What would be good inclusivity training?

[bopper]

Food for thought:
My corporation has like 78% male 22% female

https://www.wiley.com/network/instructors-students/education-trends/im-not-your-guy-dude-why-language-really-does-matter

http://getitwrite.ca/2016/05/11/man-hours/

[Caracal]

(2) is strikingly bad pedagogy. You don't want to put yourself in the position of policing that sort of thing, so if you're going to give that assignment, you need to (a) take the time to explain what you mean by the relevant terms, and (b) either take students at their word, or require them all to give a brief explanation of what they take to be their culture, and why their selection counts as coming from a different culture.

Yeah, just as a general rule, no professor should be trying to define and regulate what cultural backgrounds students can claim. That you're trying to do it based on their appearance is just absurd and stupid. This is not someone who was prone to doing a lot of thinking about his assumptions.

[ciao_yall]

Early in my career I had the idea of a film of a nice looking white guy on his first day on the job. I took these from my actual experiences.

1) Enters an office and has to talk to a group of women while a poster of a hunky man in a Speedo leers from behind the desk.
2) Is congratulated for helping achieve diversity goals, even though I was awarded top trainee in my program.
3) Asked about my plans for balancing work and family, even though I wasn't pregnant, married or even dating anyone.
4) Male boss wanted to be huggy with everyone. When I told him I wasn't super comfortable with that, he asked if I had been date-raped.

I'm sure many of us have been in similar situations and can add to Chad's First Day at Work.

[marshwiggle]

Early in my career I had the idea of a film of a nice looking white guy on his first day on the job. I took these from my actual experiences.

1) Enters an office and has to talk to a group of women while a poster of a hunky man in a Speedo leers from behind the desk.

My wife has had experiences like this visiting clients in heavily male dominated fields.

2) Is congratulated for helping achieve diversity goals, even though I was awarded top trainee in my program.

If this were in nursing or daycare, it wouldn't seem too odd.

On a philosophical note, if hiring for diversity is important, is it at the same time wrong to acknowledge that a particular hire helps with this? Or, do we have "diversity hires" that we identify for this reason, and "merit hires" who happen to be "diverse", but we don't draw attention to?

It seems we're stuck with one or the other.

3) Asked about my plans for balancing work and family, even though I wasn't pregnant, married or even dating anyone.

I don't have a problem with this being asked of everyone. I've been on the "daddy track" my whole career, and turned down promotion offers expressly because they would interfere with home life.

4) Male boss wanted to be huggy with everyone. When I told him I wasn't super comfortable with that, he asked if I had been date-raped.

With MeToo and similar things, I'd guess this kind of thing wil become increasingly rare in that there will be much less physical contact, socializing outside of work hours, etc. Probably a big net benefit, although it will eliminate some of the informal mentoring that happened in the past. (And of course the abuses of the situation that also happened in the past.)

[ciao_yall]

3) Asked about my plans for balancing work and family, even though I wasn't pregnant, married or even dating anyone.

I don't have a problem with this being asked of everyone. I've been on the "daddy track" my whole career, and turned down promotion offers expressly because they would interfere with home life.

Some thoughts on that.

1) Has anyone randomly asked you how you were going to handle a future theoretical situation, potentially planning to withhold job and promotion opportunities depending on how you answered?

2) Men with families are perceived to be more responsible and devoted to work than women with families. So answering that question is a net positive for a man, regardless of how he answers.

3) The fact that you were offered promotions even though you were known to have a home life is pretty unusual in itself. Many women find themselves shunted onto the "mommy track" as soon as the engagement ring appears, if not sooner.

[mahagonny]

It's the women who are huggy in my workplace. They don't have a risk. When I was a man I would have  preferred to avoid it.

[apl68]

(2) is strikingly bad pedagogy. You don't want to put yourself in the position of policing that sort of thing, so if you're going to give that assignment, you need to (a) take the time to explain what you mean by the relevant terms, and (b) either take students at their word, or require them all to give a brief explanation of what they take to be their culture, and why their selection counts as coming from a different culture.

