Or the fuzzier "equity" vs "equality" debate.
You might say that marxism is for more equal outcomes than we have under today's system, but that's true of lots of things that aren't marxist (any form of progressive taxation to fund social programs, for example).
But even that's sort of an oversimplification and doesn't do either marxism or "equality of outcomes" justice.
Communism and socialism, which are considered different in modern writing but were the same in Marx's time, are something Marx believes are an inevitable outcome of capitalism.
Marxism suggests that when the workers own the companies, then benefits are distributed to the workers who own/operate the company. Profit doesn't get centered in individuals, it gets spread across the workers of a company.
Folks like Lenin/Stalin took this idea further and created an authoritarian regime out of the ideas, and create what we commonly think of as 'communism' in the states.
Edit: Parent comment asked a question about Marxism, I'm getting downvoted for explaining some high level concepts of Marxism? Do folks want me to dive deeper into the dialectical models Marx discussed? Lol
Not too surprising given the general demographics of HN being quite biased towards startup founders, VC's, and the like.
Generally "Marxism" is thrown around as a boogie man term by people with little understanding for something approximating extreme authoritarianism in which the state owns all the means of production and allocates everyone the same resources.
(Source: I grew up in a Marxist country and was taught Marxism by a Marxist teacher.)
Also, no; most prominently, we largely dedicated our resources to pointless heavy industry at the expense of light industry and services.
If you're talking about the USSR, there was actually some dissension after the death of Lenin on whether light industry or heavy industry should be focused on. Lenin wanted to focus especially on neither, with his NEP that would create a temporary market economy to figure that out on it's own.
Eventually, the decision was taken to focus on heavy industry. The decisive arguments for a focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxian economics - those arguments went either way. The main determinant of the Soviet focus on heavy industry was the failure of Stalin to obtain security assurances from Western Europe, leading to a focus on heavy industry for military purposes.
At least in the 20s this was a solid move, because Soviet heavy industry saved tens of millions of lives by stalling the Nazi offensive, whose plan was to kill 50% of the Soviet population (something very bad).
After the end of WW2 however, it was pointless in retrospect to continue the focus on heavy industry. But the Soviet Union did not really calculate the geopolitcal impact of nuclear weapons and built a military that could rival NATO, and this required a lot of heavy industry.
Pretty much, Marxism had nothing to do with Soviet investment in heavy industry. The main reason was to feed the Soviet war machine, from the very beginning.
If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human.
> The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries.
I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
I don't see the incompatibility. Lenin used Marxism, a method of analyzing history, to derive a political program for the Russian empire. Not everything that the Soviet Union did was done because of Marxism Leninism - the vast majority was done out of practical considerations, outside of the general guidelines.
>I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union. I explained to you why this focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxism, and everything to do with the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. I gave an explanation that was valid from death of Lenin to the end of the Cold War. It seems to me that my thesis that the Soviet government wasn't a "Marxist government" but rather a government whose political program was initially based partly on a Marxist analysis of history, but were many of the fatal decisions and errors had nothing to do with Marxism.
Subsets can't contain elements that their supersets lack. If A is a subset of B, then if x is an element of A, x is also an element of B. So the claim that a state ideology is a subset of a method of analyzing history would necessarily imply that methods of analyzing history habitually contain elements of state ideologies at their core, which I haven't observed. Hence I see a contradiction there.
> You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union.
I did not grow up in the Soviet Union, hence I wasn't talking about it.
As for a method of understanding history containing and ideology, this is absolutely the case. All methods of analyzing history and social systems at some level rely on an ideology. Marxism as a method of analyzing history also is an ideology. For other methods of analyzing history often the ideology defaults to the current ruling ideology.
Marxism also contains economic theory, and social theory, all in the goal of analyzing history and changing it. Marxism writ large contains all of its sub-tendencies which understandably after 150 years evolved a lot.
