…I’m pretty confident that the context of my statement was quite clear.
Well that’s a bit wishy washy, don’t you think?
Would you care to be just a tad more specific?
Are you of the opinion that Rosa Parks should have just moved to the back of the bus?
…well of course they have a “say.” They obviously can’t stop any random person from filing a lawsuit. But that wasn’t my point.
It was clearly wrong.
…in the context in which I used the word, i was clearly right. But I’ll concede, for the purposes of debate, that you did post the US legal definition of Sex-Based Discrimination.
Now would you care to be more specific about how to “make a stand” apart from “doing it legally?”
Do you accept that discrimination is perfectly okay, as long as you don’t admit it?
It is discrimination and prejudice, divisive political posturing of the worst kind. Every bit as wrong as when it happens the other way round. There are vanishingly small areas of employment where a person’s gender play any part in the selection process, and film/tv director is certainly not one of those.
Refusing to hire women because they are women is wrong
Refusing to hire men because they are men is wrong
And of course it is counterproductive because by saying that this policy is fine you legitimise the reverse.
The best stand to take? Have a completely blind selection process at every stage and then be able to point at their employees and confidently say “these people were picked on merit and merit alone” If that results in a completely female company then great.
Equality of outcome is nonsense, equality of opportunity (rigorously enforced if necessary) is the way to go.
Naah. Some discrimination is good. Some discrimination is better termed “justice”.
I’ve worked in companies which ended up with a majority of women simply because they were willing to hire women while their competition was not. BUT! That only compensates when hiring entry-level people, or in any other situation where there is a dearth of people of the preferred gender*. In a sector in which there is a definitive gender bias (whichever gender), as soon as you start asking for experience the bias which already influenced the entry-level hirings by other companies will mean that your own unbiased one gets better-looking CVs from the favored gender.
To break that bias, one needs to go further.
I don’t think so. An equal opportunity, together with education and encouragement is all that matters. The numbers will then take care of themselves over time but certainly we should never expect the numbers in any profession to work out as exactly 50:50 and we should not try to engineer the numbers at all to gain an immediate effect.
Imagine sacking the vast majority of female primary school teachers and vets in order to bring in men.
In the UK, for medical students, doctors in training and doctors under 30 years old, women outnumber men. This has been a trend and over time this will translate to the higher-level positions being held by women as well.
That’s the way to bring about equality and I’m assuming you wouldn’t want a gender cap put on practicing medicine to keep the numbers 50:50?
That doesn’t go against my point though, anyone seeking to employ from only one side of the gender pool and putting in place artificial barriers is losing out, They are idiots. Had they historically been willing to employ on the basis of pure ability and merit then this would not have been remarkable.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am aghast at how willing some people are to casually and proudly engage in bigotry.
That’s the thing: it is not equal opportunity when the majority of an industry is biased. The occasional opposite-bias company is a drop in the sea.
Using your own example of primary school teachers: if an all-male school opens in a district, they’re likely to hire mostly-male teachers on account of having an all-male student body. Heck, if the owners are an all-male religious order, a lot of the teachers will be “built-in” and male. How much of an impact does that have on the global status of primary school teachers gender balance in the district? In the state? In the US?
At least in the US, I don’t think so except under a very few circumstances. For example, if the restaurant is family-owned and only employs family members that might be legal. There are certainly small restaurants where someone not Chinese might find it difficult or discouraging to be employed there - if, for example, the owners and most employers speak mostly Mandarin then there would be a bias towards people who could speak/understand that language. Certainly, it’s becoming more and more common to see Caucasians and blacks employed by larger Chinese (and other ethnic restaurants). Even in the past, though, it was quite common for busboys and at least some of the back room staff to be other than Chinese (typically Mexican or other Latin American)
Aside from pure bigotry - wanting to maintain a “pure” ethnicity for tourists, language barriers, wanting to employ only their own family members…
Do you think the majority of veterinary clinics and primary schools are “biased”?
Re: ethnicity of servers in ethnic restaurants. Tourists from outside the US generally don’t care, Americans tend to have much more of a fixation on “visible faces must match restaurant cuisine” than other countries.
I’ve no experience with US veterinary clinics, in Spain most veterinarians are male but the numbers match those for veterinarian degrees. The number of practicing female veterinarians has risen in parallel with the number of women who get veterinarian degrees.
And as for US primary schools, yes. But it begins with the parents.
So a company with a stated policy of only hiring white males for a given set of positions is not engaged in discrimination or injustice, as long as the white males are qualified?
Regards,
Shodan
It is an interesting legal question. I think it can be justified based on overall inequity and it can only be looked at in terms of the entire industry, but IANAL.
But the the response to the above , which I think would be a terrible situation, is not “all female schools” it is “equal opportunity schools” with a recruitment policy based on merit.
I don’t want there to be a bar on anyone doing anything. It should be illegal to discriminate against someone just because of their gender, companies should not be allowed to run such policies and they should named and shamed and smacked down over it and the same logic applies whether is bias for women or men.
Nava, I think this follows on from a couple of points that I made and it is worth pointing out that I was talking about Medical School, Veterinary college and primary schools in the UK, not the USA. Don’t know if that makes any real difference to the discussion but I just wanted to be clear.
Veterinary schools are harder to get into than medical schools. The guys can’t cut it so they become doctors.
A large majority of those admitted to veterinary colleges in the US are women. Cite. AFAIK this is not as a result of affirmative action programs.
Regards,
Shodan
Cite?