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tinybluntneedle t1_iu1v7ms wrote

Reply to comment by Programmdude in New Zealand women lawmakers outnumber men for the first time. by flabbywoofwoof

The purpose of quotas is to choose women between equally qualified candidates when there is a heavy bias towards men in a group of people. You may not like it, but it doesn't matter. That's the right thing to do because history has shown we cannot trust a fully male legislative body. And there are plenty of excellent women to fill those spots.

Also you cannot get fair representation without forcing it due to bias. This has been proven with experiments in the workplace, academia and even in blind analysis (aka when you don't know the gender of the applicant, that's because men and women build profiles and cvs differently and when men have to choose whom to hire, they tend to go for those profiles more similar to theirs - even though qualitatively there is essentially no difference).

We own half this planet, so we get half the say in organizing our society. That's it.

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Programmdude t1_iu20l6g wrote

I'm fully for the government fully representing our diversity, I just want a better way for it to happen than forcing it. If males are in charge of the hiring process, then quotas are the lesser of two evils (forced representation is better than no representation at least).

However, in that case the "best" choice would be to ensure that there are more women in the hiring position, so managerial positions are more representative. If the hiring people are representative of the whole population, theoretically the hires would also be representative and be diverse without requiring quotas.

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tinybluntneedle t1_iu21zjc wrote

Quotas are not forced. Quotas do not require you hire someone subpar. Quotas are a requirement to hire the female applicant when equal skillset are presented by male and female alike, in case of male over-representation.

As for your solution to only force quotas in the hiring department, this is nonsense because the hiring team is, a team. Decisions are made jointly, seniority matters, or are you suggesting we completely exclude men from hiring teams? /s Bias does not affect only men, bias affects women as well. Our perception of every job and profession not traditionally inhabited by women is severely biased by history and experience. Also, to go back to the initial topic, a cabinet, well, the people in charge are the one doing the hiring and even in cabinets there is no quotas by law, so the people in charge are hiring the women. You perceive women going into powerful positions as non-meritocratic and done out of pity yet you most likely have no clue what their cvs are like.

And furthermore, this kind of rhetoric assumes that an all male force is by default normal and meritocratic. And all female force, or mostly female force has no meritocracy in it, that it must be forced for women do not have similar or better qualifications. And this is essentially misogynysm. Everything male is default, everything female is not normal.

This is not a discussion in good faith because you are knowingly twisting the meaning and purpose of quotas.

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Programmdude t1_iu753ou wrote

It might be due to my misunderstanding of quotas, as they have not been common in anywhere I've worked. My understanding is mostly from reading online about US universities where they want X% of black students, X% of asian, etc. Therefore, when a student A applies with the exact same GPA (and extracurricular activities or whatever else they use to determine who gets into university) as student B, but student A is white and B is black, B will get in while A won't.

I'm assuming it works somewhat similar with hiring quotas, where they want roughly 50% female staff, so if there currently 40% male staff, then either they can't hire females, or they are strongly encouraged to hire more males (or vice versa if there are more male staff).

My solution wasn't to have quotas in the hiring staff at all, it was to have no quoatas anywhere. It also wasn't a solution, it was an ideal. My core argument is that if the hiring team is representative, then they will hire in such a way that you'll end up with representative workforce. That's because the bias' should cancel each other out. If men are biased to hire men, and women are biased to hire women, having 50% men and 50% women on a hiring team should result in 50% men and 50% women being hired.

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tinybluntneedle t1_iu77ogn wrote

There are no laws for quotas in any country that force them on you. At most, there might be some lightweight directive that demand you try to fix extreme gender imbalances. Numerical quotas are not legalese. Companies define internally how they want to support gender and racial equality. Quotas also do not mean that you want everything to be 50/50 as a first milestone but try to infuse diversity in teams step by step. No company is going to force itself to continuously hire less qualified staff and harm their bottom line over a self imposed rule. Furthermore staffing is more complex than just how many years of experience one has. There are a lot of things that influence a decision. Even among 2 white male candidates, it is not necessarily that the one with the most work experience gets hired, sometime another candidate may have less experience overall but is fluent in a particular tech stack of interest, or maybe shows personality traits that make them more likeable and flexible in the eyes of their potential employer. As for your suggestion about hiring staff, bias affects men and women alike. Also even if you create a 50/50 hiring staff, male inherent bias and female learnt bias will still tilt the decision in a bad way. Bias needs decades to be unlearned.

In a perfect world we would not need quotas. We are far from a perfect world.

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