As this is a hot-button topic, let me be clear at the outset: It is not of course the case that one has to be both white and male in order to be competent. Further, I don’t hearken for a return to times when women and “visible minorities” (and, frankly, especially blacks) were systematically excluded from participating in the upper tiers of our various institutions.
Speaking of institutions, inasmuch as we care about their being effective, we should be paying infinitely more attention to the characteristics of the individuals that would make them up than what identity boxes their presence would check off. The political desirability of the latter is increasingly tending to trump the former. But on the bright side, if it weren’t for Scott Adams hitting a diversity ceiling in his corporate career, we wouldn’t have so many funny Dilbert cartoons.
Let’s start by talking about women, by actually talking about men. In a world where employment equity has been perfectly achieved, roughly 50% of all jobs would go to men. Would this be a more desirable state of affairs?
On your next trip to the dental office, instead of the hygienist working around your teeth and gums being gifted with feminine finesse, you’ll be more likely to be dealing with a man who has to contain his strength in order to make his way between your molars and bicuspids.
On your next trip to the hospital, may it be far from now, instead of having a naturally nurturing caregiver caring for you (consider the two meanings of “to nurse”), you may have a man who executes as best he can the tasks attendant to what we may sincerely hope is your eventual convalescence. Let’s hope he’s not just there because he didn’t make the cut at firefighter school, which is now effectively higher for men since 50% of the jobs have to go to women.
Or what about when you want to put your child in day care, giving them over to strangers so that you are free to continue being a worker bee? Well, assuming you’ve at least seen the trailer for Daddy Day Care1, I don’t need to elaborate much here, except to say that studies have shown that women excel men at managing the concurrencies in a domestic multitasking environment. If you must work, perhaps your sister can mind the children. Heck, in some cultures it’s no big deal to just give your sister one of your children if she’s for some reason barren, for example.
This is not to say that a man can’t clean teeth, participate in patient care, or read the bedtime story. But if we were to insist on a 50-50 split, at least in the first two cases there would be more than a few who would be better off doing something else.
Now let’s talk about women a little more directly. There are only a few things that literally no woman anywhere can do – for example, to have as many children as Osama bin Laden would be quite a trick2. Some women who are genuinely strong (not just for a woman) can become firefighters. A lot of amateur men would struggle to pick up a point off of Serena Williams.
But this does not mean that firefighting would be improved with a 50-50 split, or that professional sports leagues should be 50-50 on their teams. Here we are running into the simple fact that men are (often far) the stronger sex3, and these are places where strength matters, but they are not the only places. If a vanload of petite Japanese ladies pulls up to your door, you might be skeptical of their stated purpose of helping you move house.
And what if we had to regulate our music consumption so that 50% was written by women? (Performed by would be a much easier target to hit.) For every Joni Mitchell, there are a dozen or more Neils Young and Diamond. For every Sarah NicLochlan, many Barenaked Ladies. For every fleet tailoress, several Billys and Bruces. What’s going on there?
Some occupations require technical acumen, which is something that many women are possessed of. I myself, in my second and graduating year of an electronics diploma program, was excelled in an electronics competition by a brilliant young lady still in the first year, she taking silver and I the bronze. She ultimately got to go to the nationals and was doubtless an excellent ambassador for our school and province4.
And yet I think it’s the uncommon woman, perhaps a bit of a tomboy, who excels at these sorts of things. There also seem to be quicker dropoffs at the ends of the proverbial belle curve when it comes to IQ – the further you go into Actual Genius Land, the more men outnumber women. Fortunately for women, the same also holds when you explore the left side, that from which Jeff Foxworthy gets his semiotic material.
This might come down to the fact that you can roll the dice when it comes to men much more than you can with women. Traits that might take men out of the gene pool are punished in nature’s lab much less than those that take women out. It is not necessary to have one reproductively available male for every female – it is the females that are the real population bottleneck, and if that bottle is stopped or broken, your population is basically finished. A people cannot be without its women.
Speaking of nature’s lab, it’s a great big world, and not all of the bloodlines of man come through Northwestern Europe. Different environments present different imperatives and opportunities for specialisation. Given that, it would be extremely weird if, for example, Irish, Basotho, and Koreans were absolutely identical (on aggregate statistically) in every respect except in hue, stature, and physiognomy.
So we ought not to act like we all should be identical, or that our interests and strengths will all tend towards the same things. Of course particular peoples and their social systems are interwoven, and there are also geographic constraints – so it is not merely a matter of physiological potential IQ that determines whether Lesotho gets sovereign space launch capabilities.
Although it is perhaps not a pressing concern for the young couple above, equity policies are negatively affecting the prospects of East Asians when it comes to securing places in higher education in Washingtonian North America. Basically, if you’re an American with some African in you, you can get into a good school if you have good grades, or sometimes even with just decent grades. But if you’re East Asian, you need more like an A+++ average to stand a chance. (I suppose that’s partially because you’re competing against all the other A++ East Asians, and even the likes of Harvard still wanted to be able to have a competitive football team.)
If you’re a smart Asian generally, it’s hard to stand out from all the other smart Asians. As you can see here, 25% of Asian SAT takers in Michigan in 2022 got scores above 1400, compared to 4% of whites. We’re lucky we’re so good looking!
Perhaps the most important reason to stop giving preference to people who check off certain boxes of blood or genre is that it undermines their own accomplishments as persons. The way things are right now, it’s hard to tell if women or persons of hue are placed where they are because they really deserve to be, or if is to make things look better politically.
And at the end of the day, the reason to have the institutions that we have is so that they can fulfill their mandates.
- Or the sequel, Fathers of Early Childhood Education ↩︎
- A planter can sow their seeds in many plots, while one plot might only be good for one crop per growing season. ↩︎
- On the whole – as a counterexample, many grown women can out-wrestle most three-year-old boys ↩︎
- Specifically its adjacent masterpiece ↩︎