I don’t want to dox myself, but I’ve been at my job for 5+ years. I guess either my boss or I fat fingered something while I was on boarding, cuz just now I was going over some paperwork and… As far as my job is concerned I’m Native American. I am very much white. Nobody ever brought it up.
I couldn’t find an easy way to change it and I’d rather not talk to HR if it’s not a big deal. So, forget about it? Call HR?
I know this is very common in the US but as an European this is still a weird concept for me to keep track of a person’s ethnicity at all.
Does this have any implications whatsoever in terms of benefits or something? Otherwise I’d just let it be.
Keeping track of race is entirely optional.
You’re 100% free to decline including it on any personnel file or application (with the exception of acting/modeling). It’s also self-identifying.
Consider that as a multi-racial pluralistic society - our values will be different than a European country whose major ethnic groups are the indigenous people.
We have an unfortunately long legacy of systematic racism issues. Communities or color experience slower emergency response times, fewer school resources and teacher pay, redlining and gerrymandered districting, food deserts, fewer public transportation options, and often fewer per capita polling stations on Election Day.
Until race stops being an observable factor for community outcomes, we still have a lot of work to do.
Many organizations see and understand this. As part of their sense of corporate social responsibility, companies make a good faith effort to hire from a ethnically diverse pool of candidates. If all your candidates are white - a company needs to ask itself if that’s a reflection of their own hiring biases or if that’s a systemic issue within the talent pool? It’s good to know these things - because industry surveys are constant - which help local leaders, non-profit organizations, colleges and universities, and governments do their jobs.
Meeting diversity goals is good for a variety of reasons. Importantly in capitalism, it’s good to investors because customers tend to prefer supporting diverse companies. Perhaps more importantly than that, different backgrounds offer different modes of thinking when it comes to problem solving. Crowd sourcing from a bigger idea pool is good for productivity.
Over here (Austria) asking about race or processing this information in regards to a job wil land the employer in hot water really quickly, since it opens them up to racism claims.
I used to work for an organization that provided legal, educational, medical and social services to inner-city children and their families. These families were mostly Black and Latino.
If we were hiring for a job that had an equally qualified black and white candidates, the choice is clear. In order to be successful, you need to have good professional relationships with clients. It is far more effective if the client can relate to one’s lived cultural experience. It’s also very important for at-risk children to see relatable adults succeed in a world that has been systemically unfair to them.
In Austria, this hiring process may be considered racist. But here, we recognize that there are a lot of fringe benefits when hiring for diversity.
In fairness, race is not something that’s discussed unless it’s directly related to the role. As stated above, you are free to check “Prefer Not To Say” if an application asks about race. Most of the time, that information is used for census and surveys.
Having done a lot of HR in my life, you’d be surprised how many hiring managers are passively racist.
I’ve seen applications rejected simply because the hiring manager doesn’t want to embarrass themselves mispronouncing a name. Or they assume communication language skills without ever talking to someone. Or they not-so-sublte, “I can just feel this one won’t be a good fit”.
Like, “Really, Bob? What’s on Fatima’s resume gives you that impression? She’s clearly qualified.”
I wonder how much worse the racial wealth gap would be if ‘equal opportunity employment’ wasn’t a thing.
I understand what you mean, that in some specific situations hiring for a specific race can be a benefit, but in cases like that you can hire for something similar that is legal again here too. E.g. you could hire by experience with certain communities, for example. Or you can hire for “sympathy”. “This person is personally a good fit to our company and the role”. With that point you can hire whoever you want.
This is also the Achilles heel of the anti-discrimination laws, since the hiring manager can just say “The applicant’s personality wasn’t a good fit” to anyone they want to discriminate against.
And yes, I have personal experience with how racist and sexist some of my bosses have been so far.
In one company, my boss was directly excluding any applications by women for IT roles, because “they would distract the boys in the IT department”. Even though all “the boys in the IT department” were in long-term relationships. (Btw, I also really hated it that he called us “the boys” even though we were all ~30).