The issue with DEI is that it tries to addresses discrimination with MORE discrimination
If you know that the general population is 20% race A, 10% race B, 30% race C, and yet your admissions are only pulling in 40% race C, 5% race B and 55% race A, you know something is wrong. Policies designed to keep your admissions closer to the general population would not count as discrimination because if everything is functioning correctly your distribution is going to at least resemble the gen pop distribution. Obviously it will never be a perfect fit, because various factors like location, education etc will influence your hiring pool.
A lot of people insist that trying to get your metrics to match reality is discrimination because they think it means someone who "doesn't deserve it" will get hired instead of them. The reality is that a biased pipeline might exclude you too, regardless of your gender or skin color, because a biased pipeline is probably filled with things like nepotism, people blackballing candidates off of Vibes(tm), hiring based on appearance, etc. For every time biased hiring benefits you, it probably hurt you 3 times and you might not have noticed.
The reality is that if you look at the raw DEI metrics for most large corporations they do not even vaguely resemble the general population. There's no rational excuse for that, you have to do something.
Doesn't this ignore the fact that there actually might be biological differences between various races of humans? I mean, aren't most top runners black? I don't follow this closely, but it does seem there is bigger percentage of black people compared to general population.
Isn't the fair way to focus on equal opportunities, not outcomes? Give everyone the chance, but pick based on objective criteria (ideally in a blind way)?
Show me that we have a society in which everyone is enabled to thrive to their full potential and then make this argument. Until then biological essentialism is profoundly stupid.
Yes, genetic advantages are a thing which is why the NBA is dominated by black people but social factors are also a thing which is why the NHL is dominated by Canadians.
Diversity programs aim to address the second factor i.e. giving a temporary boost to people who didn't have access to social and economic privilege.
Why are black people disproportionately in pro basketball? "It must be genetics!". It couldn't possibly be the fact that basketball courts are easier to build in the inner city than baseball fields. It couldn't be the fact that many poor black kids see the salaries that sports stars make, see the accessibility of a basketball court, and think "that's my ticket out.". (A neat documentary about this is "Hoop Dreams")
For some reason people find it easiest to default to looking at personal characteristics, which in the alt-right online spaces is genetics (in the regular right it's culture). If I had to guess a reason I'd guess that we're evolutionarily used to living in small tribes, sharing the same environment with everyone we meet, so we look to personal factors to explain preferences and abilities. But we no longer live in those homogeneous environments.
The location of basketball courts is incidental and i'm not certain what your point is.
Which is coincidentally the average height of NBA players (meaning almost half of them are below this height).
There are a maximum of about 600 NBA players at any given time, so a little more than 300 at 6' 6" or above.
Having good height genetics means you have a 0.25% chance of being an NBA player in any given year. Not factoring in foreign players. Maybe a 2% chance in your lifetime.
Being a black person doesn't give you any more advantage than being a white person when it comes to height. In fact, in the USA, white American males average an inch taller than black American males: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-hei...
(Yes, I'm aware of standard deviations, and unfortunately don't have this statistic for the two groups.)
> The location of basketball courts is incidental and i'm not certain what your point is.
The importance of social factors in opportunity (and motivation) to build talent in certain endeavors.
However - and this is a major issue - the outliers aren't captured in averages. I read a book called Taboo by John Entine that went into this exact issue. The issue is that the outliers are what determine champions at the elite level and people with west african heritage have slightly more genetic advantages - notably in sports like basketball. there is also the issue of rising incomes and the breaking down of societal barriers. As more black americans have access to sports like basketball, more of their slight genetic advantages can express themselves. All this gets masked by averages.
Entine's book makes a point in passing - africans will slowly start to dominate sports like football (soccer) that were traditionally dominated by white people. The french men's and women's football teams are showing this, as are many other european football teams. Football is more about skill and places less of a premium on height but there is one role where height is important - the goalkeeper. In the french squad, all their goalies except Lloris are either black or mixed heritage.
Do certain traits tend to be more prevalent within certain broad genetic backgrounds? Sure. But for any given individual, or even family, this tells you nothing. And unfortunately, when people start to use these broad genetic backgrounds for prediction, you end up with cultural filtering whether you wanted it or not. The measuring stick becomes the goal in some way.
Let people be people. Let them find their own path through trial and error, unless they actually come looking for advice. Let them know if they're genuinely not a competitor after they have tried, but give them the genuine chance (a rare few will overcome even this).
Within the last couple of hundred years we've finally developed societies in which people don't have to follow in their parents footsteps, but can find their own vocations. I don't want to lose this because of some eugenics inclination and racial stereotypes.
:D Sumo wrestler football goalies FTW. :D
Where artist choice comes in to the picture is if a label focuses on a single genre, you're now subject to the race balance in that genre. I don't think that's a problem, but it still is ideally fair recruiting.
It is not a problem to be solved when different cultural groups make different choices for themselves and their families. The real problem is that DEI comes about 20 years too late to do anything to help, and sometimes it is in industries that don't appeal to the cultures it is trying to attract. Properly investing in children will greatly increase the number of minorities in the pipeline for college and well-paying jobs.
Investing in children and creating equal opportunities for children are both great measures to take to boost diversity in education and the workplace.
Suppose I observe that 10% of the population is in class X, but only 5% of my hires are. I could try to adjust my job application acceptance criteria to increase that number to 10%. I could try to change my outreach efforts to encourage more of that class to apply. And I could possibly determine that a lot less than 10% of the pool of potential qualified applicants is in the class, that much of the bottleneck is earlier in the pipeline, and that something needs to be done about the pipeline.
And note that those latter options are hard. In many respects, affirmative action is an easy way out.
There was a large case study on this in California: prop 209. Here’s an article about the outcomes:
The upshot is that the measures taken after public university affirmative action was outlawed in California were more effective than affirmative action was.
I read a much better and more detailed article about this, but I’m having trouble finding it now.