I’ve seen on reddit people say that the concept of “equity” is all about fairness and giving people what they need to succeed and that has nothing to do with equality of outcome. However I am a woman in tech and I’m constantly hearing advocates of equity talk about how we need to get 50% of industry to be female (same with corporate boards, politics, other fields etc). Despite saying it has noting to do with equality of outcome, they do seem to focus a lot on equality of outcome as their goal.
I guess I am wondering whether equity is truely about justice and not about achieving equality of outcomes? And if equality of outcome is not the goal, then what is? How can we know whether equity has been achieved if we are not using equality of outcome as a metric?
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I’ve seen on reddit people say that the concept of “equity” is all about fairness and giving people what they need to succeed and that has nothing to do with equality of outcome. However I am a woman in tech and I’m constantly hearing advocates of equity talk about how we need to get 50% of industry to be female (same with corporate boards, politics, other fields etc). Despite saying it has noting to do with equality of outcome, they do seem to focus a lot on equality of outcome as their goal.
I guess I am wondering whether equity is truely about justice and not about achieving equality of outcomes? And if equality of outcome is not the goal, then what is? How can we know whether equity has been achieved if we are not using equality of outcome as a metric?
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There are little telltale indications, like that one study that indicated a man with a “black” or “Latino” accent stands a worse chance of getting a job even given similar credentials
To over reduce the overarching idea that workforces should be representative of the population;
The idea is based on the notion that people on equal footing with different immutable traits are inherently equal in terms of skill and aptitude. A discrepency in outcomes should then indicate a discrepency in footing. Keep in mind that all of this is in aggregate.
The opposite of that assumes that people of different immutable traits with equal footong have different values in skill and aptitude. This conclusion paves the way for things like segregation or eugenics. “Why advocate for a demographic to get into metric if they’re predisposed to be worse than others?” is how that would start, and was used as justification for segregationist and eugenics movements of the past.
Ta-Nehisi Coates made a comment that stuck with me. It was on a podcast and thus hard to link so I will do it from memory. It was regarding the black / white wealth gap but I think it applies generally.
If we reached equity the black / white wealth gap might exist but it would be in the range of statistical noise.
You brought up women in tech. You might not know this but when computer science began as a field, it was dominated by women. Why? Because it wasn’t considered as important, as requiring high level skills. For example, Margaret Hamilton led the team that coded Apollo 11. Men built Apollo 11. As computer science became seen as important, men started taking over the field and the salaries increased. This happens often. When education became female dominated, the salaries dropped.
Equity really wouldn’t be measured by 50% of every field being male and 50% being female. The better measurement would be that within reasonable bound, being male or female wouldn’t really matter in overall success.
The underlying belief is that the reason women are a minority in tech is due to gender discrimination and that’s a problem worth fixing. If you don’t agree with that premise, you aren’t ever going to understand the motivation behind equity programs.
If you do agree with the premise, then I’m not sure what you’re asking. Of course it would be measured by the % of women in tech since that’s the issue. What else would be the measurement?
I think the thing people misunderstand about “equality of outcome” is that it is a macro-level metric—meaning that you use it when looking at stats over an entire population, not individuals.
If you just look at any two individuals, no one expects them to have the exact same income, net worth, educational attainment, etc.
But if you are looking at entire populations you should see things balance out. One person makes more, another makes less and it’s a wash.
So when you see that one entire population has wildly different outcomes than another, that means that among those groups it isn’t balancing out. There are a whole lot of people making less than more in one group, and a whole lot of people making more than less in another.
Let’s take identity out of it and look at it this way. If you saw a that a person has a rare brain cancer and lives in the 60647 zip code, you wouldn’t necessarily think where they live has anything to do with their cancer. But if you found out that 20% of the people living in 60647 had this cancer, but that only 0.05% of people living everywhere else have it, you would probably think there’s some environmental factor causing cancer in that zip code. Because statistically this outcome is highly improbable without some outside influence causing it.
I wonder if it has to do with how we define “outcome”.
Like I don’t believe in equality of “outcome” meaning that everyone is equally deserving of exactly the same consequences of their actions / behavior. If female tech lead X does behavior Y and other female tech lead A does behavior B – I wouldn’t expect both tech leads to have outcome K.
But I would expect a workplace environment where there are an equal number of female tech leads and male tech leads. Like I guess I don’t see “being employed some place” as the outcome.
It’s never going to be.
Nobody is ever going to be color or gender blind.
Doesn’t mean an unachievable goal is pointless to try for.
I’m reminded of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s answer:
>And when I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
For one employer, we were able to achieve a higher ratio of minorities and women simply by having names and identifying information scrubbed from resumes before the hiring committee/individual saw them. That will get you nowhere near 50% but it is an equitable way to make sure we aren’t just racising and sexisting out candidates. I am also in tech, it is like trying to find male elementary school teachers, we just don’t see many applications.
IMHO the problem is not something we can fix at the time people are trying to get hired, you need to get in front of girls or whomever by 4th grade. By 4th grade, in this country, girls already start lagging behind males in math and science subjects. This is despite a trend that males are, on general, under-performing girls in K-12. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that girls can’t do it or that there is some male gene that makes us more adept at these things, but we are losing girls very young and it is hard to get them back.
It is reasonable to measure how many people we are ‘losing’ in the pipeline and figuring out why they are mainly female. To do that, we do need to consider who ends up a qualified candidate after secondary school and post-secondary school. If the majority of students entering college are female, why are there so few engineering and other science based graduates who are female compared to the student body as a whole. To be clear, even if you bring in male students, compared to the student body they still represent a sliver of the whole, and that is a problem. That sliver is mostly males, and gets more male as you get through the upper division credits.
