> these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity.
FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize.
> In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination.
The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar.
If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination?
It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through.
> Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.
Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.
FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize.
> In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination.
The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar.
If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination?
It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through.
> Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.
Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.