As far as my assumption that you were talking about the Soviet Union, often Marxism Leninism refers to the precise ideology of the Soviet Union. If you meant it in a different way, you'll have to specify the country and time period because various different ideologies call themselves Marxism Leninism (and none of them come from Marx or Lenin).
Not quite. According to the original Marxist dogma, Russia couldn't become socialist in 1917, since it had too few proletarians, and too many peasants - i.e. it wasn't capitalist enough for a socialist revolution. Bolsheviks disagreed with that, obviously (and some Marxists even say that this forcible approach in a society that wasn't ready for it is precisely why the USSR turned out like it did).
It just so happens that, given the pre-existent distribution of wealth will have followed other rules, the first step of marxist enaction inevitably ends up being "the big reset" where inequality of outcome gets temporarily removed for everyone.
So a Marxist would want, for example, the employer/employee distinction to be abolished. But there would be no issue with inequality in the employee class, an employee may very well produce 3-4 times more value than another.
This is something that Marx explicitly wrote about - he thought that different people had different needs and abilities and thus should receive sometimes very different amounts of resources. The examples he gave would be someone that works much faster and better that someone else, or someone that has children to raise.
Those headlines tend to get spun as "Chicago district eliminates advanced classes" or something to that effect, because it gets people riled (spelling?) up.
Please, point me to your sources if you are talking about something different.
EDIT: The tracking still occurs in early grades, the isolation grouping does not. Students are still tracked and tested for ability, deficiency, and performance. What they are not doing is grouping them exclusively into high, medium, and low, and letting those groups dictate resource access. They are grouping across abilities, allowing high performers to work with medium and low, thereby allowing them to take a leadership role while still providing the other two groups with valuable resources.
Are they actually lower performing or is this an effect of bias?
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that children with less resources do worse. I thought the purpose of performance tracking was to give the ability to help those who were struggling. Instead, you're saying that it's more helpful to just not know who's struggling and that somehow creates more equality.
>Are they actually lower performing or is this an effect of bias?
This is why these programs in early grades are eliminated - they absolutely were based on bias and external factors. Yes, children with less resources do worse. That was the problem. Students with less access would be tracked low, thereby ensuring they had access to even fewer resources (which were diverted to high performers and TAG classes).
>Instead, you're saying that it's more helpful to just not know who's struggling and that somehow creates more equality.
I didn't explain it well. They still track student ability for interventions, they don't group solely by ability. When they did the latter of those two, the have's had even more and the have-nots had even less.
The shame in all of this is that the choice has to be made at all. I think, ideally, every student should have a roughly equal amount of attention and dollars allocated to them and if a school is underfunded, everyone suffers until the problem is remediated.
I suspect there's some sort of incentive on the administrators of these schools, be through funding, personal career advancement or something else, that makes them want to max out the top end rather than raise the low end.
>ideally, every student should have a roughly equal amount of attention and dollars allocated to them and if a school is underfunded, everyone suffers until the problem is remediated.
The problem is that this is sort of what happens right now, and it's not great. The current funding scheme relies disproportionately on local property taxes, which only serves to exacerbate the effects of inequality. The current system is a warehouse for student bodies, with oversize classes, underfunded supplies, underpaid teachers, and too many unfunded mandates.
Ideally, we figure out funding (that's way above my pay grade), and then we can move on to cross-ability grouping. Seriously, it's just a fact that high achievers learn much better when they are left to (roughly) their own devices, with guidance and outlines for progress as appropriate. Low achievers learn better when they are led through the process by someone who can put the language in terms they can understand; ideally with support outside of the teacher, such as from peers (look up supplemental instruction for a model in there). Middle achievers will consistently live up to the exact expectation you place on them; so they need a system and environment that places increasingly more strenuous expectations on them, both socially and educationally.
Combine all of that, and you have a wonderful cross-age, cross-ability classroom focused on social development as well as academics. The ability to specialize for various fields such as STEM, art, or technical education is just built in, as well!
