Diversity - Can it Be Achieved in Academia?

[Flying Pig]

Reading comprehension is a valuable skill. There are probably books you can read with exercises to help you develop this skill. (Xmas present request?)

I didn't say race was of "no consequence", I said it doesn't make one different or "diverse".

Say you do 1,000 blind interviews of black, white & Asian met thruout, lets say, New York City, do you think you'll be able to guess their race by their answers? Or will you just be shooting in the dark?

If you interview people worldwide race will be even less able to be determined by even the lengthiest questionnaire (a black guy from Stamford, CT is going to have stuff in common with his peers locally and very little in common with his doppelganger in Zaire).

Who someone IS is diversity. Your culturally background is certainly contributes a large piece to shaping who you are. Is it all that you are? Not even close.

We know - because we've tested it - that nearly everyone (not just white people) will come up with a different answer if they try to 'rate' the candidates in the knowledge of their ethnicities, or even their names, than if they do so blindly.

 

[Narz]

We know - because we've tested it - that nearly everyone (not just white people) will come up with a different answer if they try to 'rate' the candidates in the knowledge of their ethnicities, or even their names, than if they do so blindly.

That's not really surprising, any new information is going to change the results whether it be their ethnicity, their height, a photo of how hot their girlfriend is, whether the dude has the same name as their bully older brother.

Life's simply not fair. We can't create countermeasures for everything.

 

[Flying Pig]

That's not really surprising, any new information is going to change the results whether it be their ethnicity, their height, a photo of how hot their girlfriend is, whether the dude has the same name as their bully older brother.

Life's simply not fair. We can't create countermeasures for everything.

In this case, there are blindingly obvious countermeasures. We don't give the people selecting a name or a face to go on. It's all very well to say 'life's not fair' when it's not stacked by history, geography and sheer weight of prejudice against you.

 

[Ryika]

In this case, there are blindingly obvious countermeasures. We don't give the people selecting a name or a face to go on. It's all very well to say 'life's not fair' when it's not stacked by history, geography and sheer weight of prejudice against you.

I always find it interesting when people bring "history" and "geography" into this kind of debate. What purpose does it serve other than trying to artificially create some sort of guilt? Reality is simple: Everybody starts their life at some point. Some people start at a lower point that others. It simply does not matter how older generations got to the point that current generations are at now.

When it comes to prejudice race is just one of many factors, we simply cannot correct all of them and picking out race as somehow being more important than the others is just nonsense.

The biggest problem black people have is not prejudice, the biggest problem is being in a circle of poverty. Help the poor and the amount of black people higher up in the pyramid will increase all by itself over time.

 

[Flying Pig]

I don't follow that line of argument. We can't correct all prejudice, therefore we should do nothing where we can correct some prejudice?

Again, I observe that your first paragraph is easy to say when it all goes fairly well for you: it's much easier to tell other people to stop complaining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

 

[Narz]

In this case, there are blindingly obvious countermeasures. We don't give the people selecting a name or a face to go on.

I can get behind that.

It's all very well to say 'life's not fair' when it's not stacked by history, geography and sheer weight of prejudice against you.

Any "fairness" system that helps more than it hurts I'm all for. Give everyone a chance. However, "diversity" for diversities sake is patronizing to those it claims to serve.

 

[Narz]

I don't follow that line of argument. We can't correct all prejudice, therefore we should do nothing where we can correct some prejudice?

Again, I observe that your first paragraph is easy to say when it all goes fairly well for you: it's much easier to tell other people to stop complaining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

I don't think opposing forced-diversity is saying everyone has it equal or that everyone should help themselves. You can offer assistance to people without objectifying them ("our campus catalog would look really good with a negro like yourself, perhaps with his arm around a ethnic looking lesbian for good measure").

 

[Flying Pig]

Nobody's talking about selecting anyone because they're black (or lesbian or ethnic-looking): quotas only come into play when everyone selected is picked because they are, as far as we can tell, the best fit for the job. There are inevitably more people who fit that bill than there are places, and we know that people unconsciously (or not) select according to race, class, sex and whatever else anyway. There's no choice between blind selection and biased selection: selection can be biased in favour of people who already have the advantages, in a way that's never going to improve, or it can be biased in favour of the disadvantaged, and remove the need for itself in the length of a career.

