This line of thinking seems logical but is missing out on the human experience part of the equation. It doesn’t address why things are the way they are today. Affirmative Action, for lack of a better phrase, does a lot of things:
1) It provides representation for the future. “Mom went to college so so can I!”, “Wow, if Susan Wojcicki can run Youtube, then I can do something like that too!” Seeing people you can identify with being successful affects how you view yourself.
2) One of the reasons diverse teams are more productive is it helps stamp out the “oddball” feeling. If you are the only person in your peers that looks like you, it can have a chilling effect on how you interact with the team, how your success is measured, and your mental well being. If you don’t believe this, go to a club where no one looks like you and see how much you feel like standing out even more than just existing there.
3) It normalizes it. The only reason we are talking about it is because people in these positions are extraordinary. Normalizing it reduces implicit bias, gets other, previously discriminated against people back into the conversation and is the path towards it being a nonissue. The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.
4) Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.
There are important reasons for these sorts of hiring decisions that have lasting consequences. And if we want to make the issue disappear we have to start at the top, not at the bottom.
The “oddball” feeling is also very real in profession where a single gender represent over 80%. It was one of the finding in a government report in Sweden why so few men chooses to enter the education profession. With a majority of people working in profession with significant gender imbalance, universal affirmative action would help to reduce the problem of people perceiving a toxic working environment. A universal problem should be solved using universal methods.
For normalizing, there is two primary strategic methods. You can treat people special as with affirmative action, or you can treat people being there as being normal by treating people as individuals. Both methods works, but they also work against each other. Treating people as special create hostility and resentment, while treating everyone as individuals has the risk being perceived as supporting statues quo.
And yes, we can start at the top. Affirmative action at college applications is not the same as affirmative action at board members. Affirmative action should be universally applied using common rules, but that is sadly not how it get applied. The few times people try to make common rules for affirmative action it get abandoned quickly because the wrong group benefited from it, or it get removed based on anti-discrimination laws.
Moreover, while I believe that diversity is a benefit, I suspect returns diminish beyond 5-10% (beyond that, it's no longer "wow, a career woman! I've never seen that before!"--similarly, a team that is 50% black is probably not going to produce a facial recognition product that is 40% better than the team that is only 10% black, although the team that is 0-5% black may well make a product that performs poorly on black faces).
> The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.
I'm not sure this is true; I think it's mostly just that "gays are harmful" was a really hard position to support, and the gay rights movement didn't try to bash their opponents over the head (they weren't trying to cancel people for questioning dubious narratives, for example).
> Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.
You can't assume someone had greater social barriers based on race or gender. What is true for a large, diverse group of people (like a race or a gender) is often not true for individuals. This is just stereotyping.
If there are few women in tech, and few women professors of computer science or engineering, there will be few girls taking tech courses. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, and you need explicit action to break it. Affirmative action is one of the only known ways of doing this, as it has been at least moderately successful at integrating black people into high-status positions and jobs after the centuries of slavery. Explicit programs to encourage STEM education for girls in school are another, but less proven.
* The things you were exposed to as a child. Whether or not you know/see people who look like you in a certain career path.
* Whether or not you feel like you fit in at certain classes in school.
* The biases of your mentors and whom they choose to invest in. People favor other people who they feel are similar. This impacts who gets opportunities for further training positions. Who they write recommendations for. Who gets opportunities for internships. Each of these choices compound, as people with more opportunities look better than people with less.
* The biases of your peers and coworkers. Who gets blamed when things go poorly. Who gets credit for successes.
On the individual level, it's usually difficult to point out exactly where the injustice occurs to know how to address it in real time. As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others. With that in mind, it becomes much more reasonable to essentially reverse discriminate. Given two people with the same resume, with person A being from an underrepresented group and person B who is not, the best candidate is likely A who has had the additional burden of biases.
Doing this at large actually will reduce the biases. As it becomes normal to see the underrepresented group in a career path:
* More kids will see people like them in the career, leading to more trying it
* Classes will be more diverse and welcoming so more will stick to it
* Mentors are likely more diverse as well and will give opportunities to other people that look like them
* When you don't stick out, it's more likely you'll be treated fairly by peers and coworkers
What this does is distribute the injustice evenly between the races, but this sort of concern about races (rather than the individuals that comprise them) strikes me as the very essence of racism: it's treating individuals within a race as unimportant and treating race itself as all-important.
> As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others.
We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.
