I really hope this comment gets higher on the page, because I think it explains the situation really well.
I was going to make a comment mentioning how the asymmetry in what is allowed in big companies frustrates me greatly. People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right while people who vocally express support for older social structures get cancelled. Well your comment explains that asymmetry perfectly with something I had never considered: legal risk.
It is apparent to me that many people in the country still align with the old social structures, but they aren't allowed to thrive in modern corporate America. How will this affect society in the long term? What would it take for things to change?
> People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right
Have you seen _any_ major tech company with close to 50% women or 40% non-hispanic white employees? In engineering roles? That's just aiming for parity with U.S. demographics, but when you consider how much of the world travels to the U.S. to work in tech, that 40% number should be much higher!
So if women and minorities are not being "hired left and right", and not all women and minorities ascribe to the viewpoint you describe, then that viewpoint cannot be being "hired left and right".
The "old social structures" may be on their way out, but their vestiges are clearly alive and well despite the moderate legal "risk" that has been added in the past few decades. The law may be an asymmetric tool, but as it stands, a tool that isn't up to the task it was designed for.
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To reframe things, some questions:
How would you define "the old social structures".
Do you think they are good/bad/benign.
Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?
> Have you seen _any_ major tech company with close to 50% women or 40% non-hispanic white employees? In engineering roles?
Depends on what you'd consider close. Apple, for example, reports 47% white non-Hispanic employees overall and 44% in engineering. (https://www.apple.com/diversity/) From my personal experience, I've never worked on a team where white people were a majority, although in one case I think the company as a whole was.
Apple's numbers here are a lot better than I expected!
For comparison, many of the other FAANG companies fare much worse, and many of the smaller companies I saw when consulting and doing a startup looked even less diverse than big tech.
> How would you define "the old social structures"
They're social and cultural beliefs that used to be accepted by corporations and the media but are now not. For example, unequal outcomes doesn't imply discrimination. Some cultures are better than others. There are widespread physical and psychological differences between men and women. These are common beliefs that are still common, but people are afraid to voice them.
> Do you think they are good/bad/benign.
Any extreme ideology is bad. Requiring strict gender roles or saying whites are superior is extremely harmful. But so is flagrant discrimination against whites or other similar things. What is bad is allowing one extreme while suppressing the other.
> Do you they are still present/fast fading/already gone?
I read some studies somewhere that stated that conservatism and liberalism are inate character traits that never really go away in a population. This means that changes in the visibility of such traits is largely a function of how much power one side or the other can gain. This means that in the 50's, liberalism was just as popular as now but they didn't have the power.
Now its swapped. Liberalism has the power, the corporate support, the narrative. But that doesn't mean that conservatism is any rarer than before. This power asymmetry increases the chances of conflict. See the affect of the Culture Wars on our political system.
I want to emphasize that my personal opinions don't matter much at all here. But if corporations continue asymmetric political pressure, there will be pushback. What will the repercussions of such pushback be?
I was going to make a comment mentioning how the asymmetry in what is allowed in big companies frustrates me greatly. People who express disdain towards the current social structure and disparage groups like white men get hired left and right while people who vocally express support for older social structures get cancelled. Well your comment explains that asymmetry perfectly with something I had never considered: legal risk.
It is apparent to me that many people in the country still align with the old social structures, but they aren't allowed to thrive in modern corporate America. How will this affect society in the long term? What would it take for things to change?