Comment by master-lincoln
5 days ago
>"our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call.
I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions
That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.
> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was
What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.
> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself). In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...
I guess it must not violate the law as the last president vowed that men would be ineligible and he would only select a woman: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/15/politics/joe-biden-woman-...
Is that comparable though? It's not an open job position with requirements listed that anybody can apply for. I don't know how that works in the US, but according to wikipedia the president can nominate a person and a majority vote in both houses of congress can confirm that. It's not like the best candidate wins...this is politics...
> I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
It is illegal for jobs in USA, but not for university student spots. Trump has said he will make that illegal though, so it might change and become illegal like in most of the world.
It isn't legal for individual university spots either.
What a university can do, or any form of corporation in the USA can do, is to announce goals to have its body be made up in roughly the same was as the general population, according to some demographic metrics.
So you can't say "student #68 must be female"; you can say "we are aiming for a 50/50 male/female student body" and then take steps to get there.
It is illegal in the US but the law isn't enforced when men are on the losing end. As someone else points out, the POTUS himself violated this law openly and in public. Because everyone knows that and because feminists agitate constantly for female-biased hiring, it's been effectively decriminalized.