[prepend]

“Equity is the goal.”

I don’t think this is a good goal. Unless you mean equity of opportunity. Equity of outcome is a ridiculously foolish goal in that outcomes will vary substantially and trying to have equity at the end on arbitrary human factors with easy to measure biases (gender, race, etc).

So the goal is not 45/45/10 for gender distribution for all roles. As that is obviously impossible as roles change and then people would need to be redistributed ad infinitum (eg, project managers have “perfect” gender diversity of 45/45/10 today but now the role is changes and split into product owner and product manager. Does this mean that the roles must include the same gender mix?)

[skedaddle]

Equity and equality are different. Equitable means fair, just, unprejudiced, considerate of all involved, etc. Equality means evenly balanced, identical on both sides, measurably indistinguishable.

I think we want an equitable outcome and that most people (regardless of any other opinion) would actually agree that equality of outcome is not necessary.

[prepend]

I appreciate you making the distinction, but I still don’t think outcomes are the place for equity. My gender example still stands using your clarified definition.

Is it fair that now a sub population has different gender distributions? Is it fair that 90% of programmers are male? Etc etc. I think it is counterproductive and too late to making meaningful changes based on outcomes.

Perhaps if you get to a high enough macro, but even then, I see logical weaknessss in opinions comparing income based on gender because outcome does not, necessarily, mean bias. It’s just easier to measure.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

Apologies for my ignorance but what does “45/45/10” mean?

[CamTin]

From context I'd guess he means 45% male, 45% female, 10% non-binary.

[albertgoeswoof]

Is that a real policy for anywhere? How / where do you find 10% non binary from? I don’t think there’s enough people to go around even if you hired every single non binary person in a given city.

[prepend]

I did mean 10% as non/binary, but my numbers were just notional. I should have been more clear.

I think, especially with improved technology, that 10% will be more common. Cynically thinking, it will be easier if there were some specific quota. Gender is probably the easiest protected class to change after religion, so it’s especially sensitive to outcome quotas.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

Oh, I see! I wasn’t familiar with this term.

So, this system is used in the United States, right?

[meowface]

The poster was suggesting a hypothetical situation where that is a policy. Very few places in the US have 50/50 gender quotas, and I doubt any have quotas which include non-binary people. I believe they were mocking the idea.

[prepend]

I was not mocking the idea, but giving an example where a reasonable quota led to bad outcomes. While I’m against outcome quotas, I’m firmly against discrimination (including mocking) of people based on who they are.

[dannyw]

Male, female, non-binary.

[mebreuer]

With a high enough sample size, shouldn't equity of outcome reflect equity of opportunity?

[naasking]

Not at all. For instance, if there are innate gender dispositions to certain subjects, then those fields will have a much larger proportion of that gender. There's evidence this may be the case in STEM for instance, which would explain the so-called gender equality paradox.

[prepend]

Perhaps, but it wouldn’t be useful for companies since even google’s 20k population wouldn’t be big enough to clear out all of the confounding variables.