Yeah, they are. Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. But the reason is that much of the white male faculty were hired decades ago, when white men still dominated academia. Change is slow.
There is no "over-representation" of protected categories, only of oppressor categories. A standing joke about the Swedish equivalent of the D.I.E. drive - here it is called "Jämställdhetsmyndigheten" [1] (literally "The Equality Authority") - is that "100% equality is achieved when all departments have 100% women". They are totally blind to the fact that e.g. veterinary sciences and social "sciences" are ~95% women while being laser-focused on some areas where women are (still?) in the minority. This attitude gives lie to their claim of striving for equality and shows it to be nothing more than an ideologically driven activist organisation.
> A standing joke about the Swedish equivalent of the D.I.E. drive - here it is called "Jämställdhetsmyndigheten" [1] (literally "The Equality Authority") - is that "100% equality is achieved when all departments have 100% women".
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked how many female justices sitting on the Supreme Court would be enough. Her answer was nine. (N.b. the U.S. Supreme Court traditionally has nine justices.)
It's not really a joke. In any instant, equal proportions of men and women would represent equality (by sex). But taking the long view, 100% of the positions in those fields were held by men, so 100% would have to be held by women for a while in order to redress the historical injustice. This is "equity", a step beyond mere equality, and it's the E in DEI/JEDI.
The only way to redress historical injustices is to invent a time machine to go back and prevent them. Otherwise, you're just creating new ones to reperate old ones.
> It's not really a joke. In any instant, equal proportions of men and women would represent equality (by sex). But taking the long view, 100% of the positions in those fields were held by men, so 100% would have to be held by women for a while in order to redress the historical injustice. This is "equity", a step beyond mere equality, and it's the E in DEI/JEDI.
I think this statement is going past equity straight into reparations.
Equality: Men and Women should have equal criteria for getting the job.
Equity: Women should have an easier time to counter an unbalanced gender representation
This statement: Women should have an easier time because men in the past had an easier time, even if the pendulum shifts.
I believe this is a misinterpretation of what RBG said. Here's her full quote:
“WHEN I’M SOMETIMES ASKED ‘WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH [WOMEN ON THE SUPREME COURT]?’ AND I SAY ‘WHEN THERE ARE NINE,’ PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED. BUT THERE’D BEEN NINE MEN, AND NOBODY’S EVER RAISED A QUESTION ABOUT THAT.”
My reading of the quote is that is she's saying that a female justice should be not be any more surprising than a male justice, and thus that an all-female court should be no more surprising than an all-male court.
Just working out the probabilities, if women and men were selected as justices with equal probability, single-gendered courts should occur about 0.2% of the time for each gender.
That's a small number, but not a vanishingly small number. While I don't think we can say much about courts prior to ~1975 (equal gender opportunity to the court not yet being an objective), it seems reasonable to say going forward that IF we are achieving the stated goal of equal gender opportunity, we should expect that an all-female court will eventually occur.
Yes you have the interpretation right. She wasn't making a mission-statement, she was illustrating the faulty premise embedded in the question that there is some required count of women in the court that must be met in order to satisfy the feminists, as if the underrepresentation was something to ameliorate by imposing a quota rather than being indicative of a deeper general problem with how people think about equality.
Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?