> This is why they sometimes advocate for preferential treatment for minorities: equal opportunity is no good if one group of people do not have equal access to those opportunities because they were born poor as a result of historical injustices.
I hadn't thought of equality of opportunity in this way before, but it does appear to be an innate problem of that approach.
As a counter-argument, I think the preferential treatment approach is upside down. Hiring less qualified people to redress historical inequalities is a top-down approach, authoritarian and minimally impactful. The individuals you hire help them, but not the disadvantaged community at large. We should be taking a bottom-up approach where the disadvantaged are afforded more community funding to bring up their access to opportunities. It is a slower approach because it takes a few generations to see the results, but it leads to long-term change, not band-aid fixes which I feel preferential treatment delivers.
As a counter-country-argument, why not take both approaches? There's something about trying to fix a wrong with more wrongs that I feel will damn the entire system.
Preferential treatment can mean many things. For example, you can provide programs for ethnic minorities to retrain as developers. It could mean scholarships that are only available to black people, or immigrants, or deaf people. It could mean training recruiters and interviewers so that they are less biased in their evaluation of candidates - in ways that they might not even realise.
That said, aiming to hire more people from disadvantaged groups can have positive effects beyond just the people that you hire. It gives young people a wider variety of role models. It can increase your team's performance because you have a wider variety of viewpoints. It can lead to wider cultural change in the company as a whole, making qualified people from disadvantaged backgrounds feel more comfortable applying for senior roles.
And it doesn't have to mean hiring worse people. Perhaps it just means focusing more on problem solving and creativity and less on education and 'culture fit' in your interview process, or advertising your jobs in places where they will be seen by a more diverse group of people.
I hadn't thought of equality of opportunity in this way before, but it does appear to be an innate problem of that approach.
As a counter-argument, I think the preferential treatment approach is upside down. Hiring less qualified people to redress historical inequalities is a top-down approach, authoritarian and minimally impactful. The individuals you hire help them, but not the disadvantaged community at large. We should be taking a bottom-up approach where the disadvantaged are afforded more community funding to bring up their access to opportunities. It is a slower approach because it takes a few generations to see the results, but it leads to long-term change, not band-aid fixes which I feel preferential treatment delivers.
As a counter-country-argument, why not take both approaches? There's something about trying to fix a wrong with more wrongs that I feel will damn the entire system.