> We can tell that it occurs, but we can't even accurately measure the degree to which it occurs. Our discourse generally just assumes that the degree of disparity is the degree of discrimination on the really, really awful assumption that disparities can only be caused by discrimination.
Plenty of studies have been done on this topic. I don't think it's controversial to say that disparities are due to discrimination
"Diversity" is empty HR speak, please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation.
To keep an open mind I did a thought experiment and found a few: entertainment, fusion food, music, those things I'd imagine benefit greatly from diversity.
If you hire all of the same socioeconomic strata even if they are different races chances are you will not get a wide depth of experience and world view
Demographics of this city I believe are 30% minority and 70% white. Of the 10 Homes owners closest to me (and they are all home owners no rentals) 4 of them are black.
My employer has a much larger than 30% black workforce.
Homelessness is not a large problem here, however it is primarily white men that I see homeless. probably on the order of 70% matching demographics
I am tired of the false narrative that the midwest is racist.
Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities.
This is only a dilemma if you completely ignore the history that precipitated such efforts.
In Norway years back they promoted a program for women to study engineering disciplines. They increased a lot.
So at some point they thought they could stop doing it and percentages came back to where they were before after some time I recall.
If it was a cultural thing... they would have stayed. On the way u had discrimination by sex (AFAIK men were not paid for choosing engineering and women were paid FOR choosing, a privilege under any circumstance since noone forbid them to choose that).
All in all what happened is that some ppl saw a chance (incentive) in dtudying cheaper or whatever. But was the real reason to choose those degrees bc they really liked it?
I really think promoting good stuff is nice. But distorting it via positive discrimination is not the solution.
if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back.
sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture. and that includes possible ongoing discrimination against women, only that the financial support helped some women to enter engineering despite the discrimination happening.
it is possible that this program was the wrong approach. (where it comes to discrimination, i believe it matters to teach everyone to change their attitude towards women in engineering) or that it simply wasn't active long enough. it takes time to change peoples attitudes. maybe after a few decades people get used to women in engineering. (that worked in china, they have a lot more women in engineering)
the problem with liking it is that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the field at hand. i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture, and that alone would be enough to rather work in a job that i don't like where the people are nice than the reverse.
Yes, that is what happened.
> sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture
This reminds me of "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. The culture was not changed probably because there is more than just culture underlying human choice... at least that is my belief. Of course, not all is biology, but not all is culture. It seems that in this case things tend to indicate that there is more than culture behind these choices.
> it is possible that this program was the wrong approach
why not just convince people why they should choose X or Y? Why you have to reserve money or resources actively? That, you know, means that some people that are more valuable than others, will lose their chance... is not that discrimination? Is it not that what they are fighting? You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side...
> i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture
Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? I might not like in a sis culture, right? I mean, the problem exists... no, the problem does not. Things are the way they are and we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others. If you work somewhere, you cannot pretend the world will change immediately around you just bc we think it should be something different. We need to deal with that, and trying to force everything into our ideal just leads to frustration. Instead we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem.
then why try at all? if we believe this goal should be achived then we should keep trying until we get there.
You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side
that is a reasonable argument, but plenty of counter arguments exist. some are being discussed on this page.
Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite?
oh sure, however, teaching is an entirely different problem.
as a parent i want my children to be exposed to male and female role models (what teachers are to them) in equal measure. therefore for the sake of children i want gender parity in schools to be enforced by law.
but you could make the same argument with other professions that are dominated by one gender. nurses are probably a good example where men may not feel comfortable.
we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others
why not?
one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?
what we want is gender equality, that is equality of opportunity (not necessarily equality of outcome)
so that means we want more opportunities for women in engineering. for that we need to understand what is keeping women out of engineering, and how can we get more women into engineering. (and then replay that for any profession and respective gender)
and if access to financial resources is a reason, then it absolutely makes sense to provide additional financial resources to women.
again, i have no idea what happened in norway. access to university is free in norway, so i don't know what they would need money for.
if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change. how do we get them to change? possibly only by exposing men to more female coworkers. but that means forcing the issue, and pushing women into engineering until men learn to treat women as equals.
i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching), but i strongly care about women and men being treated equally, and a large part of that is men learning to treat women as their equal and respect them professionally.
we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem
you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.
but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.
It is good to try, but we already tried a million times. It just does not work. This is like trying to jump from the top of a building and trying to not get hurt when you smash the ground. Reality has a certain shape. Some people try to fight reality based on the fact of "things should be like in my mind" ignoring all psychology, antropology, biology and other aspects behind it saying it is just a cultural thing.
