Does Diversty Make United Less Safe?

 

Steve Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, drew a lot of flak this past week for two things.  One of them raises serious questions about the tradeoff between so-called diversity hiring practices and safety.  The other concerns one of Kirby's hobbies and can probably be dismissed as irrelevant, although it contributed to the overall attention level he's been receiving lately.

 

Some videos alleged to be showing Kirby—a 56-year-old married father of seven—performing as a drag queen went viral, amassing 2.7 million views in only a few days.  As I have no means of knowing whether these videos are authentic or when they were made, and I can't find any evidence that either confirms or denies their provenance, I fall back on a policy I once read which the manager of an ice-manufacturing plant told his employees in the 1920s:  "As long as you do your work well during the day, I don't care what you do at night."  While the CEO of a major multinational corporation may regret a time years ago when he dressed up in drag, I see no reason to draw any far-reaching conclusions from that fact, if indeed it is a fact. 

 

Its chief use by certain media organizations has been to serve as eye candy for the related story, which should be considered seriously:  whether United Airlines' stated diversity-hiring intents are so extreme as to cause their passengers unnecessary safety risks.

 

While I have not been able to locate the original June 2021 interview that is the basis of this charge, the closest I can find to a direct quote from Kirby is from something called "The Patriot Oasis" on X:  "We decided that 50% of the aviation academy students would be women or people of color.  Today, women and people of color make up only 19% of our pilots."     

 

The issue here is whether a prestigious and demanding profession—that of airline pilot in this case—should be allowed to compose and propagate itself according to criteria that are strictly professional-merit-based, or whether one should also consider what for the lack of another phrase I will call identity-based factors.  Questions like this are made clearer by extreme cases, so I will use an example to show what I mean.

 

In 1960, less than 5% of lawyers in the U. S. were female.  Many law firms would hire women only as secretaries and legal assistants, and many law schools either had a policy of not admitting women at all, or making it very difficult for a woman to obtain a law degree.   But things changed, and today, 38% of U. S. lawyers are women. 

 

Similar things can be said about the professions of medicine and engineering.  For a variety of reasons both historical and political, barring women from entering professions simply because they were women became something that was both frowned upon, and eventually made illegal by Federal and state laws.  What once seemed part of the nature of things now seems highly prejudicial and arbitrary.  In retrospect, the custom of banning women from the professions of law, medicine, and engineering seems to have few if any redeeming features, and undoubtedly lost the talents of many otherwise qualified women.

 

Lifting bans is one thing.  But setting numerical goals for percentages of various identity groups is a different thing.  Is it justifiable to arrange selection and admission processes to shift the percentage of various identity groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, social classes, etc.) in directions that appear to be desirable, not for the intrinsic good of the profession itself, but for an extrinsic good such as distributing the benefits of highly-paid prestigious professions among identity groups who have previously not enjoyed them? 

 

If Steve Kirby's stated goal of his "aviation academy" students being 50% women or people of color is achieved, what are the consequences for the distribution of pilot quality among the graduates?  Qualitatively speaking, if the total number of slots in the academy is fixed, and the selection rules are changed so that the fraction of women and people of color rises from whatever it is under strictly professional-merit-based criteria (presumably less than 50%) to the stated goal, some people who would have otherwise been admitted can't get in.  I have no idea how hard it is to get into United Airlines' aviation academy, or what criteria one must meet in order to be admitted.  Presumably, it includes a track record of flying experience and education, and perhaps some tests of professional ability. 

 

The critical question is, does United Airlines maintain their professional-merit-based standards of admission and graduation and hiring while also managing to admit more women and people of color?  To answer this question in detail would require months or perhaps years of research and access to information which is probably proprietary.  But the answer is critical to our query. 

 

If United raises their fraction of discriminated-against minorities by admitting and hiring them with lower professional criteria than those applied to other applicants, it is clear that quality is being compromised.  But if they achieve their diversity goals only by extensive and intensified recruitment efforts, for example, and maintain the standards they held before the diversity initiative started, then there is nothing to worry about safety-wise.

