What should diversity really be?
Read an earlier thread and it got me pondering… what should diversity programmes really focus on?
The banker stereotype is a straight, white man from a privileged background.
There is a lot to break down here: sexuality, race, gender (sex, whatever you call it), background. Isolating each of those aspects, you can argue some are more preventative than others, or show more/less representation.
For example there could be 5 analysts from 5 ethnic groups, the product of a diversity programme. The catch? All descend from wealthy families and attended H/Y/P. Should this outcome be what we strive to achieve? Is there really anything “achieved” by 5 very privileged people getting into privileged roles because of a “diversity” programme?
My question really is “what SHOULD the optimal diversity programmes be?” Should it be gender/racial equality? Social mobility? LBGTQ representation? Should one be prioritised over the other?
Curious to hear all’s thoughts.
Whatever it should be, you’re not going to get a good answer on this forum. The only people who voice (strong) opinions on diversity are 1)white guys who feel aggrieved by diversity recruiting 2)diverse candidates. Nuanced responses will not be delivered on this platform. Threads about diversity always become shitshows sabotaged by butthurt white dudes who can’t answer how depreciation flows through the 3 statements but expect CVP offers. Don’t waste your time.
.
Here we go
*Places racial quotas on people*
*They're just butthurt and/or they deserve it*
Shocking. People who are facing racial/ethnic quotas are unhappy. I think, additionally, probably much of this stems from the fact that the one group who made most of the advancements in human rights, tolerance, and have created the most welcoming society to others in the entire world, are increasingly being **** upon by ungrateful outsiders who seem intent on villainizing the people who enabled them in the first place. Ironically, since it seems a great deal of people don't actually care for Western values, and instead long for this new 'racial equity (equal outcome=race communism)', the society that enabled any good times in the first place will no doubt be destroyed.
Also to answer the original poster, likely your brain has been entirely melted by technological usage and over-socialization. Open a history book to get the answers you want. Or better yet, just go to Yugoslavia and find out "What Should Diversity Really Be?"
deleted.
Most welcoming society in the world?? We were brought us here as slaves– unable to live in any good neighborhoods and send our kids to decent schools until as recently as when your parents were growing up... what are we "ungrateful" for? Ex slaves would fight in America's wars just to come back and be treated as second class citizens up until Vietnam. FFS my grandparents were spat on when walking to school and were never able to take the bus growing up– yet, you feel that you can tell black people how we should feel about our treatment in America and that we should be grateful for the ability to be free and build wealth or whatever? That's a crazy amount of nerve imo. I grew up pretty middle class in a NYC suburb and went to an Ivy, all to caveat the fact that a lot of my friends are white and I don't have any ill-will towards white people; however, the idea that we should be grateful or whatever the fuck you're implying is so weird to me... like the running joke about black people from white people (ranging from American scientists, to bigots) is that we're monkeys yet I should be grateful to white people? For what?? For most of this country's history the consensus view was that we were worth less than an average white person and you think that the Civil Rights Movement 60 years ago when your grandparents were growing up erased that and everything magically got better? Even your language is super whack man... what do you mean "tolerance"?? Tolerance of what– the offspring of freed slaves who build a lot of the wealth of this country? It's like now that minorities are increasing as a % of the total population and white people get some flack for historical actions, they feel disenfranchised lol... welcome to the club. Give me a break. For all the complaints about diversity, it hasn't affected any of your opportunities to be leaders in whatever bank/law firm/tech company you're at. If you haven't noticed, take a look around your bank and you'll see there's not a single one of them in which white people do not have the vast majority of mgmt positions. Also, stfu with the "go to this country to find out about diversity". We were brought here and were slaves for generations– go where?? Do we not have the right to complain about what our experience has been. And if you think we don't have the right to complain, then Conservatives shouldn't have the right to complain about media censoring, because America has more freedom than most of the world so just "shut up or leave"
Also, I'll just note that the propensity of people on this site to point to a few wealthy black people in America who get diversity SA positions to "prove" that all of us are rich and don't deserve it is so fuckin weird to me... it's entirely anecdotal even if that's the case, there are so few wealthy black people as a percent of us in this country it seems entirely disingenuous to me...
They should just do what they do in London. There is no "diversity recruiting" for SA. Everyone applies on the same job listning. That way diverse candidates can just be selected normally and you can be reassured they're smart and competent because they've had the same interview/AC as everyone else. I think in the US it's different and easier for diversity? Don't agree with that tbh, I think its reductive and offensive to make the process easier because someone is black e.g.
