Equality of outcomes is insanity. The presumption that it is how things are supposed to be has basically been used to justify anything, up to and including rape and genocide. "Equality of outcomes" is basically Marxian ideology dressed up as a virus to be injected into a democratic society. It throws out meritocracy. Is it any wonder that many ideologies which espouse it also seek to throw out logic itself?
The fundamental issue that I see addressed in social justice is that opportunity is deeply and currently inextricably affected by your circumstances in life. Taking steps to address this, is, as you said, foundational.
When people presume that a 50/50 gender distribution is the goal, and that falling short of that is evidence of discrimination, then yes, they are arguing for equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity would allow for skews in various fields to work themselves out naturally.
Ask a woman in tech, or a black man in tech what their experience is. Often there's an unstated assumption that they don't belong, or that they're at a lower level. I'm south asian, and when I visit my work's offices on the east coast, I get pegged as an electrical technician rather than an engineer. /And I'm in the in-group generally/.
I'd also argue that 50% is a much better goal for gender diversity in engineering than the ~10% representation women have currently, especially considering that the gender equilibrium point for engineering is currently unknowable due to the massive systemic discrimination/opportunity problems.
I have no problem with front-loaded incentives. Google started recruiting directly on the campus of Howard University, and they have the numbers to show that it actually revealed qualified applicants that would otherwise have been missed. But mandated quotas which are equality of outcome are problematic to meritocracy itself.
Equality of Outcome logically contradicts Equality of Opportunity, and must be rejected.
I am disheartened to see your post greying out.
I concede though, that some methods of affirmative action would appear to be local attempts to enforce "equality of outcome," but I don't think this is the goal of affirmative action campaigns. If anything, it's a measure taken (locally) to create an environment that can support equal opportunity (locally). As society approaches having equality of opportunity, I imagine that this strategy would lose its utility and be discarded.
In this case, in the span of two comments, the poster went from:
>Do people actually argue in favor of equality of outcomes? Can't say I've ever seen this done, but then again I haven't seen everything.
to arguing in favor of equality of outcomes.
Individually, both of these posts are fine; but together are problematic.
So either this is a troll, or it's an example of someone so "ideologically possessed" they think they're justified to lie in pursuit of their goals.
Remember: meta-criticism.
Some of those people don't see any reason for there to not be equality of outcome between groups other than discrimination. So to them, they aren't after equality of outcome, they're fighting discrimination. It just so happens that those things are one and the same for them.
For others, I think they recognise that their initiatives are focused on equality of outcome, but the long term goal is to achieve equality of opportunity. The idea being that seeing people like yourself do something is important in considering it an option, and that making yourself a minority isn't very attractive even if the other aspects of the position might be. The equality of outcome in the short term approach is a way to address the chicken and egg style problem of for example, not wanting to be the only woman in a 15 person development team.
To be sure, I think difference in outcomes in aggregate is a strong signal of unfairness in the system. But the mechanism of the critique, and its employment of thoughtcrime punishment, and ideologues' apparent complete lack of concern for inverted power situations (like when girls do better in school than boys) make me deeply suspicious of such people's motivations.
Equality of opportunity means we aim to provide everyone access to the same chances. Reduce the (present and historic) systemic discrimination by race and gender. Improve access to the basic tools required to achieve success (education and mobility). But we cannot guarantee that everyone will turn out the same (either by choice, fortune, or misfortune it just won't happen). It may still be a pipe dream, but it's far more achievable.
How will you do this and how will you measure the results of the attempts to do this without measuring the outcomes of your attempts to do this?
The thing is, we know that they're not. And since skill and preference are not equally distributed, equality of opportunity will inevitably lead to inequality of outcomes. And that's okay: different people are different.