Originally Posted by
nene
Perhaps I wasn't as clear as possible. Even before DEI was "a thing", at least in the 90's and 2000's when I was involved in them, the US Navy required all promotion and selection boards to have a minority and female member (yes, among the other 8 probably white males) to ensure that the process was properly considering all aspects of the services desire to ensure properly qualified female and minorities were promoted to the max extent possible, which was generally stated as a precept of each board.
Over those periods, depending on the economy, manning, and needs of the service, sometimes it was easy to promote as many as possible. Sometimes the conditions made it so the selection rates were very slim.
My whole point of recalling the picture in record decision was that before that decision, it was assumed that if enough women and minorities didn't get selected it was because some on the board saw the picture and were racist/sexist (despite women and minorities being on the board).
But the reality proved quickly, without the picture, board members could not tell who to give extra consideration to, and selection rates fell when just considering records.
The Navy used to consider "pain points" when looking at records so a sailor/airmen that had done many deployments would generally been considered ahead of another that had less. I remember the female board rep usually giving the reminder that a female that was making the Navy a career and also desired a family was bound to be more constrained to volunteering for Navy pain for the sake of advancement, likewise the minority rep would remind board members that many minority sailors/airmen came from disadvantaged backgrounds so if it took a bit for them to hit their stride in their career, that may be a possible explanations. Never were we encouraged to promote anyone who wasn't qualifiied, it was just often the promotion/selection boards were quite competitve so there were more qualified personnel than were to be selected.
This was all before I had ever even heard of DEI. The Navy always has tried hard to find/train and promote minority leadership. But so has most companies, so the competition for the same talent is tight.
Well, maybe I didn't read as carefully as I should. For starters, IMO requiring a minority is wrong. If there isn't a qualified minority then we will have no minority until one is qualified. But if only 20% of the board is minority it really wouldn't change the outcome that often. And I will admit that for leadership in the armed forces I would probably lean more towards the best vs the good enough.
A lot of the complaining about DEI pilot hiring is that they don't have as much experience, but there have been times before where a commercial and 250 hours would get you in at UAL as a white male, and right now all the legacies are hiring pilots with way less experience than a decade ago. If you aren't good enough you obviously don't belong in the cockpit regardless.