K. Reid Wightman :verified: 🌻 :donor: :clippy: on Nostr: spouse got involved with the dei program at her work. the real keys she says were 1) ...

spouse got involved with the dei program at her work. the real keys she says were 1) just getting underrepresented scientists to apply, and 2) making sure you interview more than one underrepresented person. then 3) hire the best person for the job.

by following #1 and #2 you remove a ton of weird innate biases that people have that, even if they're conscious of it, they fall into. basically, if you follow #1 and #2, you even the odds that #3 results in someone besides a 'white dude' getting the job.

The stats were crazy: say you have 10 candidates. If you interview just 1 minority, they have ~1% chance of getting hired. If you interview 2 minorities, they have ~10% chance each (which is exactly what it should be out of a pool of 10!). This is even when 'smart' people are doing the interviews and they've been taught about implicit biases.

Anyway, following those rules her team ended up hiring a grad student recently who turned into a super duper rockstar. this grad student discovered something crazy about the way genes work. the hire now has a patent application for a cool discovery, and papers coming, and is part of this whole new research paradigm now.

and all because the grad student comes from a part of the world where they eat a different type of foodstuff than westerners. basically learning some fundamental new things about the way genes work in a plant that nobody else would have even thought to look at in her field, which can have huge impacts on western foodstuffs now that they understand the underlying chemistry.

anyway. it's not a 'diversity hire' story. that isn't what DEI is or should be. it's just a "get a diverse pool of applicants to apply, then choose the best one, and sometimes you end up really clicking with someone who brings something new to the table" story. which, in my mind, is exactly why diversity wins...