The topic is adversarial collaboration, essentially, the idea is to have people with diverging opinion work together as a way to limit bias and make something better in the end.
Because gender studies are a highly polarizing topic, it is an appropriate example, but I think the same ideas can be applied to topics like programming. For example, by pairing an architecture astronaut with a hacker, one may get something sensible, if both survive the encounter. For me that's what diversity is all about, more than narrow concerns about race, gender, religion and sexuality.
This sounds a lot like my workplace, where we have a shop foreman and fabrication team who tends to just want to build to print and get it shipped on time and at a profit, an engineering team who tends to hyper-optimize and inspect every parameter of the design, and an administration team that prioritizes process following. Left to their own devices, build would throw together something unreplicable and in desperate need of a redesign, engineering would be perpetually making ever more complicated prototypes and never ship anything, and admin would be holding so many meetings to go over so many forms that there would be no time remaining to make any mistakes (or to make anything at all), but together, it's a pretty successful team.
Sure, we poke fun at each other in the lunchroom, but it's all good-natured. Perhaps that's a better example of adversarial collaboration than a highly-polarizing gender studies paper...
I work with some people who I almost always disagree with, almost like magic. But from that disagreement can often come better solutions than either one of us would have been able to come up with on our own.
It obviously doesn't work in every situation, and everyone needs to ultimately be on the "same team" and want a similar overarching goal, and everyone needs to know when it's time to back off and concede a point. But there's just something so powerful about working together to solve problems from completely different viewpoints that prevents anyone from getting too focused on some small part of a problem.
In reality, there are many, many reasons that explain outcome disparities between groups and it's not safe to assume that disparities are caused by discrimination. Thomas Sowell has a great book on this topic, aptly named "Discrimination and Disparities".
How were life choices controlled for in these studies? I’m sure lots of black people in the pre-civil rights American South never applied for jobs only given to white people because not getting lynched is a pretty important “life choice.”
Put another, less stark way: if you see no one like you in a certain field, starting as a child, can you really say it was a “life choice” not to pursue, I.e, computer science?
> How were life choices controlled for in these studies?
The studies would consider lynching as a form of discrimination. I can't recommend the book enough if you are curious about the topic, it cites numerous studies.
The overall conclusion is that we shouldn't expect equal outcomes even in a world devoid of discrimination. The most obvious example of that are the various minority, and discriminated against, groups that outperform majority groups (e.g. the Chinese in Malaysia, American Jewish, etc.).
However, a lot of folks let group mentality ruin otherwise great opportunities.
We don't need to accept individualism to accept that argument, we need to accept that people are blind and deaf to the world around them, and somehow make major life decisions without basing them on any sensory and social input.
Which is a much harder sell.
I think it would be interesting if someone did a survey across all of Mike Rowe's dirty Jobs to see what the sex representation was.
Made me think!