One group i think should absolutely not be diversity are LGBTQ. Tell me, what does some white privately educated twink know about being under represented lol - they're still a white man, just fruity.
Clearly they need all the help they can get it. According to wikipedia, "a recent study has showed that in the US full-time employed Gay men now earn 10% more than their heterosexual counterparts."
The optimal diversity program is one that doesn't need to exist.
In my opinion, the problem with the entire question is that there is some sort of presumption that hiring for diversity is wrong on it's face. The alternative is to hire mostly white, mostly male people from a very small group of educational institutes, all of which leads to reinforcing something of an old boys club. In my time in banking I encountered very few unqualified minorities or women; I saw a lot more unqualified men whose father plays golf with the MD of the group on the weekend.
Put another way, in an even reasonably equal and fair system, one which is truly a meritocracy, you would expect to see something like 30% of the people on a given banking floor be a white man, given that ~60% of the population identifies as white (and thus, approximately half of them are men). If anyone here can tell me with a straight face that they think banking is made up of only 30% white men, then I guess we can have that discussion, but as an assertion it's pretty tough to defend. In other words, we effectively do give preference to certain groups, it's just that the group that gets defaulted in is white men. No one ever seems to want to discuss that side of it. And given the history of this country, it's quite clear why it is white men who are so disproportionately represented. Yes, you can talk all you want about how Jim Crow is in the past and yada yada yada, but either the impact is that minorities and women are badly discriminated against in the hiring process on Wall Street or else white men are given massively preferential treatment. There isn't really another option
You are grossly oversimplifying this and seem to be confusing equal opportunities with equal outcomes. How can you possibly expect the demographics of the banking floor to represent that of society without taking other factors into account such as interest to work in the industry, education and so on...
Even if the system was 100% "fair" with all barriers removed it would be foolish to expect 30% of the banking floor to be white males simply because that is how they make up the broader population. Men are far more likely to be attracted to jobs with high pay in exchange for intense working hours and poor work life balance (trying to deny that is just lying to yourself), and will therefore naturally take up a larger proportion of roles.
Example in a different context to help illustrate my point: Denmark is one of the best countries in the world for gender equality yet has one of the lowest rates of women working in engineering fields. Why? Because they are simply less interested in it. The same is observed for men in caregiving roles such as nursing. When given complete freedom to choose what they want to do, men and women sort themselves accordingly into careers that match their natural interests.
Fine. I'll accept this. Now lets explore it, because "interest in banking" comes from somewhere, right? Maybe you're more exposed to finance growing up, because a close relative works on the Street. I wonder why it is mainly white men who have this interest... could it be that our parent's generation actively excluded women and minorities from banking roles, so that today if you're a 22 year old black man you don't have anyone to tell you it's even possible?
This argument makes sense on it's face, but breaks down entirely when you actually think about why it might make sense. Unless your position is that minorities are inherently less able to understand finance or work on Wall Street, then you need to find a reason for why demographic disparity is so pronounced in banking. Does it need to perfectly reflect American demographics? Of course not. But we're not even close to that.
I'd be interested in some evidence of why that is. Asserting that the current state of affairs looks the way it does merely because of the fact of its existence isn't a great argument. It's like saying black people don't want to be Fortune 500 managers, because there aren't many of them. But lets accept your premise for what it is: women are less likely to want to be in high powered roles (though even that is hard to support, since banking is a tiny percentage of the workforce and thus high powered women would gravitate there, so in that sense it's not meant to be representative of the general public), and even if they are, are more likely to quit to focus on family or something else.
Where are all the latino bankers, or black ones?
Again, I'll accept your premise, but ask why minorities also seem horribly underrepresented. It's either two options: current and historical factors are keeping them from even applying in the first place, or you think they're inherently less able.
Lets be clear - to the extent there is a problem with preferential hiring on Wall Street, it isn't diversity hiring, but rather nepotism and advancing people who are well connected. This doesn't necessarily mean white men, but given banking's fairly bigoted history, those tend to be the people with connections. As I've brought up before, when I worked on Wall Street the MD responsible for hiring was from a non-target, think a Tufts or Wake Forest. Four of the nine analysts in my class came from that school. Is there any chance that those two facts are unrelated? Almost certainly not. The point being, there is a ton of bias in hiring decisions, unconscious or not, and personal preference plays a huge role. I see people on this forum talk about "fit" all the time, as a reason to hire one person over another, but that's just another way of saying "this is the son of the one of the guys I play golf with on the weekend, so I know him a little and am comfortable." That is the insidious way that privilege gets enshrined. So all diversity hiring is doing is preventing hiring managers from imposing their own priorities onto the system, not wrecking the concept of an egalitarian working environment.
