The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:

> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.

That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.

I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"

I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.

I'll try to assume good faith, but this is the sort of framing often used in the waning days of unpopular ideas.

That's not what DEI ever was. It fundamentally came down to evaluating disparate impact and then setting targets based on it. The underlying idea is that if a given pool (in the US, generally national- or state-level statistics) has a racial breakdown like so:

  10% X
  30% Y
  60% Z

But your company or organization had a breakdown of:

  5% X
  25% Y
  70% Z

You are institutionally racist and need to pay money to various DEI firms in order to get the right ratios, where 'right' means matching (or exceeding) the population for certain ethnic minorities. The 'certain ethnic minorities' value changed over time depending on who you would ask.

The methods to get 'the right ratios' varied from things like colorblind hiring (which had a nil or opposite effect), to giving ATS-bypassing keywords to minority industry groups (what the FAA did here).

DEI started as exactly what the original poster stated. It then has transformed many times, including through quotas (ruled unconstitutional in the 70s), and something similar to what you're talking about, to the more modern notion which is more about getting the best candidates from all populations.

Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has happened. For example, https://www.ashkingroup.com/insights-media/the-power-of-blin...

The only place I can think of where the opposite is with college admissions, but college admissions is a weird thing in general in that I've never understood why admissions is tied to a stronger academic record (ties into, what's the goal of a given college). In areas such as sports, the impact has been even greater -- and there it's not even colorblind, but simply opened up the pool, and is more metrics driven than just about any profession.

Not really. Everything is downstream of the pressure on organizations to address disparate impact. Some examples:

When a company is under pressure to boost the number of X engineers, they quickly run into the 'pipeline problem'. There simply isn't enough X engineers on the market. So they address that by creating scholarship funds exclusively for race X.

When a school is under pressure to have the racial makeup of it's freshman class meet the right ratios, it has to adjust admission criteria. Deprioritize metrics that the wrong races score well on, prioritize those that the right races score well on. If we've got too many Y, and they have high standardized test scores? Start weighing that lower until we get the blend we're supposed to have.

The goal of the college is not to get the students with the strongest academic record: it's to satisfy the demand for the right ratios.

Repeat over and over in different ways at different institutions.

> Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has happened. For example ...

The study underlying that post is a great example of another downstream effect of DEI efforts. That study did _not_ show what the headline or abstract claimed.

When you hide the gender of performers, it ends up either nil or slightly favoring men. That particular study has been cited thousands of times, and it's largely nonsense.

http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...

The study did show it. The author of this critique properly notes that Table 4 is not an apples to apples comparison. The author of the study notes that expanding the pool of women as used in Table 4 likely brought in less talented musicians disproportionately.

Table 5 does the more apples to apples comparison. The critique notes that sample size is too small, but it captures 445 blind women, 816 blind men, 599 non-blind women, and 1102 non-blind men auditions. That's certainly sufficient for a study like this.

The study also does reflect how when a population feel like there is less bias against them in a system they are more likely to participate -- even if that means on average the level of "merit" might go down, but those that make it through the filter will better reflect actual meritocracy -- and that's what this study showed as well.

No, it doesn't. This is a dramatic reach and complete misunderstanding of the stats. The data in table 5 is not statistically significant.

If you go down to table 6 (which is also incredibly weak), it shows the opposite: men are advancing at a higher rate than women in blind auditions.

Andrew Gelman reviewed the link as well and agreed:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...

Table 5 is stat sig. There’s not a p-value given but the effect sizes are large. The knit place it’s not is the semi-final and final rounds with their smaller sizes.

And table 6 shows blind auditions significantly increased the chances of women advancing from the preliminary round and winning in the final round. However women were less likely to advance past semifinals when auditions were blind. But still a net win.

Gellman is focused on the “several fold” and “50% claims” it made. But the paper shows 11.6 and 14.8 point jumps, which are supported by the paper.