by John Allen Paulos
In politics, business, and education, the issue of how to ensure proportional representation of groups is often salient. A salient issue, but usually an impossible task. Why?
Since group identity and wokeness arouse so much emotion, a “geologic upheaval of thought” as Proust characterized it, it’s probably best to discuss a couple of simple illustrative scenarios abstractly. Consider, for example, a well-meaning institution, the Earnest Enterprises Foundation say, operating in a community that contains a numerically dominant majority group, Maj, and two subgroups – a substantial minority group, Min, and a smaller minority group, Sm, which has members in group Maj as well as members in group Min. Let’s assume that the group Maj constitutes 75% of this imaginary community, Min the remaining 25%, and let’s also assume that 10% of the community belongs to group Sm, whose members are known to be somewhat marginalized and less likely to self-identify as Sm, self-identity being a somewhat nebulous notion. This latter assumption introduces complications since the extent to which the groups differ, self-identify, and intersect is unknown to the foundation or even to the community. Let’s further assume that only 4% of group Min members self-identify as Sm and 8% of the group Maj members self-identify as Sm.
Making a well-intended attempt to assemble a workforce of 1,000 which “fairly” reflects the community, the foundation most naturally (but not necessarily) prioritizes the Maj-Min dichotomy and hires 750 members of group Maj and 250 members of group Min. But this is problematic since just 10 members of the group Min (4% of 250) would self-identify as being in group Sm, AND 60 members of the group Maj (8% of 750) would self-identify as being in group Sm. Thus ONLY 70 or 7% of all 1,000 workers would be self-identified members of group Sm.
It follows that, despite their best efforts, Earnest Enterprises would still be liable to charges of bias. It could obviously be accused by its Min employees of being anti-SM since only 4% of the Min employees (10 of 250) would be in group Sm, not the assumed community‑wide 10%. Interestingly, the foundation’s group Sm employees could likewise claim that the foundation was anti-Min since only 14.3% of the self-identified Sm members (10 of 70) would be from group Min, not the community‑wide 25%. Read more »