I have no doubt that there are things worth doing in this field, but I do worry about the potential for this to take attention away from even higher priorities. One reason why big organisations move slowly is because they have to get approval/input from so many people before they can actually do anything. Secondly, I worry that this is an example of dispersed costs and concentrated benefits in that optimising on second factor tends to be making some sacrifice or compromise on the first.
There is likely to be an adverse selection effect in that the kinds of people who would want to be a diversity officer tend to be the kinds of people who also take the strongest stance and hence are more likely to push us toward prioritising this more than we should.
I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad idea, just it isn’t as obviously good as it looks at first glance.
I have no doubt that there are things worth doing in this field, but I do worry about the potential for this to take attention away from even higher priorities. One reason why big organisations move slowly is because they have to get approval/input from so many people before they can actually do anything. Secondly, I worry that this is an example of dispersed costs and concentrated benefits in that optimising on second factor tends to be making some sacrifice or compromise on the first.
There is likely to be an adverse selection effect in that the kinds of people who would want to be a diversity officer tend to be the kinds of people who also take the strongest stance and hence are more likely to push us toward prioritising this more than we should.
I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad idea, just it isn’t as obviously good as it looks at first glance.