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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Obviously if you need some disability then that's going to be an exception to the rule.
But when someone says "We need more women in the workforce so let's only hire women. Men need not apply" that's not equality. If we said "This person worse at the job but he's black so we will make the enter easier for him because he can't compete with white people." That's not equality.
Minorities get passed over and screwed over for basic needs like housing, education, childcare, etc. As a result, when someone says "we only hire competent people, the best people for the job, it's not our fault if these minorities we interviewed happen to be incompetent" that's already setting things up to reduce their presence in society, which loops into making them poorer, with less access to basic needs and so on. Refusing to hire a woman for one job and hiring a man instead because you think she's less competent is tunnel vision, you're focusing on a single job and trying to scale that to the whole of society; the most direct answer is just to hire more people and train everyone. It's corporate thinking to assume you will only hire a single perfect worker for all of your jobs, but all you're doing is only reducing your work force, which only ever works for the corporate bottom line until you run out of people to fire. And when the imbalance is so bad, there is a point where, on a large sale, you need to hire a higher number of women / Black people / handicapped people to catch up, because you've shut them down the whole time; and that basically makes it your own fault if you think they're less competent than educated competent men, because they didn't get the opportunity, because they didn't get the training, because... they didn't get the opportunity.
The "hire only competent people = only white men" is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it creates the entire situation of everyone else being less competent, being lower on the decision totem pole (like the decision to help minorities get out of that loop), having lower incomes. If you help only your own because they have the skills you want, you are creating the situation where you perceive everyone else to be lower by your own standards. Someone's gotta make the first step to bring everyone up to the same level, and you know it's not going to start in education and housing. Because those people are not up there making the decision to help with that. The people who can make the decision choose not to help, because those minorities don't have the same skills as this other guy here.
So you're saying to start a new system where you only hire non white/ non males. Suddenly you have a whole generation of young men/ young whites being passed over for positions just because they are white/ male. So what happens the next generation? You only hire white males because they were past over in the last generation.
No mention of hiring based on lower income. No you are doing it based on race. So rich black people get a huge benefit over poor white people who never had any opportunities and currently don't but, fuck them right, they are white. They shouldn't feel hard done by that they are poor have no opportunities in life because hey that CEO is an old white guy.
This is why it's stupid you are actively disenfranchising people. Sure people got mistreated in the past but misreading people now isn't going to make them be not mistreated. It just means twice as many people have been mistreated.
I say balance and that's your take?
Man. I spoke about hiring based on skills the whole time. This imbalance in poor, less skilled white men was already there before you started talking about diversity hire, but you chose to blame diversity hire, because you think unskilled women or minorities get hired over skilled but poor white men. I spoke about improving housing, education, childcare, and all other basic needs, I didn't say that only applies if you're not a white man. It goes for everyone. But those poor white men aren't getting help from the current situation either way, and you seem to think that the only solution is to hire them over minorities. You're not talking about helping all the people in this situation, you just want the poor white men to get hired and not get passed over for less skilled women - you're fine with leaving everyone else behind. You're not even considering that everyone might deserve a spot somewhere, you think there's only one spot and it should go to the skilled white man.
Aren't you also talking about diversity hires? I'm assuming you think there's an imbalance that needs fixing, and your way of fixing it seems to be to hire minorities at a much greater proportion than how they're represented in the population? Shouldn't your solution be more class based?
You complained that hiring was focusing on women and men didn't need to apply and that's not equality. I discussed why diversity is important to lift up people in need and why that is, in fact, equality. You're the one who keeps focusing on poor white men, pretending that I'm ignoring them, why are you pretending they don't benefit from equality and improving housing, education, childcare? Equality helps everyone.
Oh okay you're just straight up lying then lmao. To those used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Did you know that about half of humanity is female? You know half the people in high places aren't female. Or even in medium places. And let's not even talk about all the other minorities.
Wherever you are, see if you can find some unemployment or income numbers for your area, if it's broken down by gender or ethnicity. It might surprise you!
Firstly, I'm a different person. I'm just interested on what your solution is. No need to be so hostile. I've likely just misunderstood you.
My critique is specifically on the bit I quoted. You need to divide it by generation. The hiring, especially for starting roles, is heavily biased towards the young. These people are just coming out of college.
