4 ms·

>Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. This line of thin

>Discriminating in favor of some women/minorities doesn't help other other women/minorities elsewhere who have been harmed by discrimination. This line of thinking seems logical but is missing out on the human experience part of the equation. It doesn’t address why things are the way they are today. Affirmative Action, for lack of a better phrase, does a lot of things: 1) It provides representation for the future. “Mom went to college so so can I!”, “Wow, if Susan Wojcicki can run Youtube, then I can do something like that too!” Seeing people you can identify with being successful affects how you view yourself. 2) One of the reasons diverse teams are more productive is it helps stamp out the “oddball” feeling. If you are the only person in your peers that looks like you, it can have a chilling effect on how you interact with the team, how your success is measured, and your mental well being. If you don’t believe this, go to a club where no one looks like you and see how much you feel like standing out even more than just existing there. 3) It normalizes it. The only reason we are talking about it is because people in these positions are extraordinary. Normalizing it reduces implicit bias, gets other, previously discriminated against people back into the conversation and is the path towards it being a nonissue. The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal. 4) Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb. There are important reasons for these sorts of hiring decisions that have lasting consequences. And if we want to make the issue disappear we have to start at the top, not at the bottom.

belorn 4y ago
Those are the general arguments in favor of Affirmative Action, but neither explain why we only apply them selectively when we feel like it. "Mom went to college so so can I" is relevant for people who lived in the 50-90s, but for those entering college today, the mother is more likely to have a college degree than the father. "Father went to college so so can I" should be the intention today if we want to fix gender inequality in college graduates. The “oddball” feeling is also very real in profession where a single gender represent over 80%. It was one of the finding in a government report in Sweden why so few men chooses to enter the education profession. With a majority of people working in profession with significant gender imbalance, universal affirmative action would help to reduce the problem of people perceiving a toxic working environment. A universal problem should be solved using universal methods. For normalizing, there is two primary strategic methods. You can treat people special as with affirmative action, or you can treat people being there as being normal by treating people as individuals. Both methods works, but they also work against each other. Treating people as special create hostility and resentment, while treating everyone as individuals has the risk being perceived as supporting statues quo. And yes, we can start at the top. Affirmative action at college applications is not the same as affirmative action at board members. Affirmative action should be universally applied using common rules, but that is sadly not how it get applied. The few times people try to make common rules for affirmative action it get abandoned quickly because the wrong group benefited from it, or it get removed based on anti-discrimination laws.
throwaway894345 4y ago
I'm pretty reluctant to discriminate against people to make other people feel better, and I think there are ways to achieve the same without discriminating--specifically, promote more substantial identities besides race and gender (which is to say, undo all of the hyper-racialization that we've done over the last decade). Moreover, while I believe that diversity is a benefit, I suspect returns diminish beyond 5-10% (beyond that, it's no longer "wow, a career woman! I've never seen that before!"--similarly, a team that is 50% black is probably not going to produce a facial recognition product that is 40% better than the team that is only 10% black, although the team that is 0-5% black may well make a product that performs poorly on black faces). > The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal. I'm not sure this is true; I think it's mostly just that "gays are harmful" was a really hard position to support, and the gay rights movement didn't try to bash their opponents over the head (they weren't trying to cancel people for questioning dubious narratives, for example). > Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb. You can't assume someone had greater social barriers based on race or gender. What is true for a large, diverse group of people (like a race or a gender) is often not true for individuals. This is just stereotyping.

belorn 4y ago

Those are the general arguments in favor of Affirmative Action, but neither explain why we only apply them selectively when we feel like it. "Mom went to college so so can I" is relevant for people who lived in the 50-90s, but for those entering college today, the mother is more likely to have a college degree than the father. "Father went to college so so can I" should be the intention today if we want to fix gender inequality in college graduates. The “oddball” feeling is also very real in profession where a single gender represent over 80%. It was one of the finding in a government report in Sweden why so few men chooses to enter the education profession. With a majority of people working in profession with significant gender imbalance, universal affirmative action would help to reduce the problem of people perceiving a toxic working environment. A universal problem should be solved using universal methods. For normalizing, there is two primary strategic methods. You can treat people special as with affirmative action, or you can treat people being there as being normal by treating people as individuals. Both methods works, but they also work against each other. Treating people as special create hostility and resentment, while treating everyone as individuals has the risk being perceived as supporting statues quo. And yes, we can start at the top. Affirmative action at college applications is not the same as affirmative action at board members. Affirmative action should be universally applied using common rules, but that is sadly not how it get applied. The few times people try to make common rules for affirmative action it get abandoned quickly because the wrong group benefited from it, or it get removed based on anti-discrimination laws.

throwaway894345 4y ago

I'm pretty reluctant to discriminate against people to make other people feel better, and I think there are ways to achieve the same without discriminating--specifically, promote more substantial identities besides race and gender (which is to say, undo all of the hyper-racialization that we've done over the last decade). Moreover, while I believe that diversity is a benefit, I suspect returns diminish beyond 5-10% (beyond that, it's no longer "wow, a career woman! I've never seen that before!"--similarly, a team that is 50% black is probably not going to produce a facial recognition product that is 40% better than the team that is only 10% black, although the team that is 0-5% black may well make a product that performs poorly on black faces). > The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal. I'm not sure this is true; I think it's mostly just that "gays are harmful" was a really hard position to support, and the gay rights movement didn't try to bash their opponents over the head (they weren't trying to cancel people for questioning dubious narratives, for example). > Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb. You can't assume someone had greater social barriers based on race or gender. What is true for a large, diverse group of people (like a race or a gender) is often not true for individuals. This is just stereotyping.