Quote:
Originally Posted by rymack
Lastly I have a friend who is a crown prosecutor and we were discussing the idea of him becoming a judge . He’s white / male. When I asked him what the prospects of that happening was he said “ well I’m not really the right demographic etc of what they are looking for”. Or something along those lines .
He went on to say they were trying to diversify the roster of judges to include more Indigenous , women , etc ( anything besides white men and to some extent white women).
I was a little annoyed on his behalf because I thought he is/was qualified and being not seen as a good candidate because he’s white seemed unfair. To his credit he mentioned he was totally ok w it . We talked about how important representation is in places like the legal system. And while I understand it and ultimately agree with it I still find it hard to square that circle sometimes .
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Good on your friend for his take on this - depending on the domain/sector a white male may be genuinely disadvantaged due to DEI in that the rebalancing is so aggressive that new candidates are negatively impacted but on the whole, the diversification efforts are just rebalancing an existing injustice - ie, white males were so over-represented for so long that what's happening isn't bias for minorities but equalisation.
In software development we were seeing women be ~35% university graduates (depends on the decade you look at) but we'd somehow only end up with 25% of intermediate developers being women and then something like 10% of mangers being women. So when tech companies say we want 35-40% of their devs to be women, they're really just trying to get to the numbers that they see coming out of school.