Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place.
I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?
Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.
But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.
Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.
The counterfactual to that claim is nursing. Nursing is a very good job that has a relatively low barrier of entry yet the field is 88% female. The reason for that might be cultural but the reason is certainly self-selection, not discrimination. However, the difference may, in fact, be genetic (hormonal, more likely).
Nursing is the mirror image of programming. If the gender compositions were reversed, the campaigns for STEM would, instead, be for healthcare.
It may not be useful to look at outcomes to determine if opportunities are equal. It may be harder, but looking at opportunities to determine if opportunities are equal is really the only option.
Until that's addressed, we can't even begin to assert that Nursing is inherently a field dominated by a single gender. Ditto teaching, writing, and so forth.
"discrimination of men in nursing" returns some great resources for looking into this further.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4799908/#:~:tex....
It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.
This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.
Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.
Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.
So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?
Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.
To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.
This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.
And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".
However, if an 85 year old with arthritis and glaucoma wants or needs to join the workforce, they should have the opportunity and the tools available to them. Many from the Baby Boomer generation are finding themselves in the "needs" category, for example.
But why divide things along skin color? There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
Because that is the basis on which people are being discriminated against? If people suddenly started beating up people with red hair, why wouldn't we try to help the group "people with red hair"?
> There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
The same people who care about race-based discrimination are also trying to create equal outcomes for those groupings. Why do you think they don't?
"There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity." The word "inherently" is doing all the work here by making acknowledgement of endogeneity look bigoted. But whether any of the thousands of factors that produce an outcome are "inherent," whatever that means, is irrelevant. You should always expect endogenous interactions if you haven't used a methodology that prevents it, like randomized blind experiments, difference in difference, instrumental variables, etc.
With such a small subset of the population, statistically there wouldn't be an even mix. But IMO there should be at least some representation of every "protected" attribute. There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.
Please provide three examples. I played college football at a tiny division 2 school and have never met a woman (I live in the gym these days) for which this is close to true.
Even if you're referring to a low/no contact position like kicker/punter you're still under threat of a 220 lb linebacker destroying you [1].
Doubt it, outside of possibly kicker. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.
There could be a professional female league of course, like the WNBA for basketball. But if even tennis has to keep men and women separate to be fair, then there's little chance a physical sport like the NFL would be competitive for women alongside men.
I will grant you this. A top-level woman can not out-physical a top-level man.
But, there's more to professional sports than just physicality. You brought up Tennis - but as proven in the various exhibition matches, women have not been cleanly swept as one might expect, and many have won over the years.
This leads me to say that there's room even in the physically intensive sports for both genders, not to mention in the less physically intensive sports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_%28tennis%...
I say complicated because it's not just about the number of people employed, but also how much they're paid, whether or not there are separate leagues, what about the coaching staff, etc.
It's fine to think of pro sports as one of the very few professions where you're performing so close to the human limit that biology actually becomes a factor. It's not just gender, for example short people won't be equally represented in many sports, which does not need to be true for almost any other job.
Also, given that the split of actual humans in the workforce is quite close to 50/50, if we successfully equalize male-dominated industries, we would expect female-dominated industries to also equalize just because of the available employees. As in, we shouldn't just consider each industry in isolation, they're all part of one big society, and they all impact each other.
For example, men are well established to be physically stronger in general, so fields requiring heavy manual labor like parts of construction requiring a certain level of strength, will naturally favor men. All else equal, this pulls men from other fields so that the other fields would be like 52/48 women/men. Of course things aren't equal and we see an amalgamation of different factors, some preferential, some physical, some discriminatory, leading to imbalanced outcomes. But remove the discriminatory and that doesn't mean you get 50/50.
If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
I don't think there's any biological reason for that, and if it's true I think it's due to mostly contrived cultural factors that are themselves caused by historical discrimination.
> If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
Yes, I'm not fighting you on this, I don't know who you're arguing with. There used to be a male bias in college admissions, now there is a female bias. There is clearly no biological explanation, so it must be due to the discrimination and cultural factors I described.
Equal opportunity to participate, yes.
It starts with a basic belief—do you agree that US Society is disadvantageous for certain racial demographics?
And helping some groups of people - yes, sometimes the grouping is determined by race - is not discriminating against everyone else.
In other words, lifting Asians, Blacks, Hawaiians, and Eskimos is not being racist towards "Whites" as is asserted elsewhere in this discussion. I use quotes because white is a pretty new categorization. It used to be Germans, English, Italians, Irish, etc.
One potential industry to consider, especially considering the site we're on, is startup entrepreneurs - especially those who are able to get VC and Angel funding.
But his dad did use it to their advantage. OP then gets to grow up in an upper-class city with a great school district.
Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
Because if someone can't go to MIT, they're doomed to a life of abject poverty? Really?
A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job by not getting into medical school.
OPs dad got into medical school with this discrimination, so its not a leap to imagine OP would have grown up in a lower middle class area if not for discrimination.
Into that medical school. There are others.
> I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs
I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments.
AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.