I’d like to start a series seeking viewpoints from across the political spectrum in general discussions about modern society and where everyone stands on what is not working, what is working, and where we see things going in the future.
Please answer in good-faith and if you don’t consider yourself conservative or “to the right”, please reserve top-level discussion for those folks so it reaches the “right” folks haha.
Please don’t downvote respectful content that is merely contrary to your political sensibillities, lets have actual discourse and learn more about each other and our respective viewpoints.
Will be doing other sides soon but lets start with this and see where it takes us.
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