Monday, September 03, 2007

Discrimination Hurts

The Financial Times has a really interesting article on the large quantities of skilled professionals who leave their companies due to discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping.
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1 comment:

PG said...

This sentence struck me as stupid:
This yearly exodus is motivated by highly personal reasons but it has a powerful common effect: a brain drain from key parts of the US economy at a time when corporate America is struggling to recruit talent to compete with low-cost rivals from emerging markets. Unless people are leaving those parts of the economy or the U.S. altogether, it cannot properly be described as "brain drain." That's like saying big law firms suffer a "brain drain" because there's massive turnover -- except a lot of the people end up going from one big law firm to a different big law firm. (I have a friend who was disappointed with the firm at which she was a summer associate because they were inattentive to dietary needs, both hers as a vegetarian's and also those of people with religious restrictions; she's currently interviewing with several otherwise identical big law firms that she's presumably vetting for vegetarian-friendliness.) I expect the same thing happened with the Arab-American at the bank; he left that particular banking company and went to a different one that seemed more welcoming.

The better point to be made in the article is that for each person who leaves, the individual company loses the investment in that person's training that may be specific to the company and not useful in the next job, and aggregated over a whole industry or economy, that's a lot of money lost.

1:41 PM

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