Well, I could be wrong, but I believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.
Diversity programs are frustrating for candidates because sophomore insight programs are genuinely helpful for underclassmen to get a small taste of investment banking to confirm interest. All the large banks that do these diversity programs don't have a comparable program for non-diversity candidates. I think it's a missed opportunity for genuine inclusion. Until any motivated and smart sophomore can attend programs similar to diversity insight days, diversity pipelines will get negative attention on WSO. It is simple discrimination that non-diverse people, ORMs, and anyone deemed too common in finance can't participate. There should be another way to encourage less represented demographics to apply to finance roles without siloing the pipeline and providing a distinct advantage. I think diversity programs should focus on widening the whole recruitment funnel and reinforcing that personal characteristics are not a factor in hiring. Any suggestion otherwise is discriminatory, immoral, and will cause people to be hired for the wrong reasons.
I believe that socio-economic status is the primary driver of academic performance and should be the main focus of contextual admissions!
If I only had a minute to answer the question, I'd say that you should base it off of socio-economic background than race or gender, because statistically, socioeconomic upbringing is a much cleaner predictor of future success than race, gender, or other metrics.
I come from a low income background (40k-50k is the income my dad has always made for a family of four) he is the only person that worked as my mom raised my sister and I. Anyway, when I was admitted into school (Non-Target) my parents wouldn't be paying for my schooling or anything so I began working full-time in order to attend a good school and well by working full-time they later told me I would need to begin helping pay bills and such and so by working many hours (36hrs a week) and going to school full-time I felt hopeless because I didn't have time for clubs or other things but I finally was able to network and that landed me an internship my freshman year. Now I have a pretty dog shit GPA (currently working on getting it up) so my GPA can look good for when recruitment starts this year for 2024. I will be applying to diversity things since I am a poc and I really want to work in investment banking. Diversity programs do help and I am glad they exists to propel students like me to be in spaces where we usually aren't invited into because if we all want to be honest (investment banking is a pretty closed cliché).
I may catch some flak for this but I don't think racial minorities, women or LGBT are necessarily always the people that need the most "help" from diversity programs... I don't see why a black student from a wealthy background, born and raised in New York, should be getting boosted by a diversity program while a lower-class white student from North Dakota wouldn't. In this scenario, the black student is much more likely to connect with interviewers anyways (assuming he has been raised on golf, spent his summers in the Hampton's, etc.) than said white student from North Dakota (who may have not even known what investment banking was prior to attending university).
Actually, I happened to be browsing Linkedin one day and saw a Spanish international student (hailing from a top-tier private high school in Spain) who had gotten into a diversity program by presumably branding himself as "Latino / Hispanic"... This is what happens when racial affiliation takes precedence over indicators like family wealth, etc.
Personally I think that household wealth would be a much better determinant of whether "diversity" is satisfied. This would still benefit racial minorities like blacks and hispanics (since unfortunately, these groups have much lower median household wealth than the rest of the country). Just saying that diversity programs seem to only benefit those minorities who were already well-off in the first place (with smart parents nudging them towards finance).
On another note, I always found it humorous how, I as an international student and technically first-generation immigrant, was not considered a minority and eligible for these programs since I was white. Not that I would have applied (not because of any false bravado, but because I am already consider myself quite privileged coming from an upper-middle class background).
But your entire post is premised on the idea that it's the wealthy black kid taking the North Dakota guy's spot, when in reality, it's the white Manhattanite who is "taking" up a spot.
When you talk about why diversity hiring is or isn't unfair, you're missing the elephant in the room, which is that almost by definition, huge numbers of white men aren't deserving of being there either (in a meritocratic sense). You are squabbling over who gets "allocated" 30% of the roles while de facto "reserving" the other 70% for white men. Why isn't that talked about? Why is it automatically the minority "stealing" a spot and not someone else?
And yes, I understand it's easier to point to a policy that searches out minorities and scream about that. But in my own anecdotal experience, there are far more white guys getting hired because dad is an executive at a business the bank wants to bring on as a client than there are "undeserving" black kids getting jobs. The entire reason we have diversity hiring in the first place is because we know that left to their own devices, hiring managers will only bring on those people, the kids whose parents have personal relationships with the MD, a connection a minority is unlikely to have for the simple reason that historically, his parents or grandparents were legally or socially ostracized from making the connection in the first place
That's definitely very fair and helps me to challenge some of my assumptions. As you say, wealthy white people still have a leg-up over wealthy black people in a massive way. And in many cases, wealthy black student and poor white student are more deserving than wealthy white student. However, I think the nepotism aspect that you're harping on is maybe overstated. "White guys getting hired because dad is an executive at a business the bank wants to bring on as a client", like come on, banks aren't scrutinizing every potential candidates' family tree to see if there any business opportunities to be found. Yes, yes, maybe the executive father pulls one of the bank's MDs to the side and asks for help finding a spot for his son but this is such a one-off example.