Yeah, just as a general rule, no professor should be trying to define and regulate what cultural backgrounds students can claim. That you're trying to do it based on their appearance is just absurd and stupid. This is not someone who was prone to doing a lot of thinking about his assumptions.

The fact that things like this apparently continue to happen is, I suppose, one of the reasons that institutions feel a need to push things like inclusivity training.  But then the trainers may make assumptions--or implicit assumptions--about the people they're working with that are offensive and create resentment and pushback.

[mamselle]

You're posting a lot of information about yourself, and then touchy when someone inquires further.

I should have explained my reason. I have the impression that you are a freelance tour guide. An honest living if there ever was one. And you seem to love to delve into parts of those parts of history that implicate white people as thieves, interlopers, exploiters. And I wondered if you do this because it's in style and therefore profitable (tips!) or because it's your particular take on history. The white guilt craze probably won't last forever.

I'm only touchy when someone gets what I've said so backwards that I'm baffled about where their ideas originated, except perhaps in their own isolated hermeneutics.

I'm currently doing several things, primarily music teaching, at the moment. I have for thirty years now been a once-a-week-tour-guide in July and August; I haven't led tours for two years now because of the health situation.* My tips usually total about 20/week because I stuck to historical facts and didn't use effusive, dramatic superlatives and polarize complex narratives as other guides do.

I don't do tours for the pay, I do them to disseminate historical information. And even if I were doing higher-powered tours, they wouldn't any leave time for posting on working hours. You're out the whole time, and then you're done and you go home. I've never even had an office to work from.

That would have had to have been during my stints doing daytime desk jobs, which I haven't done for almost a decade now. My last E/A job was freelance, meeting my Ex. Dir in a couple of nearby academic libraries so we could use their materials for the publications we were working on, etc. I was only paid for the hours I was doing direct work on those pubs, editing them, writing for them, prepping them for sendout, etc.

The bolded part is the part you may want to examine in your own self-assessment about diversity awareness, by the way--not mine.

I work pretty hard to present a balanced view of all people in the world as created beings of great worth. There are some warts-and-all issues that are raised during my tours, but they are balanced against discussions of exceptionally careful people. In this case, some are even white males who underwent a lot of difficulty to get where they did--persecutions, jailings and beatings by those under Archbishop Laud among them.

I just don't leverage those over the jailings, beatings and enslaved conditions that others in that community also experienced, which is what others have done until more recently. I was probably 8 years old when the unfairness of the ways Native Americans and blacks were treated historically began to bother me--this is not something 'trendy' or 'new' for me at all.

I care about all kinds of people, and about getting the narratives of their interactions over time right.

M.

____
* In past times, as I've mentioned now and again, I have worked 'desk jobs' that might allow for the kind of 'paid time' you seem to be assuming I have: I never did. The places I've worked all have keystroke counters: we once saw a colleague walked out by security when IT proved he was writing his novel on work time. We might occasionally have been allowed to use a large-format printer or copier, if we brought our own paper, and asked permission, and stayed late, but the rest of the time was so full of tasks, that wouldn't have been possible.

The novel-writer was falling so far behind in his other work that IT was prompted to examine his computer use closely, and that was sort of a cautionary tale for everyone else, if we'd even had that idea to begin with. A couple of other places were more casual, if you had all your other work done, it was like you were on a retainer, they didn't care what else you did. But those jobs were a very long time ago.

And I only bring up these things because I'm aware my path has been so (unexpectedly, to me, too) non-traditional that I want people to know I'm not making things up out of whole cloth: they're based in my own experiences and observations, as well as on my studies and attention to the facts. I can't claim some of the credentials others do, but it's fair for others to want to know what I'm basing my credibility on, so I try to explicate.