Giving your example of 50% women in the population, and a law firm is 100 people, 90 of which are men. That firm now needs to hire 90 women and 10 men to reach that 50% goal. But now you've also influxed a tonne of women into that workforce, meaning now you'll need to hire disproportionately more men next generation after the original 90 men have retired. It creates a cycle of discrimination. Obviously that's oversimplified, and there's additional factors you could add to the example e.g. staff turnover.
I don't disagree with setting hiring goals 50/50 men/women if that's what your advocating for? It doesn't immediately change workplace demographics, but it should even out over time. And there are still issues stemming from the amount of male vs female degree holders in certain subjects that are heavily gender biased, like engineering, vetinary practice, and IT.
I'm also totally for raising funding for public services and education to ensure everyone gets the best start on life they can. No disagreement there. It'd be ideal if we could encourage young men/women to more evenly participate in different subjects.
Again I'm sorry if I misunderstood your point, it wasn't clear to me
Oops, sorry for the confusion.
Even though we reached equal representation? You want to reinject more of one side to recreate the imbalance we were getting away from a minute ago? The only gap is between generations, when the old people retire, at first that'll be a lot of men since they're the only ones that were there, but it shouldn't be that hard to map that out to maintain equality through the change. Plus, hiring seniors is a thing, so hiring older women and not all young women can immediately balance that retirement sausage fest faster, removing the gender imbalance per generation. You're supposed to hire at all levels, entry level only is just more corporate speak. And that's not just about women or minorities, that's already a subject for people who can't get a job because companies want both experience and entry level pay, this isn't new, it already hits everyone, including poor white men. Fixing this helps everyone.
Also, I mentioned it before, but I'm not talking about a single company on a single job position. As long as everyone plays the game, and not everyone has the same amount of people on the same generation and retiring at the same time, it shouldn't be that hard to smooth out the curb to the middle, and then stay there. All HR departments in the world should know how to plan that, they're built around their love of Excel sheets.
Hiring 50/50 is of course part of it, yes, it's not like the whole world is really doing 100% women only everywhere, you know that's just not reality. If one company is doing "men need not apply", you know there are other companies that aren't. Of course that depends on the job, because places that say "this job is only good for women" (like, you know, low-level healthcare), or the other way around (mechanics? That's only for men!), has been an issue long before people started complaining about diversity hire, they just didn't like to mention it because they liked it. Hiring exclusively women was fine when it was for low level jobs that men obviously don't want to do - except there's plenty of men who do want to work in healthcare or childcare or education, and they can't.
Encouraging young men and women to branch out more is of course a good idea, but we've seen for decades that women who want to try STEM and the likes often ended up chased away by men who say "it's no place for women" (students, senior employees, teachers) and because the culture is already plagued by sexism and racism and exclusion and actual threats. Starting at the bottom and doing nothing else doesn't actually work, we've tried that and it failed hard and we've all gone surprised pikachu face about it. The fact is that young women do want to try STEM, until they get assaulted and victimized, just like there are young men who do want to try traditionally female jobs, until they get mocked and harassed for not being manly enough. These people already exist, we're already telling them to try it out - only to destroy them within a couple years. We do have to include the middle and the top right from the start, it has to happen everywhere, and people who fight back have to be forced to accept it - we have to clean up the "locker room" culture and the "traditional gender role" culture to protect the people that want to join these places.
Thank you for the calmer reply, I've upvoted you, and appreciate your response. I'm 100% with you on improving access to education, and the issues women and minorities face in university courses. My end goal is the same as yours, I want to see equality in the workplace and elsewhere, I'm just trying to address what I think are legitimate concerns that the previous commentator raised.
I get that senior hiring is a thing, the problem is that as you've mentioned, historical discrimination has made it very difficult for women and minorities to get the appropriate credentials and skills required to adequately perform in senior roles. Not saying they're incapable, of course not, just that this is an issue we're still suffering from.
My worry is that this historical discrimination will force companies to over hire women and minorities in starting roles, and be unable to hire women in senior roles, if we pursue short term demographic equality. This leaves young men, particularly poor young men, at a disadvantage, and does nothing to fix the historical oppression women have suffered from.
