Would adding a family of South Korean people to a group of North American indigenous people considered as being diverse ?

Eventually this would thin out the indigenous people and we would be risk of losing their culture.

Where do you put the bar between Diversity and Culture ?

We in technology were diverse long before it became fashionable

Khaptain: “ Would adding a family of South Korean people to a group of North American indigenous people considered as being diverse ? Eventually this would thin out the indigenous people and we would be risk of losing their culture. Where do you put the bar between Diversity and Culture ? ”

"We in technology were diverse long before it became fashionable."

Have a quick google search limiting the results just to the The Register and I am sure that it will quickly confirm that many of the Register's articles show quite the contrary. It's a subject that has been debated many times..

[1]The Register.com Diversity

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atheregister.com+diversity

I could be misunderstanding your suggestion but I do not see a bar between Diversity and Culture. It seems to me that the existence (coexistence even) of multiple cultures is an important component of diversity, and that a monoculture would be rather non-diverse.

In agriculture, we've found monocultures to be very efficient over short time periods, but to also lead to decreased soil fertility, decreased ecosystem services and functions, decreased robustness to stressors and pathogens, and an overall lack of long-term sustainability. Diversity it seems, is crucial for long-term success, and planting fake plastic carrots into a field of potatoes likely won't cut it.

I'd expect the exact same thing when growing people (or conferences, industries, ...), obviously!

~40 years ago the company MD drove a Porsche. I could never persuade him to get a bumper sticker reading "my other car is a clapped out 2CV".

Boss has a "my other car is electric" sticker on their Tesla.

For technology you want (need?) diversity of thought. What HR usually hires for is diversity of sex, gender or skin colour, i.e. things which in a photo will shout "Look! Diversity!" and gain the company brownie points. Unless you can show the latter sort of diversity necessarily produces the former, there's no win. As a counter example, I strongly suspect that the skin colour of Old Etonians makes sod all difference to their thinking(*). So are there any peer reviewed papers on correlation between the various sorts of diversity? If not, we're running on happy thoughts and Just So stories.

(*) Pro example: I've worked with quite a few people diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome. They are truly wonderful people to have as colleagues, especially for someone like me who's very "seat of the pants" in my approach.

When I started in IT, about 40% of the office was women and there were diverse races in the mix as well. That was in the 80s. I worked at a large consultancy and 2/3 of my bosses over the 15 years I was there were women and they were much better managers than most of the men I worked for.

In more recent years, each new job I've had has been less diverse - and not for want of trying, in my current job, we looked for a couple of new co-workers for 18 months, no females applied, although we did end up with a Ukranian and a Turk joining us, as well as 2 native Germans. I suppose you could call me diverse, as I am a British immigrant, working in Germany...

"in more recent years, each new job I've had has been less diverse - and not for want of trying"

Possibly because employers are trying so hard to tick the boxes, so there's quite remarkable competition for some groups of people. Case in point - a female relative recently graduated (just) with a 3rd class engineering degree from a tier 3 university. Walked straight into a job, turned down multiple offers and had to beat them off with a dirty stick. Her boyfriend, same course, same uni, but first class honours too several months longer, multiple interviews with no offer, and eventually had to grab the first one who offered him anything.

In my own job, we've recently recruited a whole load of around 40 interns for one year placement. The makeup of this group is so unrepresentative of the population at large, in terms of the recruited group having vastly more diverse characteristics than the UK population, the only logical explanation is recruitment bias. Perhaps if this were a one off I'd accept it as sample variation, but wherever I look I see similar evidence.

I do remember sending out an application to the customer in the late 90s. It was issued to their regional offices in around 60 countries around the world. After 2 years, we'd had 2 bug reports! And one of those was a bug in Windows.

I'd written the spec and the test cases before the other programmers started on the project and everything just seemed to click with the project. It was probably my proudest moment.

The Windows bug? There was a Win32 API for returning the month names in the local language... I tested it on German and French Windows, as well as British English. It worked fine. Then we started getting bug reports when it landed in the different countries. They weren't using local language versions of Windows, they were all using "International English" and a bug in the API meant it returned "January" as the name of all 12 months! After talking to the client, we just hard coded it to January through December as all employees had to speak English and the local translation wasn't necessary.

It's very politically correct to talk about "lack of diversity" and there seems to be an implicit assumption that diversity is always a good thing and that something must be done to address the lack of it. I'd venture that in reality, that there are actually very few situations where there is any advantage in having a very diverse workplace.

It's incredibly hard to take a very diverse group of people and then expect them all to have compatible values, work nicely with each other and sing from the same hymn sheet. In the real world, some people are borderline incompatible with each other.

Surprising as it may seem, every project doesn't need (reads from this month's checklist): a man, a woman, a white person, a black person, an oriental, an indian, an arab, a native american, a billionaire, a homeless person, a scientist, an artist, a yankee, a confederate, a protestant, a catholic, an Israeli, a Palestinian, a university professor, a high-school dropout, a war veteran, a hooker, a disabled person, a convicted criminal and a bunch of people with rainbow coloured hair. Perhaps if you need a focus group for a product that needs to appeal to a wide range of people then it's worthwhile, but that is a rare exception. Most of the time all you actually need is a bunch of people with the right skills who can work well together.

People from different backgrounds see things in different ways, which might (in theory at least) help solve a difficult problem, but how often does that actually happen in real life? More likely you find that arguing over lots of contradictory ideas and opinions at every meeting is just frustrating and inefficient. Whereas people with a similar kind of mindset (whatever their background) can often work very well with each other and achieve a lot.

Perhaps we should relabel "diversity" as "lack of homogeneity". Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating discriminating against people of any kind. But I think we should stop the box ticking exercises and just hire whoever is best for the job. It really doesn't matter if people of any particular group are under-represented, provided they are not being deliberately excluded.

"arguing over lots of contradictory ideas and opinions at every meeting"

Replace the whole lot.

It's not about "helping solve a difficult problem". It's about not making unnecessary assumptions, or at least being aware when you are making them so you can think about their effects and test for them.

This, incidentally, is why I worry when I see and hear about "activist" workforces putting pressure on their employers to take sides on (this or that). Because that's a tell for lack of diversity in the workforce. The assumption that all "right-thinking" people see things the way you do is the root of about half the evil in our world.

The nasty part of me thinks the conference made up a woman (or multiple women) because the real candidate speakers were not "hot" enough. But nobody could be that juvenile, correct?

"This is most plausibly due to lack of staff, especially the most experienced, due to sector contraction during COVID causing early retirement and career changes."

Nah, especially for Aviation that's exceptionally shortsighted. It's part of it, but there's been lots and lots of pressure from the general upheaval of the aviation business as a whole that's having repercussions on all sorts of levels and bad management decisions are definitely also part of the mix, with financial decisions seemingly starting to get a stronger footing and pushback from flight crews becoming less effective.

> ...they'll get pretty angry for good reason.

Presumably your point is that "a good reason" isn't simply that they've been found out?