 

[Ryika]

I don't follow that line of argument. We can't correct all prejudice, therefore we should do nothing where we can correct some prejudice?

Correcting some injustice has impact on all other forms of injustice. By increasing the number of one group you automatically diminish the chances of all other groups, including the other groups that already have a hard time. You may even make things worse by having "black quotas", because they also count for the rich black people who would not need that help. And that's true for any other factor that you're ignoring.

Again, I observe that your first paragraph is easy to say when it all goes fairly well for you: it's much easier to tell other people to stop complaining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

See, here's the problem: I don't give a damn about your guilt because I do not associate with that guilt. My life was hard enough because of a number of factors other than race, just because you seem to have lived a nice life and now feel guilty for that does not give your statement any validity.

"It is easy to say X when you're not affected by X." is not an argument. It's just a nonsense-statement that ignores the argument.

 

[Hygro]

Race seems to have about the same consequences as (a lack of) height when it comes to the wage gap (claims wikipedia), I assume that also means they're discriminated against when it comes to hiring - so should we have quotas for short people? What about Quotas for overly ugly people?

Give it 20 years.

 

[bhavv]

In this case, there are blindingly obvious countermeasures. We don't give the people selecting a name or a face to go on. It's all very well to say 'life's not fair' when it's not stacked by history, geography and sheer weight of prejudice against you.

This is what colleges and universities in the UK do, like when I applied for a receptionist job at one.

The application forms are read over by a first group of people who decide whether or not they meet the criteria for the job / course. If so they are then given a number and passed onto the people who handle the recruitment stage, without the name or any diversity information of the person. The recruitment people then decide on who to accept for an interview based purely on the skills / experience / qualifications of the applicant.

Diversity monitoring is only used to monitor if a fair representation of ethnicities / sexualities / religions etc are applying for the job, not for the diversity of the eventual successful candidates.

 

[Flying Pig]

Apparently that's only been happening for weeks, if not months, but it's a good step.

Your last statement is spot-on, which is why (in my view) quotas only work under two circumstances. Firstly, they are applied to things with very large sample sizes - say admissions to a university (which takes on several thousand students every year), officers granted military commissions (several hundred) and so on. It would be silly to ask someone hiring five people to stick to a quota, because it's by no means certain that you're not going to have enough obviously better people to make it get in the way of decent selection.

Secondly, you've got to set the quota a little lower than you would expect - to say that if they end up with fewer than this from a certain group, something's gone wrong. If, for exxample, I were setting a quota for the 200 cadets taken into Sandhurst every year, I would be silly to say that 85% of eligible people are white (fudging slightly for the inevitable Omani princes), so we need 30 non-white cadets: realistically, we know that there is a problem with attracting Army officers from every group that isn't posh white men, and that's not primarily a problem that quotas will solve (though they'll help: what sort of impression does it give if people never see an officer who doesn't talk like the Queen?). On the other hand, I might fairly set it at something like ten: if we're doing our jobs right, we'll get more than that, because that's below the profile of applicants we expect. If we don't need the quota, it won't come into play. It's not perfect, but it stops us from being stupid. In that case, making a selection of 199 white cadets suggests that we missed a lot of better potential officers elsewhere, which may well cost lives further down the line: it's not usually that extreme in business, but these processes help everyone.

 

[warpus]

A person with zero experience would be less likely to run off and join some other organization.

The only type of person with 0 experience to hire in a situation where you have applicants with a lot of experience applying as well, would be when I'm hiring an intern.

This is what colleges and universities in the UK do, like when I applied for a receptionist job at one.

The application forms are read over by a first group of people who decide whether or not they meet the criteria for the job / course. If so they are then given a number and passed onto the people who handle the recruitment stage, without the name or any diversity information of the person. The recruitment people then decide on who to accept for an interview based purely on the skills / experience / qualifications of the applicant.

Diversity monitoring is only used to monitor if a fair representation of ethnicities / sexualities / religions etc are applying for the job, not for the diversity of the eventual successful candidates.

That sounds incredibly prudent and tactful, eh.

 

[JollyRoger]

I think there should be some sort of quota for right wing and religious blowhards. Otherwise, they may not make the cut based on merit and we would lose out on diversity,