Chief of Naval Personnel: Lack of photo in officer record brief hurts diversity

DevilD77

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11:16a, 8/4/21

AG

"I think we should consider reinstating photos in selection boards," Nowell said Tuesday at The Navy League's 2021 Sea-Air-Space Exposition. "We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed."

You mean "diverse" people don't get selected based on their merits?

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2021/08/03/cnp-removing-photos-from-promotion-boards-has-hurt-diversity/

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Eliminatus

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1:22p, 8/4/21

AG

Unintended consequences are a shame, aren't they?

It's fine to poke fun at this stuff of course but it sucks to see our military as the social testbed for all of this garbage.

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CT'97

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1:58p, 8/4/21

AG

That doesn't add up, the O7 selections are maybe a dozen a year. Everyone on those boards and the officers being selected have worked together for 20+ years and while probably not directly in every case at least know each other through reputation.
5 years of O7 selections is also a short time frame and a small population to get any kind of trend that might have a statistical significance.

I am all for diversity and encouraging it at all levels, but to use the O7 board as your argument for board photos is lazy at best.

Texas A&M - 148 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress.

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strbrst777

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10:03p, 8/5/21

Merit should be the basis of promotions, for crying out loud. How is that not fair to all?

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AgLaw02

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6:41a, 8/6/21

AG

Didn't the Army just remove photos from promotion paperwork to reduce the chance of discrimination against minorities? Now the Navy says photos should be included to reduce discrimination.

Just about everyone agrees that there's tremendous value in ensuring a fair playing field where discrimination is minimized or eliminated. But some proposed changes are so amateurish that it's hard to take them seriously.

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GAC06

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3:16p, 8/7/21

AG

We need to see people's skin color so we can be colorblind. Because actually being colorblind didn't wind up fitting the narrative. After all, dIveRsitY iS ouR sTrenGtH

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Smeghead4761

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6:28p, 8/7/21

What's unspoken in all of this is that it looks a whole lot like the promotion boards in the past were engaging in some tacit affirmative action, enabled by the photographs.

The powers that be assumed the opposite was going on, and were taken by surprise when it turned out they were wrong.

The hand wringing about 'diversity' isn't new. I remember waiting on the results of the CPT (O-3 type) board selections, back in 1999. The board results were delayed several months, allegedly because the minority selection rate was too low. (And at the time, you actually had to work at it to not get selected for Captain, like some kind of actual misconduct.)

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