RAF recruitment chief refused ‘unlawful’ order to ‘prioritise women and ethnic minorities over white men’, leaked email reveals
RAF recruitment chief refused ‘unlawful’ order to ‘prioritise women and ethnic minorities over white men’, leaked email reveals
30 comments
Thank fuck! Give that man a bonus please we need more like him.
What a chad(ette). Racial and sex bias when recruiting for work especially in this field and in general is a very, very terrible slope to go down. It may work for a short bit but it’s ripe for abuse in the long run. It didn’t work out for the country I was born in and sure won’t work out in the UK. The main issue imo is that people are still looking at it as xyz race and sex instead of as people as a whole. Whether we like it or not consistently thinking about sex and race whether our intentions are good or not have bad consequences.
Surely, if someone is right for the job, you hire them regardless of their gender, skin colour etc…
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If not then that’s rather fucked up. Gender, race etc.. should have nothing to do with the hiring process.
I mean are they really doing that well for recruits they can get picky?
Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a RAF specific issue
Similar disputes and tensions will pretty much start to happen in almost every lucrative profession up and down the country. This culture will affect your profession. This will likely have an impact on your own hiring and promotion prospects. Start to take notice now
Start reading up on your rights and the letter of the law is all I have got to say
We really do live in a clown world.
So HR sees the form you fill. Good job I pretend to be Jewish in every job application, as should you.
Literally “more diverse drone pilots”
Good. This nonsense has been going on for far too long.
as an ethnic minority brit…good. it’s not us that asked for this. it’s a tiny % of weirdos at the top as always.
This has been going on across many of the armed forces and government agencies for a long time and the quality of operations has suffered substantially as a result.
I can only imagine grins in Moscow and Beijing when they read this. Sad, once meritocracy is gone so is an healthy, prosperous society.
Good no one should get special treatment because of their race and gender. Besides, why purposefully alienate the demographic who make up the majority of the British armed forces aka: young white men. Its utter nonsense for the sake of appeasing some chart made by people who don’t know what they’re doing
My company (construction) have started openly referring to quotas. I thought it was illegal. There is also a programme now within the company for women to progress into leadership roles but nothing for men. I literally don’t understand how it’s legal.
Like this is anything new. Welcome to the recruitment of any government job when they have targets to meet.
As someone who works in the tv / film industry, this kind of diversity hiring at the expense of others is a real thing. My industry is rife with it and they dont even hide it.
I tried to apply for a job for ITV a few months ago, one im completely suited to in terms of experience, but a large part of the application was 3 seperate essay questions to be answered around how i am diverse enougn to join he team but also how i can use that diversity to enrich the job? Ofc i didnt get the job, im not saying i deserved it, but fucking hell did i feel at such a disadvantage.
As a straight white male, who (imo) is pretty good at my job regardless, I had no fucking idea how to even go about answering those questions. Like wtf? Wtf does divirsity have to do with someones abilitiy to perform a job to a high level? I thought we were supposed to be aiming to reach equality, not to replace on group with another and say we did it.
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But… but Reddit said this stuff doesn’t happen!
Reminds me of the guy who applied for a job in IT where he sent in his perfect application, then sent another one where he made himself a black woman, worse qualifications, spelling mistakes, etc etc, and the black woman application got an offer whilst the original got denied.
There are two things we are looking at here.
As a society, POC people are generally overlooked over their white counterparts on opportunities when similarly qualified. We need to eliminate that unconscious bias and provide more opportunities for everyone to compete for. These are deep societal issues that require a lot of time and consistent effort to uproot.
But I fear as a society, we are simplifying the issue to “just hire more black people” – we are in a way, over correcting and in the long run will cause more issues. White working class people will see this as their opportunities taken away, potentially furthering the racial divide and driving them towards the alt-right, and further pitting the white man against the POC person. Which does nothing towards helping us grow and move on as a society.
I say this as a person of colour.
Edit: replace the term “BIPOC” with “POC”
There’s a ton of comments about white racism but the reality of the situation is that all of the UK armed forces are struggling to both recruit more people and retain enough high skilled people to then properly train enough people after that.
They all could really do with a reform, there’s still so much antiquated nonsense and honestly some parts of RAF that are like Sandhurst could do with being forced to be less of a white posh playground.
We need to take our armed forces roles more seriously, before it bites us in the arse.
At least half of the road to this hell is paved with good intentions.
– we have a problem – almost zero female recruits. this is bad, it means we are halving our candidate pool.
– we have identified some problems, the old recruiting sergeant calls all the women “sweetheart” and smacks them on the bottom when they enter. none signed up.
– let’s teach these old men to stop harrassing, or just replace them.
– how will we know if we succeed?
– let’s measure how many women make it through, you know what, let’s do better let’s include the % of women in the recruiter’s performance reports, that way they’ll have to be more mindful of their behaviour.
– that’s awesome, unintended consequence it looks like the recruiters now are trying to hold more events in venues other than rugby clubs, and actively reaching out to more women,
we’re expanding the pool of candidates, high fives all around.
this worked so well, let’s make sure that the performance review is all about the % of women recruited.
record scratch —
lightbulb above the head of the recruiters -> i can get top performance if i just stop hiring men.
This is what happens when you put ideology above reality.
Things I learnt from this subreddit today: racism is ok so long as it happens to the right demographics.
Cool. Good to know.
Recruitment should be based on meeting the job requirement. That should be the only criteria.
Sexuality, Gender, Race, Religion just shouldn’t come into it. If you are a fit for the job you are fit for the job.
I think all interviews should be carried out over the phone or behind a curtain with a voice changer so you can’t determine any of these things. Only way nobody will complain. Would also prove whether or not there is a bias when hiring.
Intruiging the media really wants this story pushing. Seeing it a lot on reddit lately.
In case anyone is wondering why these targets exist, it’s because CVs with white male names have repeatedly been proven to be rated higher by recruiters than identical CVs with female or ethnic minority names.
These biases exist everywhere, whether consciously or not is irrelevant.
Discrimination is wrong, ‘positive’ or not.
To put this in perspective: whether it still is or not, selection for the Army through aptitude and fitness tests had candidates ranked A to D, and your speed at recruitment into the Army was based on this rank.
The RAF operate a similar system and the order in this case was essentially that all women and BAME candidates of any ranking would be recruited before any white males that achieved the highest A rank.
This *is* positive discrimination and unlawful. Campaigns to get more women and minorities into the forces are important, but that’s done through advertising and encouragement to join, not lowering standards and forcing less suitable candidates through the process.
I am amazed with the technology available today that large organisations don’t have a piece of software that can ‘scrub’ any discriminatory factors from a CV – age, sex, religion, even name (as certain names have resulted in recruitment bias).
The hiring manager is then given the scrubbed CVs and makes a decision on moving to the next stage (interview) by the quality of the CV alone.
Then, on a similar note, the interviews are done via video, but the applicant has a voice filter (think neutral computerised voice) and a face filter that imposes a cartoon robot face to the interviewer (and go with Hulk Green or something like that).
Hey presto, the CV assessment and the interviews are bias free, as the hiring manager has no idea of the applicant beyond their skills and experience.
They are simply known as applicant A1 or A7 etc. and when the offer is made to a successful candidate, only then is the hiring manager given the remaining details of the applicant.