If anyone is interested in funding my charter school idea - it's a neighborhood based one-room-schoolhouse model where education and learning are led by the abilities and desires of the students. Much free time, much outdoor time, and incorporating everything in the above paragraph. Completely unrealistic for public schooling in the united states due to the inordinate per pupil cost. But just a lovely idea.
I've actually ranted about this cause/effect before. I think it's particularly bad here in California given the wide variety of income levels in the state.
> Seriously, it's just a fact that high achievers learn much better when they are left to (roughly) their own devices, with guidance and outlines for progress as appropriate. Low achievers learn better when they are led through the process by someone who can put the language in terms they can understand; ideally with support outside of the teacher, such as from peers (look up supplemental instruction for a model in there). Middle achievers will consistently live up to the exact expectation you place on them; so they need a system and environment that places increasingly more strenuous expectations on them, both socially and educationally.
I think that's all true but it doesn't account for something that I think is a noble goal with somewhat bad implications: I think we want to maximize the progress and achievement of the top achievers. People seem to want 100 doctors/scientists instead of 10,000 accountants.
I have two thoughts on this:
1. Since our global economy is increasingly winner-take-all, we should consider focusing on the high performers. The lower performers will lose, anyway, so it's most important not to sandbag high performers.
2. It sounds like the idea is really to extort high performers into doing unpaid labor to educate their lower-performing peers, at the expense of their own opportunity to advance academically. Is this fair to high performers? Isn't it the school and faculty's job to teach students, not fellow students' job?
The issue is that low performers are often only such because of external factors (low income, food insecure, other factors like that), and not due to actual ability. If we focus exclusively on high performers in the low grade, we will only create a WIDE and absolutely inhumane division among the have's and the have not's (more so than what exists).
>2.It sounds like the idea is really to extort high performers into doing unpaid labor to educate their lower-performing peers,
No. You're 100% wrong in your assessment. One of the best ways to learn to do something really well is to teach someone else how to do it. This applies to everything. Letting high performers take a leadership role teaches them not just the core competencies, but also those 'soft skills' that are so often left out of advanced curriculum, but are vitally important to success.
Also, just to nitpick, adding [that] via edit to my quote is unnecessary to the sentence. That word isn't at all needed for context, clarity, or proper sentence formation. Not sure why you did that.
No, those factors all contribute to the actual ability of the student; you seem to be talking about inherent or latent ability. As a student, I don't care why my low-performing peers are holding me back, I just care that they're holding me back.
We shouldn't focus exclusively on the high performers, and we should absolutely try to ameliorate those factors with things like free school meals and after-school programs. These policies help those with latent ability to turn that into actual ability.
But we can't skip that step. It's important for students to be around students of similar actual ability, because we absolutely cannot afford to slow down the high performers in a perverted quest for equity.
> No. You're 100% wrong in your assessment.
Yes, you're 100% correct in your assessment. I know that what most helped me to excel in math was tutoring my peers in basic mechanics and notation and walking them through absolutely trivial exercises with which they still struggled.
Thank God I never had to endure a class that promoted my intellectual growth by challenging me with more advanced material than my low-performing peers could handle. I learned so much more taking a leadership role.
It is obvious you have little to no personal experience in difficult technical subjects (STEM) and are invested in a political agenda to change the world as you see fit rather than enabling our best and brightest to fully self-actualize.
I wonder how it can be that one has the desire and aptitude to succeed there and the public school can deny people that opportunity. That just seems antithetical to public education.
Every time I see a news article about this, they aren't being honest about what is happening. My high school in particular is often in the news for this reason and the reactionary articles are universally BS.
The freedom in outcomes argument is 100% a strawman used by far right pop culture icons to drum up views and clicks.
That's different from wanting similar outcomes between groups of millions of people, because those almost invariably come from inequality of opportunity.
I don't know of any left tendency that believes in equality of outcomes. Even communists don't believe in equality of outcome.
