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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender.

Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender?

Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.

Similarly with the race thing. The US fought a big civil war about whether people with dark skin were livestock or people and the losing side didn't actually change their mind just because they lost. So they needed laws to address that.

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This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021, women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students", does that argue that we should have affirmative action for men's admissions to college?

No, doesn't count for men. They're just broken and need to "step up".

Or perhaps, once shorn of the advantage of being physically stronger, it turns out that they are a bit rubbish really.

> But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.

What makes you think that affirmative action for women was successful?

I don't see a lot of women garbage collectors. There certainly aren't a lot of women working on oil fields. 5% of Firefighters are women. Whenever I hear about AA it sounds like the plan isn't "equality" but "construct an ideal racial society". Sounds a lot like the bad ideas leading up to WWII, which eventually led to the most horrific crimes against humanity in the history of the world.

I don't think that women are quite equal in terms of social perception and treatment, but I don't think the proportion of women garbage collectors or women firefighters is a good indicator of that. Rather, it's more subtle; women are more likely to be perceived as overly emotional and treated as submissive, and so on. I don't think there's a wage gap, but the lack of standardized maternal leave (though parents in general should be given paid leave) can greatly affect career opportunities. I agree that some people seem to prefer a bizarre "ideal [insert convenient demographic marker here] society", and I vehemently oppose such a notion.

I think that worked in the timeframe it did because women as a group aren't generationally poor (which is to say they aren't born any more or less well off than men), and so the entire shift was one of cultural attitudes. Perhaps AA for women helped normalize female doctors more quickly (haven't looked at any data on this but it seems plausible), though it remains to be seen if the same strategy can work for balancing CS. I'm curious though: did people at the time assume female doctors were less qualified because of AA?

So why even look at race at all (in college applications)?

I live in a small, now-EU, once a socialist country, and we calculate points based on grades and starndardized tests, and top X get accepted to college, without colleges even knowing who they are at all.

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