[Hegemony]

When someone asks a woman or a minority if they're a diversity hire, the implication is "How did you get here? Normally your kind is too inadequate to be hired, so I assume you're just here to fill a quota, not because you're actually qualified." I mean, what kind of answer would a questioner expect? "Hey, are you our new diversity hire?" "No, I was hired on my qualifications." Or "Yes, women are almost always unqualified, which is why you see so few of them in this field, but because of political correctness I got in anyway, hahaha!" Or "Yes, thank goodness for diversity hires, because I'm so incompetent that I couldn't get any other job!" I mean seriously, what kind of answer is expected?

But if a man is training as a nurse or a kindergarten teacher, there is already the expectation that people of that gender can naturally perform at that level. After all, many men are doctors, which is perceived as harder and more prestigious, so it's not a step to believe that men could perform at nurse level. Men are college professors and school principals, which are perceived as harder and more prestigious than kindergarten teaching, so it's not a stretch to believe that men could perform at kindergarten-teacher level. So asking such men if they are diversity hires is not to imply "I'd bet you're inadequate and you got this spot unfairly, right?"

That said, I think asking anyone if they got where they are by means of special allowances is obnoxious and objectionable. And again, what kind of serious answer could be expected? It's not a legitimate inquiry about paths of accomplishment; it's just a way of needling them.

[dismalist]

When someone asks a woman or a minority if they're a diversity hire, the implication is "How did you get here? Normally your kind is too inadequate to be hired, so I assume you're just here to fill a quota, not because you're actually qualified." I mean, what kind of answer would a questioner expect? "Hey, are you our new diversity hire?" "No, I was hired on my qualifications." Or "Yes, women are almost always unqualified, which is why you see so few of them in this field, but because of political correctness I got in anyway, hahaha!" Or "Yes, thank goodness for diversity hires, because I'm so incompetent that I couldn't get any other job!" I mean seriously, what kind of answer is expected?

But if a man is training as a nurse or a kindergarten teacher, there is already the expectation that people of that gender can naturally perform at that level. After all, many men are doctors, which is perceived as harder and more prestigious, so it's not a step to believe that men could perform at nurse level. Men are college professors and school principals, which are perceived as harder and more prestigious than kindergarten teaching, so it's not a stretch to believe that men could perform at kindergarten-teacher level. So asking such men if they are diversity hires is not to imply "I'd bet you're inadequate and you got this spot unfairly, right?"

That said, I think asking anyone if they got where they are by means of special allowances is obnoxious and objectionable. And again, what kind of serious answer could be expected? It's not a legitimate inquiry about paths of accomplishment; it's just a way of needling them.

So, how do we know someone is a diversity hire or has been hired on merit?

We don't.  So we go by the average. Statistical discrimination, not founded on animus.

This will stay so long as diversity is promoted. It is true that wages for the diversity hires rise. That's the point, quality be damned.

[Hegemony]

Dismalist, I don't quite understand your comments, but "quality be damned" seems to be saying that there are not enough qualified or meritorious people of underrepresented groups to be hired into the positions you're envisioning? Like, say, people want to increase the number of women physicists or black physicists, but you don't believe there can be enough meritorious women physicists or black physicists, so the ones that will be hired don't actually deserve the jobs? I wonder if you have hard data to back up the idea that the women and black people in the field are worse scholars than the white men.  Or perhaps it's just an a priori assumption.

[mahagonny]

That prof sounds pretty silly. 

Absolutely. Especially evident here:

2) One of the assignments was to attend a performance of music "not part of your own culture," and turn in a write-up covering the event.

This led to a lot of frustrated students, as the prof, based on no other knowledge of each student other than name and physical appearance, began vetoing students' choices based on very broad categorizations of "cultures." He also didn't care what culture a student had actually grown up with, only ethnic background.

All of this pompous "prof-as-God" nonsense deserves all of the criticism it gets.
Particularly the veto part; not being able to trust the students to follow instructions that he could in no way verify is just obnoxious.