In fact I could be inclined to agree with you in some ways; its more accurate to state that progressives don't believe in equality of outcome in much the same way as they don't really hold any disdain for racism/sexism or any of the other causes that claim to champion but they like the power that comes from doing so.
For example no progressive has any issues with an imbalance in genders in nursing; this of course contrasts brilliantly against theirs views on it in the tech industry.
I do believe that roughly speaking, for an equal amount of work, black and white people should have similar salaries, for example. Something that is not the case today.
This is a disparity that can't be explained away by choice, or innate supremacy, but is instead à result of inequality of opportunity. So you have to fix the opportunity gap.
I do have an issue with the imbalance in nursing. That's because there is a strong stigma against men in nursing and men in nursing often suffer strong discrimination. In a society where these stigmas don't exist but men in general decide not to become nurses, that's fine.
Same in tech. There are stigmas and discrimination against women in tech at every level. For example, different countries have massively different amounts of women in engineering. Women in countries where this amount is lower often report discrimination. So this is clearly not a question of choice, and is thus a gap in opportunities led by sexism.
It would be nice if you wouldn't assume the absolute worst possible interpretation of the argument of your interlocutor. This is against HN's guideline and generally increases the amount of noise. It's also quite rude.
And the same goes for your opposition to the gender gap in nursing; as demonstrated by the mysteriously absent global-push to rectify the issue.
Funnily enough I seem to recall it being the countries with far poorer track records on "equality" that tended to produce the higher number of female engineers; and that (for example) scandinavian efforts towards "equality" seemed to have quite the opposite result.
Using Scandinavia as a barometer for equity in engineering for men and women is cherry-picking. Where I live, these measures were very successful and in the leading engineering-only university the rate of women graduating is now 30%. Seems successful to me.
As for this: >Perhaps you don't, but for progressives it remains a core part of their ideology and one that can't be no-true-scotsman-ed away, now that the belief has become publicly embarrassing to have supported.
The only way to get out of this conundrum is for you to find evidence that at the ideological level progressivism is based on equality of outcome. I can't prove the negative. I can give examples however of specific far-left ideologies from anarchism to communism to mutualism to intersectional liberalism do not, at the ideological level, aim for equality of outcome.
As for your university efforts I'd have to know what those actually were before making a call.
And re progresivism and quotas; it isn't based on it but it subscribes heavily to it due to its utility.
As far as progressivism and quotas, I simply can't argue on this unless you give me a specific progressive tendencies. If you're talking about US progressives writ large then the main reason quotas are so popular is because the people in power that put those quotas in place, which often weren't even progressives, found quotas to be easy to implement as other solutions are very difficult and inconvenient for those in power, though popular.
As for the 2nd point, that's more of what I'm getting at; that core populist/mainstream progressive movement. I could certainly believe that the leaders are jumping on it purely due to, as you say the simplicity and popularity of them.
What you assert as proof that "it worked" was, if I understood your "30%!" correctly, an increase in equality of outcome.
How does this square with your claim to favour equality of opportunity, not outcome? Doesn't it show that what worked was what you claim not to favour; why would you crow about that?
> Same in tech. There are stigmas and discrimination against women in tech at every level. For example, different countries have massively different amounts of women in engineering. Women in countries where this amount is lower often report discrimination. So this is clearly not a question of choice, and is thus a gap in opportunities led by sexism.
Do you have a source for this claim? Because this contradicts the sources I have read on this topic. The share of women in engineering varies, but not by much. Most countries fall between the 20-30% range. We see no countries where women make up the majority. Furthermore, the representation of women in countries with better gender equality is actually lower than ones that are highly misogynistic [1].
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
To me it seems you have gone to great lengths to clarify that you mean exactly what the original poster is referring to.
I don't believe their reading your argument at face value is in any way assuming the worst possible interpretation.
It's not a personal attack for someone to disagree with your beliefs.
>You believe in quotas, you believe in equality of outcome.
Who is 'you' here? Who said they believe in quotas?
