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| quote: | Originally posted by chrismack
Is it possible that there are so few "qualified" women and minorities in the workforce that anything other than systemic discrimination has caused this? |
YES!
I'm sorry Chris, but your whole argument here is based on a series of causal fallacies, by which I mean that you consistently suggest (and indeed, insist upon) a cause-and-effect relationship without providing any evidence that it is so.
Your reasoning here falls into the category of what the logic textbooks usually call "complex cause", which in a nutshell means that yes, you've identified two issues that are related (inequities in the workforce and past systemic discrimination) but are in reality only part of a much bigger picture. You've ignored sub-cultural morals and values; you've ignored pre-existing economic conditions; you've ignored the sorry state of the schools in "ghetto" areas; and you've ignored, most importantly, the question of how many so-called "minorities" actually want to be in the positions where they are "under-represented!"
The context of this complex cause question is this:
| quote: | | I guess I find it funny to think that a white male can feel that he is ever being discriminated against when a quick look at senior management of almost any company would see a complete team of - you guessed it - white men, with a couple token women and minorities thrown in for "diversity". |
Now aside from the fact that it isn't senior management that makes these decisions (it's the Human Resources departments of these companies, which are dominated now by women and Pakistanis and a small number of Arabs and Asians), this argument makes a few assumptions that simply don't make sense.
Is it logical to assume that white males will only want to hire white males? The implication here is the hackneyed argument that everyone is secretly prejudiced toward their own "kind". While that may be somewhat true on a subconscious level, it is a great insult to people who have worked so hard to get to the top of the business food chain to insinuate that they aren't capable of hiring the most qualified people, whatever their race or ethnic background is. Clearly they are capable, otherwise they would not have made it as far as they did.
And even if this were true - even if white men really did favour white men as potential employees - it would follow logically from this assumption that quotas could never *ever* correct this problem. You have to concede that people either *are* intrinsically racist or *are not* - if they aren't, then they are capable of hiring the right people with or without quotas - and if they are, then quotas will never cure the greater societal ill and will only result in the aforementioned band-aid solution of racist white men hiring white men and racist black women hiring black women.
Unless your argument is that white men are prejudiced while black women are not - and it should be clear to anyone that this statement is racist in its purest form (the belief that one race is superior to another).
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To wrap this up: it is at best illogical, if not patently false, to identify a specific cross-section of a large population and insist that they be represented equally in every small pocket of society. There are many reasons why they are not. They may be under-represented in some places, but over-represented in others - that is not discrimination, that is statistics! Why would you assume that an arbitrary grouping of people (and these groupings ARE ARBITRARY if you really call yourself "colour blind") would spread themselves out perfectly evenly over every facet of society? That just doesn't make sense - it completely ignores the intrinsic randomness of individuals. Am I going to go out to rural Saskatchewan and ask why they don't have more people in the high-tech industry? Am I going to insist that the high-tech industry discriminates against farmers? Of course not!
Statistics don't prove causation. In this case, they don't even really provide a correlation in a "before and after" sense with affirmative action. I could just as easily watch a toothpaste commercial where they say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend Colgate Total" and say that hey, Crest and Aqua-Fresh have just as many products on the market so dentists must be biased toward companies with 7 letters in their name. One could make the argument that no matter what their reasons were for recommending Colgate Total, they are in fact biased toward companies with 7 letters in their name - you can't really prove it wrong, can you? Or, maybe the "9 out of 10" statistic is total bullcrap and they left out part of the sentence which originally read "9 out of 10 dentists recommend Colgate Total over Dog Shit in order to prevent Gingevitis".
You just don't know where these statistics came from or what they really mean. You can't just make assumptions - for one thing, the way we group different "minorities" is arbitrary in itself and it's entirely possible that many "invisible" minorities, like Italians, are also grossly under-represented in some parts of society and over-represented in others. Maybe the under-representation of visible minorities is the result of a societal ill, and I'll be the first to concede that it probably is, but it's premature to point the finger at "discrimination", especially in the 21st century in a country like Canada where nearly 40% of the population, as you yourself said, identify as "minorities". That's almost half the country! How about instead of falling back on tired old cliché leftist generalizations, we actually do some work into locating the real causes of the problem (if you even consider it a problem)?
Talk is cheaper than research, I suppose...
___________________
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