Microsoft's executive vice president of human resources, Lisa Brummel, said in an email to employees that there is still "much work" to be done regarding Microsoft's diversity. "Diversity and inclusion are a business imperative. Diversity needs to be a source of strength and competitive advantage for us," she said.
Enforced diversity for the sake of diversity is a massive and costly burden around the necks of corporations. It brings down quality while raising expenses. I'm pretty sure it's one of many reasons why businesses are moving production over-seas.
A friend of mine used to have an upper-management job at a large plant, from which he retired. Part of his job was sorting bids and hiring outside contractors for projects, both large and small. When he first started, the hiring criteria was, as expected, quality and cost. However, that changed over time, until it came down to an official guideline handed down from corporate headquarters. Basically, after that, the main critera became the sex and race of the contracted company's ownership.
At the top of the list was Native American female on down to Caucasian male at the very bottom. If he had two bids, one by a female owned contractor and one by a male owned contractor, he HAD to hire the female owned business. If it was between a Native American female owned contractor and an African-American female owned contractor, he HAD to hire the Native American female owned business.
He was pretty disgusted with this, as it meant that the high-quality contractors he liked were often frozen out by low-quality contractors who would set up a figure-head minority as co-owner. He said it would often turn out that he would hire the initial contractor based on minority-status then he would have to go back and hire ANOTHER contractor to COMPLETELY RE-DO THE PROJECT, often at additional expense because they would have to strip away what had been done. We're talking about paying double price for projects that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.
With that kind of situation to deal with, I don't know that I can blame corporations for fleeing to other countries.