>they like the power that comes from doing so.
Again, who is this mysterious strawman you're building? Where is this argument coming from? What is your proof? I am very progressive, and I very much have disdain for racism, sexism, and any other bigoted activities. It has nothing to do with power. Often, I am unable to do anything about this behavior because I lack any sort of structural power in my local area. So what does that mean for your argument?
>For example no progressive has any issues with an imbalance in genders in nursing
I literally work to bring men into underrepresented fields in higher education. There are programs across the nation specifically designed to recruit, assist, and help ensure the academic success of men in nursing, men in daycare/education fields, and men in other traditionally 'feminine' fields. Claiming this absolute of a statement is just absurd.
You seem to be building an odd little strawman to knock down based on some bogeyman theoretical progressive you have imagined. I'm trying to point that out to you.
Can you cite any evidence that this is the case? It seems you are simply defining inequality of outcome to mean the same thing as inequality of opportunity at the group level.
Claiming to support equal opportunity while simultaneously asserting that inequity necessarily indicates unequal opportunity amounts to a long-winded way of saying that the goal is equal outcomes.
And saying that unless someone believes in equivalency between equity and equality, then they believe in innate differences between groups is very reductive. There are plenty of factors here: culture, preferences, geography, and more.
Additionally, I find this whole assertion I see often nowadays that there's some invisible force creating opportunity disparities between different arbitrary groups of people to be a bit hand-wavy and suspiciously convenient. To me it is comparable to asserting that the disparities are because it was the will of God.
Finally, your statement is a roundabout way of saying "if you don't agree with me you're a racist and I don't talk to racists" and that is extremely dishonest. Frankly, if you don't want to talk to people you don't agree with, why are you on a discussion website at all?
For the sake of illustration, assume two large groups of kids who innately would have had identical ability, but one's growth and education is (on average) more stunted because their families are more likely to be single parent families, or have a parent in jail, or just very poor (which affects a lot), so right now they don't have identical average ability because they did not get equal education and support some decades ago.
If you want to have equal representation of the groups, you'd have to artificially correct for all the previous differences in opportunity - without a time machine, you can't actually fix the differences in their skills and experience (no matter how fairly or unfairly those differences came to be), you can only pretend that those differences don't exist. And so we come to the core issue that granting equal treatment to unequally capable candidates means granting unequal treatment to equally capable candidates, there's no way around it.
And there's also a gap between treating individuals fairly and treating groups fairly. You can't/don't measure the opportunity differences on an individual level, but on a group level, and individual variation in opportunity is huge. In general, any "compensating opportunities" happen at a group level, because if one group is underrepresented under a "background-blind" schema, then it's because lots and lots of capable individuals from that group have "filtered away" and gone on to very different life paths long before applying - and any corrective action or quota system is not helping those individuals who suffered most from the lack of earlier opportunities (because they're already "out"), instead it's granting a larger (compensating) opportunity to other individuals who just happen to be from the same group but had enough opportunity to "stay in the game", while individuals who personally have had so-so opportunities get punished if they happen to come from a group that (on average!) has more opportunities.
I guess, what I'm saying is, that the outcome being 'only xy% women in tech with a goal of 50/50' is an easily digestible way of saying, women do not have the same opportunity as men to get into tech. But it's harder for companies to outline the steps to ensure those opportunities than it is for them to proclaim that goal.
>We can see for example in scandinavia that you get unequal outcomes if you amplify the equality of opportunities.
Absolutely. (I actually had to look through my post history because I wondered if you were another person who brought up that statement!) What I said to them was, "And that's fair. My argument isn't that it needs to be split and completely equal. It's that the freedom to choose needs to be equal, and the playing field needs to be level, so that who is and who isn't in 'field a' is, in fact based on merit and not arbitrary classification at birth such as gender and ethnicity."
