What does that role provide outside of forced diversity i.e. racism. If it helps I am not a white male myself, but Mexican.
The reasonable interpretation then is that this isn't the right interpretation. The only other one I can think of is having prescribed immutable characteristics you're hiring for.
Also that just makes the entire argument meaningless. Is the idea we should maintain DEI hiring because that way people doing the DEI hiring have a job?
What kind of circular logic is that.
If a program treats people equally, that's a good thing. If you want equal outcomes (regardless of many very real factors), that by definition will require unequal treatment.
But related.
I was at a museum that had a full-sized submarine on display. There was a touchable model and audio description for blind people.
Equal, as much as possible - a Braille variant of a novel, for example, provides a fairly equal experience. Equitable, when perfect equal results are not possible. You can't fix a person's severed optic nerve, but you can certainly attempt to give them fair access to things.
As with "negro" and "colored", the new positive term eventually became a slur via concerted efforts from its opponents. ("DEI mayor": https://www.npr.org/2024/04/04/1242294070/baltimore-key-brid...)
Affirmative Action was from Executive Order 11246 (1965) -- concurrent with and part of the same movement as civil rights legislation -- applying to federal contracting; it largely spread to large organizations that weren't direct federal contractors through subcontracting relationships and through state governments adopting similar requirements in their contracting.
They're absolutely in the same category.
A lot of the culture war entities which now dominate the GOP did so (obviously, with different language, as "woke" and "DEI" weren't the current generic epithets for things the Right doesn't like) at the time, but (1) were mollified in some cases with special exclusions, like religious schools being excluded from the definition of covered public accommodations, and (2) otherwise were less politically powerful within the party.
Equal is giving everyone a printout.
Equity is giving the blind student a Braille version.
The latter is an attempt at providing equal access to the contents to those with different needs, so that they may learn equitably.
(The alternative term JEDI might argue that this is the just result.)
Equity would be mandating that blind students pass at the same rate as sighted students regardless of their scores.
Equal outcomes for all is not equity - it is inequitable for a deliberately lazy person to succeed when a hard working person does not, just because of something they were born with.
Giving every student the same printed packet is equal treatment, but unjust and inequitable to the blind student.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity?wprov=sfti1
> Social equity within a society is different from social equality based on formal equality of opportunity. For example, person A may have no difficulty walking, person B may be able to walk but have difficulties with stairs, while person C may be unable to walk at all. Social equality would be treating each of those three people in the same way (by providing each with the same aids, or none), whereas social equity pursues the aim of making them equally capable of traversing public spaces by themselves (e.g. by installing lifts next to staircases and providing person C with a wheelchair).
And out of those, accessibility is the one that has actual measurable metrics and requires expensive technical skill and compromises with non-accessible functions to implement well. Everything else on the list is PR work.
Which is a real shame because accessibility features and policies actually make things better and easier for everyone.
People with disabilities wanted to be included in society.
The goal of the Act was to provide a more equitable society for those people.
It would absolutely be derided as "woke DEI nonsense" if proposed today.
ADA predates DEI by a couple decades. Lots of people, including Republicans, support the ADA and support expanding its protections.
This is a pretty standard tactic of partisans when their pet issue becomes unpopular - take something unrelated, or at best tangentially related, and pretend it's related or that that's what they've been advocating for all along.
I don't care if you support the ADA or you don't. I don't care if you support DEI or you don't. But they're different, they've never been related, and any attempt by partisans on the left to lump them together is just trying to reframe the issue as "against DEI == against the ADA" because of course everyone on the right hates disabled people right?
Now, sure. At the time? Same sort of bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
Both are rooted in the same concept - that people should have fair opportunity to participate in society even if different in some ways.
No, it wouldn't.
DEI might be things like expending resources for outreach to and soliciiting applications from the blind community because there were almost no blind applicants, when blind people could reasonably do the work even if, on average, blind people would be at a disadvantage compared to the sighted given the job responsibilities.
DEI would be concerned with encouraging applicants by and consideration of blind people to a role they can still effectively perform.
It's based on the generally logical idea that if your company with 10k people is staffed with 99% white males in a place where that doesn't reflect the workforce, the most logical conclusion is probably not "only white males can perform this role".
On average? Maybe! The woman in that video looks like she could severely kick my ass; I strongly suspect she could carry me. (I also suspect there are multiple roles in a fire call, and "carry big man" may be balanced by "squeeze into tight spot" tasks at times.)
If you can't hear the joking tone in that statement in the video, I'm not sure how to help you. "You're in a fire, I'm helping you, don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
DEI simply posits "there are probably some women just as qualified (or more!) as some of the men you already hire, so be open to it and perhaps encourage their consideration". Very few organizations manage to hire the absolute best person on the planet for a particular role and over-estimate the extent to which their interview process manages to successfully filter for it.
There are absolutely differences between men and women, but there's a lot of overlap. The absolute six-sigma ends of the bell curves likely matter if you're, say, at the Olympics, but my local fire department has visibly overweight men in their 60s on staff.
And that's fine! But it probably tells you that quite a few women (like the one in your video) are also capable of doing what they do - of which a significant portion is not carrying unconscious people out of burning houses.
(I've selected male/female simply as an example here. There'll be different excuses offered for not hiring black firefighters or gay firefighters in reasonable proportions.)
However, this is not what DEI is about. DEI is about seeing that 5% as a too small number, and trying to increase the number by lowering standards for women. Letting everyone apply is enough.