I almost upvoted your post on realizing you are a woman and thinking I’d like more women on LW. Then I realized how ironic that was. Then I did it anyway, likely influenced by the pretty photo on your article (not caring whether it was stock or you).
Fixing our meritocracy presumes we have a meritocracy to fix. Certainly a democracy is not a meritocracy, unless your definition of merit is EXTREMELY flexible to the point of defining merit as “getting elected.” Certainly the Athenian and 19th century American democracies which supported human slavery were not meritocracies, unless again your definition of merit is flexible enough to include being white and/or patrician.
If there is a lesson from the study you cite, it would seem to be that one should push for quotas at the governmental level. It is said by many, but I don’t know the evidence, that an advantage Europe and US have over Islamic societies is that we are much better about monetizing the talents of women, and so we have up to 200% more per capita effective productivity available. Your Indian lesson shows an example where rather extreme and anti-democratic quotas appeared to shift the preferences of the broad population to include more humans more broadly in what they see as the talent pool.
Is it likely that quotas in the US have worked negatively rather than positively? Looked at myopically one might make the case. But pre-quota US was a MUCH LESS integrated society. I grew up in a middle class suburb in Long Island (Farmingdale) hardly a bastion of white privelege. In the 1970s, a black family bought a house and had stuff thrown through their windows and a range of other harassments perpetrated upon them by anonymous but I’m willing to bet white perpetrators. Now we have interracial couples all over the southern US, and tremendous reduction in racist feeling in people younger than myself. Correlation is not causation, but it ain’t exactly an argument against causation either.
I almost upvoted your post on realizing you are a woman and thinking I’d like more women on LW. Then I realized how ironic that was. Then I did it anyway, likely influenced by the pretty photo on your article (not caring whether it was stock or you).
Fixing our meritocracy presumes we have a meritocracy to fix. Certainly a democracy is not a meritocracy, unless your definition of merit is EXTREMELY flexible to the point of defining merit as “getting elected.” Certainly the Athenian and 19th century American democracies which supported human slavery were not meritocracies, unless again your definition of merit is flexible enough to include being white and/or patrician.
If there is a lesson from the study you cite, it would seem to be that one should push for quotas at the governmental level. It is said by many, but I don’t know the evidence, that an advantage Europe and US have over Islamic societies is that we are much better about monetizing the talents of women, and so we have up to 200% more per capita effective productivity available. Your Indian lesson shows an example where rather extreme and anti-democratic quotas appeared to shift the preferences of the broad population to include more humans more broadly in what they see as the talent pool.
Is it likely that quotas in the US have worked negatively rather than positively? Looked at myopically one might make the case. But pre-quota US was a MUCH LESS integrated society. I grew up in a middle class suburb in Long Island (Farmingdale) hardly a bastion of white privelege. In the 1970s, a black family bought a house and had stuff thrown through their windows and a range of other harassments perpetrated upon them by anonymous but I’m willing to bet white perpetrators. Now we have interracial couples all over the southern US, and tremendous reduction in racist feeling in people younger than myself. Correlation is not causation, but it ain’t exactly an argument against causation either.