> Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments.
Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?
Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked how many female justices sitting on the Supreme Court would be enough. Her answer was nine. (N.b. the U.S. Supreme Court traditionally has nine justices.)
It's not really a joke. In any instant, equal proportions of men and women would represent equality (by sex). But taking the long view, 100% of the positions in those fields were held by men, so 100% would have to be held by women for a while in order to redress the historical injustice. This is "equity", a step beyond mere equality, and it's the E in DEI/JEDI.
I think this statement is going past equity straight into reparations.
Equality: Men and Women should have equal criteria for getting the job.
Equity: Women should have an easier time to counter an unbalanced gender representation
This statement: Women should have an easier time because men in the past had an easier time, even if the pendulum shifts.
“WHEN I’M SOMETIMES ASKED ‘WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH [WOMEN ON THE SUPREME COURT]?’ AND I SAY ‘WHEN THERE ARE NINE,’ PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED. BUT THERE’D BEEN NINE MEN, AND NOBODY’S EVER RAISED A QUESTION ABOUT THAT.”
My reading of the quote is that is she's saying that a female justice should be not be any more surprising than a male justice, and thus that an all-female court should be no more surprising than an all-male court.
Just working out the probabilities, if women and men were selected as justices with equal probability, single-gendered courts should occur about 0.2% of the time for each gender.
That's a small number, but not a vanishingly small number. While I don't think we can say much about courts prior to ~1975 (equal gender opportunity to the court not yet being an objective), it seems reasonable to say going forward that IF we are achieving the stated goal of equal gender opportunity, we should expect that an all-female court will eventually occur.