I also wish this analysis hadn’t been done on such a precious and prestigious and stressed field, as it’s led to some lazy and stupid takes: “poor white man thinks he’s entitled to a TV show” or “all the movies suck because of DEI hiring.”
Factually: from about the mid-2010s peaking in the early 2020s I personally observed hiring and employment practices that were facially illegal and yet aby concerns were dismissed as “not relevant because we are prioritizing diversity.”
Eventually, the message was received, processes were changed to silently implement directions without the need for the facially illegal implementation. Specific examples from personal observation, across different orgs and industries. This is anecdotal, but not just one anecdote in one place.
- Directions to “select the diverse candidate in the event of a tie,” while two diverse candidates in a tie would be given an additional interview or other screening before a final selection. On its face, a direction to use protected status as a hiring/promotion criteria.
- Senior leaders re-ranking short lists based solely on names (gender markers), without also reviewing any other parts of the files or notes.
- Specific instructions that gay men should not be considered “diverse candidates” for the purpose of advancing DEI principles.
- Specific instructions to “maintain a diverse balance” or “improve the diversity in the office” when multiple jobs came open.
- In academia, internal decisions by committees that a spot must be filled by a non-white male, with preference for non-white candidate.
Here is the rub from my end: this happened in the absence of legislative changes and instead came down as a mandate to ignore existing EEO law in favor of a greater interest. And maybe, socially, that is the right call. But the net effect was a lot of double talk: “we don’t discriminate on the basis of race or sex, and when we do it’s for the right reasons. And this did lead to a well-founded suspicion that things were not what they were said to be and made it impossible to really measure impact in either a good or bad way. And I think naturally people tend to believe they got screwed and it colors decisions made in good faith as well.
Maybe society did need a few years of positive, re-balancing discrimination that proportionally disadvantaged a population that in earlier generations was privileged. But we didn’t ask that or discuss it or say we were doing it. We just tried (and failed) to gaslight everyone and pretend that we weren’t making important decisions about hiring and promotions based, in part, on race and gender. And that lack of honesty is creating a lot of resentment.
From my personal experience, the impact did fall mainly on millennial men at the beginning or early middle of their careers. The mandates and decisions were frequently passed down by established white men in leadership.