I think it is reasonable to say that if we generally understand that women are just as capable as boys as a result of our biology, then there is obviously a social pressure that keeps women out of these fields. That social pressure exists for males as well, if I grab a random male out of college and ask them what their major is, it will most likely not be an engineering or lab based science.
> Despite saying it has noting to do with equality of outcome
You are confusing two different things.
Equality of outcome is policies that work to achieve a certain outcome.
That is not the same thing as saying that if opportunity is equal we would expect to see say 50% representation in an industry.
The right-wing response to this is always along the lines of well maybe we have made opportunity equal and maybe women just naturally don’t want to work in tech, its always an appeal to innate properties (maybe black people just don’t like hard work, that kinda thing)
But in nearly all circumstances this is an insanely premature conclusion to make even if you ignore the appeal to essentialism.
It is a conversation we can have if we have done everything we can to ensure equality of opportunity and enough time has passed to allow those policies to filter through and you can present a plausible workable reason why it might be a case that isn’t along the lines of “Maybe women just not good at the maths stuff”
Needless to say we are very very far away from that.
Equality of outcome is a decent metric but not the only one. You can determine whether people are being treated fairly and properly accommodated by studying exactly that.
Account for the factors that normally affect something and control for race or gender or sexual orientation etc and see if you have an unjustified statistically significant disparity. There are a bunch of studies that have already done this (I think since commenters have referenced them).
I see it as a difference between means and goals.
The goal is a hypothetical society in the future where the circumstances of your birth have no impact on your eventual station in life, i.e. a true meritocracy.
But we can’t use the means of forcing equality (of outcome) on people, that would be anti-meritocratic.
You don’t talk about the kind of policies, corporate or governmental, which are being used or proposed to achieve either equality or equity. It’s the details of these that matter here.
Well repeated studies have shown that, all things on a resume being equal, a person with a “white-sounding name” are more likely to get callbacks than a person with a “minority-sounding name” if you will.
There have been cases of black homes in the same condition being undervalued compared to white homes.
Funding schools based on property taxes overwhelmingly benefits white people.
The saying “It’s not what you know. It’s who you know” overwhelmingly benefits white people. Just look at Trump’s Cabinet of Who You Know Hires. Can’t even get communication security right.
Maybe fixing some of those things can get us on the road to true equality.
Equality of outcome should be seen as a signal that equality of opportunity does not exist and encourage us to search for disparities that we can address without causing worse problems. If we can’t actually find any disparities we don’t need to just tilt the scales towards people based on that assumption, but we should try to address them when we do.
You have already stated the goal. Equity is obviously the ideal. The community is better served if every individual maximizes their potential. That is only possibly if everyone gets the best possible shot at succeeding.
To give evidence we have improved equity in an area you do have to measure outcomes. But maybe its a leap to say something like, we have put a lot of money into getting more women into engineering and now we think we need more work or we are failing because Meta doesn’t employee 50% female engineers. I think all you need to avoid this pitfall is simply to refine the numbers and see if similar proportions of qualified women are succeeding in engineering relative to qualified men. Like if only half as many women apply to become software engineers as men. But there are more women in college. Then seeing half the number of women in software positions isn’t a problem. And there is already no proof of bias in hiring men over women for those positions creating a lack of equity.
You can tackle separate issues then, like should more women be exploring engineering? Why don’t as many women chose engineering as a college major? Maybe there are reasons these will never be equal. People and organizations will of course fail to target the right measurement or put it in the right context. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look at outcomes to try to show equity as opposed to equality.
I also think it is worth saying that in any area where people are trying to measure something. Like how smart if our AI system, how much money did we save deploying this new tool, ect. We always end up relying on imperfect measurements and we never know for certain we achieved the best possible outcome or that we have chosen a good set of measurements. In fact I think most of the time we make poor choices of measurements and metrics to try to market or sell a certain approach, program or tool.
I work in food systems/sustainable agriculture, so I will speak to that. For my field, it can be difficult to disentangle outcome versus equity, but here are my thoughts on one food equity goal:
No more food deserts
On its face it seems like equality of outcome, but the existence of food deserts means our food system is inherently unjust, and thus we can’t use cookie cutter approaches or metrics. An equity lens argues that justice exists when the root causes are eliminated and that means giving more attention/resources/capacity/funding, etc to the impacted areas.
Food deserts are created due to a mix of intentionally racist policy decisions (redlining, racial covenants, “urban renewal,” the purposeful siting of infrastructure to disrupt non-white communities, such as the national highway system), unintentional policy consequences such as tax structures incentivizing business investment in suburbs which comes at the expense of rural and inner City areas, and business practices, eg Big Box retailers driving small food businesses out of business.
Food equity has been achieved when 1) these barriers no longer exist and 2) communities are sufficiently empowered to fix the problem as they see fit. How do we know we’ve achieved this? When we conducted research that can answer these types of questions: Does the locale have the ability to ban dollar stores or are they pre-empted by state law? Does the locale have a policy system that incentivizes food entrepreneurship? If a local wants to grow their own food, do they have access to relevant education, do face regulatory burdens preventing them from growing their own food, eg bans on backyard chickens or home gardens. These are questions of opportunity, not outcome.
Its things like these that make people turn against the very idea of equity and it shouldnt be happening