But remove all diversity programs and I find it hard to believe that suddenly, everyone in the Analyst class is now a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt. The best talent will rise to the top, with maybe 2 or 3 nepotism picks.
At the end of the day, I was trying to say this: wealthy white kids get boosted by nepotism and family connections, wealthy and poor black kids get boosted by diversity programs, and poor white kids (who are considered equally privileged as wealthy white kid) are left with fuck-all.
This is a completely false assumption. There are currently 0 diversity programs in place for Asian Americans and yet many still make it into the industry with 0 family connections to Wall Street. If you were right, Wall Street today would be made up solely of minorities (women, black, Hispanics) and connected people. This is not the case. There are plenty who make it on their own merit, which means that diversity programs are not what stop hiring managers from acting in this manner.
Okay, lets generalize....why not? For some reason, I can't quote specific sentences.
1. My guess is that the vast majority of people in IB are white and male. In general, females are not as interested in finance, so there are probably a smaller number of binders of females to hire. Asians are well represented in finance but based on WSO, it seems like this demographic favors asset management, hedge funds and private equity. Not sure why. Black people are under represented in finance, may be due to favoring other industries
2. Your comment about the 5 wealthy privileged analysts coming from different ethic backgrounds is similar to the majority view of WSO about diversity.
3. Diversity programs should be based on whatever the a company wants them to be, within the law, of course. If a company feels strongly that 30% of the staff should be female, then that is the percentage it should be, assuming that they have the qualifications to do the job.
I think this is a good point that often gets overlooked in these conversations. Diversity hires are just as qualified as anyone else! If there was some evidence that your average diversity hire was incompetent, then there might be some argument to be made against it, but at the end of the day everyone on the bank floor is capable of doing the job.
Yeah, the assumption on WSO is that diversity hires are not as qualified as other hires. I am not sure what the basis here is, other than broad generalizations about certain types of people. Some people here feel that if you get the highest scores or grades, you should get the job. The thing is you probably don’t need a perfect score on a standardized test to succeed in finance. There are plenty of areas in finance that require strong personal skills. If a company feels that your personal skills are weak, you might not get a job.
Overall, diversity is people of all backgrounds doing the best of their abilities.
It's so funny hearing everyone talk about "diversity of backgrounds" because all ya'll are referring to is non-wealthy white kids lol. I would bet my bonus that there are more white MDs/CFOs/CEOs/HF managers/PE and law firm partners from rural America vs. wealthy black people in those positions. As per McKinsey, there are 2% of black families with a net worth of over $1mn... yet you all will continuously point to the one black kid you saw on LinkedIn who got SA at Goldman and keep spewing this bs about "diversity of all backgrounds". The presence of someone from a wealthy black family is statistically low to the extent that it's diverse in and of itself. None of ya'll ever cared about "diversity of backgrounds" until there were minority programs... it's just a rebuttal. And to play devil's advocate, even if there was exclusively wealthy black people in these diversity programs at banks, is that not diversity of background given their underrepresentation within wealth statistically? They're still black lol. Their parents still had to talk to them about what to do when they get pulled over by a cop, whether they lived in Oakland or Greenwich. They likely still dealt with racism at Deerfield/Andover/Eton/Trinity or wherever else they went in high school and college as well. All of this whole diversity of background is so whack to me lol. It's just white people trying to include themselves in something that wasn't meant for them.
This site will argue for diversity to be attached to a socio-economic metric because most white bankers come from wealthy families– so poor white kids are diverse. Yet, they do not consider wealthy black people to be diverse regardless of their under-representation within the wealthy class... because by being wealthy their experience in America mirrors exactly that of a wealthy white person..? And when poor black kids get into these program, you all still shit on them. Like wtf logic is that haha
Source for black millionaire stat: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/the-…
It's just another cover for people to express their inherent, perhaps unconscious, bigotry.
As you say... all of this only became a problem when it was specifically minorities getting a leg up. Even now, no one complains about the rich white kid with the connections "stealing" a spot. There is an implicit assumption here that minorities aren't supposed to work high paying, white collar jobs
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