Part of the application process to become an Air Force officer when you already have a college degree (via Officer Training School) is an interview with a senior officer. The Air Force flew me out to Las Vegas to meet with I think it was a colonel. I could be wrong, but it’s irrelevant anyway.
While we were waiting around for the interviewer to show up, the recruiter was looking over the list of candidates there for interviews. She came to my name and very quizzically asked why my name had a letter D next to it. I don’t know why she asked me, but it was very odd. She finally asked someone she knew who used to be a recruiter and got the answer: It meant I had diversity credit.
Diversity credit. Me, the whitest and male-est of white males. If you put me in the lineup of Air Force pilots from 1970 you would notice no difference. My attitude and background are different, sure, but nobody marks that as “diversity”. The only thing we could figure is that I had experience in a couple of foreign languages (Japanese and Korean).
There is something important I need to get out of the way: there was no way I was not going to get picked as a pilot. My test scores for the officer test were 99s (expect somehow Math? Which was a 97) and my pilot qualifier score was something like 93. I had (on paper) a 4.0 GPA and years of work experience, an eagle scout award, and various high school awards (which they cared about for some reason).
But when I got the call saying I had made it, and several times since then, I had a nagging thought in the back of my mind. Am I just a diversity hire?
I feel I should pause for a moment to clear up exactly what I mean by that. I do not mean to say, suggest, or imply in any way that having a diverse military is bad, or that we should avoid diversity. By “diversity hire” I mean the hiring of someone who is unqualified merely to satisfy diversity quotas. Whether or not this actually happens is irrelevant to the ensuing thoughts.
It’s ridiculous on its face, because clearly I was qualified. The only way it could possibly be true was if for some reason it was between me and an actual “diversity hire” and I won because I checked the diversity box as well as had better performance. But I don’t think even that is realistic, though maybe that’s because I’m not convinced “diversity hiring” is actually a thing among pilot recruiting.
But the thought persisted: maybe I wasn’t really the best choice, but I somehow got in because of that D next to my name. And I wondered: if it is that much of a problem for me, do people who actually belong to minority groups ever feel this way?
Fortunately, I had a group of people to ask: America’s Class.
American’s Class was an… experiment? Marketing stunt? where they collected students in a class to represent the diversity of America. They pulled students in from all nearby classes so that they could roughly represent the demographics of America. When I talked to several friends who were in that class they confirmed my experience, emphasized by a class for which they were selected by their minority status. All of them said they worried that they were just selected for “diversity points”, and weren’t really qualified.
Again, diversity isn’t a problem. But even the perception that standards are being lowered for people because of their traits or membership in minority groups is damaging on morale, and lowering people’s confidence in their abilities will damage your organization more than a lack of diversity will. There has to be a better way.