Presumably for the same reason you wouldn’t get a civil rights activist to replace the captain in a Navy boat. We need people fighting for civil rights, but we also need to create room for people from diverse backgrounds to do all of the rest of the work that needs doing.
It's probably a reliable collective action problem. For example, the point of the 1965 Civil Rights Act was to help black men so their families could stay intact, but Howard Smith poison-pilled the whole thing by diverting it to women.
For people who are in the military, I point this out in its internship form. The Skillbridge program was designed to facilitate internships for departing servicemen to address difficulties with veteran unemployment, but the spoils mostly go to officers with highly marketable skills, like submarine and cryptography officers. After all, those officers have each been practicing the art of finding and utilizing beneficial programs to their advantage for decades by that point in their lives; why wouldn't they use this one too?
Good catch. That should be an easier problem to solve. If a few of them just volunteer to give their jobs to minorities, that will do wonders for diversity.
There's so much push-back because the answer always seems to be "discriminate against non-black candidates to improve diversity" or "allow political propaganda to be openly preached in your organization".
There are structural problems that inhibit participation from underrepresented groups. The objective is to level the playing field so everyone has a fair chance at success.
disclaimer: i am a black engineer who is tired of wasting time arguing with people who harbor views such as yours.
We need to fix the problems of racism and sexism, which means we shouldn't be excluding anyone from any program or job based solely upon their race or sex. Programs like this fly in the face of that goal and ensure that these problems will continue in perpetuity.
While I understand that sentiment, I think there's just a lot of difficulty in addressing the root causes since they've been hundreds of years in the making and it is not always obvious what ripple effects are.
Those pushing for more representation are hopefully also pushing for change in the root causes that lead to unequal access and opportunity.
Even if underrepresented minorities are hired, those hired will be the upperclass representatives of those minorities, and a lot has been written on these divisions. It turns out races are not some unified organs. And neither are genders for that matter. There is no solution whereby the owning class can continue exacerbating inequality in a morally righteous manner.
It depends on the purpose of the program. If the purpose is to recruit even more, then they shouldn’t be included because they are already over-represented. Many of the minority-focused programs are about recruitment and increasing the pipeline.
Why is there an assumption of injustice that has to be rectified only when certain jobs have skewed demographics, but not all?
Why is there no societal wide calls for racial re-balancing in the NBA or NFL, or olympic sprinting competitions? Or gender re-balancing for military combat roles or logging in the timber industry, or elementary school teacher or veterinarians?
Maybe because giving a hand to a historically disadvantaged group of people IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. I'm astonished that I even have to type this out for you.
I think the reason is that historically black people and women were intentionally discriminated against and prevented from entering school and the workplace, so there's an attempt to actively make amends for that. So politically that's why the focus is on race and gender.
I also think that people who champion social justice are also very much in favor of investment in education and public resources like public libraries to help with economic mobility. So I don't think that isn't a focus on economic mobility, it's more that we expect the federal and local governments to flex their muscle to ease problems with social mobility while companies themselves are supposed to make themselves more welcome to diverse candidates.
Demands like this came from minorities. It's a small, easy thing. Not every project is sufficiently well funded and connected (probably none is) to directly contribute or influence school budgets. Many communities, however, have outreach programs and some measure of support for minorities (funding for conferences used to be one, when we had conferences). To do more groundwork, we'd need more connectedness on the ground.
I'd love to be able to ensure a fair distribution of resources to schools, but that's where we would need to interact more with human rights activists that know how to be the most effective, while making sure we manage organization's funds in a way that's in accordance to its bylaws (which may need to be changed before anything else).
I don't buy the argument that the Ivies need to be demographically representative of America so that America's leaders will be, because
(1) leaders should not be drawn predominantly from a small group of schools
(2) you do not need to be black/brown/white in order to represent well your black/brown/white constituents.
There is also overwhelming pressure on minorities to not only succeed and be perfect but to gain positions of power to make it easier for those that follow. It's incredibly difficult to do that as an IC (for either gender).
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