Just received a company-wide questionnaire (on Saturday, lol) from some Employee Research Group with "The questions on corporate diversity and inclusion".
And though I already sighed expecting to answer like "I'm totally ready to hire Asian lesbians instead of engineers" but suddenly there was a set of questions if I feel comfortable myself as a foreign culture representative, and some proposals like:
What would you like us to do more?
- Perform a corporate hiking activity with a storytelling about different countries and cultures
- Organize diverse coffee point meetings with discussions on culture difference
- Internal networking events (like building career-development relationships inside the Toyota Group)
- Community Service (for example: volunteering for a program that teaches students)
On the one hand I was quite surprised with the reasonable points, on the other hand, there's no actual need to push additional diversity into the company while office looks already as a Tower of Babel: I suppose I've heard nearly every existing language, and members of all these cultures are right here, working together.
As for the LGBTQIA2S+ (oh wow, now there are digits and special characters, waiting for Unicode for even more safety): the answer is suddenly "No one cares about you activity outside of the workplace"
Literally https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-03/toyota-curbs-dei-policy-after-activist-attack-over-lgbtq-support :
> The company will “narrow our community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness,”
So much to my surprise I'm totally aligned with a company policy: I do not care about who are you, how do you identify yourself, who do you support or something like that. Usually I contact the colleagues via slack chat, and I definitely don't care who is on the other side of the connection: if you provide me good code, you're a good person. OpenSource community worked like that for decades already, and now the corporate leaders begin to acknowledge that.
Being a member of some ethnic/religious/gender/whatever group does not make you a good engineer, neither does it make you a bad one. "Talk is cheap, show me the code", and now "If you want another competition, show me how do you like hiking, if you've got some time!". Attend math classes, not gender studies, to join the engineering forces.
Sounds like a diversity movement I'm ready to join.