 

There really is no other way to answer this question that I can see.  And of all the various places I've seen or heard this topic discussed, no one seems to have carried the inquiry to the depths it needs to go in order to answer it with fairness both to United Airlines and to the flying public.

 

Maybe some investigative reporter is busily digging into the records as we speak, but somehow I doubt it.  The drag-queen videos combined with a two-year-old interview quote have done their job of increasing Internet traffic to certain sites that are more interested in traffic than truth or objectivity. 

 

In order to remain professions and merit the respect and prestige they receive from the public at large, professions, including that of airline pilot, must maintain their professional standards, and must also be perceived as maintaining those standards in order to retain the public's trust.  This Internet-based kerfuffle about Steve Kirby has undoubtedly eroded that trust, but has left the real question of pilot quality unexamined.

 

Sources:  I referred to a Fox Business report at https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/pilots-hired-based-merit-not-diversity-safety-top-priority-aviation-expert-says, the quote from Patriot Oasis at https://twitter.com/ThePatriotOasis/status/1747584074175107488, and for statistics on women in law at https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html, in addition to the Wikipedia article on Steve Kirby, United Airlines CEO.

Breathing While Black: Discrimination By Pulse Oximeters

 

For several years now, you have been able to go to your local drugstore and buy for less than $50 a device called a pulse oximeter.  It's a little thing you clip on your finger, and in a few seconds it displays two numbers.  One is your pulse rate, and the other is supposed to be the percent of maximum capacity of oxygen that your blood is carrying.  Most healthy people show a blood-oxygen percentage of around 98%, but anything considerably less than that means you're not getting enough oxygen to your tissues.

 

Hospitals and doctors have more sophisticated versions of these devices, but apparently they all share the same flaw these days:  they can give falsely reassuring readings on people whose skin has significant melanin content.  Black people, in other words.  So for decades, anyone in that category whose blood oxygen has been monitored with a pulse oximeter has been in danger of going untreated for low blood oxygen, compared to a person whose skin was lighter. 

 

This is not news.  The problem has been known for decades, but received added publicity during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Studies have shown that people of color receive less supplemental oxygen than average during medical treatment, and bad pulse-oximeter readings only exacerbate this problem. 

 

Fortunately, some engineers at Brown University are trying to address the problem.  In a report carried by the health-information site Statnews, Kimani Toussaint, a Black professor of engineering, is reported to be working with students on a patentable idea that will lead to pulse oximeters that give the correct reading no matter who is being tested, and what color their skin is. 

 

I wish them well, and hope that they can make a significant difference in what has to be one of the most embarrassing deficiencies in healthcare technology to come to light in years. 

 

It didn't have to turn out this way.  The same article cites a report in Wired on one of the first oximeters to hit the market way back in the 1970s, developed by what was then a medical branch of the instrumentation company Hewlett-Packard.  In their typically thorough way, H-P included 248 people of color in their volunteer pool of testing subjects, and made sure the readings were as good for them as for the other volunteers. 

 

Of course, the H-P device was a little fancier than the ones you get at Walgreen's.  It examined eight wavelengths of light, not one or two like the current ones do, and was about the size of a small beer cooler.  I'm sure it sold for more than fifty bucks, too.  But it got the oximetry ball rolling, and from that point on it was a question of how cheaply the device could be made, and whether inaccurate readings on a minority of the FDA-required sample population could be disregarded in the approval process, which they apparently were. 

 

I don't think anybody in the healthcare industry deliberately intended to make devices that discriminated in a purely technological way against people of color.  But beyond a certain point, ignorance was no longer an excuse, as studies were published describing the problem and cautioning clinicians not to trust readings of pulse oximeters with darker-skinned patients. 

 

But this is not a good solution.  The right fix, as Toussaint and his colleagues recognize, is to make pulse oximeters that work right for everybody, not just for white folks.  Supposing the Brown academics succeed (which seems pretty well guaranteed at some level, as H-P got it right in the 1970s with vastly inferior technology), what happens then? 

