Affirmative action programs are controversial because people who have privilege generally don’t like other people getting that privilege (because then they are

Affirmative action programs are controversial because people who have privilege generally don’t like other people getting that privilege (because then they are no longer special). As an analogous situation, men often claim that women talk too much. There’s fairly strong evidence that the claim is merely sexist nonsense[1]. So forgive me if I’m unwilling to give a crap about whether people who look like me (white men) feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick because there are people like me working to end the special privileges that they have gotten literally for decades. Especially since so many of them really aren’t all that. The London School of Economics makes it clear that gender quotas actually improve meritocracy by squeezing out mediocre men[2]. Your rephrasing is mostly correct, but I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know how to see your own biases, you cannot design a meritocratic interview process that doesn’t inherently have bias against women and/or minorities. As this entire discussion on the firing of the author of the screed shows…there’s a lot of people who can’t see that they have biases. (And yes, I have biases. I have to work very hard to prevent those biases from causing me to discriminate. This is largely why I involve my team in hiring and constantly discuss the problems with bias blindness with them, too.) [1] http://thejunglenook.tumblr.com/post/75517868909/do-women-talk-too-much-hint-science-says-no http://thejunglenook.tumblr.com/post/75517868909/do-women-ta... … but also see [3] as an extension because it actually gets to the heart of just why the (now-ex) Googler at the top of this was just so wrong. [2] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quotas-and-the-crisis-of-the-mediocre-man/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quot... [3] http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/145374253955/do-women-talk-too-much-hint-science-says-no http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/145374253955/do-women-ta...