So, were I in the class, would I have been discouraged from going to a performance of Mozart, since I'm obviously of European descent?  Or would it be okay, since I'm from Arkansas and presumably grew up hearing nothing other than country & western and bluegrass?

Unless there was some pretty clear definition of what "culture" means early on in the course, it's totally bogus, for reasons like this.

Yet the teacher was, in good faith, trying to give the class an assignment that takes into account the new 'liberal' orthodoxy. Namely, someone in a position of power gets to assign a group identity to each person and then require specific things of that person in his relationship to society based on that assigned identity. And the professor could easily have felt pressured to by the communications in their midst from diversity staff, chancellors weighing in on current events, etc. The logical culmination of this thought process is the supplanting of the Golden Rule, which is actually a part of many people's legally protected freedom to choose their religion. As in you are now required to adjust your interactions with others based on the biases that have been attributed to you. It's a crazy approach, and perhaps what is needed is for it to lead to total collapse of communication and functioning in the style of the Tower of Babel. So we can then start over from ground Zero with some common sense. Like for instance, for three weeks we will study this music, and for the next three that music, etc.
This is quite different from teaching theories or research about implicit bias or encouraging people to delve into the subject, because in this case someone gets to assign an identity to each student, or at the very least, the student has to identify himself by group(s) and be able to defend that identification to the professor, suggesting that the person doing the assigning of identities (the one with the grade book)  does not have bias.
And this kind of stuff is definitely coming, whereas diversity staff are in a position to dole out 'information' that you can't question, lest you be identified as bigoted.

[mahagonny]

You're posting a lot of information about yourself, and then touchy when someone inquires further.

I should have explained my reason. I have the impression that you are a freelance tour guide. An honest living if there ever was one. And you seem to love to delve into parts of those parts of history that implicate white people as thieves, interlopers, exploiters. And I wondered if you do this because it's in style and therefore profitable (tips!) or because it's your particular take on history. The white guilt craze probably won't last forever.

The bolded part is the part you may want to examine in your own self-assessment about diversity awareness, by the way--not mine.

None of these points are in dispute. I learned about colonization and slavery from my hopelessly racist ninth grade social studies teacher many decades ago, and how our ancestors in the USA came to understand slavery had to be ended by force and at considerable expense. The left acts like they have new information when all they have is different people with stale, recycled rage, the NYT and other media hype.
Of course it's a good idea to examine one's own assessment of things periodically. We agree on that too.

[ergative]

Dismalist, I don't quite understand your comments, but "quality be damned" seems to be saying that there are not enough qualified or meritorious people of underrepresented groups to be hired into the positions you're envisioning? Like, say, people want to increase the number of women physicists or black physicists, but you don't believe there can be enough meritorious women physicists or black physicists, so the ones that will be hired don't actually deserve the jobs? I wonder if you have hard data to back up the idea that the women and black people in the field are worse scholars than the white men.  Or perhaps it's just an a priori assumption.

Maybe 'quality be damned' was getting at the fact that mediocrity is overrepresented in white dudes, since they don't need to compete on merits as fiercely to get the positions that everyone assumes they're qualified for? If that's the case, then--going by averages--we should expect that an arbitrary white dude is less qualified than the black lady holding the equivalent post. Statistical discrimination, not founded on animus.

Or, y'know, if it's truly impossible to know whether someone was a diversity hire or not, we could evaluate them on their own actions, without pre-judging (ooh--look at that etymology!) what we think they're capable of.

[marshwiggle]

Or, y'know, if it's truly impossible to know whether someone was a diversity hire or not, we could evaluate them on their own actions, without pre-judging (ooh--look at that etymology!) what we think they're capable of.

You mean like the 24 year old armorer on the set of "Rust" where Alec Baldwin killed someone by firing a gun that wasn't supposed to be loaded?