The Magical World Of Liberal EquityAnalysis finds white NYT employees receive higher job performance ratings than POC colleagues. If you hire for reasons other than competence, what do you expect?
Rod Dreher
Aug 23, 2022
One is shocked, shocked by this news, surely:
An analysis of comprehensive data for roughly 1,000 The New York Times employees conducted by members of the union that represents its newsroom found that Black and Latino staffers are far less likely than their white peers to receive strong job ratings.
There are financial consequences to job ratings because they influence the size of employee bonuses, the NewsGuild union says. But staffers tell NPR the differential is even more important because it indicates an underlying systemic problem that the paper is failing to address. It is demoralizing, they say, and contributes to the premature departure of some colleagues.
The guild's study, released today, comes amidst uneasy negotiations over the newspaper's contract with the NewsGuild. The paper is still operating under the terms of the last one, which expired in 2021.
"Being Hispanic reduced the odds of receiving a high score by about 60%, and being Black cut the chances of high scores by nearly 50%," says the report from the NewsGuild chapter representing employees of The New York Times. The study, shared before its release with NPR News, reflects data stretching back to 2018, when a new rating system was put in place.
While there were some fluctuation — on average, the performance of Black employees rose over the intervening years, while it declined for Latinos at the organization — white workers were consistently assessed as outperforming their peers.
Well, gosh, let's see. If you hire people on the basis of anything other than competence, you should not be surprised by this result. That is to say, if a middling performer who happened to be a Person Of Color got the job over a Person Of Paleness who was more qualified, you should not be surprised to find that the diverse employee can't do the job as well as those who were hired on the basis of competence alone.
Think about it: if white people with blue eyes had a significant hiring advantage over all other white people, because the newspaper decided that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion required increasing the number of blue-eyed white employees in the newsroom, it stands to reason that the blue-eyed would not rate as highly on performance as the other whites, overall, because they were selected for an attribute that had nothing to do with their ability to do the job.
Seriously, does anybody really think that The New York Times is racist? I guess those who believe that the only possible explanation for racial disparities in job performance is racism must believe it. The report I linked to above, from NPR (naturally), doesn't even mention this as a possible explanation for the disparity. It is inconceivable to the liberal/progressive mind that this could be true.
Therefore, the evaluation system at the Times will have to change to reflect DEI priorities. Newsroom managers will have to figure out another way to determine who among their workers can actually get the job done.
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I have a bee in my bonnet about this stuff because in 1997, a section editor at a newspaper I really wanted to work for told me I was the perfect candidate for an opening, and that my clips (writing samples) were first-rate. He said that the job interview was just a formality at that point. Fantastic! I thought. But then the man stopped taking my calls. Finally I was able to pin him down, and he sheepishly said that he had been informed by the (white) editor-in-chief that he could not interview me until the newspaper had undertaken a national search for a woman or POC for that position. I could tell that this editor knew he was behaving shamefully towards me, telling me that I could not have a shot at that job, despite my qualifications, because of my sex and skin color.
I eventually got the editor-in-chief on the phone, and told him I would pay for my own plane ticket to fly in to interview, just please give me a chance. Nope.
Months went by with no word from them. Meanwhile, I got a job interview at a much better paper. On the very day I was offered and accepted that job, the other paper called, said they had not found a female or POC job prospect who was as talented as I, and they would like to fly me in for an interview. It felt great to tell them forget it, that I found a better job.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-magical-world-of-liberal-equity/
