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Your points about these things are right in that you can’t just randomly apply a quota anywhere in the process and expect a good result. Eg the solution to disc
by themarkn 8y ago
Your points about these things are right in that you can’t just randomly apply a quota anywhere in the process and expect a good result. Eg the solution to discrimination in the justice system is probably not to put more white people in jail for no reason. But if everybody received the same punishment for the same crime, that would actually happen.
“Blindness” is ideal once people get into the stages of the process where they are being evaluated on an individual level. It should be the goal.
Quotas are not targeted at those problems.
The important piece that a lot of us people seem to miss is that the ongoing effect of historical racism and sexism messes things up and creates unfairness before people even get in the room. Massive unfairness. Compounded in a thousand different ways over somebody’s life. Creating pressure away from one kind of life and towards another simply through historical inertia, because for most of history people like them did not have full rights as human beings.
Quotas seem bad at solving the problems you point out because they are not for that. They are an attempt to measure, and correct for, much bigger trends.
Well-designed quotas at the right places in processes could let the pool of people (who are then evaluated blindly) be a much more representative group. Quotas (or some other measurement) would let you know if some proxies for discrimination were still getting through the process.
Insurance companies my not use race, but a zip code can be a proxy for race, and the kind of neighborhood a person lives in can make them more likely to suffer a break-in or make a claim for some other reason.
I really do believe that it’s impossible to treat people as individuals with 100% certainty that that’s what you are doing. No matter how hard you try. Even in all the examples you gave, there is progress but things are not done.
Hopefully this makes my point more clear.