 

Like any industry, the healthcare-technology industry wants to make money and serve its customers as well as it can.  Compared to consumer products, devices sold for healthcare purposes are highly regulated and licensed, and jumping through the regulatory hoops is a cost that makes up a significant fraction of the price.  Unless the FDA insists on changing its rules so that pulse oximeters have to read equally accurately for all colors of patients, the industry doesn't have much of an incentive to adopt a newer technology that does that, whether it's patented by Brown or developed on their own.  For one thing, it means a whole new round of proof-testing and regulatory approval.  And for another thing, the market for pulse oximeters is probably not that big, and making a substantial investment in it for a benefit that will show up in only a minority of patients is a hard marketing sell.

 

I'm reluctant to use the phrase "systemic racism," but it might well apply in this case.  As I said, I don't think any individual manager or pulse-oximeter company set out to discriminate against people of color in developing devices that don't work quite as well for that group.  But somewhere along the long road of development between H-P's giant 1970s device and the $50 versions of today, somebody compromised some things and created the problem.  It would require a huge effort of investigative journalism and probably subpoenas to find out exactly how it happened, but the outcome is clear.

 

Sometimes, adverse publicity by itself will make an industry clean up its act.  Maybe if enough people of color ask questions of their clinicians about pulse oximeters, it will have an effect back up the supply chain and the companies will go to the trouble and expense of dealing with the issue.  But it's not going to happen automatically.  In the old days, a letter-writing campaign might have had some effect.  These days, social media is the obvious channel to use in letting people know there's a problem.  It's a pretty blunt instrument, though, a little like putting out a cigarette with a fire hose, and it can backfire on the user as well.

 

But as the Statnews article quoted Toussaint as saying, this problem is a poster child for increasing diversity in science.  If it's not a problem to you or people you know, you simply tend to ignore it.  Now that we know it's a problem—all of us engineers—I think it's time somebody should do something about it. 

 

Sources:  Statnews carried the article "‘A poster child’ for diversity in science: Black engineers work to fix long-ignored bias in oxygen readings" at https://www.statnews.com/2022/08/19/diversity-in-science-black-engineers-work-to-fix-long-ignored-bias-in-pulse-oximeters/.  The Wired article about the 1970s H-P oximeter is at https://www.wired.com/story/pulse-oximeters-equity/.

Mr. Damore, Welcome To the Prophet Club

In the Bible, being a prophet was not a sought-after job.  Prophets were chosen by God to deliver messages that more often than not turned out to be unwelcome.  And sooner or later, the same lack of welcome greeted the prophet himself as he stood in the city gate telling the people things they didn't want to hear.  Bad things tended to happen to prophets when they got on the wrong side of the establishment.  The prophet Jeremiah, after telling King Zedekiah to surrender to the attacking Babylonians, was accused of treachery and thrown into a muddy well, where he was left to die.  Only the intervention of a friendly official rescued him from a miserable death.

I don't think former Google engineer James Damore has any special line to the Almighty, but by now he has experienced the same thing that the biblical prophets discovered:  say things that the leadership doesn't want to hear, and sooner or later you're going to pay for it.  In response to a ten-page memo he posted entitled "Google's ideological echo chamber" in which he criticized the atmosphere created by gender-diversity programs at his company, the Internet lit up with a storm of attacks on him, and Google ended up firing him.  But exactly what did he say?  First, some background.

Like many companies these days, Google has initiatives and programs in diversity, including ones that attempt to change the fact that the percentage of women in computing is about 24%, according to an organization called Girls Who Code.  The desired change, naturally, is an increase to something closer to the representation of women in the overall U. S. population, which is 50.8%. 

           

I say "naturally" because there is a widely held assumption that when the percentage of women in a desirable field of endeavor—CEO suites, being rich, holding political office, or working at any job that the culture perceives to be desirable—falls below 50.8%, this proves that there is injustice somewhere that needs to be rooted out so that the percentage will more closely approach the magic 50.8%. 