If I had that answer, I honestly think I would be a billionaire. Really though, I have no practical ideas, because it isn't something I work with regularly. It seems like a sociologist could come up with something, some way to measure sentiment among youth, or something to that effect, but that's beyond me.
>Are we already at the point of equal opportunity? If not, why?
I don't believe so. Even the often touted Gender-equity paradox can be boiled down to gender stereotypes manifesting in individuals' decisions (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31063).
All I know is that I see nearly no women enter STEM majors at the institutions I have worked with, whereas education and social work is almost 100% female. That is lopsided enough to tell me that something is at play here. I just simply am not educated enough to know what, how to measure it, or how to attempt to fix it.
"If I had that answer, I honestly think I would be a billionaire."
If we can't even define the problem and the underlying causes or measure the outcomes, then how can we fix it? Even if we try things, we would have no idea if they are actually beneficial because we don't even know what to measure.
"I just simply am not educated enough to know what, how to measure it, or how to attempt to fix it."
If we can't measure it and don't know how to fix it, then do we even know that a problem exists?
"Even the often touted Gender-equity paradox can be boiled down to gender stereotypes manifesting in individuals' decisions"
But if it's their own free choice, then why should we interfere with that? It's like saying my mom doesn't want me to play football because I might get hurt, so I'm going to base my decision on that. That is up to the person to decide if they want to use that as part of their decision making. Nobody is forcing them.
The study had a question about if being a house wife is fulfilling. If a person finds that fulfilling, should we prevent them from doing that? I ha e a STEM job and I don't feel fulfilled. Judging by the number of disillusioned posts on HN, it looks like an engineering job is not something that is fulfilling. I don't see forcing people into it as a fix for anything. You're talking about swapping social norms that value family (fulfillment as a house wife) for the social norm that making more money, even at the expense of fulfillment, is what society values.
I'm not saying that this is your position. It's just a position I've encountered with fequency.
Inequity is not evidence of inequality. Evidence of inequality are things like: sending identical resumes save for male vs. female names and measuring the difference in response rate, anonymizing candidates' voices and measuring changes in interview performance, or other tests that see changes in output directly attributable to aspects of the candidate's identity.
Not really, but it's a bit nuanced.
I'm not taking a position here on what is correct, but advocates for this sort thing will state that inequality in current distribution of outcomes is due inequality of opportunity in the past. If you accept that as true, you have a problem from a policy level as to what to do about it, if anything.
One approach would be to attach the opportunity side only, and assume that in time a more equitable distribution will arrive over time. The problem is for something like this "in time" is probably measured in generations.
Another is to try an tip the scales a bit to correct to impact of opportunity on those people effected, or on your company (or other institution) or both. A problem with this approach is you by definition don't really know what the correct distribution should be, so you are likely to be a bit hamfisted about it.
A progressive might argue that this program gives women a better "opportunity" to succeed, whereas a conservative would say that the program was created for the purpose of influencing "outcomes", and that by focusing exclusively on women the program is intentionally creating unequal "opportunities".
Probably the biggest of these going on right now is the inequality in pay. Women are paid less (they are). This immediately implies sexism because no other explanation is even possible.
Well, usually when I see somebody arguing "equity vs. equality", they're advocating strict racial quotas: absolute equality of outcome, at the level of race.
In fact, I'm a supporter of equity over equality in plenty of instances beyond basic necessities. I think certain avenues to pursuing this are better than others, and that there are some instances where pursing equity over equality is misguided. But yes, I do believe there are instances where pursuing equity - at least in part - is better than exclusively pursuing equality.
Point of order: I'm taxed the same on my one-millionth dollar of income (assuming the same source) as Jeff Bezos is.
... I just don't have a one-millionth dollar of income to tax, but if someone wants to shift things toward equality rather than equity I'll happily accept donations toward that end. To make things more equal for Bezos and to strike a blow against equity, naturally.
This is exactly my point: a flat tax rate would be more equal, but less equitable. And I do support a tax code that is more equitable, rather than more equal in this regard.
