are expected to act in an egalitarian manner, and everyone else is welcome to have an in-group tribal favoritism. So, if you really want to persist on this, expect White men to start tribalizing and having an in-group favoritism also.
I'm not saying that's good. I'm saying it's what is going to happen, just by natural human nature if this continues. The excesses of DEI all could have been pushed back on using LIBERAL values of equality. You have failed to do so, so now expect people to push back on them using illiberal values. The can of worms that has been opened since the extremes of the 2010s is not easily un-opened.
Let me rephrase 1) for you.
1. Favoritism in favor of women (mostly white), black / Hispanic men, and LGBTQ+.
Seems you folks hate DEI but never open DEI audit reports to see who the main beneficiary is. Sorry, it is white women overwhelmingly but that doesn’t fit your MAGA agenda because you are not merit first instead you are white first. When you don’t feel comfortable expressing it directly you call it American/Canadian first but based on your definition only white folks are true Americans rest are just immigrants or illegals.
There is no such thing as religious DEI ie Jews, Muslims etc. Absolutely, men do get discriminated against by DEI policies but rarely it is white men.
White bosses ensure that competent white men climb the ladder unless they are up against white women at which point it is a 50/50 depending on if they are a rainmaker and can pushback on HR, or just horny mid 40s MD who is bored of his wife and teenage kids and wants some proximity to young women.
DEI consumes 50% of hirings / promotions and inevitably these seats are allocated to women to achieve gender targets set by board. In the past, these seats would be open competition and often competent Asian / Brown men would win since they are grinders but lack white privilege. So, who exactly is missing out, largely Asian / Brown men and to small extent white men may be.
If you want to eliminate DEI, you will have to view this issue from gender angle and drop the racial one. Unsure you lot are ready for this conversation and hence, DEI will continue. Gender DEI is only one banks care about now and are actively implementing it. Go read annual reports and DEI audit reports to gain perspective. Out of 100 seats, offering 5-10 seats to underprivileged black / Hispanic kids won’t change much but 40+ seats being allocated to women most of whom are secured by white women and white men have first priority on the remaining 50 seats. Don’t get what you are complaining about unless you have courage to call out freeloading of white women.
So honestly, I don't disagree. I've seen that in the military where completely incompetent females got promoted for political reasons. And I've worked with some badass female Soldiers also. The competent ones by in large got out and went on to business or other careers.
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