[twomoretime]

That's not my point at all. And it is a myopic conclusion to draw from my comments. Unfortunately in our society we have been conditioned to expect a singular outcome from any such discussion and immediately avoid it on grounds of offensiveness.

The point is that here you literally have a mechanism which is explicitly prioritizing traits which have nothing to do with merit. Regardless of whether our other metrics are appropriate, it is by definition clear that with this system you will inevitably dilute competence -

Incidentally this is a source of political bias in academia; you get your way if you can convince a generation or two that that having people with different skin colors working together is somehow going to improve the quality of science that you practice.

[Daishiman]

No, it is absolutely the point, unless you believe that the skill for CEOs was fairly distributed in its proportion of old, white men, or if you feel that whites and Asians objectively make for better engineers, or if you think that blacks make for better jazz musicians.

Drop this ridiculous rationalization of racism and sexism.

[twomoretime]

>or if you think that blacks make for better jazz musicians.

But it isn't racist to suggest that they may be better sports players, right?

Look, none of what I'm saying justifies discrimination against individuals, because we are still dealing with probabilistic distributions. What it does suggest is that inequality of outcome can be explained without resorting to racism and sexism. Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.

[Daishiman]

> Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.

Sure, now go out and prove that that's actually what happened and that the penalty is worse than the benefit of elevating of people who used to have no status to even play the game.