If you look at this assumption on its own in the cold light of logic, you can start to see some holes in it.  Some of the highest-paying jobs in the country are in professional sports.  Where are the protests that there aren't any women playing for the Green Bay Packers?  I don't want to start a trend, you understand.  And professional football itself is losing popularity in view of the revelations of long-term brain damage it can cause.  But the point is that many of the assumptions and assertions surrounding issues of gender diversity are based on something besides mathematically exact logic.  And that's a good thing, because logic and undisputed facts can take you only so far.  Something else is needed in order to discuss these matters intelligently:  an ability to articulate the foundations of one's moral judgments.  But these days, that ability is much rarer than the ability to code.

I have read Mr. Damore's memo, and at one point he refers to "moral biases."  Judging from his words, he is neither a political scientist nor a philosopher, but he recognizes that more than logic is required to deal with human-relations issues such as diversity and gender roles.  In his memo, he wrote some things that are undoubtedly unpopular in the Silicon Valley setting of Mountain View:  "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways."  He cites personality differences that women show compared to men, many of which are positive:  agreeableness, ability to work in teams, and so on.  And he admits that males tend to rank higher on aggressiveness and the willingness to put in long unpleasant hours to get ahead in an organization.  He winds up his memo with a recommendation to "[h]ave an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs." 

It is a matter of public record that Mr. Damore was let go by Google shortly before Aug. 7.  Legally speaking, Google is probably not breaking any law to fire him, as California has what is called "employment at will," which means an employer can fire you at any time for any reason, or no reason at all.  Nevertheless, firing him doesn't contribute to an atmosphere at the company that would encourage an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of diversity programs. 

Along with Mr. Damore's memo, the website Gizmodo posted a statement from Google's diversity officer, in which she said of the memo, "I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender."  But she didn't say what those incorrect assumptions were.

Engineers are trained to be logical, using known facts about the world to create useful products.  But human life is about more than logic and reasoning.  What Mr. Damore calls "moral biases" are really each person's conclusions, drawn from his or her world view, about what constitutes right and wrong.  And while "Googlers" (as they call themselves) may be mental giants when it comes to logic, programming, and the skillful exploitation of the Internet to generate revenue, neither Mr. Damore nor his opponents in the company are able to articulate the bases of their moral principles any better than they could when they were in high school, or perhaps earlier. 

Instead of a reasoned debate based upon clearly expressed moral principles, what happened when Mr. Damore posted his memo was the Internet equivalent of a riot, at which point Google called in their human-resources cops to quell the riot by arresting (firing) the riot's instigator—the cyberspace equivalent of dumping Mr. Damore down a muddy well.  He won't die from it, but he's certainly been soiled in the sight of many.  And it's far from clear that the conservative media outlets which have started to lionize Mr. Damore as a martyr to their causes will encourage meaningful debates about gender diversity either.  Mr. Damore may have left one echo chamber only to walk into another one of a more conservative bent. 

It's possible to have a reasonable, logical debate about gender diversity, but only if everyone can lay their moral cards on the table first.  And these days, we lack the vocabulary and often the courage to do so.

Sources:  I referred to reports about James Damore's firing carried by the San Jose Mercury-News at http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/07/googles-anti-diversity-engineer-should-he-be-fired/ and Bloomberg News at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo.  The percentage of women who code is from https://qz.com/814017/the-percentage-of-computing-jobs-in-the-us-held-by-women-is-expected-to-shrink/, and Gizmodo carried Mr. Damore's original memo and the response by Google's diversity officer at http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320.  The story of what happened to Jeremiah after he said unpopular things is in the 38th chapter of the Old Testament book of the same name.

The Limits of Diversity

This month's Scientific American devotes twenty pages to articles on diversity in science—the shameful lack thereof, and what can be done about it. One piece is a kind of confessional by a Lockheed Martin engineer who quickly moved into management and found that as she chose staff from widely varying backgrounds, the quality of her group's work increased.  Other articles cite social-science studies that show diverse organizations are not only more socially just; they do better science and engineering too.  The reader of these paeans to diversity could not be blamed for taking away the impression that diversity is like goodness:  you simply can't have too much of it.  Is that true?  Or are there limits to diversity?

