Well you seem to be data-driven, so let me answer the question this way. The Rooney Rule is affirmative action, not a quota system. And let’s say you adopt one. How do you know if it’s working? You count the results.
What if by implementing the rule you increase diversity by 1%. Is that enough? 5%? Is it significant? Maybe a good target number for success is to mirror the diversity in the US population, which I believe is currently estimated around 38% non- non-Hispanic White. So the 5 % increase isn’t good enough, right?
Most likely you go back and tweak the rule, maybe interview more diverse candidates. Or you try to recruit from different sources. And then you count the outcome again to see if you landed on the right approach judging by the results. And it doesn’t. So you go back again. Repeat.
Basically you’re designing a process (recruitment/hiring) in an iterative fashion which is detached from the desired outcome (a specific quantity of diverse employees). It’s kind of ridiculous. No other system I can think of is designed in such an obtuse fashion. I mean, you actually have the ability to obtain accurate data directly related to your goal (race/ethnicity of applicants) but cannot directly use it to implement your goal (% of diverse hiring).
This is because anti-quota advocates have instilled the inherently racist idea that in order to fulfill a quota directly, one must hire some number of suboptimal diverse candidates. Or in other words, using the numbers in my example, to get to the theoretical 38th/100 diverse employee by directly targeting that “quota” number of 38% diverse employees, some incredible trade-off in skills must have been made for that applicant.
And so instead we are forced to accept a Rooney Rule or some other affirmative acton hiring process approach, a blunt instrument still fraught with human bias, and we seek the identical result of the quota approach, which is, in fact, to hire that same theoretical 38th/100 candidate. But the “process” approach is way, way, less effective than the quota approach due to the bias and so we never get to that candidate.
The inability to legally use race-based data for hiring, aka “quotas,” inherently limits our success at diverse hiring, and this is a win for the opponents of diverse hiring.