As I said before, it this was just cultural, numbers would not have come back to the starting point. This is a very clear signal that we should not be doing that, but something else. Or probably nothing! Because doing that creates side effects. I am ok with promoting women to study engineering, as my parents did with "what do you like better?", "wanna try this?", for which I and them payed the cost in time and money. But I am totally against arranging public resources systematically so that people that are valuable cannot enter a place because of a stupid quota. That should be, literally, illegal, under the premise that discrimination is forbidden for reasons of gender, race, etc.
> one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?
The goal is that people should be happy and doing what they want. You do not need a grant to give an engineering to someone bc she is a woman. That is not true. You just need to encourage them. Yet they do this, why?
If some people are not happy by how the world looks in their mind (I think we all find things we do not like), that is not a reason to start public scholarships and stuff like that to do things that clearly do not work, or at least, have not worked before. If I try a business, or something to promote something positive to others, I am not entitled to make 3rd parties pay the economic and discrimination (they get out of the system bc of quotas). The second thing is even worse than the economic part, which is not good either, anyway, IMHO, bc it violates the right of people to their property/effort.
> if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change.
Where did you take that men discriminate women in engineering? Please show me the facts. This is so silly. I have worked with women in engineering, for me they are just my mates. This is like saying I am discriminated when I am a man and date bc girls look more at certain aspects of me than what I pay attention from them.
It is just different interests, you cannot do anything against that. And there is nothing bad in it. If it bothers someone, it is that person who has a problem accepting reality. They pretend the one who has the problem is reality. This is highly absurd...
> i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching)
Me none. I do not care almost 70% are women in Spain university, as long as there is no incentive to promote girls and leave guys out. If things are like that, there must be a reason, and the reason is not discrimination, at least in Spain. That is silly. The only discrimination I saw is the fact that they are actively bribing girls to study certain degrees, but when a degree is full of women, they do not do the opposite. That said, I am against this kind of briving in either direction. If you want to study something, it is bc you have a natural motivation in the first place: shifting the cost to third parties should be illegal, as I said.
> you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.
The problem is that they do not, at least it looks like no when they run public programmes. What they do is to try to maximize the votes like when a scammer tries to sell you a broken product or service. Their interest is to maximize the benefit for them, not for us. This, unfortunately, is the nature of politics (and of humans, in general): we do what benefits us the most first, and later, yes, we are not super bad and we have a heart there. But we go first. It is like that. There is plenty of literature showing all this...
> but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.
There is not a problem. It is not a problem that most girls are teachers or most guys are engineers. Look how easy it is: you talk to men and you tell them why they should be teaching. You talk to women and you tell them why they should do engineering (higher wages, blabla). If they do not want to choose it, there is nothing you can do, you have to respect it and not starting an artificial war that just has bad side effects: kicking out people that genuinely wanted to study something bc of a quota, creating an artificial incentive and have people with zero vocation on a job... things like that.
You just make things worse when you do this. Honest opinion: the problem does not exist. Bc "we want more men, women, black, white, whatever" in place X is just a wish of the mind that should not be a real goal just bc of our taste for symmetry. It would be nice? Probably for some. But you are making others pay the cost. Noone is entitled to shift the cost of things they do not pay for to 3rd parties. I will always be against that, and it should be illegal (in theory it is..., at least in Spain, but in practice they do it).
it is nothing like that for 3 reasons
1. first and foremost the "white only" schools was legally required segregation, it was imposed by law and the elimination of that required law to reverse. These laws have now been absent for decades
2. Primary education is where this battle should be fought, even today there are still battle that need to be fought when it come to resource alloation, school choice, etc. You do not attempt to fix a bad casting after the poor you need to fix the mold.... We do that by fixing primary education which is being used by various political factions on both the left and the right to push political agenda and not education.
3. Once we get to adulthood, using discrimination to "fix" historic discrimination will not resolve the underlying problem (see #2) and will likely create more discrimination against the very groups you are attempting to assist, it is in all cases a general net negative.
The fix was to forcibly integrate schools: explicitly mandate not just that black students be allowed, but actually that they are integrated in significant numbers, including by providing special facilities (school buses) to take them to the better schools that were farther away from their homes - the policy known as "busing" [0]; a form of (positive) discrimination.
Of course, as the article notes, this can also have negative consequences, so any such measure is far from easy to apply.