I chose law in particular, because it's fairly even in graduates today, even in women's favour, and there's way more graduates than jobs, which means that if we wanted immediate demographic equality the industry as a whole could experience the same issue as the hypothetical company above, but obviously not as dramatic. Which is why I take issue with the short term goal being equal demographics. The short term goal should be equal hiring, with the long term goal being equal demographics as the older generations filter out.
In many metro areas young women already earn more than young men.
It's not fair that women and minorities have been held back, but I'm worried that going too hard too fast is going to cause more long term problems
Thus reads like diversity hire.
Look we both agree give everyone the sane opportunity, education houses etc.
But you get a company like this 100 people. Over 30's: male 80:20 female
So you get 10 new entry level openings, applications male 70:30 female. There a load of shit going on here, but to make it simple we both agree women have previously been under represented (let's ignore children and whatever).
There are some people who say we are going to have an intake of under 30's so because the workforce isn't 50:50 male to female we should ideally hire only women until we get it to 50:50.
So now you hire 10 women and have a workforce of male 80:30 women. Right?
That's not fair. Even hiring 50% women isn't fair. Everyone should have equal opportunity, thats thr only way it is fair. It should be 7 men 3 women, on average.
Discriminating against men now doesn't stop women in the past being discriminated against it just adds to the amount of people discriminated against. There is no other way to treat people than fairly.
No, it should not. That's just ridiculous. You don't fix unequality by maintaining it just because that's what you're always known. You want to keep the privileges you have now while denying improving the situation of others, because you think losing your unfair advantage over others becomes unfair to you, that's nonsense.
Hiring 50/50 is not discriminating against you just because you were at 70 before. You don't get to decide that half the female population of the planet shouldn't be allowed to work - because that's what your 70/30 is, if the 70 is most of the male population (let's imagine a >90% employment rate), then the 30 is around half of the female population, you're saying the other half will never be allowed to work. You're assuming they can keep being SAHM or whatever else.
The thing is that the 70% of workers being men shouldn't mean there are less men if it becomes 50%. Men aren't losing their jobs. It means there are more workers, including the same number of men, and more women. This isn't supposed to be a zero sum game when population grows.
You're an idiot. Every single person gets a fair 10% chance.
Just because 1 woman wants to be an engineer and 10 men do doesn't mean the woman is 10 times better than men. Or that she should be 10 times as likely to get a job just for being a woman. It should me she gets equal opportunity as men. If you only hire a woman because she is a woman that's not equality.
It never goes the other way around. Do you think we should we only hire male teachers and male nursery staff and male nurses because they are under represented?
Everyone getting the same chance means 50/50 hiring because believe it or not, women do want to work in all fieds; the current 70/30 soon goes down to 50/50 from there. And yes, men do want to work in healthcare and child care and education, surprise. Why do you need to make sure they can't? Because that is in fact the same process that happens, one side is actively shunned from some jobs and the other side gets shunned all the same, even though there are people on both sides who do want to work in both types of jobs. The reality that you pretend doesn't exist is that there are 10 women who want to be an engineer at the beginning of their education and they get stomped down to 1 until she gets passed over for some 10 men who at first wanted to work in healthcare but were bullied into engineering. This 1 woman to 10 men scenario is your own creation.
It takes actual work of being unfair to maintain the imbalance you benefit from. Man you don't even understand the math of your own argument, maybe the women who get hired over you actually are more skilled.
Actually countries that have more equality or have increased their equality over time shows that there is an increase in gender divide through certain jobs.
So no it isn't 50:50.
I'm not arguing for affirmative action, but the current system does not treat everyone equally. People applying to jobs with black sounding names get hired/interviewed much less than white sounding names on equivalent resumes.
I don't know what the solution is but the current system is not working.
Take names off then.
Hiring unevenly now to make up for things in the past just makes inequality now. It doesn't solve any inequality of the past.
I keep seeing this claim, but where are those numbers coming from? Are they from recent studies, or 20 year old studies? Are they major national employers or rinky dink mom and pop shops in Alabama? If you check the news you will see that companies like Google are actually being sued for purging white candidates, and Asian males. Straight up just deleting their applications based on their ethnicity and sex. Google is not alone in this. There are plenty of other companies you can find news for. The company I work for said that 85% of all interviewees need to classify as "diversity hires". So, I keep seeing the claim that white people have an advantage when applying for jobs, but what I actually see at the corporate policy level is the exact opposite.