I don’t really like being accepting of oscillation.
Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against.
Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.
It is not progress at all. The pendulum of who to discriminate against has been swinging back and forth for hundreds of years. And every time a new group is targeted, it is to the cheers of some other group.
It's difficult to have a factual debate around workplace discrimination because anyone who suggests that women are being favoured, is instantly attacked by social justice activists who rely more on moral outrage rather than facts or logic. A lot of the discussion on this thread today would not be something that people would say out loud near coworkers.
I agree with you strongly. This isn't progress. This is essentially the same shit on a different day, and amplified by social media. I'm by no means accepting of it, I just feel this analogy is more accurate.
I brought up dynamic systems to point out that this isn't and won't be a three-step process of "the extreme, the other extreme, the golden middle". This phenomenon is continuous and oscillating; more than that, it can be dampened, stable or runaway, and which of those it is, depends on a lot of factors. If we manage to dampen it down, then we'll have made progress.
If you aren't just hiring every person who walks through the door, you are discriminating. The question is whether you are hiring on relevant characteristics or irrelevant bullshit, and whether your job is more appealing to people on the basis of protected characteristics in ways that end up with an overwhelmingly-male workforce of people willing to be treated unfairly. Being thoughtful and taking responsibility for which people you are choosing to include is at least honest, unlike accepting a sexist status quo as magically "neutral".
Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against.
Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.