What does diversity mean?  It has both an objective aspect, and a subjective or political aspect.  In the strict sense of diversity meaning merely "difference," one can objectively measure diversity in genetic makeup, diversity in hair color, or diversity in virtually any other measurable characteristic that a group of things or people has.  This scientific aspect allows statisticians to crank out reams of charts showing the degree of gender diversity in the number of Ph. D.'s granted, ethnic diversity in hiring practices, and so on.  So in this scientific sense, diversity is a quantifiable, measurable thing.

But when we ask what kinds of diversity are significant in the sense addressed by the Scientific American authors, the list narrows to political and cultural hot-button matters:  gender, race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on.  Scientists and engineers must deal with these matters not as mythical objective professionals, but as human beings.  And in so doing, the issue becomes an ethical, political, and even philosophical one.

The idea of virtue is not a scientific concept, but it is one of the best ways to describe a certain class of characteristics involving choice, as Aristotle says.  I think Aristotle would class diversity as a type of virtue because a diverse organization is better with regard to social justice than a non-diverse one, and (as the social scientists have shown), diverse scientific organizations do science and engineering better than non-diverse ones.  Making something intrinsically good and also better at what it does are the two main aspects of a virtue (again, according to Aristotle), and diversity qualifies on both counts.

The next question is this:  can you have too much diversity?  Most virtues represent a mean or rough average between the two extremes of excess and deficiency.  Assembling a competent technical organization with a mind to diversity represents a compromise between extremes.  In the decades before diversity in its modern sense was recognized as an organizational goal, those in charge (usually white males) picked the best people they could while following the cultural norms of their time.  These norms generally (but not always) excluded women and minorities, and tended to perpetuate the demographic makeup of the organization, while making it extremely hard or impossible for non-whites and non-males to enter.  This was bad. 

However, you can imagine an opposite extreme.  The perfectly diverse organization would have diversity statistics identical to those of the largest applicable sample group:  the state, the nation, or even the world.  William F. Buckley is supposed to have said he'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the entire faculty of Harvard University, and in this proposal, at least, he was favoring the opposite extreme of diversity I am talking about.  But if diversity is the only criterion of selection, the specialized competencies that a research or engineering organization needs will be absent, except by chance, and it will fail to achieve its objective, unless its only objective is to show that it is acceptably diverse.

The U. S. National Science Foundation has in recent years spent a substantial portion of its resources encouraging diversity in various ways.  To the extent that these efforts have righted previous injustices committed either consciously or through unconscious bias against certain groups, they are to be applauded.  But there is nothing scientific about the choices of which measures of diversity to work on. 

In a secular democracy, these choices are made politically.  And making politics your ultimate authority can land you in unpleasant places, as scientists in Russia and Germany have found.  A crackpot biologist named Lysenko got his hands on the political levers of control in the old USSR in the 1920s. Lysenko thought acquired characteristics could be inherited, and for the next forty years, any Soviet biologist who disagreed with Lysenko about evolution was liable to disappear into the Siberian work camps.  And the Nazi party in Germany took delight in calling Einstein's theory of relativity "Jewish physics."  Such blatant overruling of science by politics can always happen if those in charge value political goals more than the integrity of science.

I am personally about as un-diverse as you can get: an old white male conservative Christian Texan.  An organization composed of people like me would score close to zero on any diversity index you care to name.  I view the diversity project as an attempt, however flawed, to show the type of love that wills the good of the beloved to people who would otherwise be kept from flourishing to the best of their abilities.  There is nothing wrong with this type of love.  It is the type of love Jesus Christ exhorted his followers to show to each other.  But implementing diversity in a way that helps those who need that type of help without inflicting harm or the loss of opportunity on others is an inherently complex task.  The only way to do it perfectly would be to have perfect insight into the problem of social justice, and only God has that.  Any human attempt at diversity represents a compromise between using resources to increase diversity, versus using resources to address the task at hand.  And those promoting diversity should remember that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Sources: The October 2014 issue of Scientific American includes Stephanie C. Hill's article "In pursuit of the best ideas:  How I learned the value of diversity," on pp. 48-49.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Lysenkoism and "Deutsche physik" ("German physics").