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The point is, there are other policies which will impact demographics. I don't want to change the subject too much, but I actually think the french level requirements in the canadian public service lead to worse outcomes than white-male exclusion, even if it were scaled up 100x. It's currently impossible to manage employees or be in a sufficiently senior role unless you speak french, even when the vast majority of francophones opt to read,write and speak in english when working. When my team is hiring, I'd rather work with a "non white male" constraint than a "must speak french" constraint. The french requirements are often unnecessary and make it very difficult to hire talent. As a french speaker, I've leapfrogged colleagues of similar productivity because they were anglophones who couldn't even be considered for a number of promotions.
Still, though, I agree that on the surface one policy sounds a lot better than the other and that they're not analogous with respect to why they impact demographics.
I would say it’s more than just “on the surface”. One policy is based on immutable characteristics, the other is based on the possession of a skill which they would like employees to have. “Any policy that affects racial composition is tantamount to racism” is an extremely tenuous position at best.
You claim that a “non white male” constraint isn’t as bad to you as a “must speak French” constraint, but in spite of your explanation it’s hard to see why this is so. You can make the argument that the French requirement is extreme and should be relaxed since it isn’t integral to job performance, but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment. White men can’t simply assume a different demographic if they want to, and their exclusion isn’t for lacking a certain skill but instead for ideological/diversity reasons. It’s easy to see which condition is far more restrictive and far more difficult to justify.
I didn't say the french policy was racist, just that it led to worse outcomes. I probably won't convince you. You're not a canadian public servant and don't see what it's like. I'm not defending the no-white-male policy or anything. Apologies for the what-about-ism, I made an off-topic comment and now I'm just elaborating.
Here's a situation I've seen a ton: An employee wants to become a manager, so they go on paid french training, putting their job on pause for weeks or months. When they come back, they inevitably don't use their french because francophones don't care and don't want to slow down important conversations by speaking to a french novice. Once their newly acquired french abilities atrophy, the training cycle repeats. I've seen this happen to a ton of really talented people with passion for their domain.
Also, learning french as an adult is pretty difficult, especially when the public service is not at all immersive. Even francophones usually prefer english because they'd prefer not to learn twice the terminology, check weird grammar rules or slow down communication.
I see where you're coming from. However the outcomes I've experienced suggest the french-requirements are a worse policy.
That’s interesting. In Texas(which has a similar percentage of Spanish first language speakers to Canada’s French first language speakers), Spanish speakers are generally willing to put up with novices by slowing their conversations down.
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Okay, I’m outside right now, so it’s hard for me to draft anything. A few things, though:
Difficult =/= impossible. It might be hard, but this does not mean it’s equal to something you literally cannot change. You’ve made a case for why the French barrier is bad, but not for your comparison.
Your comments seem to imply that you have no real experience with the “non white male” policies, so making a comparison between whether language barriers or diversity-based demographic barriers are worse based on your experience is premature at best. This could be taken as evidence of a lack of diversity initiatives in the Canadian public service, but I’m not too inclined to rely on anecdata as a source because of 1: potential issues with unrepresentativeness and 2: distortions relating to perception.
The studies I’ve seen relating to hiring biases in the Australian public service (the country where I live), while not exactly extrapolable to the Canadian situation, suggest that "diversity hiring" is de facto being practiced and that it is endorsed. These biases favouring women and minorities in the Australian public service were found in a study conducted by the behavioural economics team of the Australian government, and in light of this finding they discourage blind hiring because it might prevent public servants from discriminating in the Appropriate Direction.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170702213823/https://pmc.gov.au/resource-centre/domestic-policy/going-blind-see-more-clearly-unconscious-bias-australian-public-services-shortlisting-processes
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