A. Everyone regardless of demographic has the same opportunities, talent and interest in tech
B. You force people into positions they don't want and force people out that do want them
The same goes for education, nursing, construction, sewage, fire fighting...
That's the real crux of what we talk about when we talk about equality of outcomes. What qualifies as a necessity? And that's when you start getting arguments that start with things like "well in a modern society..."
You'll probably be hard pressed to find someone that says that someone deserves to starve to death because they're unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You'd probably also be equally hard pressed to find someone who thinks that waigu beef is a basic necessity. You say "strawman" and they say "moving the goalposts" and none of that is productive, this is a legitimate discussion that is going to be had, needs to be had and is not over or settled, shutting it down by calling the opposing viewpoint fallacious on false premises will not change that, it will only be counterproductive.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/equality-vs-eq...
Not generally, no; “equity” generally refers to fairness of treatment (as distinct from non-differentiation in equality); while concepts of fairness vary, equivalence of outcomes not the moat common understanding pursued under the banner of “equity”.
Which is not to say that the two are never (especially in particular narrow domains) the same, but they aren’t in general the same.
Equity is closer to "equality of opportunity" than "equality of outcome". "Equality" is neither of those things because it doesn't correct for differences in opportunity and therefore obviously doesn't yield an equal outcome.
I call it Harrison Bergeron:
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
Equality of outcome is undeniably evil.
There are certainly many people advocating for explicit "equality of outcome" policies e.g. various quota systems that mandate granting unequal opportunities for otherwise equally suitable applicants in order to achieve an equitable outcome for various groups (e.g. gender, ethnicity, caste, etc) the applicants represent.
This is the problem in your definitions. Are you talking about equity of outcome at the individual or group level? You are mixing the two there.
No on is advocating equity of outcome at the individual level. People are using equity of outcome at a group level as a measure of equity of opportunity at the individual level because there is an assumption that when two large groups of people have similar opportunities they will have similar normally distributed results at the individual level. If you argue otherwise, you quickly start getting into areas of bigotry by saying that a certain group is not willing or capable to make the most of opportunity.
But there seems to be a "definition mismatch" about what "equality of opportunity" means - I'm talking about equality of opportunity and equal treatment for individuals as they are right now at any particular decision point; and this is substantially different from what's measured by, as you say, "equity of outcome at a group level as a measure of equity of opportunity at the individual level" because that essentially measures an "integral" of all lifetime opportunities for all these individuals.
The key difference is whether we consider that "equal opportunity" should include or exclude compensating of earlier unequal opportunities. In general we're talking about specific decisions or policies that unavoidably come after some unequal opportunities e.g. the socioeconomic status of the family you're born in, which correlates with almost every measure of success. I would define "equal opportunity" as a "background blind" system that looks at the relevant attributes of individuals despite of or because of whatever earlier life they had - but it's clear that equal opportunity right now won't result in equal outcomes at the group level, since those would be influenced (and probably dominated) by all the differences accumulated before that. And vice versa, if you're trying to compensate for that, then you might get an equality of outcomes for the groupo, but at this moment you would be granting unequal opportunities to these individuals, even if they actually accurately compensate for other, earlier unequal opportunities to the same specific individuals and not just the groups to which these people happen to belong.
You admit "equality of opportunity" isn't practical right now due to existing systemic biases. The people fighting for equity would probably say it isn't practical in any foreseeable future. Maybe some day we will correct for systemic biases against certain races or genders, but odds are there will always be some sort of inherent disadvantage for various people. Physical disabilities are one example. That is where equity comes into play. Forcing an employer to install a ramp for a an employee in a wheelchair isn't being "background blind". They are not being treated equally because extra attention and resources are being devoted to them in comparison to their coworkers. However this unequal treatment is just in order to provide them an equal opportunity to overcome a disadvantage their coworkers never experienced. They would not have "equality in opportunity" without an inequality in how they are treated.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/equality-vs-eq...