The idea of picking under-represented groups to balance out apparent bias against them is debatable on its face, with many people disagreeing with the idea. Opposition, however, is often wrapped up in incoherence or bigotry, so it’s worth listing the three main arguments against it that I see.
1. The problem remains unsolved. Cure is better than treatment, and the visible symptom of (presumed) underlying bias might be addressed, but the causes of inequality are a better focus. Racism will remain, if racism was the cause.
2. The visible correlation is not necessarily the causative factor. The measurable outcomes, of fewer women in positions of power, or fewer black people, are not necessarily directly because of bigotry against visible characteristics. These measurable features correlate with a host of factors which are more likely to be the cause, such as poverty, cultural background, upbringing, learned character traits and so on. This truth is even acknowledged in literature on the subject. For example, feminists have found that women tend to be taught to be more considerate, polite and self-effacing, and that this directly effects their lack of promotion. Picking more women without addressing the underlying cause will select arrogant, confident women who are as bad at the job as the arrogant, confident men.
If minorities do worse at school because of poverty, fix poverty and bad schooling. If rich parents naturally promote their children’s chances, and white people tend to be richer, reduce parental influence and give equivalent support to all. If people respect confident, aggressive men and trust their judgement of themselves, teach people to be better judges of ability.
3. It assumes that the bias being addressed is the only distortion in the selection process. If there are other, hidden quotas being enacted then the result can shut other groups out entirely. For example (and b is also roughly what I believe), let us imagine that:
a. there are 10 executive roles being recruited for, and all is fair in recruitment except that there is direct bias against women, such that only 3 would be recruited. In this circumstance mandating a target of five women might be fair and useful.
b. there are 10 executive roles, of which five are filled by nepotism and networking, in which qualified, but not the best, candidates are selected because of their connections. Historically there has also been some force against selecting women, as only 3 in 10 of the roles have been taken by women. If we mandate a target of 5 women, the result could be very far from fair. If, for example, women tend not to be beneficiaries of the networking effect, then of the five merit-based roles available, they have historically achieved about half, which could easily be entirely fair, since they are 51% of the population, or perhaps bias in their favour, as 3 in 5 is 60%, above their proportion of the wider population.
The new mandate would ensure that all unconnected men stand no chance at all of getting these desirable roles (all five would be filled by women, to balance the five well-connected men who did not get their roles through merit), and we would then have a system in which the established connections-based privilege remains unaddressed, and is joined by a new form of sex-based privilege, while shutting the rest of the population out of such chances entirely.
This option b is very likely to be true, but not as extreme. It is people at the margins who suffer. If there is only one instance of nepotism in the ten roles, the fifth-best man will be bumped off the bottom of the list. He might be worse or better than the fifth-best woman, but campaigners who compare him to her and say it’s a marginal decision miss the point: the quota ensured that rather than sharing a 50% chance of being bumped off the list because of nepotism, it would always be the man. He, a blameless, hard-working individual, is being punished for sharing a characteristic he did not choose and cannot control with someone else. Men are not one great hive mind, sharing their success and power. We are humans, and the success of one is not the success of all.
Everyone wants their chance at the top, and it’s easy to see discrimination where misfortune occurred. Quotas displace discrimination onto others rather than eliminating it: they are a way to enhance inequality by dumping ever more disadvantage onto a shrinking group of people who fit no measurable grouping.
If we do nothing to address hidden factors then we are working off a logical fallacy. Any researcher who found a correlation and left it at that would be laughed out of a job (in the sciences, anyway: think tanks clearly have a lower standard). Correlations are the start of research: we need a theory for how they occur, which we test with further evidence. Do we believe that people dislike brown skin? We can test that outside of work contexts. Do we suspect that dark skin is a signifier of unwanted cultural background or behaviours? We can test the effect of such behaviours when exhibited by other skins. And so on, for many ideas and tests.
And when we have a well-evidenced theory of how the correlation occurs we will have a solid foundation from which to act, which may well not involve using the more easily measurable factors of sex and skin colour at all.
Instead we have hysterical lefties, who ought to be promoting fairness (this being a central plank of left-leaning politics), instead insisting on positive discrimination as some sort of show of adherence to bleeding-heart doctrine (called ‘woke’ nowadays). Their opponents struggle to explain exactly why this feels wrong, and their misgivings are often explained as bigotry by the left, and turned into bigotry by the right, who assure them that their doubts are reasonable and feelings valid… and that this is because bigotry is reasonable and valid. Faced with being denounced as heretics by frothing loons or welcomed by sly people who engender misgivings of their own, many fall into the embrace of the bigoted right.
There is another way: enunciate clearly the arguments that lead to such doubts, so that sane people can resist the pull of each radicalizing force and think for themselves. I am not a centrist who thinks that the middle of any two positions is the morally correct one, but I do think that the unquestioning loyalty to doctrine on the left, and the hateful idiocy on the right are both negative radicalizing forces in society.
Those men who see quotas for disadvantaged groups as crowding them out from opportunity in life are not necessarily people who want to maintain privileged access to good things. It could be the precise opposite: noisy, arrogant, wealthy, over-confident members of those disadvantaged groups welcome quotas which give them an easy route to success (while the rest of the group remains as disadvantaged as before); and meritorious candidates who belong neither to a privileged network nor a defined disadvantaged group get crowded out of what little chance they already had of living the meritocratic dream. Campaigners seem to enjoy squabbling over who gets the crumbs left behind by connections and privilege, leaving the real problem of wealth inequality unaddressed.
