Obviously this is considerably more likely to actually be the case in some businesses and industries than others.

> If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company.

I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions.

Then you haven't looked very hard. There are even programs with financial incentives, e.g. http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduce...

The bursary in question is only £3,000 which is nothing. And the total fund is only £30,000 - so enough for 10 nurses.

This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting.

Of course, because no such jobs exist from which men are mostly absent. You can't expect a response of the same size when the problem is nowhere near the same size.

You responded with an article about a sum of money so trivial it would cover 10 men for perhaps a couple of months depending on where they live.

If that's the best you can find, this doesn't really disprove his point.

If you're saying the efforts are not of the same absolute magnitude, then I would agree; my point is that they are similar relatively to the size of each problem.

If you insist that diversity efforts are only "real" if the same effort is applied to solving two problems which are of clearly different orders of magnitude, then I can only say that I find your definition of "real" perplexing.

What remains is that the word "diversity" doesn't mean diversity. It means focusing on getting women into positions of wealth and power - which you appear to be agreeing with me about, but for you it's an "ends justify the means" situation whereas for me and other posters here it isn't.

If diversity advocates cared about diversity they'd attack all gender disparities with equal vigour because it'd be the disparity itself they care about. But obviously they don't: they only go after the ones where there are big benefits of money and power to be had. Gender disparities that favour women or that don't yield large streams of money and power are ignored.

However they don't admit that. This is what rankles. Instead of talking about money and power they claim they merely want "gender diversity", which is false.

Yeah, to me this makes no sense. It's like saying that if you care about infant hungriness, you have to help with equal vigor both those starving in war-ridden areas and those in wealthy neighborhoods whose parents occasionally forget to give lunch money. Or that if you care about forest fires, you give the same number of fire engines to California and to Delaware.

In my opinion, if you care about a problem, you dedicate more resources to where its effects are more pronounced.

Look at it this way. I make the charge that so-called "diversity advocates" don't care about diversity, that it's not a matter of prioritisation - gender is just a smokescreen. I posit they could achieve 100% female boards but then they'd stop. They wouldn't go on to try and tackle the dominance of women in teaching because they never cared about diversity to begin with: just money and power.

What evidence or arguments do you have that could convince bystanders I'm wrong? There are none. The behaviour we observe can be explained in both a complex way (yours) and a simple way (mine), so Occam's Razor applies.

With hunger this is easy. Measure the number of children sick of malnutrition or that dies of hunger per population and square miles. With forest fires you measure the number of forest fire per square miles and affected people per square miles.

So what should we use in order to measure gender disparities. What about gender segregation, ie the professions with the highest rate of gender segregation get also the highest number of resources dedicated to it. We could measure by effectiveness, looking at the historical rate that gender segregation goes down per number of resources in gender equality. We could look at gender disparities in the form of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, addressing each layers gender disparities.

The parent comments implies that money and positional power is the metric being exclusively used here to measure anything.

Adding another programmer to my company would be less valuable then adding a salesperson. Similarly, adding people with diverse perspectives is more valuable then hiring only people that grew up in the same city, at our income level, with same gender, ethnicity, age, etc.

An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function.

They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it.

Humans aren't gender either. Doing gender quotas reduces candidates to their gender.

> An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function.

> They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it.

Ohh, no. My assumption is that current hiring is not perfect, but gender quotas are waaay worse. Gender-blind hiring would be better than both.

Why shouldn't the right person be hired just because they have both sets of genitalia? How does that fit in to the quota system?

Board members might be the least likely of all people related to the company to have the right credentials. It's networks, power, relationships. Not usually talent.

Though I'm totally against board quotas, it's very easy to see how women are locked out of this game. Far, far more so than for normal roles within an organization.

It's the friends of low level managers who get hired who sometimes have the least credentials.

Individual fitness is not independent, let alone group fitness. And without independence you are just plain wrong.

Sociology dressed up as a priori mathematics is rarely credible. Even worse if the math simply isn't correct.

Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce?

I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Though I also said it is not necessary. Lack of independence alone makes you wrong.

> The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce?

Which same argument? The argument you made was about filtering lowering fitness.

Going for the conclusion instead of the argument. You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong, but saying that the conclusion is wrong. Congratulations, you're an ideologue.

I specifically said why your argument was wrong. Without independence it is simply untrue.

> Congratulations, you're an ideologue.

I am. Mathematical flummery triggers me.

If it were true then it would apply to selection by any attribute e.g. experience or qualification. The only way you'd get around that would be to include the attribute in the fitness function. You're then back to deciding what effect gender has on the fitness function i.e is gender selection good for the business?

My opinion is that affirmative action is naive and that society is better off to strengthen meritocratic hiring. Removing names from CVs may help women slightly but there's no reason to believe that men and women would achieve the same outcomes given equal opportunity.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...