Both are discriminatory, but one is virtuous and the other is bad?
It is right to try to take systemic steps to equalize access to opportunity across the board. The best (but imho still incredibly flawed) way of doing this is to use "anti-biased" hueristics to increase representation of certain people. In school admissions, for example, this might mean prioritizing applications from poorer areas. In other places this means having minimum quotas for hiring certain genders or ethnicities.
Yes, to be utterly semantic, it is discriminatory. I don't know how this sits with me, but it is technically true. But, whether it sits well or not, it is virtually impossible to fiddle ourselves out of this quagmire of inequality without taking proactive _opposite_ steps. We need to somehow equalise the playing field, thus equalising access to merit, thus equalising the soundness of the so-hailed "pure meritocracy" that so many seem to uphold as the ideal.
If people perceive that some groups are getting extra at the expense of others then that is seen as wrong, but if those in need are given communal surplus that is seen as just. In the circumstances of historical injustice you have competing claims that overlap depending upon which details are in focus.
Any data to show this is happening? From what I have seen, the primary benefactors of diversity initiatives come from the upper crusts of society(mostly upperclass white women, white lgbt, and some asian sprinkled in).
I have yet to see a diversity report that bins by intersections instead of broad categories. There's a reason for it.
I think there are additional externalities that need to be considered. For example, some of these discriminatory policies are going to cause strife, hate, and resentment, etc. in the people who need to be discriminated against. I think there may be unintended consequences that we're only beginning to see.
Discrimination causes problems that can take a long time to emerge and a long time to address. We're STILL seeing the effects of this on many minority groups - but the solution IMO isn't to do it all over again.
It feels BAD to be discriminated against.
As a migrant from dirt poor family from ex-Soviet Republic, I seem to forgot to collect my generational merit, where and when can I do that? And can I add it to my own merit?
Counter that by providing less privileged people with more opportunities, not by changing the definitions of merit.
It's basically impossible for anyone to become a chess grandmaster without exposure to competitive chess when you're less than 10. This obviously favors the children of the well off, but you can't deny that these children end up being better at chess.
The same goes for education in general. If elite preparatory schools didn't offer a better education than public schools, nobody would pay for them. You shouldn't use their doing better on standardized tests as an indictment on standardized tests because they're genuinely better educated. Asians tend to have the highest SAT scores of all races, and they're the least likely to drop out. Black people tend to have the lowest SAT scores, and they're also the most likely to drop out. This is a sign that the SAT is a good metric. Yet, the far left frames this two examples of racism: that both the SAT and colleges themselves are systemically racist.
By principle, I actually am in favor of affirmative action, but I'm tired of all the anti-merit rhetoric used to justify it.
Which is why this sort of slacktivist approach to everything is so popular today on social media. It's easy and lower effort to go after western culture while sitting behind a keyboard than to fix the hard problems happening IRL.
But it's not. It's being applied with the same level of knee-jerk emotional reaction and sloppiness of classic "I don't like people of skin color x" racial prejudice - which is what it is.
The theory that you're describing is quite different from what is being applied in the real world.
Rather than fight to make the system equal and fair, you favour tilting it in your direction assuming it will never tilt the other way?
If a person making hiring decisions says that the next candidate for such-and-such role should be a person from such-and-such group (a woman, a person of color, etc.), then the criterion of being the better candidate doesn't apply. Or, rather, it gets adjusted such that belonging in the desired group is included in the list of what makes a candidate better.
I completely agree with you, which is what makes all these recent trends in hiring all the more fascinating to me. If the only concern of a company were the bottom line (which I would expect it should be), then there wouldn't have been any conversation about marginalised groups etc., because, for companies, a candidate's demographics would have been irrelevant. The only thing that would have mattered is which candidate is expected to be the best fit for a given position. That it doesn't work like that suggests that companies are also political creatures, and are concerned about their public image and, possibly, about things like ESG scores. It may even be that the public image and things like ESG scores are a strong contributor to the bottom line.
In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves.
Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill.
It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.
If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.
But the reality is that the vast majority of tech jobs are in the first category. There are far more people building web sites than kernel network stack hackers.
Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it by hiring a different woman in some other job because humans aren't fungible.
California brought in a law banning all male boards in 2018 because the problem is so endemic. Not 1988, 2018.
A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.[1]
So this is still happening now, and for decades most boards just had a token woman at best.
For me personally, when I found out about how unrepresentative corporate boardrooms were, that changed my mind about positive discrimination.
It showed me clear evidence that network effects were too strong, meritocracy is a farce and it had to be broken by forcing a cultural change, i.e. positive discrimination was the right solution.
If you go back far enough in my comment history here you'll probably find me arguing against it. But I learnt about the persistent gender and minority inequality on boards a decade or two ago and changed my mind.
You should too.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requi...
>A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.
is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).